THE FORM OF REALITY: A Meditation on Process Dualism
by Robert Johannson
2.There are two kinds of process.
3. The Relationship is a gestalt.
4. Information is information.
5. Information is choice.
6. Information is contextual
7. Information is hierarchical
8. Information is historical.
9. Communication is . . . the transmission and reception of information.
10. Meaning is translation.
11. Control is an information process.
12. Holistic systems are structures of communication and control.
13. Conclusion
Appendix A: Historical Postscript: The two monisms.
Appendix B: What Is a Cybernetic System?
THE FORM OF REALITY
A Meditation on Process Dualism
by Robert Johannson
The problems that we face going into the 21st Century are issues of holistic systems. How do you balance individual rights and social responsibility? How are we to understand the relationship of the organ to the body? the relationship of mind and body? the placebo effect? How do we deal with the paradoxical responses of self-regulating systems? What do we do when families, defence departments, and industries take on a mind of their own? How do you govern a society of institutions, or worse a society of transnational institutions?
These are all issues of communication and control. We have made major strides in understanding them in the 20th Century. This essay is an attempt to explicate and elucidate some of the more important of these discoveries.
.All thinking is based on presuppositions. The most important of these presuppositions are the subjects of the philosophical disciplines of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. The philosophical discipline of Metaphysics asks a simple question: What is real? Like most philosophical questions, it is fundamental. All of our thinking is based on the assumptions we make about what is and what is not real.
Let me begin with a simple affirmation and proceed from there.
Reality is process.
Heraclitus got it right. All is flux.
Plato got it right. Every thing beneath the moon is subject to mutability.
Marcus Aurelius got it right. Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.
Galileo got it right. I don't care what they say. I saw it move.
Edmond Spencer got it right. The ever-whirling wheeele of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway.
Shelley got it right. Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow
Naught may endure but Mutability.
Tolstoy got it right. Time is infinite movement without one moment of rest.
Einstein got it right. E = mc2
Whitehead got it right. Process and reality.
Richard Buckminster Fuller got it right. I'm not a noun, and I'm not an adjective. I think I'm a verb.
Anne Wilson Schaef gets it. Living is process.
We make reality a noun. But it's not a noun. Reality is always changing. It is never static. To determine if a noun is a nominalization we ask the question. "Can you put it in a wheel barrow?" If you cannot then the odds are pretty good that you've got a verb that has been transformed into a noun. Can you put reality in wheel barrow? I don't think so.
Now this is a debatable point. There are people who argue that you can put reality into a wheel barrow, and anything you can't put it into a wheel barrow is not real. They insist that they have a really big wheel barrow, and it is just a matter of time before they get everything into it.
Instead of debating this I'm going to apply another test. This test is to put "Is it an ongoing" in front of the noun. Is it an ongoing reality? I'm sure it is.
Reality is a process.
2. There are two kinds of process.
Reality is process. That is the easy part. There is lots of precedent for this position and some pretty impressive people have thought it before me. In the University I learned that there is only one argument and that is the argument from authority. (You are permitted to say it, if a bunch of dead guys with long names said it first, and you can quote them on it.)
Now comes the problem. There are two different kinds of process. This is a radical statement. If reality is process and there are two different kinds of process, then there are two different kinds of reality. The idea of two different kinds of reality is what most metaphysicians have argued against. I would argue that most metaphysical theories look so odd, because they are trying to find some way to explain the two realities as though there were only one.
Process is transmission and transformation.
I am not about to define process. But I think that there are two aspect that are essential, or necessary conditions. Process is transmission and transformation.
Process is like a sentence. There's a noun and a verb. Something that remains the same and some aspect of it that changes. One kind of change is to change place, to move from one place to another. A second kind of change is to change form, to move from one shape to another.
Transmission means that the thing that is constant can move from one thing to another. It can be transmitted.
Transformation means that the thing that is constant can change from one shape to another. It can be transformed.
There are two different things that can be transmitted and transformed: energy and information.
There are Energy processes. Energy can be transmitted and transformed.
The theory of motion, or movement managed to make a major leap forward when it developed the first law of thermodynamics. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. What that means, being translated, is that if an object acquires energy, then it has to have come by transmission. The energy must have come from some source. If we see a change in the movement of some object then we can ask where did the energy come from, or where did it go. In other words we can talk about physical cause and effect.
