Challenge: I don't understand all these big words. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
Response:
Let me attempt two answers to that.
First the simple answer. You want to look at the simplest explanation.
That is the series of lectures on the Sea Change.
The Sea Change: Seminar 1. Control
The second answer: We are systematically destroying the ecosystem. The reason that we are doing this is that we have no way to talk about systems. The central problem facing Western Civilization is the problem of holistic systems. We can grasp simple ideas like running out of oil, or any other non-renewable resource. This is a simple matter of the addition and subtraction. Thus everyone supports recycling. We have a harder time grasping systemic responses. Thus the idea of global warming is understood as the temperature going up. The idea that global warming is causing it to be cold and rainy is hard for us to grasp. The idea that antibiotics kill germs is easy for us to grasp. The idea that the use of antibiotics will inevitably give rise to supergerms is hard for us to grasp. Simple cause and effect we can understand. The cause giving rise to the opposite effect because of the adaptive quality of systems is too complicated for us. We don't have adequate mental models to deal with it.
We need new models of how reality works. We need a model that can describe holistic systems. That is what the New Paradigm sets out to do.
The question, "What is real?" is the subject of the philosophical discipline called "metaphysics." The answer that our society has to this question is "atoms." Reality is made up of atoms, and anything that isn't an atom, isn't real. This is called "materialism." The second part of this model is that these atoms are governed by universal and unchanging laws, which Science can discover. Once all these laws are discovered it will be possible to deduce backwards to everything that has ever happened and project forward everything that ever will happen. Once people get a little bit sophisticated they realize that this model doesn't correspond to reality. People have goals; they make decisions; they live and die. None of this fits the materialist model.
What I propose is an alternative model I call "Process Dualism." It says that reality is made up of form and substance. If you look at a table you see that it is made up of matter, the atoms that make up the wood, and that this matter has a form, it is shaped like a table. This gives rise to two different processes: energy processes and information processes. The energy processes are governed by the laws of thermodynamics. The information processes are governed by the nature of information and communication. A lot of work was done of information theory in the 20th Century, and the various papers on my website sum it up. But the most important idea was formulated by Claude Shannon: "Information is choice." A world that has information processes as well as material processes is a world of choice. The old materialism denies the existence of choice, purpose and meaning.
It terms of practical applications, the immediate effect is to change
our understanding of cause and effect. In the old materialist model, all
change is the application of force to an object. In the Process Dualism
model change is also caused by the form of the situation, and by the communication
and information aspects of control systems. One of the things I do in this
set of papers is to develop a general theory of control.
Challenge:
There are two types of products and processes
- material and non-material
Non-material reality consists of mental processes
and products
A key feature of mental processes and products is
their lack of existence apart from the thinking person.
Accordingly, both types of reality exist only for
human beings and any higher-order primates with the capacity for thought.
If thinking beings did not exist, only material reality would exist. Nonmaterial
reality exists because of the capacity of the human mind to create it.
Response:
This is conventional dualism. When you hear people denouncing the evils
of dualism this is the model that they are denouncing.
Let me pull out and comment on the key
points.
There are two types of products and processes - material and non-material
The basic problem with this is How do they relate? If one is material then it cannot, by definition, relate to the non-material. And vice-versa. This is the standard mind /body problem. In conventional dualism there is simply no solution to it. Materialists argue that mind is just a different kind of matter and we will eventually figured out how it works. Philosophers like John Searle are quite adamant that mind consists of gray matter. If it's not gray matter then it's not mind. Your analysis leans pretty heavily in that direction. It's pretty much the standard North American version.
To rephrase my analysis: reality has two aspects: substance and form. The statement as such is trivial. The important point is that form can be transmitted. There is a communication process distinct from material processes. It is information. It is distinct from and transmissible apart from the substance in which it inheres. Thus a ball bearing is made up of iron and it is spherical. The fact that it is iron is invisible and only derived by a process of deduction. The fact that it is a sphere is communicated to us by the medium of light. This is a realism in that it affirms that the idea of a sphere is real. The ball bearing really is a sphere. It is a sophisticated realism, in that it affirms the mediated quality of communication.
A key feature of mental processes and products is
their lack of existence apart from the thinking person.
Accordingly, both types of reality exist only for
human beings and any higher-order primates with the capacity for thought.
If thinking beings did not exist, only material reality would exist. Nonmaterial
reality exists because of the capacity of the human mind to create it.
When people denounce dualism. This is what they are denouncing. The intellectual objections are the same as that given above. But the denunciations are rooted in moral objections. This is the anthropocentric universe. The objective observer in a dead world. This is what is killing us and destroying the ecosystem. Built into it is a basic contempt for all non-human life forms. Some deep ecologists call it speciesism. It's kind of like racism only different. When the racist says "they're not like us, they don't feel pain the way we do." the racism is immediately evident to everyone except the racist. When we look at the world in the same way it leads to an abuse of the ecosystem, in the same way that racism leads to an abuse of people.
