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Title (with link to Amazon.com -- why use this link?) |
Author(s) |
| publisher name and address | year of publication |
FIRST DRAFT
SECOND DRAFT
(c) 1 March 1990 by Alan Scrivener
(c) 22 August 2002 by Alan Scrivener
| New! Beginning in September 2002, I will be sharing a free e-Zine, "Cybernetics in the Third Millenium" (C3M), about 1,000 - 18,000 words per issue and about one isssue every other month. If you are interested in a free subscription to this electronic newsletter, please email abs@well.com with C3M in the subject. |
[A similar web site exists at the Principia Cybernetica Project. - ABS 8/11/96]
A lot of time has been wasted arguing over what the terms cybernetics and systems theory "really" mean. Rather than add to the muddle, let me just define them, and some other related concepts, the way I mean them and leave it at that.
In cybernetic language, the course of events is said to be subject to
restraints, and it is assumed that, apart from such restraints, the pathways of
change would be governed only by equal probability.
Causal explanation is usually positive. We say that billiard ball B moved
in such and such a direction because billiard ball A hit it at such and such an
angle. In contrast to this, cybernetic explanation is always negative. We
consider what alternate possibilites could conceivably have occurred and and
then ask why many of the alternatives were not followed, so that the particular
event was one of the few which could, in fact occur...
... Cybernetic systems are a special case, however important, of systems
showing self-regulation.
Cybernetics is a theory of control systems based on communication (transfer of
information) between systems and environment and within the system, and control
(feedback) of the system's function in regard to environment... The model is of
wide application but should not be identified with "systems theory" in general.
"When we try to pick up anything by itself
we find it is attached to everything in the universe."
-- John Muir
I keep having this image of a survey course in human physiology, in which the syllabus
covers each body system in turn, and in the final week it is all put together into a
whole person. But, as the semester drags on the instructor gets behind in the
material, until suddenly it is time for finals and the integrative material has not
been covered. "Well," says the teacher, "I will leave it to the more ambitious
students as an extra credit project."
I see this as a metaphor for what is wrong with our educational system, and the body of knowledge on which it is based: we have great methods for taking things apart and analyzing them, but the problem of putting them back together is trivialized even though it is unsolved. If Western Civilization's science, religion, philosophy and epistemology were in better shape (more mature?), we would not need cybernetics and systems theory as separate areas of inquiry; they would be woven into the fabric of our knowledge as already are other prior mental tools such as: the flexibility of language, the rigor of linear algebra, and the etiquette of professional communication. But instead our tradition of education has a blind spot when it comes to complexity, interconnectedness and relationship, and properties that emerge from them.
This might all seem like abstraction of abstraction, some kind of "airy fairy" diversion of language, except that the results are vital to questions of survival. As columnist Ellen Goodman pointed out about health research (LA Times 5/26/87): "There's a tendency to study single diseases and small body parts instead of lives. The group concerned with the maintenance of lungs doesn't always 'do' ankles and the cancer- prevention team isn't 'into' cardiovascular diseases. As the last generalists, we, the owners of whole bodies, are supposed to think of ourselves as nothing more than the sum of parts and potential diseases to be taken care of with separate regimens." [Emphasis mine.] Or, as a Buddhist baker once said, "We're all in this alone." We each face the integration of life, the universe and everything with few really useful clues from our mainstream culture and educational systems.
The blind spot in our civilization when it comes to wholeness and loops goes back a long way. Plato said, in Georgics, that "Helmsmanship is unassuming and modest and does not boast and does not behave as if it had done something wonderful." This contempt for piloting fits in with the general ancient Greek aversion to any linking truth-seeking with useful activity. This meant the literate philosophers and the skilled workers were kept apart. The Romans were by contrast ruthlessly practical, had literate engineers (who could write down their skills and plans). They conquered the known world with their "practicality," which had toxic social, religious and ecological side effects. Christinanity swept the Roman empire partially as an antidote to the Roman toxic pragmatism. The dark ages were, in Europe, a period of avoidance of practical applications of technology in favor of the search for religious grace. Our civilization didn't deviate from this pattern until the 13th Century, when literate monks were forced to garden, and dragged out a bunch of Roman engineering books, rediscovering hydraulics and inventing the windmill. Similar integrations of learning and labor helped bring about the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. And yet today we call schools where more practical skills are taught "Junior Colleges," while all the really useless ideas are confined to "Universities." Greek logic was made symbolic by nineteenth century academic George Boole, who -- like the Greeks -- prohibited loops in logic chains. But in this century electronic engineers found that you can build logic gates physically, and you can hook them up in loops, resulting in both digital memories and digital oscillators. These humble engineers were "off the map" of Western civilization's mathematics and philosophy. One of the simplest of these circuits was a one-bit memory, which was named a "flip flop" -- indicating the lack of academic tradition for the whole idea.
Our traditions cling to the idea that explanations can be built of short causal chains: event A causes event B, which causes event C. Loops are prohibited because they are hard to analyze, introducing non-linear terms into the equations. Therefore our current scientific method has become a form of pretend madness in which we deny that anything is connected to anything else unless we can prove that it is. We use this method because we can so much more easily start with assumed isolation and then prove the connectedness of the components of a system than do the opposite. But our simplifying assumption has become an article of faith, and this false faith is aggravating the "externalities" of our society: pollution, crime, alienation, illiteracy, the decay of our infrastructure, the decline of our industry. All of these problems have been amplified by the success of our technology in achieving narrowly defined goals. Cybernetics and systems theory are part of the antidote to the toxic byproducts of our short-sighted reductionism.
"What is a man, that he may know a number,
or a number, that a man may know it?"
-- Warren McCulloch
In 1868 James Clerk Maxwell (author Maxwell's equations of the electrodynamics, and
inventor of the mental construct Maxwell's Demon) was invited by steam engineers to
help them figure out why the governors on their engines didn't always work right:
sometimes the steam engines exploded. Maxwell analyzed the "steam-engine-with-
governor under a changing load" as a system of non-linear differential equations, and
concluded the system would do one of five things based on the coefficients of the
equations. (1) It corrected the speed back to the desired level fairly smoothly (the
most desired response):
By the 1930's, when electronics was still young, electrical network theory had developed, and the select few who studied it began to understand self-correcting systems. Doctors also tended to gain this intuition, and in 1932 physician Walter Cannon in The Wisdom of the Body coined the term homeostasis to describe this phenomenon.
By the late 1940's, thanks mostly to the growth of electronics, a lot of people were running around with the idea that "feedback" was somehow important. One of them was Warren McCulloch, a pioneer brain researcher who first proposed the mathematical modeling of neurons. He was approached by the Macy Foundation to chair a conference on the nervous system. The Macy Foundation, funded by the family that ran Macy's department store (and its famous Thanksgiving Day parade), funded conferences on medicine; they had done the heart, lungs, skin, etc. but never the brain or nerves. But McCulloch was determined to make these meetings more than a typical medical conference. He invited physiologists, electronics specialists, mathematicians, physicists, even social scientists -- including husband and wife anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. The participants met for a few days every six months over a period of several years. At first McCulloch only let the "neuro" people talk; he wanted everyone to understand the great questions facing them before they started looking for answers. But eventually a cautious collaboration developed, as the participants probed their intuition of what was missing from their knowledge of minds.
In 1948 one of the attendees, mathemetician Norbert Wiener, published a book in which he purported to name the new field of inquiry they were investigating: Cybernetics was the name of the field and the book. This move received mixed reviews from the other participants in the conference. However, many of the attendees did return to their disciplines and begin using the new set of tools provided by the conference, and by Wiener (including two who I had the good fortune to meet and study under: Gregory Bateson and Heinz von Foerster).
Meanwhile, in Germany, Ludwig von Bertalanffy began publishing papers on the theory of general systems, in which he (prophetically in many cases) laid down some of the criteria of such a theory. He pointed out that the fundamental tool of general systems theory was the system of differential equations, but any such set of equations robust enough to describe non-trivial systems was unsolvable. Therefore, intuition and computer simulation should play important roles in a theory of complex systems. But his work had little impact initially.
