Very Little New?

I’m like a cracked record with “Nothing New Under the Sun”.

I was just using the wayback machine / web-archive to find a copy of Doug Hofstadter’s contribution to the 2006 Tucson Science of Consciousness event:

“Strange Loops,
Downward Causation, and
Distributed Consciousness”
(Mentioned here in 2006.)

His “I am a Strange Loop” was published the following year 2007, so maybe there are no published copies of a paper with that full title?

ANYWAY – imagine my surprise – skimming the programme page, I find Giulio Tononi and his Integrated Information Theory was already on that programme in 2006!

And a few lines further down – Mark Solms was part of the event too! Co-host of a whole morning plenary on “Dreams” – which is of course where he started.

Everything that needs saying has already been said by someone somewhere.

(Wish I’d made more effort to attend Tucson when I had the chances – was actually living in the US South at the time 2005/6/7/8 – that early 2006 post above, I mention moving to our new address!)

General Systems Theory(ies)?

[Draft Holding Post – links being added.]

Cybernetics, like anything else, evolves, so I’m never talking about specific systems theory(ies). I’ve described my own journey every which way through systems engineering to systems thinking under the cybernetic umbrella. I have a nothing new under the sun attitude to any topic, whereby changing language may change the focus on details, but for the main part it’s really expressing a different view of the same underlying conception.

Because I settled on Cybernetics as my key word pretty early on in my Psybertron researches, and because Systems Engineering was merely my day job, I’ve tended to place Norbert Wiener at the centre of my systems constellation. He authored the book with that title as well as being one of the founders of the Macy conferences. Despite my “first cybernetics” focus from the outset on systems of human organisation and decision-making, I’ve also had a strong information and processes (ie computation) focus, so the likes of Shannon, Turing and von-Neumann feature prominently too, the latter also being part of the original Macy conferences. As well as the US axis, the British Ashby, Beer and Pask contribution has been acknowledged, though someone suggested I didn’t give enough credit to Bateson. He too was part of that founding Macy group.

I’ve also had a clear evolutionary thread – everything evolves, as I’ve already said – and in my case thanks to Dennett, like a thousand others I’ve bought the information and computation view to evolution beyond biological genetics – the bridge between the physical and the psychological. It was only through recent Friston-Solms work I really joined-up my cybernetic “systems thinking” with the thinking of evolution as universal computation – even though I’ve had an information / computation metaphysics since I started.

Levenchuk (Systems Thinking 2020)
and
Solms (Friston-FEP to Conscious Will 2021)

Bridging the physical (biological) with the psychological has been the primary philosophical consideration. The shortcomings of science when it comes to conscious will – I did mention Dennett. Solms and particularly McGilchrist have been very important recently in characterising what those shortcomings are and where their solutions lie.

The backdrop to all of this in the 21st C has been the God vs Science wars – faith vs rationality, whether we think of faith as blind or more broadly pragmatic, and rationality as based solely on relations between objective quantities or including more broadly qualitative and categorical reasoning? One consequence of this “war” has been a much wider polarisation whereby if you’re “anti-God” you are Science-led in everything – as if scientific rationality is the only yardstick of wider knowledge, and thus making it much harder to point out that it isn’t. The polarisation reinforced by the thin-end-of-a wedge response to any concession from the pro-science camp.

Funny thing is I have a part-read copy of von-Bertalanffy’s (1949) “Problems of Life” because it is ex-libris the Library of the Rationalist Press Association. It’s the (1952) version published by Watts and Co – founder of the Rationalist Press whose legacy is now managed by The Rationalist Association & New Humanist, of which I am an active member and until recently served on the Board of Trustees. Very much part of the “free-thought” movement, promotion of rational, natural and secular humanism countering the every-day effects of super-natural & dogmatic faith-based religions. I’ve already found the Sacred Naturalism middle-ground – the common ground between these seemingly incompatible spheres is actually enormous – but that’s a story for another day.