Take the classic example of the two billiard balls. One billiard ball hits the other billiard ball and the second billiard ball moves off in a different direction. The first billiard ball can be said to cause the movement in the second billiard ball because it has transmitted energy to it. The first billiard ball will slow down to the extent that it has transmitted energy to the second billiard ball. Energy can be transmitted.
The direction that the second billiard ball goes in will be determined not by the quantity of energy that is transmitted, but by where the ball is hit. If it is hit on the right side it will go left. If it's hit on the left side, it will go right. Depending on where it hits the second ball the direction of the first ball will change. The direction of the energy will be transformed. Energy can be transformed.
Take the example of the hydro electric transmission line. The energy that runs my computer is generated by a hydro electric plant hundreds of miles from me. The energy from the water is transmitted to the turbine which transforms it into electrical energy. The electrical energy is transmitted by power lines to transformers that step it down to a form that my home appliances can use. Energy is transmitted and transformed.
This is so common a phenomenon that I need not expand on the point.
There are Information processes. Information can be transmitted and transformed.
Do you read me?
As you read that line, you participate in an information process. Perhaps even, if I am extraordinarily lucky, a communication process.
Words are oral. They are primarily spoken and heard. They are transmitted from one person to another by the voice and the ear. We use the spoken word to transmit information from one person to another. Information can be transmitted.
I take the words that I wish you to hear and I transform them into key strokes on my keyboard, and my computer transforms them into letters on a page. I have transformed the spoken word into the printed word. Information can be transformed.
Information is transmitted and transformed. There are information processes. They are real.
Reality is dualistic, it is made up of energy processes and information processes.
That's the tough one.
Traditional determinism is based on the model that there is only one process, the energy process. If the world was made up only of atoms and their direction and energy are known then you could, in theory, predict the future or recreate the past, since all events are governed by the immutable laws of motion. Thus all events were determined at the moment the universe was created.
If there is another process at work then physical predictability is a shambles, or as the scientists are wont to say, "a special case."
D. T. Niles, the evangelist, used to come into a lecture and say to the audience. "Would you all stand up for a moment, please." After they stood up he would say, "Would you all sit down now, please." Then after they all sat down again, he would say. "Don't let anyone ever tell you that words don't make things happen."
3. The Relationship is a gestalt.
The question that is usually asked of a dualism is: " If there are two different kinds of reality how are they related? How specifically do they interact?" What is the relationship between energy processes and information processes?
The relationship is a gestalt. You are familiar with the famous picture that can be looked at either as two faces or as a vase. If you look at the space between as foreground then you will see a vase. If you look at the space as background then you will see two faces.
Energy processes and information processes are always happening together. The transmission of information requires energy. The transformation of energy requires form. If the energy is in the foreground then you are following the energy process. If the information is in the foreground then you are following the information process.
To give a simple example consider the wire fuse. The wire in the fuse has a specific resistance and will heat up as electricity is conducted through it. This is a simple energy process. Electrical energy is being transformed into heat. The fuse is an energy process.
There is another way to look at the fuse. If the wire is solid then the circuit is complete "1". But if the electricity exceeds the wattage of the fuse then the wire melts and the circuit is broken "0". The fuse has a meaning expressed in binary code. The blown fuse "0" indicates that the load on the circuit is too high. We may then translate into a more complex meaning say that you cannot run the toaster and the hair dryer on the same circuit at the same time.
Is it an energy process or an information process? It is both. How do the two relate? It's a gestalt. Which you see depends on which you're looking at.
4. Information is information.
"Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day." Norbert Wiener (1948)
Question: But isn't information just a form of energy?
Answer: Information is not matter.
Information is not energy.
Information is information.
It would probably be simpler to say that information is form. Aristotle was willing to see reality as being made up of matter and form. So we could quote him as an authority. And we could then happily affirm that form is one of the elemental properties of reality. But this would be like saying that energy is motion. It's a bit more complicated than that. So information is form, but it's a bit more complicated than that. The complicated part is that it can be transmitted and transformed.
When we say that information is information, we mean that it is an elementary part of reality. It cannot be reduced to anything else. It is not just a kind of matter or just a kind of energy.
Let's start with matter. It is pretty clear that information is not matter. It does not have mass. If you look at the words on the page or screen in front of you; the ink has mass; the paper has mass; the glass has mass; but the words don't. Thus the question "How many kilograms in that word?" does not make sense. When I take the words off the page and put them on the screen, there is no part of the paper and no part of the ink that goes on the screen. There are no little atoms of information floating around.
