Focusing on system levels. Example of social dances

And only one level above appears dancing/dance movement, when dance teacher (creator of dance mastery in students) watches how his students - dancers (carriers of dance proficiency) - assume aesthetic poses, perform gentle leading and attentive following, maintaining balance in turns. Previous roles (fitness instructor, rhythm instructor, coach) did not see dancers, they saw simply moving people, they saw athletes (their creator - a fitness instructor), physical practitioners (their creator - a physical instructor), movers (their creator - a coach with help from a rhythm instructor) – no matter what type of cultural movement it is, it could be parkour, figure skating. And then we talk about a specific type of cultural movement: dance movement (not movement in judo, equestrian sport, or karting).

Yet at this level, it is not known exactly what dance style/culture this movement is. Learning to dance a certain style (tango, ballet, salsa) takes time. Different ratings are given for different dance styles and for different abilities of dancers, but ballet could be learned for a decade, hip-hop for five years, social dances for about three years. We just put aside the common movement method for all dances, distinguishing them from all other cultural movement methods, believing that the dance movement method can be learned once - to be used in all "dance styles"/"types of dance movement methods". For example, one needs to learn how to dance in a pair, that is, to know how to lead and follow, synchronize their movement with the partner's movement. This is necessary for all styles of social dances (and not only social dances, dancing in pairs could be ballroom, stage, and even ballet). One can learn not just to "step", but to make a specific dance step, which has its own specificity (it contains built-in "illusiveness", unusualness/unreality). This is also necessary for all dances, one needs to learn this once, and then use it in all dances!

"Bracketing out" dance training as such, as opposed to training in a specific dance style, is the idea of multidance::dancing method. Our dance role is multidance dancer, they are already trained sufficiently to easily further master various dance styles: they have body control during movement, they have mastered common dance movement, and just need to further acquire mastery of a specific dance style.

So, overseeing our couple's dancing is the salsa teacher::"guru of a specific dance style". He observes how his salsa students - salseros (those who dance salsa, one such person is a salsero, two such people are salseros, this is the plural in Spanish) - step in rhythm with their feet. The salsa teacher looks at the same couple at the same moment in time as the physiologist, the coach, the general dance teacher. But the salsa teacher sees the couple in a completely different light (meaning he has different points of interest). He monitors the quality execution of the "stylish dancing"/"maintenance of the dance style" method (dancing while adhering to a specific dance style, in this case - Cuban salsa), and his points of interest are the posture (distribution of effort in the body while maintaining characteristic poses), how the dancers get into the rhythm of the music, shifting their weight from one foot to another and making quite specific movements specific to salsa (not tango, not balboa, not kizomba), how the dancers are dressed, how they move around the dance floor (standing in place, or "strolling"). This is the dance style: how the dancers step to the music in a specific dance, regardless of the method of performing a specific "dance figure"/move/step.

In salsa, it's not so much the leader pushing the follower to step, but the leader pushing off from the follower - and both "take off" from the point of contact at approximately the same distance. The dance is not just about the leader spinning the follower around, the dance pattern is more or less symmetric in terms of the movement of both partners - both cover approximately the same distance during the dance. And this happens throughout the entire duration of the salsa performance, in every move, with a huge variety of dance figures - the style is maintained regardless of the dance figures. Mastery of the style (sometimes referred to as the "base") of dance can take a long time. One can simply take steps in unison, even in dance steps, or add nuances - and with good mastery of the basics, a whole world of variety in steps is revealed in simple steps. On these nuanced steps, the salsero performs a multitude of movements with his partner, characteristic specifically of salsa - spins, displacements.

The salsa guru watches as our couple performs the shown figures/steps: they spin where needed, they step where needed, in rhythm and maintaining the posture that should be in salsa, unlike, for example, tango or parkour with figure skating.

The method of stylish (maintaining a specific dance style/culture) salsa dancing includes specific steps/moves (such as enchufla, sombrero), which are performed by dancers, thereby turning them into salseros. A salsero (the role of dancing a specific salsa style) is a superset of a dancer. It is indeed a superset, meaning "more than just a dancer": a salsero must not only know how to dance in general (i.e., move in a dance-like manner to the music/be a dancer), but also be able to add the specificity of salsa to their movements, that is, "have style". This means that a salsero has more mastery than just "being a dancer" - it is a higher systemic level. A software engineer is more than just "an engineer": they possess general engineering skills (knowledge of systems engineering) and also know how to program. This general reasoning about stacks of systemic levels in their roles is similar for various system types.