In 1950 Shannon and Weaver at Bell Labs published their first paper on what has been called "information theory" and "communication theory," but I would prefer to call "transmission theory." It is the study of how to get bits reliably over an unreliable channel -- a topic of great interest to Bell Telephone at that time. In academia this work eclipsed cybernetics, probably because it was less intellectually threatening; cybernetics advocated connecting outputs to inputs, which had been forbidden since the ancient Greeks, while information theory dealt with the familar model of:
+-------+ +---------+ +--------+
| INPUT |---->| PROCESS |---->| OUTPUT |
+-------+ +---------+ +--------+
Also, it didn't help that the popular press picked up and began to abuse the word
"cybernetics," as if it meant "the study of computers, robots, and electronic gizmos,"
or that the book Psycho-Cybernetics was published by plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz in
1960; it was a useful pop-psychology self-help book about auto-suggestion, but had
little to do with cybernetics.
With the advance of digital computers in the 50's and 60's, the field of "information science" was heralded, which included the study of computer languages and their compilers, as well as Shannon's work. But cybernetics mostly suffered benign neglect by information science departments. By way of an example, in 1966 Scientific American published an entire issue devoted to the new technology of information, and later re- issued it as one of their theme paperbacks, called Information. Every diagram in this book has the same structure as the one above: INPUT, PROCESS, OUTPUT.
Yet, while the so-called information scientists ignored cybernetics (which they could because they designed systems and were free to design them without feedback), those scientists investigating the biochemistry of cell metabolism, the principles of nervous systems, and the population biology of ecologies (all pre-existing systems) were drawn to cybernetics because it offered more accurate models of the systems they were studying.
Some progress was made by topologists in the late 60's in classifying systems in terms of all possible behaviors they could exhibit. Initially this work, called the theory of dynamical systems, simply refined the distinctions drawn by Maxwell's governor paper.
The biggest methodological barrier to the advance of cybernetics in the 50's and 60's was the expense of computer time. But in the 70's pocket calculators became affordable, and it was on such a calculator that some of the earliest examples of chaos were discovered. This term is not used here in the every-day sense, but to describe a fifth category of system behavior besides the four illustrated above: non- periodic deterministic behavior. The discoveries of chaos, along with increasingly available computer power, sparked a renaissance of interest in cybernetics and systems theory in the late 80's.
Won't it be exciting to see what the 90's will bring?
"Watch out -- you might get what you're after."
-- David Byrne, 1983
"Burning Down the House"
In the fall of 1969, while a Junior in high school in southern California, I got my
hands on an early Whole Earth Catalog. I was attracted to it because the title
sounded integrative, and sure enough the first section was entitled Understanding
Whole Systems. Here I was exposed to the ideas of Bucky Fuller, Norbert Wiener,
Marshall McLuhan, and Paul Ehrlich. I went to a college where I could design my own
major program (University of California at Santa Cruz, Kresge Collge), and searched
for three years for a faculty member who would sponsor my major in "Understanding
Whole Systems." Dr. Gregory Bateson arrived at Kresge in the fall of 1973, and I had
even studied his English accent for a school play, but it wasn't until he was featured
on the first page of the Understanding Whole Systems section of the new Whole Earth
Epilog in summer of 1974 that I realized he was who I had been looking for. Starting
in my senior year I took all of his classes, and he sponsored a student-directed
seminar which I taught in early 1975 on Understanding Whole Systems. I'd planned to
extend this activity into my major program, but I too quickly reached the end of my
senior year, I hadn't met the university breadth requirements to graduate, and I was
out of scholarship money.
Also in my senior year I met Dixie. We dropped out of school and bicycled across America together in 1976-77. On this journey I discovered that poverty was a real danger in an unplanned life -- a lesson that had escaped me both while growing up in suburbia and while attending a Liberal Arts university -- so upon our return from this trip I earned money and got a new scholarship so I could go back to school. I proposed marriage to Dixie, and I switched my major to Information Sciences in hopes of being more employable. Sure enough, after six months of school in 1977, at the dawn of the Personal Computer revolution I got my first job in computers, even though I had not studied Info Sci long enough to get a degree. We wed and moved from northern California to Massachusetts.
For a decade I rode the computer wave, letting my interest in whole systems be a hobby on my back burner. About the only thing I did to keep this interest alive to was to occasionally visit libraries on the Dewey Decimal System and scan the shelf that started with 000. This is where all the books on cybernetics, systems theory, theory of knowledge, philosophy of science, library science, management science, ESP, flying saucers, witchcraft and Atlantis may be found.
By 1987 I was a computer graphics programmer for the NASA Space Station project at Rockwell International in southern California, which was exciting work until Rockwell lost the Space Station contract. In casting about for a new challenge I fell into working for a company (currently named Stardent Computer Inc.) which manufactures Graphics Supercomputers. Now it so happens that the users of these kind of computers are people who need extremely high-speed computation combined with interactive graphics, and most people who fit that description are doing scientific research using a new methodogy called numerical simulation. And this methodology is on the forefront of systems theory. So I find that I am reaping the dual bonus that my hobby is useful in my job, and my job gives me opportunities to expand my understanding of my hobby.
As I explained above, some teachers recently received, through a mutual friend, a copy of my class handouts from that course in "Understanding Whole Systems" which Bateson sponsored me in teaching sixteen years ago at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC). They asked how I would revise those notes based on what I have learned in the intervening years. I am happy to answer that question.
"I throw a spear into the dark -- that is intuition.
Then I have to send an expedition into the jungle
to find the way of the spear -- that is logic."
-- Ingmar Bergman
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For each item below, I list the key concepts to be gained from the work.
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| NOTES: |
I tell you why to read this, how to get value out of it and what to watch for
(and watch out for); also any relevant history or conections.
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| QUOTE: |
One or several informative and representative quotes.
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| RIGOR: |
How good is it in imparting rigorous ideas, on a scale of one to five?
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INTUITION: |
How good is it in imparting intuitive ideas, on a scale of one to five?
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"Lovers of wisdom must be inquirers into many things indeed."
-- Heraclitus, 5th Century B. C.
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| IDEAS: |
cybernetics, understanding whole systems, tool, ecology
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| NOTES: |
Stewart Brand was running around in the mid-sixties (when NASA had taken its
first satellite photos of the earth with the entire round profile in the frame
but wouldn't release them to the public), handing out protest buttons which
said, "WHY HAVEN'T WE SEEN THE WHOLE EARTH?" And sure enough, when detailed
color pictures taken by the Apollo Eight crew of our home planet were published
right after Christmas 1968, they galvanized the public and helped in the
popularization of the ecology movement. As Joni Mitchell sang:
Was a photograph of the Earth taken coming back from the Moon. And you couldn't see a city on that marble bowling ball, Or a forest or a highway, or me the least of all."
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| QUOTE: |
The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG got started in a plane over Nebraska in March 1968. I
was returning to California from my father's long dying and funeral that
morning in Illinois. The sun had set ahead of the plane while I read Spaceship
Earth by Barbara Ward. Between chapters I gazed out the window into dark
nothing and slid into a reverie about my friends who were starting their own
civilization hither and yon in the sticks and how could I help. The L. L. Bean
catalog of outdoor stuff came to mind and I pondered upon Mr. Bean's service to
humanity over the years. So many of the problems I could identify came down to
a matter of access. Where to buy a windmill. Where to get good information
about bee-keeping. Where to lay hands on a computer without forfeiting
freedom...