Because it is so obvious that information is not matter, most people tend to confuse information with energy. Thus the question: Isn't information just a form of energy? The answer again is no. The question "How many calories in that word?" does not make sense. If it did we would have to start worrying about high energy reading.
But having shown what information is not, we need to go on and look at what information is. The twentieth century has had a lot of very clever people thinking about just that question.
5. Information is choice.
Energy is unified and constant. That is the burden of the first law of thermodynamics. Information is not unified and it is not constant. Information can be created and it can be destroyed.
Information is choice.
Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver wrote a landmark book called The Mathematical Theory of Communication. They defined information as choice within a set. Thus if you have twenty six letters and you choose one, then you have information. If there are twenty-six letters to choose from then each letter has an information value of 26. (27 if you count the space.)
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This number can then be manipulated mathematically, and used to calculate questions of capacity, redundancy, and probability,. It is easy to see how these definitions shade into statistics, for statistics is concerned with the frequency of occurrence of alternatives within a set. Since they were working for Bell Labs, the question of how much information could be transmitted on a telephone line was important to them.
Shannon also pointed out that Information can be translated into "bits" (binary digits). When you define the basic set as a simple "either . . . or," then it is a short step to defining the basic positional set as a binary choice, either 0 or 1.
Defining information as choice within a set is not unique to Shannon and Weaver. When we compare this definition to the usual definitions of information, we see that they are the same.
The Science of Form is Logic
The Science of Form is Logic.
Logicians tell us that the other logical operators can be derived from two: "v" either...or, and "~" not. These two operators create sets. This corresponds to Shannon's definition of information as "choice within a set." And Bateson's definition of information as "a difference that makes a difference."
If we look at the standard symbol of a category or set, the Venn diagram, we can see the elementary choice involved in all categories.
A set or a category is basically a boundary, a distinction. All boundaries have a basic characteristic. There can be no inside, without an outside. There can be no X without a corresponding ~X. Deductive logic is based on this assumption. Even fuzzy logic does not challenge this, only the clarity of the distinctions or boundaries. If there are no distinctions then there is no information, no sets and no logic.
Choice is the primary act in the creation of information. The set is a result of a choice. Without a choice there are no sets. Every category is the expression of a choice that creates a distinction. To choose is to create alternatives. To choose is to establish boundaries.
To reiterate. Choice is the basis of all form and all information. Therefore choice is not peculiar to humans. All organisms or (gasp) machines that are involved in processing information are involved in choice.
6. Information is contextual
The moment you have more than one boundary you have context. If we look in the dictionary for a definition of a word we may or may not find a picture. We definitely will find other words. The usual definition is a combination of the simuls et differens. In other words the things that it is similar to and the things that it is different from. Thus a "chair" is defined as "a seat for one person." It can be seen as part of the category of "seats," but different from other seats in that it is only for "one person."
The word exists within a world of other words, and the definition is used not necessarily to show its relationship to perceived reality, but to its relationship to other words. This establishes its place within the context of the vocabulary.
Truth is . . .validity
Context truth is related to propositional truth. Thus a relationship can be deduced, and considered valid because of the formal relationship of the words.
All men are stupid.
Zorba is a man.
Therefore Zorba is stupid.
If the first two of these statements are true, then the third is true. This is not found to be true by observation, but by deduction.
7. Information is hierarchical.
When A. N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell wrote the Principia Mathematica they were concerned to demonstrate that mathematics was a branch of logic, and that all the basic mathematical propositions could be reduced to logical propositions. The new Boolean or algebraic logic gave them the tools to do this. This was revolutionary. It attacked the basic scientific faith in numbers. There was a scientific mystique about numbers at one time. There was a sense that mathematics was sound. You could depend on numbers. Words were slippery things that could turn on you, and end up meaning different things to different people at different times. But numbers were solid and objective. Everyone could agree on the numbers.
But if numbers were related to logic then they were subject to the same paradoxes that logic was prone to.
Whitehead and Russell were sensitive to this problem and they wanted to solve it. They did this by creating a rule. Take a simple paradox. "The statement in quotes is not true." If the statement is true then the statement is not true. If the statement is not true then the statement is true. We have produced statements that are illogical since they affirm both X and ~X. The proposal of Russell and Whitehead was simply to make a rule against statements like that. A category could not be a sub-category of itself.