William Blake put it appropriately:
who knows but that the flight of the night bird
is not a world of delight closed by your senses five.
One of the things that Bateson did was to point out that playing otters must be capable of self-conscious awareness in order to distinguish between play and serious. He also pointed out that dolphins are capable of higher order learning, i.e. learning how to learn.
Intellectually the most serious problem
with conventional dualism is that it makes systems thinking impossible.
The most serious problems we face are all related to our inability to understand
holistic systems. The old paradigm is a linear, atomistic, mechanistic
view of the world. We are not aware of the systemic effects of our actions
or the paradoxical responses of self-regulating systems. What makes systems
so difficult to deal with is that they have minds of their own. As long
as we think that only people have minds we will be unable to deal with
this reality. What we call mind is a process of communication and control.
It is a fundamental part of reality and occurs all over the place and not
just in the human brain.
THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
Challenge: I am skeptical about much of anything being really "new"
Response:
Most of my stuff is a recasting of standard
ideas from the 20th Century. These are laid out in the Chronology.
Two things are new. The General Theory of Control is a new synthesis of
the thinking on control theory. It notes all of the previous models of
control systems. If I have missed someone significantly different, send
me a reference. Process Dualism also builds on previous thinking. Dualism
is pretty standard stuff. Process is generally attributed to Whitehead.
What is new is the concept of process as the essence of the dualism. The
idea that matter has form and substance goes back to Aristotle and beyond.
Negroponte talks about the world of atoms and the world of bits. What is
new is the idea that what is termed "mind" is part of an information and
communication process that is a basic part of the reality in which we live,
and this process is distinct from and is not co-extensive with matter/energy
and its processes. If you know of a previous exposition of the idea then
send me the reference. The reason I don't believe in copyright, is that
I think anyone's contribution to the on-going discussion is minuscule compared
to the inherited wealth of human thought.
The purpose of both of these ideas was
not to be original, but to solve specific problems that are endemic to
Western culture. These problems are all rooted in our inability to deal
with holistic systems. I had rather naively assumed that there was general
consensus on this. Now here, I must pause and ask you, old friend. What
do you think is the essential problem facing us as a culture/civilization?
And the answer has to be more specific than just "sin." It has to be our
specific besetting sin.
Challenge: I would try to add or have included something along the lines, conceptually, as "spirit" or "mystery" or the ineffable, but surely, truely, part of our wonderings...?
Response:
By these I assume you mean the incomprehensible,
and inexpressible. The incomprehensible is that which we cannot comprehend
because we are only a part of a larger whole. We like to conceive of ourselves
as occupying a godlike objective position, but we are just a part of creation.
We are parts of holistic structures. This is to me the meaning of God's
address to Job. If Job could understand the whole of creation then it might
be possible for God to explain, but Job doesn't know so God can't. Job
has to go on faith. The inexpressible is the experience of something beyond
our normal range of common human experience. The mystics are in the habit
of saying that the mystical experience is inexpressible. It is a problem
of communication. There is no way to translate it into ordinary language.
Those who know, don't talk. Those who talk, don't know. This is Job's experience
of the living God.
ISN'T THIS JUST NEGATIVE ENTROPY?
Challenge:
I am somewhat dubious about information as a tertium quid. The loss of
"information" which we call entropy is as I
recall a disorganization of matter/energy.
Response:
The idea of information as a form of entropy
was first suggested by Shannon and Weaver in The Mathematical Theory of
Communication. By the time we come to James Lovelock and the Gaia Hypothesis
it has come to be accepted as fact. The original concept of entropy was
pretty simple: you can't build a heat engine that is 100% efficient. By
the time Lovelock is talking about Negative Entropy as the sign of life
on a planet, the concept has become slightly weird. Is he saying that life
is a heat engine that achieves more than 100% efficiency? I hope not. What
has happened is that Shannon and Weaver have generated a concept that generates
confusion. It is the same confusion that gives rise to chaos theory.
The confusion is this. There is no place in the atomic or particle theory of reality for form. Since form is a basic reality, physicists attempt to sneak it in without admitting that it challenges the basic atomic model. One way that this is done is by the use of statistics. The primary function of statistics is to translate numerical data into formal categories. It was the statistical definition of entropy that Shannon and Weaver connected with. They pointed out that the statistics of information are similar to the statistics of entropy. But this is an old fallacy. The moon is round. The sun is round. Therefore the moon is the sun. But the idea took hold because physicists needed some way to talk about form. This is the same attraction of chaos theory. The idea of far from equilibrium conditions leading to self organizing properties is a way to maintain the old atomic model.