What I had failed to join-up was that, as well as being part of that secular free-thought movement, was von-Bertalanffy’s role in positing General Systems Theory. And what I only just then recalled is that von-Bertalanffy is a significant source reference in McGilchrist’s “The Matter With Things” – particularly for talk of systems as organismic rather than mechanistic machines. Those of us with a fundamental information bent do happily talk of algorithms and computing machines – but we really do mean the organismic “soft-machine” kind. This is exactly how Friston > Solms resolves organic, emergent subjectivity through Markov-Blankets and Active-Inference with causation of wholes more than determined by their parts. It’s another bridge I’m trying to build – when we talk of systems and information processing no-one needs to think of electro-mechanical computing machines – computers. (After all, for most of history, computers were humans.)

So, anyway, I’m reading von-Bertalanffy more closely again – lots of good stuff already. (He even mentions ergodicity, or does he?!) Standby.

Alexander Bogdanov’s Recovery?

I posted my interest in Bogdanov firstly arising out of Carlo Rovelli’s extended reference to him, and secondly arising from the conference in his name at the Hull Centre for Systems Studies (CSS) this time last year, and Paul Mason’s support of that.

My links got a bit confused as proceedings of that conference were uploaded and updated. Good news, the organiser Örsan Şenalp has made a consolidated post of those materials.

ALEXANDER BOGDANOV (1873-1928)
Towards a full recovery of his work and ideas.
(CSS Mini Symposium in 4 parts.)

And

The 2021 Mike Jackson Lecture by Carlo Rovelli
‘The Relational Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and Alexander Bogdanov’s Worldview’

Note Carlo Rovelli, Mike Jackson and Paul Mason are also involved in the symposium presentations and discussions. So, looks like we now have a definitive source for Bogdanov.

(Post Note – for ISSS interest
– several members present, Gary Smith and Michelle Friend?

And, oh my, look at the speakers at this
Information Universe Conference 2022
I just missed!
Carlo Rovelli, Erik Verlinde, Seth Lloyd, Stephen Wolfram.)

William James Sidis – again.

Sidis is a standard interest of Robert Pirsig fans, Pirsig makes significant reference to him, so he’s been mentioned here a couple of times.

(William James Sidis (1898-1944) basically a child prodigy of high intelligence pushed by his parents – through Harvard aged 11 (!) – that the general public / media meme is that he collapsed through some kinda breakdown into a ignominious life of trivia. Significance for Pirsig is that he too was assessed by various intelligence tests and advanced in education over several years of his early life. He only discovered later that he had been part of a longer “longitudinal” educational development study.)

Sidis did publish some strange books under pen-names, but published one important book under his own name.

Fellow Pirsigian David Harding (@GoodMetaphysics) posted a new short video about Sidis:


I responded already, but just wanted to capture here:

I’d forgotten Sidis had published his “life as entropy reversal” idea back in 1920. And, I remember Mahoney as the man that “rediscovered” him in 1979, BUT hadn’t spotted the Bucky-Fuller connection – an old class mate(!) reviewing Sidis only publication. And Norbert Wiener of Cybernetics fame too. It was 1940 before Schrödinger did the same. Black holes too.

Here is that Buckminster-Fuller letter:

The Orthodoxy Softens on Determinism?

Good to see actual scientists being public about the limitations to reductionist determinism, and why emergent objects can and do have their own causality.

Noticed Philip Ball post a note to the effect that this really could be considered a given – “well established” and “not much left to debate” – now even though there were multiple explanatory theories as to why and how.


Today Kevin Mitchell posted the following as a Twitter Thread:

Re: reductionism

There is a big difference between saying that, for some system: “if we know what the little things do, we know what the big things do” (which is trivial) and claiming that the low-level forces between the smallest particles are the only things that do or can have any causal power in determining how a system evolves from moment to moment.

The latter is a metaphysical claim, not a scientific one. And it fails to answer the question of why the particles are organised the way they are which, in many cases (especially in living organisms) is because that organisation is functional at a macroscopic level and has been selected for.

Nothing about particle physics can account for, predict, or explain why living organisms are organised the way they are. Nor can the equations governing such particles predict how such systems will behave.

Especially because they only predict how particles themselves will behave in a statistical, probabilistic fashion, not deterministically. This leaves lots of room for higher-order, organisational causes to come into play, which they demonstrably do.

[PS: Kevin was moved to write this blog post as a result of these exchanges: Getting to the bottom of reductionism – is it all just physics in the end? – (Spoiler, no it isn’t.)]