Warren McCullough and Gregory Bateson were fascinated by Russell's concept of logical levels. While Bateson was at the zoo one day watching the otters play, he began to wonder how it was that the otters knew that it was a play fight and not a real fight. He speculated that there was some communication at a logical category one level higher that allowed the otters to communicate about the meaning of their chasing and biting.
Bateson used this idea of logical levels to develop his double bind theory of schizophrenia. If parents of a child were to say things to a child that were contradicted at a meta level, then the child would be caught in paradoxes that it did not have the mental resources to deal with. This would leave the child prone to the confusion of mind that is schizophrenia. Many institutions behave in this way, claiming to do things for the good of the client that are hurtful and damaging.
One way to diagram hierarchy is the use of concentric circles.
Another way is as a tree.
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Internet |
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Intranet A |
Intranet B |
Intranet C |
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Joe |
Sally |
Harry |
Susie |
Willy |
Blondie |
Dagwood |
The Theory of Relativity is concerned with the idea of categories.
Hierarchies are related to the idea of categories within categories. Any concept of holistic systems generally has some concept of hierarchical levels. The traditional struggle in a democracy is between the centrifugal forces that see society as a collection of unrelated individuals with equal rights. And the hierarchical view of society that sees individuals as belonging to a larger whole.
8. Information is historical.
If categories are a product of choice then categories are historical. There is a time at which they are chosen. Choices create history. They have syntax.
Energy processes are basically reversible. You can run them backwards. If you look at a movie clip, you can run it backwards. It may look odd, but it still makes sense. Even a piece of music can be played backwards. But a song played backwards makes no sense at all. All at sense no makes backwards played song a but.
Choices are highly dependent on historical context. Thus there is a second kind of causality. The traditional western world view tends to look at causality as basically independent of time and space. There are universal and eternal laws of nature. They are true at all times and in all places. And causality is the application of these laws.
Information creates the concept of historical causality. Things are the way they are because someone decided they should be that way. Our ancestors decided we should have a constitution. We can change the constitution, but we cannot reverse it. Previous choices have created the context in which we must live.
9. Communication is . . . the transmission and reception of information.
In The Mathematical Theory of Communication Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver presented the following diagram of the communication process. They make the following comment on it: "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities." p.31
The model is simple on the surface. But when we look closer we find that it is very complex. The process is one of transformation and transmission. In order for a message to be transmitted it must first be transformed into a signal. In order for a message to be received the signal must be transformed into a message again. The receiver is not the same as a transmitter. It is the complement of the transmitter.
The process of communication is fundamentally sympathetic. The goal of communication is matching. The closer the message received is to the message sent the more successful the communication.
Communication is a question of harmony or rapport.
People trained in energy theory are prone to think of the message as a kind of projectile that penetrates the receiver and causes it to change by imparting its energy. This is not communication. Communication is achieved by the establishment of an harmonic resonance between the sender and receiver.
Communication is . . . code
Marshal McLuhan is famous for his insight that the medium is the message. What he meant by that was an extension of the insights of Harold Innis who pointed out that different means of communication have systemic effects. A change in the means of communication creates a change in the whole system.
It is a little bit easier if we look at it the other way round. The nature of communication is that the message is the medium. If we look for example at the Morse Code we see that the signal is a series of dots and dashes. This is the message that is transmitted from the key of the operator and received by the clicker of the receiver. The alphabet is translated into a series of dots and dashes. Thus the message in morse code becomes a medium for a more complex message at a higher level. This idea of taking a simple series of messages and making them symbols for a more complex message is fundamental to much of what is happening in electronic data processing. This allows the computer to represent the complexity of human language as a series of ones and zeroes.
The Neural Code
This basic understanding of information as a binary choice was taken up by Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts. They used it to create a model of how the brain can understand universals, or categories. The electrical action in the brain involves the firing of neurons. The neuron makes a choice, either it fires or it does not fire. Their theory is more complex than that but the basic binary choice was the core of what was needed to create a theory for how the brain could handle logic.
Binary code.