Lovelock is thinking of Entropy as a universal tendency for heat to not pass from a cooler to a hotter. Thus the universe will cool down, and there'll be no more work (i.e. heat engines) and perfect peace. Thus for Lovelock Negative Entropy is the creation of far from equilibrium conditions, i.e. an oxygen atmosphere. This he says is a sign of life. Yes, because life does set about reorganizing the environment. (I always think of Lovelock as the modern Galileo. His recanting of the Gaia Hypothesis was a sad moment.)
There are two things that they are trying to deny: purpose and choice. Shannon's definition of information is systematically ignored. "Information is choice within a set." He used a bad word, "choice". It sounds so much more scientific to talk about negative entropy. It sounds so much more scientific to talk about "bits" rather than "choices." Life forms have purposes and make choices.
My metaphysical argument is essentially this. There are two kinds of process. There are energy processes that may be defined as the transformation of energy in one form into energy in another form according to the laws of thermodynamics. There are information processes by which choices in one set are transformed into choices in another set. These are two different streams of process going on at the same time. The transistor is the great example. A signal (information) is amplified to a higher energy level. This could not happen if information and energy were the same.
The importance of this distinction is that it allows us to talk about systems, in a way that is impossible using the atomic model. It allows us to talk about hierarchy, purpose and choice.
For a more detailed technical discussion of the thermodynamic concept of entropy read my paper at Rethinking the Second Law of Thermodynamics
ISN'T INFORMATION JUST A FORM OF ENERGY?
Challenge:
Surely most of us see information not
as identical but as an attribute/pattern of energy; so the argument in
opposition to information being "identical" with energy seems to miss the
mark.
Response:
Even seeing information as "an attribute/pattern
of energy" does not get around the transistor problem. The transistor amplifies
a signal. For it to do that the information has to be distinct from the
energy. It must have its own reality. Information is real. It can be transmitted
distinct from any particular matter or energy. Whether print on a page,
or lights on a marquee or pixels on a screen, the "word" is still the same
information.
To refuse to see information as real is
to refuse to see the characteristics of information as real: holism, history,
choice, purpose. At root our madness is a refusal to see reality.
ENTROPY, ECONOMY AND GEORGESCU-ROEGEN
Challenge: In the back of my mind was the work of Georgescu-Roegen, which you might consider addressing.
Response:
Entropy and economics. I have assumed
that the standard analysis that we are approaching peak oil, and that means
we have run out of cheap hydrocarbons. I assume that means the collapse
of the western industrial system specifically western agriculture. However
Peter Schwarz in Inevitable Surprises says alternative technology is ready
to go, and that the rate of world population growth peaked in the sixties.
I am inclined to believe him. I think energy is a technical problem and
has a technical solution. It's the kind of problem that western technology
is adept at solving. The crash is a different kind of problem.
Schwarz sees the key problems as global climate change and the coming pandemic. Here again I agree. The problems that are destroying us are the ways we are interfering in ecological systems we do not understand and have no way of understanding. The two he picks on are the climate which we don't understand, and supergerms which we are breeding. I would add a host of other things as well: we are fishing out the sea, desertifying our farms, emptying our water tables, our rivers no longer run to the sea, our air is full of toxins, our water is full of toxins. our vegetables are covered with pesticides and herbicides. Schwarz argues that rich countries will get cleaner, because rich people do not want to live in garbage. I'm sorry. In the 60s Toronto did not have smog days. Now they have smog days. To the modern corporation health and safety are expenses that contribute nothing to the bottom line. To the modern politician the state has no business interfering in business.
These problems share one common factor: our inability to understand and talk about holistic systems. When Margaret Thatcher said "There is no society, there are only individuals." we have the spectacle of a Prime Minister denying the existence of her own state and nobody laughed.
There are no individuals. Quantum theory even throws doubt on the individuality of sub-atomic particles. We are all holons: we are the whole to our parts, and we are part of a larger whole. Corporations are not individuals. Neither are they aggregates. They are holons. Until we make that shift in world view from seeing the world in atomic terms as a collection of individual atoms, to seeing the world in terms of holons, the systemic problems facing us will continue to be insoluble. In addition we have to talk about how holons express purpose, and communicate and make decisions.
The inability to make that shift comes from an unstated philosophical presupposition that information is not "real," or "really real." Which, of course, goes back to the victory of the nominalists over the realists in the Middle Ages.
Population growth? Yeah, that surprised me too. But then I realized that Schwarz was talking not about "population growth" but the "rate of population growth." Or, being translated, the growth of growth, that darn reflexivity problem again. It is the reflexive quality that makes processes exponential.