The Tweet below had quite a few spin-off threads in response:


Of course the book in question is Sabine Hossenfelder’s “Existential Physics“– which I’m resisting buying to read. This thread is one good response (and the Philip Ball tweet above is in fact another):

And for “small world” completeness this Philip Ball piece is an interview with Michael Levin (see other recent “systems thinking” posts). And it’s Templeton.

Funny, I’d previously had Philip down as one of the defenders of “the orthodoxy” (mechanistic, reductive, objective materialism) but clearly no longer the case. Sabine on the other hand I was encouraged that she was taking philosophical questions about the limitations to orthodox science seriously, but I fear she is still behind the curve philosophically.

Pity that Sabine is dismissive of objections to her words on the grounds that “we can’t even agree what causation is”. I’ll say. It’s where I started two decades ago.

And, more systems thinking connections – Sara Amari and Jessica Flack are amongst the addressees in the original Tweet above. Both using systems thinking, and Jessica in particular as a means of identifying appropriate granularity. Here another recent Philip Ball tweet:


It’s all connected 🙂

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Post note, since we were talking about Philip Ball:


And his own commentary on that award:

Karl Friston and Good Fences

I’ve previously only mentioned Friston as the source of Friston’s Free Energy Principle as the backdrop to Mark Solms proper bio-psychological account of consciousness.

I listened to this discussion – hap tip to the Active Inference folks – and already made a few footnotes to the two previous posts.

It’s the first time I’ve listened to him directly. We’re on the same page in so much more. As a biologist / scientist, he’s actually into the politics – identity politics – of this, in exactly the way I am. In fact his whole piece in the last 5 or 10 minutes about globalisation destroying useful boundaries (Markov blankets) is EXACTLY my unwritten “Good Fences” thesis. Exactly!

There is a tendency of inclusion / fairness reasons to blur boundaries and minimise differences – but every boundary ignored is a relationship lost.

(Need to pull together all the dispersed notes into something coherent here. I simply cannot write fast enough.)

Systems Functional Needs

As well as dallying about at conceptual / philosophical levels with cybernetics and systems thinking in recent decades, I’ve had several abortive attempts at getting some useful tools going. In fact in those decades I was also working with and for software developers / solution providers on “generic” tools mainly in the “capital facilities” business.

Could never get the right levels of abstraction taken seriously in any products, pragmatists are always very focussed on (apparent) immediate business needs … but now I may have the right systems thinking language …

And now, my needs have doubled – I have real selfish need of tools to develop and describe / document the models I’m developing, as well as toolsets I propose for generic wider value to humanity. So …

30 years ago before ontological (graphical) languages were fashionable I was a big fan of IDEF0 – and I still am. I know now the reason for its attraction are twofold.

One – it is process focussed, yes it represents things, but all the links are flows of information and stuff between functional objects. (My whole world ontology is a information process / computation metaphysics these days.) Not surprising  quite a few flowcharting tools – yes even Visio – include IDEF0 templates, but what NONE of them have is …

Two – it naturally nests levels of abstraction as sub-systems non-exclusively within super-systems – but NONE of the tools supports this functionality.

Related, but quite independently, diagramming languages have evolved for the information models and ontologies themselves. Express-G and UML – the latter dominating for a long while – but ultimately these are just networking graphics where rules determine what semantics are carried by nodes and edges, either or both. Unfortunately as people have been driven towards standardisation (a good thing), that semantic choice has been baked-in but not necessarily in the best way. So …

The new (ISO) standard for network graphics is ArchiMate and there are already many “Archi” tools, if not many good working examples. The Architectural root of Archi was very encouraging, but the results are disappointing. Unfortunately in the new standard all the semantics are in the edges – generally a good thing – but it means the sub-super-system abstraction (a feature of the nodes) is lost. As with previous ontologies, all the management structures have to be imposed by a meta-data overlay (aka eg “Templates” in ISO15926-p7) representing the “emergent” sub-super collections – but in the real world – not that of the modeller – these are the data that “matters”. We need to re-introduce the IDEF0 functionality to the ArchiMate language.

As well as generic tools for general use (with libraries of standard objects) I now have personal need for documenting the (process ontology) models I am now proposing and describing in my own writing.