Shortly I was fantasizing access service. A Truck Store, maybe, travelling around with information and samples of what was worth getting and information where to get it. A Catalog too, continuously updated, in part by the users. A Catalog that owed nothing to the suppliers and everything to the users. It would be something I could put some years into. Amid the fever I was in by this time, I remembered Fuller's admonition that you have about 10 minutes to act on an idea before it recedes back into dreamland. I started writing on the end papers of Barbara Ward's book (never did finish reading it). * * * * * * Understanding whole systems is knowing how to fly. You can rise above local circumstances, travel with blurring speed, and set down in a place wholly distant, strange and wonderful. Or maybe not so wonderful, in which case you best know how to take off in a tight situation, and remember where home is. The price you pay for understanding is the grim knowledge of trade-offs in design. That you can have an airplane that goes fast or one that lands in 200 ft., but not both. That to save these people you may have to starve those people. By and by you dwell in a wilderness of conflicting considerations. If you survive your wishful solutions -- and there's usually margin -- you may become a wily and sky-hooked metaphysician. The solutions are always meta. The means always funky field expedient. * * * * * * Evolution and cybernetics are going to come together. This is the edge of knowledge right now, and it's right at the heart of education, and the schools don't know it. [-- all from The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1971]
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RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: *****
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scale
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| NOTES: |
In getting my mind ready to study systems of all types, I find it useful to
zoom through the universe looking at all size scales. This is an old idea; as
Jonathan Swift penned:
Hath smaller Fleas that on them prey, And these have smaller Fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.
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| QUOTE: |
Powers of Ten is a phrase you will hear soon enough in almost any scientific
conversation. It is also the short title of a brief and beautiful film
produced by the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. We came to know the Eameses
and their studio through taking part in the filmmaking...
This book is a transformation of the film, as the film was itself a transformation of an earlier little book, Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps, by a Dutch school teacher. Kees Boeke's innovative book for children was our introduction to this ingenious itinerary, and we treasured it for years.
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RIGOR: *____ INTUITION: ***__
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| IDEAS: |
difference, paradox, interactive computer games
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| NOTES: |
Two pieces in one book: The first, "Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox," an
interview with Bateson that probes well into the man's ideas about
metacommunication and his metacommunication about ideas. This is the
article that got me motivated enough to read Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
The second piece is "Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," a look at the "outlaw" origins of interactive computer (video) games, written at a moment in history when we didn't all know they were coming. The failure of "information science" to predict the important changes in computing comes from the lack of cybernetic awareness which leads to drawing a box around the computer excluding the human. Only with the programmer/operator "in the loop" do the magical effects of computers appear.
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| QUOTE: |
My father, the geneticist William Bateson, used to read us passages of the
Bible at breakfast -- lest we grow up to be empty-headed athiests.
[-- Gregory Bateson quoted in "Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox"] * * * * * * Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. [-- Stewart Brand, in "Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death..."]
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RIGOR: **___ INTUITION: ****_
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| IDEAS: |
epistemology, homology, isomorphism, minimum criteria of mental processes, cybernetics
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| NOTES: |
If Spinoza was right when he said in De Emendatione that "the greatest good is
the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature," then
this is a great book indeed.
Thinking he had a year to live (incorrectly as it turned out) Bateson condensed all the non-trivial things he knew into a book for laypersons. The bottom line: minds in organisms and ecologies are simularly organized, using digital internal reshuffling followed by analog natural selection involving an interface to an environment to achieve "mental" effects.
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In June 1977, I thought I had the beginnings of two books. One I called
The Evolutionary Idea and the other Every Schoolboy Knows It seemed to me that the writing out of some of these very elementary ideas could be entitled, with a little irony, "Every Schoolboy Knows." But as I sat in Lindisfarne working on these two manuscripts, sometimes adding a piece to one and sometimes a piece to the other, the two gradually came together, and the product of that coming together is what I think is called a Platonic view. It seemed to me that in "Schoolboy," I was laying down very elementary ideas about epistemology, about how we can know anything. In the pronoun we I of course included the starfish and the redwood forest, the segmenting egg, and the Senate of the United States. And in the anything which these creatures variously know, I included "how to grow into five-way symmetry," "how to survive a forest fire," "how to grow and still stay the same shape," "how to learn," "how to write a constitution," "how to to invent and drive a car," "how to count to seven," and so on. Marvelous creatures with almost miraculous knowledges and skills. Above all I included "how to evolve," because it seemed to me that both evolution and learning must fit the same formal regularities or so-called laws. I was, you see, starting to use the ideas of "Schoolboy" to reflect, not on our own knowing, but on the wider knowing which is the glue holding together the starfishes and sea anemones and redwood forests and human committees. My two manuscripts were becoming a single book because there is a single knowing which characterizes evolution as well as aggregates of humans, even though committees and nations may seem stupid to two-legged geniuses like you and me. I was transcending that line which is sometimes supposed to enclose the human being. In other words, mind became, for me, a reflection of large parts and many parts of the natural world outside the thinker. (* A favorite phrase of Lord Macaulay's. He is credited with "Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahaulpa.")
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RIGOR: ****_ INTUITION: *****
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metalogue, schismogenesis, deutero-learning, redundancy, coding,
pathology, double bind, cybernetics, grace
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| NOTES: |
A collection of a life's work of interdisciplinary thinking that grew more
cybernetic over the years. On the first page of the "Understanding Whole
Systems" section of the Whole Earth Epilog in 1974, Stewart Brand had this to
say about this book:
Through him I became convinced that much more of whole systems could be understood than I thought -- that mysticism, mood, ignorance and paradox could be rigorous, for instance, and that the most potent tool for grasping these essences -- these influnece nets -- is cybernetics. Bateson is responsible for a number of formal discoveries, most notably the "Double Bind" theory of schizophrenia. As an anthropologist he did pioneer work in New Guinea and (with Margaret Mead) in Bali. He participated in the Macy Foundation meetings that founded the science of cybernetics but kept a healthy distance from computers. He has wandered thornily in and out of various disciplines -- biology, ethnology, linguistics, epistemology, psychotherapy -- and left each of them altered with his passage. This book chronicles the journey. It is a collection of all his major papers, 1935 - 1971. In recommending the book I've learned to suggest that it be read backwards. Read the recent broad analyses of mind and ecology at the end of the book and then work back to see where the premises come from. In my view Bateson's special contribution to cybernetics is in exploring its second, more difficult realm (where the first is feedback, a process influencing itself, which Bateson calls 'circuit'; and the second is the meta-realm of hierarchic levels, the domain of context, of paradox and abundant pathology, and of learning.) Strong medicine.
I. - Metalogues V. - Epistemolgy and Ecology VI. - Crisis in the Ecology of Mind (the easily fatigued can stop here) IV. - Biology and Evolution III. - Form and Pathology in Relationship II. - Form and Pattern in Anthropolgy
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| QUOTE: |
They say that power corrupts; but this, I suspect, is nonsense. What is true is
that the idea of power corrupts.
* * * * * * In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are immanent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole. * * * * * * The social scene is nowadays characterized by the existence of a large number of self-maximizing entities which, in law, have something like the status of 'persons' -- trusts, companies, political parties, unions, commercial and financial agencies, nations, and the like. In biological fact, these entities are precisely not persons and are not even aggregates of whole persons. They are aggregates of parts of persons. * * * * * * When your cat is trying to tell you to give her food, how does she do it? She has no word for food or milk. What she does is to make movements and sounds that are characteristically those that a kitten makes to a mother cat. If we were to translate the cat's message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying 'Milk!' Rather, she is saying something ike 'Mama!' Or, perhaps still more correctly, we should say that she is asserting 'Dependency! Dependency!' The cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship, and from this talk it is up to you to take a deductive step, guessing that it is milk that the cat wants.
* * * * * * Evolution has long been badly taught. In particular, students -- and even professional biologists -- acquire theories of evolution without any deep understanding of what problem these theories attempt to solve. They learn but little of the evolution of evolutionary theory.
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RIGOR: ****_ INTUITION: *****
"I think that cybernetics is the biggest bite
out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge
that mankind has taken in the last 2000 years.