.It was their paper on how the brain perceives universals that lead John Von Neumann to develop his famous computer architecture, the basis of all our present computers. He used electronic tubes to act as the switches that are either on or off. The inheritor of the electronic tube is the transistor, or silicon chip. The first computers where thought of as electronic brains because Von Neumann was using the understanding of the human brain developed by McCullough and Pitts. Computers still operate by using a set of transistorized switches that are either on or off in a binary fashion.
The DNA code.
The idea of a relatively simple set of alternatives that acts as the carrier signal for a complex set of information and instruction is what lies behind the concept of the DNA as the control system for the body's biological architecture. There are four different molecules that make up the DNA molecule in sets of two.
The Genome project, the largest scientific effort ever mounted is working at decoding the DNA molecule and translating what the different parts of the message mean.
The Silent Language
McLuhan was not the only one that was looking at the communication context in the society. Edward T. Hall was also looking at the way societies structured their communication.
While McLuhan was looking at the way media shaped perceptual modalities, Hall was looking at the way that space (The Hidden Dimension) and time (The Silent Language) were used as media of communication. To the American Attache waiting outside the door of his South American counterpart a wait of fifteen minutes is a personal insult. To the South American official a wait of less than half a day would indicate groveling subservience. The context is itself a medium of communication.
Communication is . . .media
Marshall McLuhan's insight that the medium is the message was related to the changes that specific media make on the message. We talk about a chair as a visual perception in which case we think of shapes and colours. We can talk about a chair as a kinesthetic perception in which case we talk about the softness, the comfort, back support. If we talk about a chair as an aural perception then we have a very limited understanding of it. The form of our dominant perceptual mode has a major impact on our understanding of the world around us.
McLuhan pointed out that different media of communication stress different perceptual experiences. Thus the introduction of a new communications technology not only changes the means of communication, it also changes the experience of reality. He pointed out that the introduction of the printed book created a highly visual culture that accepted visual modalities as the norm. Television he thought was changing the interplay of the senses in the direction of a more tactile or kinesthetic experience of reality.
Communication is networking.
As the definition of the communication context became more important. More people began to look at the ways that a communication context is created. The question that was asked was "How do new ideas get disseminated?" The answer that people like Rodgers came up with was that communication could best be understood as a network. The communication context was a web of interrelated communication.
10: Meaning is translation.
Meaning is a relationship. We can identify two kinds of meaning by two kinds of
relationship.
One kind of meaning is reference. The word refers to something. E.g. I am sitting on a chair. A "chair" is an object that may be vaguely defined in the dictionary, but it is clearly defined in our experience. Everyone who has ever sat in a chair knows what the word "chair" refers to. The reference is to perceived reality.
In this context the word "chair" is like the morse code that functions as a signal of another level of meaning. It refers to the sensory reality that we experience. Our sensory reality refers to events in the world around us.
Map and territory
Alfred Korzybski is famous for pointing out these different levels. He said, "The map is not the territory, but has the same form as the territory." This is a tremendously important insight. If we add to this the assumption that form, i.e. information, can be transformed and transmitted then we have a justification of a modified empiricism.
Metaphysics asks the question, "What is real?" Epistemology asks the related question, "What can we know?"
The empiricists tended to argue that all we can know is what we learn from the senses.
The phenomenologists argued that we cannot know if our senses have any relationship to anything outside of our own mind. They would argue that there may or may not be something that corresponds to our sense perceptions, but we cannot know for sure.
If information can be transformed and transmitted that we are communicating with the world around us. We do perceive the form of reality.
Empiricism requires for its validity a process dualism.
Truth is . . . matching.
Truth is correlation. At this level of meaning where the word refers to the form of an event in the world. Then it is true to the extent that it does in fact match the form of the event in the world. If we were to find that other observers thought that I was not sitting on a chair, but on a camel, then we would have a discussion about the truth of the statement, "I am sitting on a chair."
CONTROL
11: Control is an information process.
In an April 21, 1966 lecture, that was later printed in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson (1972) commented,
"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." p. 484.
Bateson was utterly serious and he was not exaggerating.
The term "cybernetics" was coined by the mathematician Norbert Wiener (1948).
"We have decided to call the whole field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek "cybernete;" or steersman. In choosing this term, we wish to recognize that the first significant paper on feed-back mechanisms is an article on governors, which was published by Clerk Maxwell in 1868." p.19
What the cyberneticists had done was to change the direction of science completely. For four hundred years science had been seeking to understand energy processes. Instead of looking at the universal laws for energy, the cyberneticists had looked at how these processes were controlled. What they found was that control is an information process.
