Widening the bridges: Beyond consent and autonomy

Excellent article exemplifying syntegrity. A brief excerpt follows but the entire article is well worth 15 minutes.

"The first represents the kind of static view of individuals and their connections most often employed in terms like ‘community’. This sees the individual as a complete node unto itself with connections represented as static and uniform. This view is also expanded to create unstable fictions in which every so-called “citizen” is considered to be connected uniformly through nationality or every “woman” is connected through womanhood. But more simply, this is also just when you are planning a get-together and thinking in your head about who is friends with who in a broad overview kind of way.

"The second image represents the self as slightly more complex and networked but with connections between individuals still essentially uniform. The second model is just a complex self with a static view of its connections with others. This second model can be seen in something like the Dialogical Self theory in psychology, where the networked self is described through the ways in which composite aspects of our psyche dialog internally with each other to create coherence. This theory looks at the voices of all those people and things that influence and comprise us and the ways they live in a micro-society in our minds. This vision recognizes a network of internal nodes (such as these different voices in our heads) forming a dynamic and open-system of information sharing and connectivity seeking to build bridges outside and within itself.

"More complex than the previous images, the third view represents the fully networked self and other. It sees individuals as complex maps and the connections between the self and others as additionally forming dynamic networks of connections. This is more the neurophysiological view. In this view, each of these nodes might represent a neural pathway with a thousand individual neurons inside of it. A proper map could contain every single neuron in a brain and its full network with others or even subatomic quarks. This view represents a kind of Venn-diagram of selves where the individual network system overlaps with an infinitesimal sliver of the other. Another form of this view could be looking at the overlap of the ways we use language wherein our connotations are largely completely distinct but that there is enough overlap for us to communicate meaning."