But most such bites out of the apple have
proven to be rather indigestible --
usually for cybernetic reasons"
-- Gregory Bateson, 1966
"From Versailles to Cybernetics,"
in Steps To an Ecology of Mind
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| IDEAS: |
finite state machine, Markov machine, Law of Requisite Variety
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| NOTES: |
A good set of first principles for the mathematical treatment of cybernetics.
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| QUOTE: | The most fundamental concept in cybernetics is that of "difference," either that two things are recognizably different or that one thing has changed with time. [p. 9] |
RIGOR: ***** INTUITION: ***__
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| IDEAS: | homeostat |
| NOTES: | I wish Ashby had written more. This and the above book are all we got from this great, precise thinker. |
| QUOTE: | The development of life on earth must thus not be seen as something remarkable. On the contrary, it was inevitable. It was inevitable in the sense that if a system as large as the surface of the earth, basically polystable, is kept gently simmering dynamically for five thousand million years, then nothing short of a miracle could keep the system away from those states in which the variables are aggregated into intensely self-preserving forms. |
RIGOR: ****_ INTUITION: ***__
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| IDEAS: | finite state machine, Turing machine, neural nets, Godel's Theorem |
| NOTES: | The limit of algorithms is mapped clearly, with a firm mathematical introduction to computability and what the mind cannot do if it is merely a computer. |
| QUOTE: | This book forms an introduction to the common ground of brains, machines, and mathematics, where mathematics is used to exploit analogies between the working of brains and the control-computation-communication aspects of machines. It is designed for a reader who has heard of currently fashionable topics such as cybernetics, information theory, and Godel's theorem and wants to gain from one source more of an understanding of them than is afforded by popularizations. Here the reader will find not only what certain results are, but also why. The number of pages has been kept deliberately small [about 160] so that a first reading is feasable in an evening or two. Yet a lot of ground is covered, and the reader who wants to go further should find himself reasonably well prepared to tackle the technical literature. Full use of the book does require a moderate mathematical background -- a year of college calculus (or the equivalent "mathematical maturity"). However, much of the book should be intelligible to the reader who chooses to skip the mathematical proofs, and no previous study of biology or computers is required at all. [p. vii] |
RIGOR: ***** INTUITION: ***__
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| IDEAS: |
meta
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| NOTES: |
Heinz Von Foerster was a co-founder of cybernetics, and he retired near where I
went to college, so I got to meet him a few times (his wife made great
strudel), but what I really got a lot out of was sitting in Bateson's office
thumbing through this book Heinz put together as a year long class project
('73-'74) at the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois at
Urbana, taking notes longhand becasue the book wasn't loaned out. Included are
definitons of key concepts by Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, Stafford Beer,
Stewart Brand, Jurgen Habermas, Garrett Hardin, Ivan Illich, John Lilly,
Humberto Maturana, Warren McCulloch, Gordon Pask, Bill Powers, G. Spencer-
Brown, Francisco Valera, Heinz Von Foerster and Norbert Wiener. A new edition
was brought out by the Cybernetic Systems Program at SJSU in '86.
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| QUOTE: |
TOOL
Something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end. [--Stewart Brand] FEEDBACK The return of part of a system's output to change its input. Positive feedback increases the input, negative feedback decreases it. Hence if feedback is used (as it is in all regulatory systems) in comparing output with some standard to be approached, negative feedback is inherently stabilizing (because it decreases the error) while positive feedback is inherently de-stabilizing (and the error gains explosively in magnitude). The casual use of 'feedback' to mean 'response to a stimulus' is incorrect. * * * * * * An unpoetic inexpressive word that shrieks for replacement. Correct use of the word would refer to eating your own vomit. 'Positive'or 'negative' feedback would signify whether you like the vomit or not. I'd prefer a term like 'circuit' to indicate any system or subsystem that responds to its own action -- and something like 'convergent' or 'divergent' to indicate the nature of response ('divergent' would cover the two unstable forms -- anti-corrective 'positive feedback' and over-corrective hunting oscillation.)
|
RIGOR: *____ INTUITION: ****_
The Human Use of Human Beings:... Wiener, Norbert 1950
Avon Books, a division of The Hearst Corp.
105 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016
| IDEAS: |
entropy, secrecy is counterproductive, robots are never bored but
people are creative
|
| NOTES: |
Okay, since Wiener coined the word you might want to read something he wrote.
|
| QUOTE: |
There are those who are skeptical as to the precise identity between entropy
and biological disorganization. It will be necessary for me to evaluate these
criticisms sooner ot later, but for the present I must assume that the
differences lie, not in the fundamental nature of these quantities, but in the
systems in which they are observed. It is too much to expect a final,
clear-cut definition of entropy on which all writers will agree in any less
than the closed, isolated system. [p. 21]
|
RIGOR: **___ INTUITION: **___
Cybernetics - 2nd Edition Wiener, Norbert 1948,61
or control and communication in the animal and the machine
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
| IDEAS: |
cybernetics, function prediction
|
| NOTES: |
The problem here is that Wiener was a mathematical prodigy and he had no
patience for people who couldn't instantly follow his symbology. This means
that you aren't warned what the prerequisites are for this book, and there
isn't enough context for his equations. Still, this was the seminal book on
cybernetics, so I have to mention it. Wiener's emphasis was on function
prediction and statistics; this was his background, and he had designed
self-aiming anti-aircraft guns in World War II, which predicted an aircraft's
future path based on its previous positions.
|
| QUOTE: |
When I came to M.I.T. around 1920, the general mode of putting the questions
concerning non-linear apparatus was to look for a direct extension of the
notion of impedance which would cover linear as well as non-linear systems.
The result was that the study of non-linear electrical engineering was getting
into a state comparable with that of the last stages of the Ptolemaic system of
astronomy, in which epicycle was piled on epicycle, correction upon correction,
until a vast patchwork structure ultimately broke down under its own weight.
[p. viii, preface to 1961 edition]
|
RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: *____
"The division of the perceived universe
into parts and wholes is convenient
and may be necessary, but no necessity determines
how it shall be done."
-- Gregory Bateson, 1979
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
An Introduction to General Systems Thinking Weinberg, Gerald M. 1975, 2001
Dorset House Publishing
353 W. 12th St.
New York, NY 10014
www.dorsethouse.com
| IDEAS: |
system, state, tool, mapping
|
| NOTES: |
This is the best single book in this list for classroom or individual use to
specifically learn introductory general systems theory.
|
| QUOTE: |
Paradoxically, one way to master the power of a tool is to probe its
weaknesses. Thus we offer the Count-to-Three Principle:
|
RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: ****_
General System Theory Von Bertalanffy, Ludwig 1968
George Braziller
| IDEAS: |
differential equations, open systems
|
| NOTES: |
A strong case is made for the theoretically correct approach of using systems
of interacting differential equations to describe natural and artificial
systems, and then this approach is rejected for lack of rigorous solutions.
|
| QUOTE: |
Major functions [of the Society for General Systems Research] are to: (1)
investigate the isomorphy of concepts, laws and models in various fields, and
to help in useful transfers from one field to another; (2) encourage the
development of adequate theoretical models in the fields which lack them; (3)
minimize the duplication of theoretical effort in different fields; (4) promote
the unity of science through improving communication among specialists.
[-- from "General System Theory: Foundation, Development, Applications"] [When I joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton] I did this in the hope that by rubbing elbows with those great atomic physicists and mathematicians I would learn something about living matters. But as soon as I revealed that in any living system there are more than two electrons, the physicists would not speak to me. With all their computers they could not say what the third electron might do. The remarkable thing is that it knows exactly what to do. So that little electron knows something that all the wise men of Princeton don't, and this can only be something very simple. [-- A. Szent-Gyorgyi, 1964]
|
RIGOR: **___ INTUITION: ***__
Chaos: Making a New Science Gleick, James 1987
Viking-Penguin, 299 Murray Hill Parkway
East Rutherford, NJ 07073
| IDEAS: |
periodic non-deterministic system, strange attractor, fractal dimension
|
| NOTES: |
The traditional wisdom was that all systems do nothing, oscillate or blow up.
