Bronowski’s “Ascent of Man”

I’ve made reference, and noted others doing the same, to Dr Jacob Bronowski’s 1973 BBC TV series “The Ascent of Man”. As a 17 year old I was already doing the sciences for A-level and intending to do engineering at Uni, but tremendously influential on the history and evolution of science and humanity. Interesting right now, with Oppenheimer in the cinemas, with his friend Leo Szilard involved in the “chain reaction” thinking, and the moral dilemmas in applied science. Not just the bomb, but Auschwitz features famously too. The same thread picked-up by Durrenmatt’s “Die Physiker” (The Physicists) as a minority subject in the 3rd year of my Aero Engineering degree at Imperial.

Anyway, the reason to post that thought today is that I noticed the full series of “The Ascent of Man” is up on BBC iPlayer having been reminded of it by David Deutsch’s reference to it in the “Optimism” post from yesterday. Deutsch is one of those fellow travellers also influence by Bronowski.

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Deutsch Optimism & Systems Thinking

Just a brief holding post to tie up a couple of incomplete conversations.

I’m a fan of David Deutsch generally, and specifically recently his thoughts on optimism fleshed out by his Constructor Theory with Chiara Marletto.

He’s posted a few talks and articles recently specifically on what he means by optimism, including this one at Warp News. In response to the wall-to-wall doom and gloom from the Extinction Rebellion / Just Stop Oil brigade and in particular writer Ray Monk, whose work I’ve admired here, being “captured” by that agenda, I questioned whether he knew this aspect of Deutsch’s work. He didn’t and when I shared that link he pronounced it “vacuous twaddle”. (Monk is a biographer of major thinkers and scientists.)

Secondly, lots of post-Pandemic chat now morphing into Net-Zero / ULEZ / “Global Boiling” opinions about sane responses to proper understanding of the scale and nature of risks – a backlash to the doom-mongers. As well as the general pub chats mentioned before – people really do get it, even if concensus on sensible actions remains difficult – there was a group of young lads clearly affected by the pandemic lock-down disruptions to their lives (education > unemployment) and, with two in particular, a fair bit of talk about Systems Thinking and Optimism. I need to draft something and add signposts.

For now:

Search Psybertron on Deutsch

Search Psybertron on Optimism

Search Psybertron on Systems Thinking

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Post Notes:

And reminded myself that “Optimism” was already a chapter in his 2011 book “The Beginning of Infinity – Explanations that Transform the World.” Had already made an impression then.

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Matthew West R.I.P.

I heard today that Matthew West had died just yesterday of a brief illness, thanks to a Medium post by Ian Bailey shared on LinkedIn.

Matthew’s contribution to my own interest in ontology is kinda baked-in to a lot of my thinking, in the same way that (say) Dennett and Pirsig are, with only a few direct references to his work. [In fact he and Ian Bailey are both name-checked in one of my earliest long (Pirsig) pieces here on Psybertron.]

Coincidentally, only yesterday, I made one of those baked-in unspoken references – “All models are wrong, [some are useful].” Something he and Ian Bailey and Julian Fowler would often remind us in my earliest encounters with ontological models back in the earliest days of “PISTEP” as far back as the very late 1980’s.

My most recent encounters, after his “Digital Built Britain” work for which he was awarded his OBE, where I was bringing his output to a couple of UK nuclear industry projects, were in recent months on the “Ontolog Forum”. Back in 2010 I’m proud to say he and I were both invited speakers at the Russian Systems Engineering Challenges (RuSEC) Worksop in Moscow, organised by Anatoly Levenchuk the chair of what was then the Russian chapter of INCOSE – the common point of contact with Ontolog and with Active Inference ever since.

As Ian notes, Matthew was a devout Christian, a lay preacher and even founder of his own church, but when it came to day to day engineering and business – and his so-called “high-quality data-modelling” of these – he was as humanly pragmatic as anyone. And helpful. I recall one problem I was struggling with here on Psybertron in the early-2000’s when despite my best efforts at remaining pragmatic, my epistemological researches were getting ever deeper into the metaphysics of existence itself. I found myself awkwardly starting a question along the lines of “I know you believe in God, but …”. He could not have been more helpful in separating the issues for me.