Energy processes make things happen. Information processes control what happens.
Aristotle had argued that there are four cause. A material cause, an efficient cause, a formal cause, and a final cause. Scientific orthodoxy of the early Twentieth Century had ignored formal causes and insisted that there were no final causes. The final cause for Aristotle was the end or purpose of a thing. Thus the final cause of the acorn was the oak tree. "How could a future event cause something in the present?" asked the scientists. The cyberneticists provided the answer. The feedback mechanism in the machine and the animal showed how a machine or an animal could set a goal and then use feedback in order to achieve it. Weiner had worked during World War II on radar controlled anti-aircraft guns. A goal for the future could control present behaviour even in a machine.
As they managed to explain final causes, the also made formal causes essential. The communication process is itself a formal cause. All transformation is an expression of a formal cause.
Let me introduce a second idea. The control process has four necessary and sufficient parts or steps. Sensing, evaluating, choosing, and acting.
DIAGRAMING A CYBERNETIC SYSTEM
We can identify four basic processes of a cybernetic system and four basic processors:
1. a process we may call SENSING which consists of a feedback take-off or receptor, which takes external changes and uses models to translate them into internal information or sense;
2. a process we may call EVALUATING which consists of a controller which takes the sense or feedback information and compares it to a value or desired goal in order to produce an evaluation;
3. a process we may call DECIDING which consists of an effector or plant or rate which takes the evaluation and uses it to transform external resources of material or energy into specific actions;
4. a process we may call ACTING which consists of a specific set of actions affecting a specific situation or environment in order to produce specific results or changes.
We can then diagram the processes of a cybernetic system in the following way.
Simplified Cybernetic Diagram
12. Holistic systems are structures of communication and control.
The idea of communication and control allows us to understand holistic structures. Two things are essential to holistic structures, a common identity and a process of communication and control.
Ludwig Von Bertelanffy developed his concept of systems around the idea of the part and the whole. Organic systems have parts. This is the difference between a bag of marbles and a flower. Energy systems look at the world as a bag of marbles, let us say atoms. Each atom is an individual whole. The relationship of the marbles to each other is simply that they are close to each other in space. They are not part of "the bag." The bag of marbles is the sum of its parts and each part is the same as every other part.
The flower on the other hand is made up of cells. The cells of the flower are not just individual cells, they share a common identity. They are parts of a "flower." The idea of a shared identity is an information idea. We looked at the creation of information as the creation of boundaries, the creation of the distinctions between X and ~X, inside and outside, us and them. The creation of a shared identity requires a shared piece of information, a share model of the world. All the cells of the flower contain the identical molecule. It is the DNA molecule. The difference between the DNA molecule and the marble is that DNA is information. The DNA is the genetic code for the whole organism. The human body develops an immune system specifically to enforce the distinction between us and them. The largest organ in the human body is the skin, which makes the distinction between inside and outside. The concept of input and output is fundamental to systems, because boundaries are fundamental to systems.
But organic wholes are more than a common identity. The parts co-operate together. Each cell has a boundary that separates it from its environment. But each cell belongs to an organ and cooperates with the other cells in the organ to do the work of that organ. The muscle cells work to move the bodily processes. The kidney cells work to cleanse the blood of waste products. Each organ has a boundary that separates it from the other organs, but it cooperates with the other organs in order to do the work of the body system. The brain cells and nerve cells work together to do the work of the central nervous system. The throat and the stomach and the colon work together to do the work of the digestive system. The various bodily systems work together to have a healthy body. There is not just one identity. There is a hierarchy of identities.
In order for the parts to cooperate, there has to be a process of communication and control. It is the cybernetic processes that allow the parts to engage in different behaviours that all contribute to a common goal. The cells of the flower communicate with each other, and work together for the good of the flower.. Marbles do not.
We have had to significantly expand our concept of communication. In order to communicate with a cell you have to learn to think like a cell. We have come to see that things as different as an interval of time, a certain spatial relation, an amino acid, a neuron not firing, a blood sugar ratio, or a beautiful spiral molecule are all methods of communicating information.