Then the paradigm ripped, and the word "chaos" was borrowed from its
everyday meaning to describe systems of non-linear differential equations which
do none of the above: never stopping, never repeating. This excellent social
history ties together the math, the philosophy and the real-world applications
(turbulent fluids, unstable ecologies, heart fibrillations) of chaos theory.
|
| QUOTE: |
Big whorls have little whorls Which feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls And so on to viscosity.
[-- Lewis F. Richardson] I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. [-- Tolstoy, quoted by Joseph Ford, 1985,in "Chaos: Solving the Unsolvable, Predicting the Unpredictable")
|
RIGOR: **___ INTUITION: *****
Dynamics--The Geometry of Behavior Abraham & Shaw 1982 Part One: Periodic Behavior Part Two: Chaotic Behavior Part Three: Global Behavior Part Four: Bifurcation Behavior Aerial Press, Inc. P.O. Box 1360, Santa Cruz, CA 95061
| IDEAS: |
differential equations, topology
|
| NOTES: |
A topological approach "all possible systems" is here introduced intuitively
using diagrams, and with all the symbolic math in an appendix. This book set
came out of the chaos group at UC Santa Cruz that formed the year after I left.
|
| QUOTE: |
The strategies for making mathematical models for observed phenomena
have been evolving since ancient times. An organism -- physical,
biological, or social -- is observed in different states. This
observed system is the target of the modeling activity.
Its states cannot really be described by only a few observable
parameters, but we pretend that they can. This is the first step
in the process of "mathematical idealization" and leads to a
geometric model for the set of all idealized states: the state space
of the model. Different models may begin with different state spaces.
The relationship between the actual states of the real organism and the
points on the geometric model is a fiction maintained for the sake of
discussion, theory, thought, and so on: this is known as the
conventional interpretation
|
RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: *****
Systemantics : The Underground Text of Systems Lore: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail Gall, John 1975 General Systemantics Press, 3200 W. Liberty Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103
| IDEAS: |
intra-system goals
|
| NOTES: |
Never a false word in jest, this parody of systems theory books tell the
ugly truth about how little we control the systems we instigate.
|
| QUOTE: |
A COMPLEX SYSTEM THAT WORKS IS INVARIABLY FOUND TO HAVE EVOLVED FROM A SIMPLE SYSTEM THAT WORKED. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A COMPLEX SYSTEM DESIGNED FROM SCRATCH NEVER WORKS AND CANNOT BE MADE TO WORK. YOU HAVE TO START OVER, BEGINNING WITH A WORKING SIMPLE SYSTEM. * * * * * * "SUCCESS" OR "FUNCTION" IN ANY SYSTEM MAY BE FAILURE IN THE LARGER OR SMALLER SYSTEMS TO WHICH THE SYSTEM IS CONNECTED. Corollary: IN SETTING UP A NEW SYSTEM, TREAD SOFTLY. YOU MAY BE DISTURBING ANOTHER SYSTEM THAT IS ACTUALLY WORKING.
|
RIGOR: *____ INTUITION: *****
A Fuller Explanation : The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminister Fuller Edmondson, Amy C. 1987 Birkhauser Boston, Inc., 380 Green St., POB 2007, Cambridge, MA 02139
| IDEAS: |
tension and compression, octet truss, tensegrity
|
| NOTES: |
An island chain off of the intellectual continent, "Bucky" Fuller's theories of
systems are here explained cogently, and with connections back to the
mainland of consensus science, for the first time. Appropriately, the author
was Fuller's personal assistant for many years. She waited until he died to
write this, so with impunity she can also tell us when Fuller doesn't make
sense.
|
| QUOTE: |
The term "pattern integrity" is a product of Fuller's lifelong commitment to
vocabulary suitable for describing Scenario Universe.
Let's start with his own simplest illustration. Tie a knot in a piece of nylon rope. An "overhand knot," as the simplest possible knot, is a good starting point. Hold both ends of the rope and make a loop... [etc.] The procedure applies a set of instructions to a piece of material, and a pattern thereby becomes visible. What if we had applied the same instructions to a segment of manila roap instead? Or a shoelace? Or even a piece of cooked spaghetti? We would still create an overhand knot... The knot isn't that little bundle that we can see and touch, it's a weightless design, made visible by the rope.
|
RIGOR: ****_ INTUITION: ****_
Critical Path Fuller, R. Buckminster
St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010 1981
| IDEAS: |
ephemeralization, world game, geoscope
|
| NOTES: |
A holographic stream-of-consciousness blend of the true history of the
struggle to control technology combined with a prescription for individual
action to make the world work. Stewart Brand had this to say about Bucky
on the first page of the "Understanding Whole Systems" section of the Last Whole
Earth Catalog:
Some are put off by his language, which makes demands on your head like suddenly dicovering an extra engine in your car -- if you don't let it drive you faster, it'll drag you. Fuller won't wait. He spent two years silent after illusory language got him in trouble, and he returned to human communication with a redesigned instrument. Fuller said that as a result of his Navy experiences, he would rather be not understood than misuderstood. Plenty of both do occur, unfortunately, and the irony is that so many of the Bucky groupies I met at World Game events and such completely misunderstood his ideas. Be warned. Yet the best way to access his ideas is not through his writings, but through audio and videotapes of his talks. There he made his expression of his ideas the simplest.
|
| QUOTE: |
Ninety-nine per cent of humanity does not know that we have the option to "make
it" economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do. It can only be
accomplished, however, through a design science initiative and technological
revolution.
For three-quarters of all the trillions of nights that humans have been on board planet Earth, the Moon has been their most intimate sky companion. For millions of years humans assumed it to be obvious that no one would really touch the Moon. Those who did not assume that to be obvious were obviously loony -- lunatics, "Moon touchers." In the battle for human power systems to see who is to control the world's people and their economies, the communist U.S.S.R. and the capitalist U.S.A. had been taught by World War II that whoever could fly the highest would gain the observational advantage for controlling the firepower of their guns and thus win the military supremacy of the world. In the "cold" Third World War the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A., inspired by the German rocketry, saw that whoever could maintain the most around-the-world-outer-space-platforms could control around-the-world-firepower. The Moon was just such a "permanent" sky advantage. Greatly challenged by the Russian's initially most successful space-operating accomplishments, President John Kennedy authorized the funds for the Apollo Project, which had first to do all of the tasks here on Earth preparatory to getting a team of humans ferried over to the Moon, to land, and then to return safely to Earth. There were obvious first things first to be accomplished -- second things before third things and 7308 things before 7309 things. Some were going to take longer than others. There would be a pattern of start-ups and lead-ins of differing time lengths. This complex, shad-bone-like pattern would be known as "the critical path." The critical path of overall human history's technological evolution involved [approximately] two million things that had to be done before blast-off of the first Earth-to-Moon ferrying-over-and-back.... Now, in 1980, a large number of humans ten years of age and under, all of whom were born after humans reached the Moon, have learned so much about the Apollo Project as to be quite familiar with its critical path accomplishment. They have entered the evolutionary scenario at a spontaneous conceptual level twice as well informed as initially as were any pre-Apollo Project humans.... The under-ten-year-old post-Moon-landers are saying, "Humans can do anything they need to do." They are writing me letters saying so and asking why we don't make our world work satisfactorily for all humans. This is encouraging. By 1989 those successful Moon-ferry-over conditioned, thoughtful young ones will be twenty. That's just the right age for commanding and executing the 1989 world-embracing design science revolution, which will result in the conversion of humanity into an integrated, omniharmonious, economically successful, one-world family.
|
RIGOR: **___ INTUITION: ***__
The Sciences of the Artificial Simon, Herbert A. 1969
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
| IDEAS: |
synthetic, hierarchy, module
|
| NOTES: |
A useful definiton of invention is given, linking the concrete physical
manifestations that make an invention work with the abstract linguistic
constructs that make it possible to communicate and reproduce inventions.