You can live without food for about a month. You can live without water for a few days. You can live without air for a few minutes. It is not the lack per se, so much as the systemic effect of that lack. You are 78 percent water, but you could drown in a puddle.
Running out of stuff is not our biggest
problem. Lake Winnipeg is becoming polluted. It's not that there isn't
enough water in the lake. We just have too much runoff from hog barns,
and fertilizers, and detergents, and sewers. There is still air in Toronto,
but it's smog. Destroying the balance of our ecosystems will destroy us
long before we ran out of stuff.
ARE CORPORATIONS INDIVIDUALS OR COLLECTIVITIES?
Challenge: Corporations may be holons or hobgoblins but they are definitely collectivities - even when as with the monarchy they arre singularities- and above all they are legal fictions.
Response:
Corporations are real. This is the nub.
This is the essence. This is the core problem. It is our inability to understand
the nature of corporations that is killing us. General Motors is real.
It has a reality quite separate from any of the people who are employed
by it. General Motors has a personality. It is the personality of a psychopath,
but it is a real personality. The people who are employed by General Motors
are not psychopaths. But their job is to further the interests of the Corporation
which is a psychopath.
The central value for every commercial corporation is the same, profit. Or as Harold Geneen put it " 10 percent growth in earnings per share". It doesn't matter who the CEO is. It doesn't matter who the Board of Directors are. It doesn't matter who the shareholders are. The fundamental purpose of the corporation is to make a profit. Any employee who does not understand that will be replaced. Any CEO who does not understand that will be replaced. Any board member who does not understand that will be replaced. Conrad Black's troubles with Hollinger stem from his misunderstanding of this fact. He suffered from the delusion that Hollinger International Inc. was his personal property.
If a corporation has a choice between destroying the cod stocks and making 10 percent profit as opposed to maintaining a sustainable cod fishery and making only 9 percent profit, then it must destroy the cod stocks. Any CEO who doesn't have the guts to do it will be replaced.
All the talk about corporate responsibility, or that the CEO is a wonderful human being, or that the employees are wonderful, community minded citizens, is irrelevant. It is worse than irrelevant it is deliberate disinformation. It is like to Russian peasants believing that if only the good Czar knew of the sufferings of the peasants, he would act to help them.
The corporation is no more a mere aggregate of individuals, than you are a mere aggregate of individual cells.
An important thing to remember is that not all corporations are commercial corporations. There is a wide variety of what are called not-for-profit corporations: universities, hospitals, unions, churches, governments. They have different values. They value truth, health, respect, love, justice. One of the most dangerous tendencies in the modern world is the tendency to reform all of our institutions on the model of the commercial corporation. It destroys their core value and replaces it with a commitment to profit.
The future will not be a future of every
man neath his vine and fig tree or every family with 50 acres and a mule.
The future will continue to be a world of cities and corporations.
Challenge:
"Noncommercial" corporations are not devoted
to Truth, Justice and the American Way. A nonprofit corporation is just
a company without stockholders and as you observe, stockholders are by
no means the most important part of a corporation. A tenth of the US economy
is nonprofit. Public corporations such as the Tennessee Valley Authority
have a long history of behaving just like ordinary business corporations.
The great corporate model, the church, has an even longer record of behaving
even worse.
Yes indeed, corporations are as real as the sovereignties by which they are created and as psychopathic as those sovereignties. Some would say even moreso. We will always have corporations, municipal and commercial, etc. If those corporations retain their present form they will continue on their present course.
Response:
"If those corporations retain their present
form they will continue on their present course."
Exactly. The problem is one of form. How then are they to be reformed? Or as we tend to say these days transformed. It is a problem of information and communication.
Consider Donella Meadows posted at the
Rocky Mountain Institute site
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid790.php
"Places to Intervene in a System"
where she offers 10 'levels' of intervention:
9. Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards).
8. Material stocks and flows.
7. Regulating negative feedback loops.
6. Driving positive feedback loops.
5. Information flows.
4. The rules of the system (incentives,
punishment, constraints).
3. The power of self-organization.
2. The goals of the system.
1. The mindset or paradigm out of which
the goals, rules, feedback structure arise.
0. The power to transcend paradigms.
The idea of levels (i.e. hierarchical structures)
is essential to holism and to systems thinking.
You will note that she moves gradually
from the material flows of a system to the more powerful and pervasive
organizing ideas of a system.
I would not, however, descend to her level
0 of post modernist despair. I think it can be avoided by shifting the
model from "intervening" in systems, to "communicating" with systems. It
is true that there are very few systems we can control, but we can communicate
with them. That is hopeful.