Think about the division of labor: different sub-roles are usually performed by different people, but due to the specifics of dancing, they cannot do so - all roles need to be performed by one agent. However, the roles of creators can be separated due to the deepening division of labor - the activation of the body by a physician, the tuning of the body's work by a coach, dance lessons by a dance teacher, training in a specific dance style by a style teacher - this can (and should, quite frankly) be done by different agents, each of which has enough time to master the craft required in the dancing agent.

How to determine whether these are sub-roles - a relationship of specialization or part-whole? It is easy to get confused in functional decomposition, but the principle of distinguishing these "sub-roles" works: if there are mutually exclusive alternatives of methods of roles in one agent, then these are specializations (for example, "builder of walls - concrete worker for sliding formwork or mason for bricklaying"), and if both are needed for executing the whole method and one, and the other ("builder - mason for bricklaying" or "builder - painter for facade painting") these are part-whole levels, systemic levels, that is a relationship of composition.

And of course, it is also important to understand what project - different projects may make different decisions on how to model work/actions methods and the roles performing them, how to name these methods and roles. What might be "variants"/specializations in one project, in another project could be parts/components (and nuances, why that is so needs to be inquired from the participants of that project). By paying attention, you highlight objects to agree on joint activities in the project, not somehow "absolutely objectively, independently of the situation, one modeling for all projects". The concepts of "method," "role" - they are part of the meta-meta-modeling of the world, from our courses, they are "for all projects." However, the meta-model, the types of which are taken from the meta-meta-model, significantly depend on the subject area.

For example, in the applied field of social dances, there is a "salsero," and there is a "tangero" role (a role that dances the Argentine tango style), which are usually - mutually exclusive in one performance. The artist::role can have sub-role specializations (subtypes) of salsero and tangero, used in different projects, and another sub-role specialization, the pianist, as a superset of the musician. Consider why the pianist is a superset of the musician, not a sub-role (the same reasons why a salsero is a sub-role of an artist, but a superset of a dancer).

However, if the artist is suddenly required during a performance to dance two dances for some purpose, these would be sub-roles-parts of the multi-dancer::role. In the multi-dancer, the parts are salsero and tangero, and they are part of the dancer role.

This is explained by way of example with a simpler physical system. The house-suprasystem has parts like "internal wall" and "facade," in both of these parts, there is a subpart "brick": the reasoning with the roles of artists is the same - and remember, this reasoning is "in types," because in the wall and the facade, constructively, the bricks are different, but of the same type "brick," whereas in the brain, the mastery of salsero and tangero involves the same dance mastery, but it works twice with different parameters. Mastery is like a "program" (an algorithm executed by the agent’s body and the given instrumentation) for executing a certain method (in our case - dancing salsa and tango). Therefore, the ability to a dance style and a culture is represented by different physical objects if it is re-entrant (meaning different instances of variable/memory states of the program at different executions do not affect one another). These are ontological reasonings, and systemic thinking is impossible without mastering modeling.

Modeling is primarily the assignment of a type of a meta-model to model objects, and this is done at many meta-abstraction levels. Thus, systemic thinking, which includes primarily system modeling and subsequent operations with the model, cannot be "in general," without being tied to a project: in different projects on the same question, systemic thinking will give different answers, leading to a different systemic description - because the same type of meta-meta-model can be assigned to different types of subject areas depending on the division of labor we work with in various projects.

The key point here:

  • All roles of different systemic levels of an agent work simultaneously. Muscle work in parts of the body, as seen by a physiologist, work of muscle bands of a mover/activity role, and so on - including the actual dancing/cultural/method of movement of a dancer/role, performance of salsa by a salsero, the artistic dance performance at an event - all take place simultaneously. All these different activities/practices/methods/ways of work/actions of the dancing couple and each individual partner are singled out in the physical world solely by our own attention: something is picked out from the background and becomes a figure, and everything else is the background.
  • Different labor roles of creators (creation time of mastery in salsa dancing - all these physiologists, coaches, style gurus), different project roles of salsero (which are present at the same time during dancing - body practitioner, mover, stylist dancer) direct their attention to different areas, and they themselves can work at different times, with the time of creation of the corresponding mastery of a specific role. Creators (in the case of mastery - these are teachers, in general - engineers) highlight different objects in the working system with their focus. All creators can look at their created and developed systems without stopping the work of these systems by "dismantling into parts," and they can act simultaneously. In the case of dancing - all doctors and coach (body engineers) and teachers (personal engineers) each see their own results (results of work of the respective organism systems and results of work of the corresponding mastery) in the dancing couple.