Consise and clear mental tools for the study of artefacts.
|
| QUOTE: |
Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives
and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of
requirements and restraints.
* * * * * * ...all mathematical derivation can be viewed as change in representation, making evident what was previously true but obscure. This view can be extended to all of problem solving -- solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent. If the problem solving could actually be organized in these terms, the issue of representation would indeed become central.
|
RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: ****_
"Man need not be degraded to a machine
by being denied to be a ghost in a machine."
-- Gilbert Ryle
(See also Bateson's essays in section III of Steps to an Ecology of Mind above.)
What Do You Say After You Say Hello? Berne, Eric 1972 Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10019
| IDEAS: |
life script
|
| NOTES: |
Someone once asked Werner Erhardt, of "The est Training" fame, how people get
into behavior traps. He said, "You don't find them; they find you." This
answer shows an awareness of elementray memetics, the theory of self-replicating messages. Before the word was coined, Dr. Eric Berne was using an
awareness of its principles to analyize behavior traps, using the methods of
Transactional Analysis, which he founded. (He first described it in the book
Games People Play, and others went on to promote it in I'm OK, You're OK.).
Do be aware: Grinder and Bandler (below) say that the Parent-Adult-Child (PAC) parts of the mind described by Berne are not really there until the patient is taught Transactional Analysis; they form just another "script," albeit one with useful handles for the therapist to grab onto.
|
| QUOTE: |
Life-script scenes have to be set up and motivated ahead of time, just like
theatrical scenes. A simple example is running out of gas. It is nearly
always set up two or three days in advance by looking at the gauge, "planning"
to get gas "some time soon," and then not doing it. In fact it is impossible
to run out of gas "right now" except in a strange car with a broken gauge.
Many winners go through a whole lifetime without running dry.
Life scripts are based on parental programming, which the child seeks out for three reasons. (1) It gives a purpose to life where it might otherwise be wanting. A child does most things for the sake of people, usually his parents. (2) It gives him an acceptable way to structure time (acceptable, that is, to his parents). (3) People have to be told how to do things. Learning for oneself may be inspiring, but it is not very practical. A man does not become a good pilot by wrecking a few airplanes and learning from his errors. He has to learn through other people's failures, not his own.... So parents program their children by passing on to them what they have learned, or what they think they have learned. If they are losers, they will pass on their loser's programming, and if they are winners, they will pass on that kind of program. The long term always has a story line.
|
RIGOR: **___ INTUITION: ***__
Frogs into Princes : Neuro Linguistic Programming Grinder & Bandler 1979 Real People Press, Box F, Moab, Utah 84532
| IDEAS: |
representational systems, pacing, anchoring, trance induction
|
| NOTES: |
A linguist and a computer programmer analyzed the work of several incredibly
effective hypnotherapists who could cure life-long neuroses in a few minutes,
and converted their (mostly unconscious) techniques into a rigorous set of
instructions for behavior change: Neuro-Linguistsic Programming (NLP).
I studied briefly under these guys at UCSC, where they managed to anger Bateson
royally, and though I coudn't bear them in person either (because of their
endless arrogance and amorality) I do get a lot of value from their books --
perhaps for the same reason I got a lot out of The Prince by Machiavelli.
|
| QUOTE: |
There are several important ways in which what we do differs radically from
others who do workshops on communication or psychotherapy. When we first
started in the field, we would watch brilliant people do interesting things and
then afterwards they would tell various particular metaphors that they called
theorizing. They would tell stories about millions of holes, or about
plumbing: that you have to understand that people are just a circle with pipes
coming from every direction, and all you need is Drano or something like that.
Most of these metaphors weren't very useful in helping people learn
specifically what to do or how to do it....
There's also a group of people who are called theoreticians. They will tell you what their beliefs are about the true nature of humans and what the completely "transparent, adjusted, genuine, authentic," etc. person should be, but they don't show you how to do anything. Most knowledge in the field of psychology is organized in ways that mix together what we call "modeling" -- what traditionally has been called "theorizing" -- and what we consider theology. The descriptions of what people do have been mixed together with descriptions of what really "is." When you mix experience together with theories and wrap them all up in a package, that's a psychotheology. What has developed in psychology is different religious belief systems with very powerful evangelists working from all of these differing orientations. Another strange thing about psychology is that there's a whole body of people called "researchers" who will not associate with the people who are practicing. Somehow the field of psychology got divided up so that the researchers no longer provide information for, and respond to, the practitioners in the field. In medicine, the people doing research are trying to find things to help the practitioners in the field. And the practitioners respond to the researchers, telling them what they need to know more about.
|
RIGOR: *____ INTUITION: *****
"The hen is an egg's way of making another egg".
-- Samuel Butler
(See also Bateson's essays in section IV of Steps to an Ecology of Mind above.)
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher Thomas, Lewis 1974
Bantam Books, 414 E. Golf Rd., Des Plaines, IL 60016
| IDEAS: |
coevolution
|
| NOTES: |
Bateson said the disease of Western civilization was piety, and the cure was
more natural history. Hang out with frog ponds and moth-filled meadows,
mental patients and people from other cultures. Stewart Brand started out in
his pre-Catalog days as a budding biologist, and insisted it molded his whole
systems thinking. So given that it is useful to think biologically, this book
(and the sequels) can help you get there. News flash: the real natural world
is messy!
|
| QUOTE: |
Item. I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it
is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too
many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving
through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this.
If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then,
satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single
cell. [p. 4]
* * * * * * Item. A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little seperate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitve bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, with their own DNA and RNA different from ours. [p. 2]
|
RIGOR: **___ INTUITION: ****_
Infinite in All Directions Dyson, Freeman 1988 Harper and Row, Publishers 10 E. 53rd St., New York, NY 10022
| IDEAS: |
symbiosis
|
| NOTES: |
A very smart eclectic physicist speculates with great insight into the origins
of life, among other things.
|
| QUOTE: |
So far as modern science is concerned, we have to abandon completely the idea
that by going into the realm of the small we shall reach the ultimate
foundations of the universe. I believe we can abandon this idea without any
regret. The universe is infinite in all directions, not only above us in the
large but also below us in the small. If we start from our human scale of
existence and explore the content of the universe further and further, we
finally arrive, both in the large and in the small, at misty distances where
first our senses and then even our concepts fail us.
* * * * * * Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent. * * * * * * Let us summarize the story up to this point. Our illustrious predecessor Erwin Schrodinger gave his book the title What Is Life? but neglected to ask whether the two functions of life, metabolism and replication, are separable or inseparable. Our illustrious predecessor John von Neumann raised the question which Schrodinger had missed and gave it a provisional answer. Von Neumann observed that metabolism and replication, however intricately they may be linked in the biological world as it now exists, are logically separable. It is logically possible to postulate organisms composed of pure hardware, capable of metabolism but incapable of replication. It is possible to postulate organisms composed of pure software, capable of replication but incapable of metabolism. And if the functions of life are separated in this fashion, it is to be expected that the latter type of organism will become an obligitory parasite upon the former.
|
RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: ***__
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology Drexler, K. Eric 1986
Anchor Press/Doubleday, New York
| IDEAS: |
Von Neuman machines, Feynman machines (nanotechnology)
|
| NOTES: |
Wake up! Watch out! The nanites (as they are called on Star Trek: The Next
Generation) are coming, and you'd better be ready for them! Smaller-than-
micro-miniature self-reproducing robots (that can mutate!) could be the plague
or terror weapon of the nineties and beyond, and could also be the panacea that
achieves universal prosperity and life extension. No kidding!