Communication and control also allows us to understand the paradoxical responses of systems. Trained in the linear thinking of energy transforms we tend to look for responses that are simple linear chains of cause and effect, or stimulus and response. Systems of communication and control cannot be understood in terms of cause and effect, they can only be understood at the systemic level. How do they process information? How do they communicate? How do they model the world in order to turn external events into information that they can communicate and process? What are the core values they are trying to maintain? What resources do they have available? How does their situation affect the results they can expect? Efforts to change self regulating systems usually meet with resistence. If the room has a thermostat then opening a window will only cool off the room temporarily. The thermostat will act to get the temperature back up again. You have to change the value on the thermostat. People are self regulating systems. When we attempt to change them, they usually find a way to thwart our attempts. Only if they change their model of the world or their values or their resources can change be effective.
The Placebo Effect
Fifteen patients are given a sugar pill and told that it is a sugar pill, but that some people find it gives symptom relief. Fourteen report that it gives symptom relief. Three report side effects of blurred vision and dry mouth. If we see the body as constantly engaged in the communicating and processing of information in order to control bodily processes then the idea that the brain can communicate with the body is normal. What is odd is the idea that the brain cannot communicate with rest of the body. The only question is what is the process of information transmission and which particular process is affected.
Current brain research is discovering more and more brain chemicals and their function in creating the body's information network. Some people make the mistake of saying that psychiatric illnesses have now been proven to be just chemical problems in the brain. This is an attempt to separate out one half of the gestalt. It is looking at the vase/two faces gestalt and saying we now know that the two faces are really just a vase. The body also manufactures the chemicals that it uses to transmit and process information. The brain is a giant chemical factory. The processes that control the creation of brain chemicals are themselves communication and control processes. There is never just a chemical problem. It is always a part of a larger communication and control problem.
Psychology
If we look at individual psychology as a process of information and control. It gives us a new way of looking at the determinants of behaviour. We do not simply ask what is the stimulus and what is the response? But how is the information processed? How do people make sense of the changes they see around them? What core values are people trying to realize? What resources to people have for dealing with the world around them? How do the limitations of their situation constrain their behaviour?
Family Therapy
It was a very small step from looking at communication in terms of creating wholes and developing concepts of family therapy. Previous psychotherapy had tended to look at the person as an individual, an isolated atom. Family therapy noticed that people had families. The behaviour that many people considered crazy, seemed perfectly sensible when seen in the situation of the family that they were part of. The meaning of the behaviour could only be understood in context.
The Corporate Metaphor
One of the issues in discussing corporate behaviour is the question of the corporate metaphor. The most famous pronouncement was Margaret Thatcher's, "Society does not exist. There are only individuals." Is the corporation a body, a person or is that only a metaphor? Is the body only a collection of cells? Is there no human being only a collection of cells? What transforms a collection of cells into a body is a process of communication and control.
Similarly what transforms a collection of individuals into a corporation is a process of communication and control. There is a sense of identity that allows the body to distinguish between us and them. There is a common method of processing information, a common set of corporate values, and a set of corporate resources that are responses to the particular situation of the corporation. The corporation does in fact have a mind of its own.
It is the fact that a corporation has a mind of its own that creates some of our worst dilemmas. There is a battle between individual rights and corporate responsibility. In the body there is no question that the well being of the cell is subordinate to the well being of the body. The cell that puts its own growth ahead of the well being of the body is a cancer cell. But the responsibility is reciprocal. The body that does not protect the well being of the individual cells is diseased. There is a similar battle between corporate rights and social responsibilities. We have created a system of transnational corporations whose only value is ten percent growth in earnings per share, and they are moving to subordinate all other facets of society to this value. This would create a profoundly diseased society and ecosystem.
Ecology
The eco-system is another corporate metaphor. We are aware of individual organisms. We are aware to some extent of the interactions of bio-regions. If we take the Gaia hypothesis seriously then we are bound to ask if the earth's bio-sphere is one large corporate organism. Beneath all our individual struggles do we feel some sense of loyalty to biological life itself.
13. Conclusion
The problems that we face going into the 21st Century are all issues of control. How do we communicate with each other. What are our basic values. What are the basic values of our institutions. How do we subordinate our renegade institutions to the good of the whole earth.
We have the resources to solve all of these problems, and we have to begin with a new metaphysics. We need to admit that communication does exist, and it is real. We need to recognize that values do exist, and they control our processes. There is a control process and it is real.
Appendix A: Historical Postscript: The two monisms.
Appendix B: What Is a Cybernetic System?
