Within my own field of vision, however, this is intricately bound up with my longstanding commitment to develop a much broader practical and theoretical perspective. This entails the best marriage I have yet encountered, between a truly scientific sensibility and the person-friendly perspective which helps us take charge, collectively, of our own pattern of life. Another heroic attempt at such a marriage was made by Robert Pirsig, in his Zen and the Art of MotorCycle Maintenance, and Lila, but for various reasons (see my other blog at http://lila-q.blogspot.com) I feel my own attempt is truer to the spirit of science and also to the spirit of human reality(1)
I would like to put this material within reach of any friendly bloggers, so I am including some key links here. The practical perspective that I offer, is strongly consequential upon the radical move I have made, of bringing systems theory and lived reality into intimate relationship.
To understand how this works, however, we need to make a broad distinction between systems theory, and systems sensibility. Systems theory is a broad technical discipline in its own right, which seems to proceed perfectly happily in the Asperger's-Syndrome "boy world" of machines, calculations, decision and control - seemingly walled off from the hot, sweaty, emotional domain of everyday living. Systems sensibility, by contrast, is implicitly a personal thing: depending on intuition, felt sense, and vague recognitions of something important that cannot - certainly can not at will - be put into words. I associate this sensibility primarily with the work of Professor Stafford Beer; so far as I know the term was coined by him, but the words (if not the true concept) have spread far and wide since Beer’s work had its first flowering
Stafford Beer represents the high point of the emotionally intelligent systems thinking, which was on the rise in the decades from the Second World War to the early 1970s. (There has been something of an eclipse of his work and influence more recently, but I suspect that the cause of this is largely to do the vagaries of cultural fashion.) The focus of his method is the intelligent cybernetic modeling of any form(2) of human enterprise. From this complex and demanding method(3) I am selecting some key principles, which will help to ground - and to provide orientation for - the delicate structure which we are going to build together.
You can find a discussion of the array of existing methods, which I see as having an essential resonance with my own work, on the following link.
A remarkable feature of our own method, is that it centres so faithfully about our personal standpoint: our personal commitments, our feelings, desires, and preferred ways of getting along together. In this sense it is more down-to-earth and personal than the practical methods I refer to on my main web-site, but so far as its domain of application is concerned, it is more general, and in effect more abstract.
To understand this paradox, we need to know the technical background and reasoning, some of which can be found at this link, but for which the underpinnings are scattered through various locations on my web-site, especially the section on systems sensibility. This technical understanding is not essential for the actual practice, but it is indispensable for understanding how and why the method works; it will also be an aid for making sense of the delicate choices we have to make in the course of our practice.
NOTE 1. The attempt to bridge the gap between scientific and everyday reality was also a primary concern of the twentieth century philosophers A.N.Whitehead, John Dewey and Justus Buchler. In other words, Robert Pirsig was by no means the first person to address this issue.
2. In Diagnosing the System for Organisations (1985) Beer declares that the approach is relevant: "whether you are interested in a firm, an international conglomerate, a social service, a consortium of like-minded people, a government department, or a national economy." One of Beer's distinctions was to be invited as a consultant to the entire economy of Chile, under the only Marxist government to be democratically elected in the history of the world. Between the years 1971 and 1973 he devoted his main professional energy to this project. Following the CIA-inspired military coup and subsequent imposition of a military state under General Pinochet, Beer was invited to return and provide his services for the new regime - which request I am given to understand he politely declined.
3. A proper understanding of Beer's approach requires an apprenticeship to the cybernetics and underlying mathematics. This would also need to be combined with practice in the detailed modelling of some real-world enterprises. The interested reader is referred to Beer's own corpus of writing, which gives by far the best accounts available, of this work.
3 comments:
Have you come across reference to 'the singularity'? the name of the concept of the point when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence (and we become 'cyber-sapiens' through its integration into our bodies through nanotechnology). It's anticipated to occur in next 20-30 years due to exponential change factors that have played out with most other technologies - predicted by (among others) key reliable techno predictor Ray Kurtzweil (see his book - 'The Singularity is Near' or his Q&A article on it at http://singularity.com/qanda.html ). The wikipedia entry on singularity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity) is well researched and worth a read. We need to be thinking about the singluarity in relation to 'grace in the now' and what developments, articulations and contributions we can make.