From my non-theist / humanist position, in the context of the 21st C post-9/11 “New Atheist” God vs Science wars, I often use the expression “I’m not anti-theist because theists and theologians are human too.”

Matthew is in that thought. R.I.P

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[Post Note 2 Sept 2024
A Tribute to Matthew West in London 11 Sept 2024.
Weird my last reference above was to 9/11. And coincidentally again, was talking about Matthew and the above post in the pub just last night.]

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Identity Politics 2023

I’ve used Identity Politics as an umbrella for my issues with definitive identity. Essentially that “definition” of anything is emergent from many relations and definitive only for specific “purposes” AND that “identity” of specific things – beyond simply naming being a unique handle in the world – is the net result of the (definitions of the) many overlapping ontological relations – classification & specialisation and whole-part (mereology). Politics because there is always a choice about which set of relations (identity) is most relevant to the context. All models are wrong. Identity is always political.

My descriptions of how all that works I’ve reduced to #GoodFences (after Robert Frost) sometimes with #GateInTheForest (after G K Chesterton). Essentially that the politics of identity is a negotiation with a history of incomplete knowledge. And that history is a “game” with definitions as rules that evolve.

I mentioned that in response on Mastodon to a Ben Taylor post on LinkedIn about Resisting Categorisation and Ben’s posted a couple of references since on Mastodon.

When it comes to “resisting” it, I see it as more like having to accept that it is happening – everywhere all the time – but that the fences, the pigeon-holes, are flexible and not to be taken as definitive except beyond agreed / negotiated contexts / purposes.

This is really just a holding post for the interesting looking references:

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Previously on Psybertron:

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Stafford Beer the Hippy?

The Santiago Boys

#EMFAMBE

Audio documentary (9 hours!) about Stafford Beer’s “Cybersyn” project in Allende’s Chile by Evgeny Morozov(*1) – “new” undated. (Hat tip to Ben Taylor on Mastodon / Twitter / LinkedIn – and was reviewed last week 22 July 2023 by John Bartlett in the Grauniad.)

Amidst all the left-right international and corporate power politics (Nixon, Kissinger, CIA and ITT vs Allende, Castro et al) and idealised socialist dreams – Utopia, literally – actually plenty of real world lessons about Cybernetics as Systems Thinking. That and a well documented history of Beer himself with recordings of him and many interviewees. “Went out a Management Consultant, came back a Hippy.” – Maturana.  Thoroughly referenced, (including modern practitioners like Mike Jackson).

Cybernetics is NEVER about the technology. Technology as something owned, physically implemented in licensed hardware and/or software can become a tool of power and dependency. Yes, there is a lot about access to information, using technology to gather more – knowledge is power (Bacon) etc – but again it’s the info not the “tech”, and who has access(*2)? Very disappointing “scientific management” (Taylorism, resource-time-and-motion) aspect to the Cybersyn project – you can only manage what you know in data(*3), etc. Early days I guess of this being something computing technology (ie Telex!) can do. But a distraction. I have similar early “tech” (Telex and Athenaeum! – ticker tape “at the club”) experiences.

Cybernetics is always about the thinking and the decision-making. Really originally (literally) about Governance – how we make (good) collective decisions. Democracy / Bureaucracy / Technocracy / Benevolent-Dictatorship -> Democracy with (or without?) some form of Elitism.

I came to the conclusion more than a decade ago the problem (of how we humans best “manage” our interests in the world) is solved by “proper” democracy and that proper democracy does require some form of “elite” – [Already mentioned here in hindsight in 2008 (*3)] – technocrats in a technical knowledge / expertise NOT technology sense. Balance of populism – popular votes on all decisions – vs delegated / hierarchical power and control. Either extreme is tyrannical. But how? It’s about the ecosystem, the thought-and-value-system, for decision- making and enactment. The technocracy (as thoughtocracy?) is about managing that NOT making / managing / controlling the decisions and actions themselves – that’s for those with their “skin in the game”. Civil service as not merely the bureaucratic executors, but also the guardians / curators of the (evolving) ecosystem – this is an area where “citizens assemblies” idea also fits well?

Hence the abstraction of Systems Thinking distinct from Project / Policy Management and Execution, and an Ecosystem that manages that distancing.

