Rhizome imagery

[Edward theurj Berge]

Here are a couple of rhizome images, one from a neural network only microns wide, one from our current universe, billions of light years wide. Do these images look like nested, hierarchical complexity? Or a different kind of rhizomatic complexity? The images we use affect how we create philosophical models (and vice-versa), so which seems more akin to the Real?

[Balder]

The brain consists of meshworks, which, as I understand the term, includes complex nested and rhizomatic relationships.  Marilyn Hamilton uses the two images you've posted to illustrate meshworks.  Here is her definition of a meshwork.

Meshwork: the emergence of patterns in the brain, resulting from the neuro-chemical connections of synapses that produce a hairnet-like mesh of axons, characterized by major primary connective pathways that produce and intersect secondary, tertiary and many further levels of connectedness.  It appears that the meshwork self-organizes connections and when a certain density and/or repeated use of pathways arises, a hierarchy of complexity emerges that enables the brain to replicate the patterns (and the capacities that arise from them), allowing retention of learning and efficiency of energy use.  This cycle of self-organizing and hierarchical patterning continues throughout a lifetime, allowing the brain to build up a repertoire of learned behavior while continuing its capacity for self-organizing adaptiveness to dynamic environments and never-ending stimuli.  While we can map these structures through fMRI scanning, we can also assess the co-related structures of consciousness that emerge in the mind from ego, to ethno, to worldcentric.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Yes, DeLanda discusses them too, like in this post. The post following is where you brought up Hamilton. I also posted a link to DeLanda's book on Deleuze, where he explores this as well. I'm guessing that the type of hierarchical complexity embedded in meshworks is not of the same kind as the hierarchical complexity of Commons or Wilber, but will have to explore her more to see. TBD.

[Edward theurj Berge]

As I noted in this post from the complexity pomo thread, DeLanda's "nests" are of a different kind than the hierarchical nests of inclusion. Much like the image in my avatar I'm seeing more of a bird's nest, a meshwork of twigs and miscellanea that yet cohere.