This book also has excellent introductions to memetics and hypertext.
|
| QUOTE: |
On December 29, 1959, Richard Feynman (now a Nobel laureate) gave a talk at an
annual meeting of the American Physical Society entitled "There's Always Room
at the Bottom." He described a non-biochemical approach to nanomachinery
(working down, step by step, using larger machines to build smaller machines),
and stated that the principles of physics "do not speak against the possibility
of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws;
it is something, in principle, which can be done; but in practice, it has not
been done because we are too big.... Ultimately, we can do chemical
synthesis... put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the
substance." In brief, he sketched another, nonbiochemical path to the
assembler. He also stated, even then, that it is "a development which I think
cannot be avoided."
|
RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: ****_
The Selfish Gene Dawkins, Richard 1976
Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford
| IDEAS: |
gene, meme
|
| NOTES: |
This book has a lot going for it. Dawkins provides a good rigorous basis for
sociobiology, demonstrating a useful set of mental tools for thinking about
teleology without anthropomorphism. This is worth the price of admission
alone. He also sheds light on the generation gap and the battle of the sexes
using these tools. (He explains why, as Bertrand Russell once said on Laughing
Gas: "hogamus higamus, man is polygamous, higamus hogamus, woman's
monogomous.") And then he goes on to do the most useful thing of all: he coins
the term meme, as an informational analog to gene, and explains it thoroughly.
The new science of memetics explains why, as Horace said nine hundred years
ago: "Words challenge eternity." And how Samuel Butler, who died long before I
was born, could make this promise to me (and to you):
Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.
|
| QUOTE: |
The essential concept Maynard Smith introduces is that of the evolutionarily
stable strategy.... A 'strategy' is a pre-programmed behavioral policy. An
example of a strategy is: 'Attack oppontent; if he flees pursue him; if he
retaliates run away.' It is important to realize that we are not thinking of
the strategy as being consciously worked out by the individual. Remember that
we are picturing the animal as as a robot survival machine with a pre-
programmed computer controlling the muscles. To write a strategy out as a set
of simple instructions in English is just a convenient way for us to think
about it. By some unspecified mechanism, the animal behaves as if he were
following these instructions.
An evolutionarily stable strategy or ESS is defined as a strategy which, if most members of the population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy. It is a subtle and important idea. Another way of putting it is to say that the best strategy for an individual depends on what the majority of the population are doing. Since the rest of the population consists of individuals, each one trying to maximize his own success, the only strategy which persists will be one which, once evolved, cannot be bettered by any deviant individual. Following a major environmental change there may be a brief period of evolutionary instability, perhaps even oscillation in the population. But once an ESS is achieved it will stay; selection will penalize deviation from it.
|
RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: *****
Nature and Man's Fate Hardin, Garrett 1959 New American Library, Inc. 1301 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY
| IDEAS: |
evolution
|
| NOTES: |
I almost didn't list this book because I'm still annoyed by Hardin's whole
"Lifeboat Ethics" thing, but then I remebered I used to be into the Population
Bomb/Limits to Growth doom-saying myself... I am listing it here because it's
a good introduction to some of the central problems of Darwin's theory of
evolution (including bravely facing some of the necessary paradoxes and sticky
ethical issues inherent in Darwin's ideas), and the theory of evolution was the
first in Western science to use cybernetic explanation in its arguments.
Hardin makes the theory even more explicitly cybernetic, especially with the
aid of some excellent diagrams.
|
| QUOTE: |
Those who take an interest in the transmission of ideas have often pointed out
how a concept may be first be developed in the "exact sciences" (physics,
chemistry) and then move out into the less exact (biology, psychology), perhaps
even reaching those dimly scientific regions called the social sciences. There
is a hierarchy of prestige among the sciences that makes it easy for us to see
examples of transmission in this direction. What has been less often noticed
is that ideas may just as well go the other way: in the idea of cybernetics we
have a clear-cut example. The principle of the survival of the fittest, said
John Maynard Keynes, is just a vast generalization of Ricardian economics. We
need now to see what this cryptic statement means, in order not only to
understand the origin of an important idea, but also to see the source of some
enduring conflicts in human thought.
An idea is always older than its name. The idea of cybernetics was used implicitly by the French physiologist, Claude Bernard, in 1787. The Scottish physicist, Clerk Maxwell, used it in 1868 in developing the theory of the steam-engine governor. But long before both of them Adam Smith had just as clearly used the idea in his Wealth of Nations (1776). The "invisible hand" that regulates prices to a nicety is clearly this idea. In a free market, says Smith in effect, prices are regulated by negative feedback. The line of thought begun by Smith was carried through in greater detail in the early 1800's by the London stock speculator and brilliant amateur economist, David Ricardo. Because his work is more thorough (and perhaps also because "Smithian" is un-Englishic) the name "Ricardian economics" is often applied to this system of thought.
|
RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: ***__
Conflict and Defense: A General Theory Boulding, Kenneth 1962 Harper Torchbooks
| IDEAS: |
phase diagram, continuous state space
|
| NOTES: |
A rigorous theory of behaviors of interacting potential belligerents is
presented, using the graphical tools of phase diagrams of continuous state
spaces. This is the one book on this list which I haven't read all the way through,
but I was so impressed with the first few chapters that I recommend it anyway.
|
RIGOR: ****_ INTUITION: **___
Understanding media: the extensions of man McLuhan, Marshall 1964
The New American Library, Inc.,
1301 Ave. of the Americas, NY 10019
| IDEAS: |
hot, cool, medium
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| NOTES: |
Poetry disguised as analysis and vice versa. Damn useful.
Some of the ideas I've gotten from McLuhan are:
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| QUOTE: |
[from the table of contents:]
10 Roads and Paper Routes 11 Numbers: Profile of the Crowd 14 Money: The Poor Man's Credit Card 18 The Printed Word: Architect of Nationalism 20 The Photograph: The Brothel-without-Walls 21 Press: Government by News Leak 25 Telegraph: The Social Hormone 26 The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim 30 Radio: The Tribal Drum 32 Weapons: War of the Icons "The medium is the message" means, in terms of the electronic age, that a totally new environment has been created. The "content" of this new environment is the old mechanized environment of the industrial age. The new environment reprocesses the old one as radically as TV is reprocessing the film. For the "content" of TV is the movie. TV is environmental and imperceptible, like all environments. We are aware only of the "content" or the old environment. When machine production was new, it gradually created an environment whose content was the old environment of agrarian life and the arts and crafts. This older environment was elevated to an art form by the new mechanical environment. The machine turned Nature into an art form. For the first time men began to regard Nature as source of aesthetic and spiritual values. They began to marvel that earlier ages had been so unaware of the world of Nature as Art. Each new technology creates a new environment which is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art form. When writing was new, Plato transformed the old oral dialog into an art form. When printing was new the Middle Ages became an art form. "The Elizabethan world view" was a view of the Middle Ages. And the industrial age turned the Renaissance into an art form as seen in the work of Jacob Burckhardt. Siegfried Giedion, in turn, has in the electric age taught us to see the entire process of mechanization as an art process.
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RIGOR: **___ INTUITION: ***__
The Medium is the Massage -- An Inventory of Effects McLuhan, Marshall & 1967
Bantam Books, New York Fiore, Quinton
co-ordinated by Jerome Agel
| IDEAS: |
art, fragmentation, global village
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| NOTES: |
As Thomas Pynchon said in Gravity's Rainbow, "If they can get you asking the
wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." That's the whole
point of the Judo-like statement "the medium is the message" -- it's designed
to shock you into realizing you were asking the wrong questions. But you can
get thoroughly "McLuhanized," pick up the lingo and talk "media speak" up a
storm, and still be asking the wrong questions. Since McLuhan wrote (lineal,
mechanized, pre-electronic) books, many of his "followers" stayed in a lineal
thinking trap -- even while contemplating a simutaneous global village -- and
many of the "hip" young people who could more easily grasp his ideas (the "TV
babies") were put off by his pages of type with no pictures. So, this book is
a sort of collage-book, graphically bold and innovative (for 1967), facilitated
by a guy named Jerome Agel -- who also did I Seem To Be a Verb with Bucky
Fuller, The Making of Kubrick's 2001, and other collage-books in the late 60's.
This is the best book on McLuhan's ideas to give an MTV baby, too.