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Notes:

(*1) No secret that Morozov’s own agenda is, like that of the Grauniad, – “a very promising avenue for reinventing what socialism of the 21st century should be”. Not surprisingly, Russian friends with real experience of soviet communism don’t rate Morozov – nor Bogdanov – but as a documentary we can draw our own conclusions from the facts. Aside – Morozov’s project he calls “post-Utopia”, Paul Mason (Bogdanov scholar) calls his “post-Capitalism”. I say a pox on all their Bayesian priors – Post-Post-Modernism for me 🙂

(*2) Clearly significant in 21st C that we have so much more “democratised” consumer information technology. Creates the illusion of more / better democracy, but of course it’s all still owned and funded with interests and power-structures. And even without dubious motives the channels become dominated by mediocre content – the medium is the message. Actually exacerbates the problem of tyrannical extremes – more activism at both ends – faster, more ubiquitous, more complete polarisation of interests. The need for the abstraction / separation of thinking and doing remains, and is indeed more urgent as it becomes ever more obscured by the “traffic” in would-be transparent information-overload.

(*3) That old myth – you can only manage what you measure – mistakenly attributed to the likes of W Edwards-Deming. Not true, and he didn’t say it anyway.

(*4) Given our 2023 Systems context, ironic (in the Alanis Morissette sense) that 2008 reference was to a piece by Dave Snowden of Cynefin. Small world of consilience?

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Meta:

Three-week hiatus here since I last posted on Psybertron. Been focussed – apart from housekeeping – on a Research Proposal on that Ecosystem idea, supported by modern neuro-science and neuro-philosophy on how we humans really do make decisions as agents in the complex real world.

Which also means I’ve missed quite a few other interesting inputs. Hat tip to reader AJ Owens on Consciousness & Semantics, Pts 1 & 2, at “Staggering Implications”.

Bit more housekeeping to clear the decks …

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Post Notes:

Note to self – The rubber hits the road in nail clusters (miguelitos) sabotage, whilst the Santiago Boys deal in cybernetic concepts. Distance between thinking and doing again.

Also – Some interaction with this post, in the comments below as noted by Ben Taylor, but also on Twitter and Mastodon. Probably really need to create another summary page for all things Cybernetic and Systems Thinking. The reply to Finn below was itself a from-memory-summary of my previous recaps, with links to three previous recaps. Just capturing  a couple of additional contributions here.

One, I can be a bit dismissive of certain specific thinkers and their branding of their own ideas and methodologies – “nothing new under the sun” – and everybody’s interpretation of everybody else is “for a reason” – so I’m always looking for conceptual essences at the “right level of abstraction”. Gregory Bateson I’ve “discarded” before on this basis, but did include him in one of the summary lists below – Cybernetics #1, #2, #3, the most recent summary before this one.

Two, as I already alluded and Ben made more explicit on Mastodon, it’s moot anyway how much (say) Cybersyn as executed represented what Beer’s ideas had originally intended, not to mention the politics  – there are nevertheless always lessons to be learned from experience of both – the thinking and the projects.

(And h/t Ben, here a post by Petter Holme, linking Beer’s Cybersyn to Hayek.)

And Three, one respondent on Mastodon – “Kihbernetics” – appears to have his own branded version of what I’m simply calling Cybernetics#3 – Feedback + Agent Feed-Forward + Agent Memory – but he also summarises his main sources:

“#Kihbernetics is the study of #Complex #Dynamical #Systems with #Memory very different from all other #SystemsThinking approaches. Kihbernetic theory and principles are derived from these three sources:

[1] #CE_Shannon‘s theory of #Information and his description of a #Transducer,

[2] #WR_Ashby‘s #Cybernetics and his concept of #Transformation, and

[3]  #HR_Maturana‘s theory of #Autopoiesis and the resulting #Constructivism

We use our Kihbernetic worldview to help people navigate their #organization through times of #change. An organization is defined* as:

“An integrated composite of people, products, and processes that provide a capability to satisfy a stated need or objective.”

*MIL_STD_499B definition of the word “system”

#People are always at the forefront of our thinking (the #who and #why are we doing this for and/or with?). Our efforts will continue with the discovery of all the functions or #processes in your organization (#how and #when something happens or has to happen?), and finally, we get to the #products and/or services that you put on the market and the tools that you use or may need to buy or develop in order to fully integrate your system (the #what and #where things have to happen?).