- Sandy Gee
Dear Sandy,
Thankyou for your comment - which is the first one on this site! - but I do have some problems with it. I've looked at both those references, and to me they are located at the far side of a divide - having a different definition or appreciation of "intelligence" from that which I believe in. They seem to me to presuppose a stripped-down version of "intelligence" - as if it were the sum total of the computing power of the human brain; and the brain being imagined as a kind of stand-alone computer: its power measured in gigabytes per second, or something.
To me, this is massively under-estimating the intricacy and the order we dwell within, (within which the brain does not appear as a separate entity at all). This larger ecology, after all, is the system we are an integral part of. The technological inventions that are extolled by the writers cited, seem to me like relatively crude devices: having their influence essentially by acting as foreign bodies, provoking widespread re-adjustments and reconfigurations of that greater intricacy and order. (Powerful, then, but not all that powerful.) To me it is simply a delusion, that our inventions come remotely near to the order of complexity such as might rival or "take over" that of our lived universe. (On the other hand, most new inventions do increase the level of complexity and the sheer chaos, of the whole system).
As I understand it, when we think of the brain as being "a computer" we are ignoring the intricate chemical, immunological and electrical relationship that a brain has with a human body, and the coupling this enables with the vast intricacy of the earth ecology. It also ignores the intricate and strange presence of the past as this resonates within the cultural and personal memories, and in the landscape and archeology of planet earth. This is just a different order and subtlety of "memory" compared with the thing a computer has - that is also called a "memory" but is merely a pre-fabricated data base.
Even when computers start to construct or gather their own data bases (and this is something that seems to thrill the science fiction writers, more than it does me) they will be doing it according to relatively crude algorithms that will not come anywhere near the complex way that living systems, species and ecologies gather and store past patterns within their ongoing patterns of life.
The work I want to do, has to do with finding more subtle ways of dwelling within the intricacy of our actual (shared) world; I am happy to incorporate whatever technology and technical ways of thinking, that would enhance the project. To me, this project does indeed relate to a "singularity" in human evolution - but it is one that has already happened, it is something we are already in the midst of. (It has to do with the invention of language, and the development of science and technology, and the rapid re-cycling and mutual impacting of cultures.) Our major challenge, as I see it, is to learn how to navigate this singularity. The science-fiction "singularity" as described in your comment seems to me a construction of intellects who have chosen not to dwell in the shared and sweaty world of here and now, but in models and abstractions that seek not to connect back and make sense with the intricate world they claim to model and abstract from. (It is what Dewey calls "apart thought" - since it is apart from lived reality. Heidegger has a complicated German expression for the same thing.)
So the singularity that I am talking about has the same "sorcerer's apprentice" quality as the singularity of the artificial intelligence bods. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we have created something like a super-human information/power/intelligence source that takes on a life of its own, and does not necessarily have our interests at heart. (Unlike the AI people, I back-date this information-revolution to the time we first invented speech, writing, and human culture - all these things have the same dual tendency, to empower and liberate us, but potentially also to take on demonic energy and become forces of human oppression.)
But in any case I want to respond to this situation by recognizing it as something we are dwelling within - and I want to research ways that we can reach to re-connect with the centre of it, in spite of all the distractions and invitations to "apart thought". I think that the methods I have chosen (and I am sure there are many others I don't know about, that we could benefit from) are in tune with the cybernetic and systems thinking of people like Stafford Beer and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. What they have in common, is that they are designed to help fine-tune our relationship with the intricacy which we are, and the intricacy that we move within. When we do this right, we are able to re-integrate the "new technologies" into a richer pattern of life. We know when we are doing it right when we can feel ourselves being true to ourselves, and in the presence of Grace.
found a quote from John Dewey 1931:-
"whenever an idea loses its immediate felt quality, it ceases to be an idea and becomes, like an algebraic symbol, a mere stimulus to execute an operation without the need for thinking."
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