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There is a world of difference between the modern home environment of
integrated electronic information and the classroom. Today's television child
is attuned to the up-to-the-minute "adult" news -- inflation, rioting, war,
taxes, crime, bathing beauties -- and is bewildered when he enters the
nineteenth-century environment that characterizes the educational establishment
where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented,
classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally an environment
much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines.
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RIGOR: _____ INTUITION: ****_
Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! Carpenter, Edmund 1973 Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10019 [out of print!!!]
| IDEAS: |
media shock
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| NOTES: |
This is such an excellent book. An anthropologist in New Guinea and environs
writes on the effects of Western media technologies on the "natives," including
us. He speaks both from first-hand experience and an amazing set of accounts
by others.
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| QUOTE: |
"Love thy label as thyself." -- Joyce
In Kandangan village the people became co-producers with us in making a film. The initial proposal came from us, but the actual filming of an initiation ceremony became largely their production.... The initiates were barely conscious at the end of their ordeal, but they grinned happily when shown Polaroid shots of their scarified backs. The elders asked to have the sound track played back to them. They then asked that the film be brought back and projected, promising to erect another sacred enclosure for the screening. Finally they announced that this was to be the last involuntary initiation, and they offered for sale their sacred water drums, the most sacred objects in this ceremony. Film threatened to replace a ceremony hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years old. * * * * * * [French Guinea prince] Modupe left Africa for the United States where he studied anthropology, then worked for MGM as an actor and consultant. To avoid offending African governments, MGM insisted that no film on Africa resemble Africa. Moduope's task was purely creative: design buildings, songs, shields, dances, masks, even "languages," all of which Americans would accept as authentically African but which no African would recognize as his. Module was so successful at this that he convinced even Africans and they modified their art accordingly. * * * * * * To depict a whole object on a flat surface, literate man employs three- dimensional perspective: he shows only that surface visible from a single position at a single moment. In short, he fails. In contrast, native artists of British Columbia represent a bear, say, in full face and profile, from back, above and below, from within and without, all simultaneously. By an extraordinary mixture of convention and realism, these butcher-draftsmen skinned and boned and even removed the entrails, to to construct a new being, on a flat surface, that retained every significant element of the whole creature.
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RIGOR: *____ INTUITION: ****_
The Media Lab; Inventing the Future at MIT Brand, Stewart 1987
Viking Penguin Inc., 40 W. 23rd St., New York, NY 10010
| IDEAS: |
narrowcast, broadcatch, the room who giggles
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| NOTES: |
Brand's earnest metalogue about how media shapes us and we shape media in
the human communication environment, disguised as a tour of MIT's R&D
facilites for exploring new media.
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| QUOTE: |
Information wants to be free.
It also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy and recombine -- too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, "intellectual property," and the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better. * * * * * * "I'm for sloppy corrective programming," [Marvin] Minsky told students at a Vivarium meeting. "When you've got a bug, don't fix it. Write another piece of code to recognize that it's about to happen and head it off." He paused. "The biological way of cleaning up code is very cowardly, and you all know what that is: death. Hans Moravec at Carnegie-Mellon is working on how to cure death -- trying to figure out how to merge code of immortals without including the bugs. Immortality has this problem: if you live forever, then you get an infinite number of bugs." * * * * * * "A couple of hundred years from now, maybe [science fiction writers] Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the twentieth century, and the professional philosophers will almost all be forgotten, because they're just shallow and wrong, and their ideas aren't very powerful."
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RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: *****
Earthwalk Slater, Philip 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, NY
| IDEAS: |
psychic pollution, community, messiah
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| NOTES: |
Slater is the only sociologist I've read who pays attention to the paradoxes
of the human web. Maybe that's because he studied under Bateson. His theory
of how a "messiah" changes a society is invaluable.
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| QUOTE: |
To exercise control over the environment limits its freedom to influence us.
We act in such a way as to make its influence a product, in part, of our own
efforts -- that is, we help create the stimulus to which we respond. Control
means we put a bit of us in the environment and then treat it as if it were a
wholly independent stimulus.
Control thus dulls and deadens our experience. The more we control our environment the less possible it is to experience novelty, however avidly we seek it and seek to coerce it. For novelty and freshness cannot be coerced -- cannot be commissioned or scheduled, like a happening. They are dependent for their very existence on our having no control over them. To pursue them is to destroy them. [p. 10]
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RIGOR: **___ INTUITION: ****_
The Devil's Dictionary Bierce, Ambrose 1911
Dover Publications, Inc.
180 Varick St., New York, NY 10014
| IDEAS: |
wit & wisdom
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| NOTES: |
Cynicism sweetened with humor sometimes liberates us to confront the truth.
Bierce was a Civil War correspondent who called 'em as he saw 'em, and later
became a satirist in newspapers.
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| QUOTE: |
cannon, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.
grapeshot, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism. habit, n. A shackle for the free. hope, n. Desire and expectation rolled into one. intention, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the immanence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.
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RIGOR: _____ INTUITION: ***__
Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered White, Lynn Jr. 1968 MIT Press
| IDEAS: |
historical roots of ecological crisis
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| NOTES: |
Harry Truman said "The only thing that's really news is the history you don't
know." This applies especially to the history of technology. Lynn White,
Jr. was the first scholar to look at technological change as a crucial driver
and indicator of social change. (White's research helped inspire James Burke
to produce the TV series Connections.)
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RIGOR: *____ INTUITION: ****_
"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
-- Robert Heinlein
Perspectives in Ecological Theory Margalef, Ramon 1968
University of Chicago Press
11030 S. Langley Ave., Chicago, IL 60628
| IDEAS: |
variety, biomass, exploitation, juvenile and climax ecology
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| NOTES: |
Margalef presents a heuristsic theory of ecology, arrived at by Bertalanffy's
method of rejecting systems of differential equations as unsoluble and
then patiently rigorizing cybernetic "rules of thumb" gained intuitively by
examining lots of data -- in his case on algae. A very good condensation of
the book, with great new diagrams, appeared in the Summer 1975 issue of the
CoEvolution Quarterly (listed below under Whole Earth Review).
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| QUOTE: |
A BASIC PRINCIPLE OF ORGANIZATION
Everywhere in nature we can draw arbitrary surfaces and arbitrarily declare them boundaries separating two subsystems. More often than not it turns out that such boundaries are asymmetric; they separate two subsystems that, although arbitrarily limited, are different in their degrees of organization. There is some energy exchange between the two sub-systems in the sense that the less-organized subsystem gives energy to the more-organized subsystem, and, in the process of exchange, some information in the less-organized is destroyed and some information is gained by the already more-organized. Probably it is useful from the point of view of general science (but distracting from the point of view of ecology) to remember a few such couplings: gas/Maxwell demon, electrical conductor/semiconductor, atmosphere/sea, environment/thermostat, substrate/enzyme, enzyme/RNA, cytoplasm/nucleus, mesenchym/nervous system, biotop/community, plants/animals, prey/predator, plankton/benthos, agrarian communites/industrial societies.
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RIGOR: ****_ INTUITION: ****_
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Dillard, Annie 1974
Harper Perennial
| IDEAS: |
nature
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| NOTES: |
This lady can see the natural world in all its naked horror. No
sentimentalist, and yet in love with all life, she helped me see wildlife --
and human society -- more clearly.
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RIGOR: *____ INTUITION: *****
Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome Meadows, et. al. 1972 The New American Library 1301 Ave. of the Americas, New York, NY 10019
| IDEAS: |
difference equations, exponential growth
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| NOTES: | Computer simulations predict that, as Werner Erhardt once said, "If we don't change course, we will very likely end up where we're headed." In this case we are headed for a massive die-off due to overpopulation, pollution, lack of resources and/or economic depresion triggered by the above. This makes the human agenda from here on out quite clear. Most of the people who attacked these conclusions did so by attacking the methodology. The methodology is correct, it just needs to be refined. (We went from having no rigorous model of the world system |