Our goal is always to make the people of your organization self-reliant to the point that they shouldn’t need our help with the further maintenance of a continuous change management process.

In any case, we’ve got your back while you do the heavy lifting of establishing a better future for your organization!”

Why “Kihbernetics” I’ve no idea, nor why that narrow MIL-Std definition for a system, and obviously in the business of branding his own consulting business – but those three source summaries – Shannon, Ashby & Maturana – look useful. People front and centre, obviously.

[Trust is essential, no solution without it – “leave us to do your heavy lifting” (ie don’t trust “them” trust me, essentially) – is placing the expert-technocrat in the elite governance position (this never goes away as I said). And it’s not about transparency, beyond basic access needs & controls. Transparency is the opposite of trust. Effectively – I don’t trust you so keep your hands and your information where I can see them.]

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Post Notes:

Essay on ITT – the bad guys – by the Morozov – the “Santiago Boys” series creator – in Le Monde Diplomatique August 2023.

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Rory Stewart – Realising the Future.

I  mentioned Rory Stewart just yesterday for his foreword to one of my library of unread books. What I hadn’t noticed until yesterday was he’d been one of the virtual guests at “Realisation2023“. I’ve almost attended Realisation a couple of times now – a mixture of conference and retreat, with a focus on … reinventing the sacred, realising a new world? Deliberately small, below the Dunbar number, and therefore relatively expensive per head, given the wonderful location. I’ve been there in spirit and at least followed their activities.

Jonathan Rowson, head of Perspectiva, publishers of McGilchrist’s TWMT, “interviewed” Rory followed by a Q&A. We discover Rory is a fan of McGilchrist (*) too – though he only mentions his first major work TMahE – amongst a lot more about how he sees our possible futures.
[(*) Note Rory did mention McGilchrist before in his piece about “good argumentation” footnote here.]

This is just an initial post, there is a lot more to analyse and recommend, capturing my initial impressions. It’s a piece of two halves. The first half is more a dialogue led by Jonathan – chess grand-master, with his very specific style and agenda of thoughts – Perspectiva and Realisation being very much his projects. The Q&A is much more open questions.

Both were very good. For now, just my tweeted reactions:

In fact the reason to come back and elaborate the analysis is precisely that last point. I agree with Rory on so much and that his intellectual knowledge involves so much honestly lived experience and yet I still see a very important place for the abstract – in the thinking parts of the process, as distinct from the project execution planning and implementation parts, where detailed rubber and best-practice must always hit the actual road. (For now Anatoly Levenchuk’s Systems Thinking course will do.)

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Gender vs Sex Again … and again … and again!

Politics likes simple slogans in these days of social media – “Trans Rights are Human Rights” has to be the most fatuous – Duh, obviously – but TWAW, Punch a TERF, Just Stop Oil, you name it. They all suffer from over-simplifying – reducing – something complex to a simple object in a wishfully “scientific” logical “debate” or fist-fight, BUT the real world isn’t like that.

Yes, gender and sex are both real I keep responding on Twitter, but they’re different – as Germaine Greer has re-iterated every decade for as long as I’ve lived. This post just to capture my re-usable thought on that, starting with national treasure Peter Tatchell today:

Working backwards through Peter’s snappy claims:

“trans identity has a material, biological basis”

True – Our minds are our identity. Even every fleeting semi-conscious thought has a biological BASIS in our material, biological  brain at some level.

“trans brain structures & processes are different”

Almost certainly true at some level. True of males and females too, but there are a myriad of “so what?” questions and consequences to consider – at all levels .

“both are equally valid”

Both are valid at some level, that’s true. How equally / differently is about the “so what?” – a political question.

“gender identity is just as real as biological sex”

Both are real, that’s true. But at different levels, with different “so what’s?”. But “just”? It helps no-one to reduce the gender-sex debate to mere science. Both have a basis in physical science – the whole world does – but they’re many layered with different development histories and consequences.

#IStandWithTQI+
#IStandWithLGB
#IStandWithWomen

I stand with all human rights, but I care about their differences too.

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Deflationary Thinking

I’ve latched onto the idea of Deflationary Thinking quite recently – the past year? – rightly or wrongly linking it to my move to the meta, to abstractions over details … (The devil, etc …)

Weirdly I was prompted to revisit Bulgakov “Master & Margarita” after Philip Goff shared a PhilPapers link with a quip about Jesus answering Pilate in his defence with “there’s no such thing as truth”.

Why any serious “philosopher” would debate “alethic nihilism, the theory that nothing is true” beyond the academic exercise, is beyond me entirely. All that says to me is that conception of truth must clearly be useless to humanity. On a par with nothing really exists.

10/10 useless. Move along, nothing to see here.

“Alethic nihilism strikes many
as silly or obviously false,
even incoherent.”

Count me in. Anyway, that paper abstract also says:

“Deflationists maintain that
the utility of the truth predicate
is exhausted by its expressive role.”

Expressive role? I’ll say! Sure it’s a word we use to express how much something is worth believing. That’s its value to humanity even though we’ve been lost in language since the linguistic turn. Time for pragmatists to move on and show nihilists the contempt they deserve?

Still, I’ll need to unpick that use of “deflationary”. Add to the pile.

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[Post Note: And talking of pragmatists, here
a piece on Wm James’ Tough vs Tender-minded thinking.]

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms

“Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms – Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East” is a 2014 book by Gerard Russell.

The Yazidi Peacock Angel (c) Tawûsê Melek

Rory Stewart provides the foreword. Like Rory, Gerard was a British officer and diplomat in the region and, like T E Lawrence before them, their knowledge comes not just from scholarly research but also from living, working and empathising with the locals in their own languages and geographies. My interest in Lawrence and “The Middle East” is one that pre-dates this knowledge blogging project and I often find myself relating my epistemological interests – what, why and how we believe what we think we know – to traditions of belief and action exposed in such accounts. All belief traditions – including science – are effectively religions in this sense and, even as an atheist, theology is an important perspective beyond disembodied logic and dehumanised science. It’s a consistent theme. Pirsig and the American pragmatists draw on native Amerindians, north and south as well as Eastern traditions. Rushdie mines south-America as well as his native Indian sub-continent.

I’m probably not going to find space for a complete read and review, and will consign it to my library of unread books (after Eco) for now, so this is really just a placeholder for the resource:

From Rory Stewart’s introduction to Gerard Russell’s work:

“The combination of linguistic skill, deep cultural understanding, courage, classical scholarship, and profound love of foreign cultures was once more common. Russell is in the direct tradition of British scholars / imperial officers such as Mountstuart, Elphinstone, Macaulay, or even T E Lawrence. But it is now very rare. It is not an accident that Russell has now moved on from the British diplomatic service and Harvard University. Academics seem to be absorbed in ever more intricate internal arguments, which leave little space or possibility for a [book] project of this ambition and scope. Foreign services and policy makers now want ‘management competency’ – slick and articulate plans, not nuance, deep knowledge and complexity.”

That final sentence pretty much drove my own Systems Thinking focus. Forgotten kingdoms represent forgotten knowledge, forgotten ways of knowing. [Hold for later – nuance / detail – complexity / abstraction …]

Hat tip Dennis Finlayson for the book itself. Any book recommended by Rory Stewart and Tom Holland is OK by me.

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 2024

Next year, 2024 is the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Robert Pirsig’s seminal work. That rhetorical, biographical and philosophical novel is woven around the real motorcycle trip as Bob & son Chris and John & Sylvia Sutherland headed out west across the US from Minneapolis on 8th July (1968).

If you follow ZMMQuality on Facebook, you can re-live that journey day by day starting from today 8th July. And if you do, you can contribute ideas and support for 50th Anniversary events next year. Dates for your diary are:

      • Weekend 6/7th and Monday 8th July 2024 in Minneapolis, Mn
      • Weekend 13/14th July 2024 in Bozeman, Mt

Whether you can participate in the road-trip or not, follow and look out for details of events at ZMMQuality.

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Updates:

50th Anniversary Edition of ZMM
(Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
 scheduled by Harper Collins in February 2024
– with an introduction by Matt Crawford.

Exhibit of Pirsig memorabilia at the Smithsonian (TBC)
scheduled for April 2024

From October 2023 – all other Pirsig and #ZMM50th activities now coordinated at the Robert Pirsig Association (RPA) at robertpirsig.org – contact, subscribe, get involved.

Click for #ZMM50th

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Previously on Psybertron:

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