Latest candidate tool in a systems thinking / active inference context is cadCAD – complex adaptive system diagrams (with dynamic “simulation” behaviour) … so, hopeful. And that “Active Inference / Markov Blanket” thought gives us a language for what is missing – if all semantics reside in the edges, the nodes have no thingness. See also footnote to previous post. It’s perfectly OK to capture semantics in relations involving the thing, but let’s not lose the thing itself.

Markov Blankets vs Lipid Membranes

Watching this wonderful “Krebs Cycle” RI lecture by Nick Lane – last mentioned him here – and just wanted to note two things for now.

One, there is an obvious topological parallel (*) between (System) Markov Blankets and (Mitochondria) Lipid Membranes at two quite different levels of abstraction – information processes and biochemical processes.

And two, early on he makes quite a few remarks against the informational-computational view and yet highlights the information element when we get to the nucleotide processes.

Fascinating for the metaphysical aspects of which came first – which is of course what his talk is about, the primacy and universality of Krebs Cycles in anything we’d recognise as biological life – from the simplest physio-chemical precursors to the most complex multi-celled creatures.

AND the inevitability aspect that once the simplest “chemistry” exists evolution of the complex follows.

(Lots to unpick on further detailed review – but fascinating to note the above on first pass. Also lots of good acknowledgments of the women involved in the research processes.)

(*) He even mentions the topological parallel at the whole earth level!!!

Q&A here too:

Oooh! and a Jeremy England question mid-way through the Q&A.

LUCA – Last Universal Common Ancestor of both the archaea / bacteria / mitochondria and the eukaryote cells – not unlikely coincidence – everything to so with structure not info – yes, yes, yes system architecture level info, not individual bits.

Wow! It’s all there.

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[Post Notes:

Watching this Luis Razo & Karl Friston talk, extending the topological parallels – beyond Razo’s balloon – even the event horizon of a black hole is a Markov Blanket. Every “thing” to which you associate individual states has a Markov Blanket in “phase space” – whether there is a physical membrane or not. All you need to know about that thing is at (or projected onto) that surface. As he says this is about the definition of using the word thing in any sentence. (Hat tip Active Inference folks.

This theory of “things” fits well to my “distinguishing between A & B” diagram in this “Identity” post.

And Razo’s bio-electricity … significant in the Nick Lane presentation subject of this post! It’s perfectly OK to capture semantics in relations involving the thing, but let’s not lose the thing itself. Curiously – I note Nick Lane is referenced by Mark Solms but Mike Levin is not. Levin is however referenced by Dan Dennett – Tufts connection. Lots in here. Thing-ness is the key – see next post re modelling tools.

“The Everything Crisis” – Globalisation – yes. The problem is the destruction of Markov Blankets, every time we lose a boundary we lose some “thing”. We are definitely on the same page.]

Workington AFC

Saw Workington at the weekend, from the 8th tier of English football (Northern Premier League, Division One North West) against our local team Marske United now in the 7th tier (Northern Premier League, Premier Division) in the last pre-season friendly before the new season. (Workington won 2:1, and looked significantly stronger. We just didn’t seem up for it, but that’s not the point of this post.)

All the while I was looking at Workington I was thinking they were a Football League club until “quite recently”.  In fact what I hadn’t remembered is that Workington were the team relegated (and voted out) of the league (4th tier / Division) way back in 1977, the year Wimbledon were admitted (promoted from the Southern League) – the team we then followed home and away for 8 seasons – basically until we won the FA Cup and made to the First (now Premiership) Division and things got a lot less fun.

More recently, having been working over in Cumbria for a couple of years, I drove past their ground many times. Small world.

Synergy – Nature’s Magic?

Mentioned in a recent “systems sciences” post being recommended to read Peter Corning’s “Nature’s Magic”.

Well I’ve had it a couple of days now and like what I read. As a result of the original “see inside” skim I’d already discovered that Corning’s idea of nature’s magic is SYNERGY, essentially that the whole is more than – something other than -the sum of the parts. (The sum of the parts will also exist at some level, subject to conservation laws, free-energy principles, etc, but …) No argument there. As we’ve all been doing since Aristotle coined that thought – nothing new under the sun – is trying to establish an orthodox scientific justification and explanatory model for why that is the case or else shifting the scientific orthodoxy so that it can be accepted.

Interestingly Corning was writing this (published 2003) at almost exactly the point I was setting off on my own research. Great news he’s not dismissive of Dennett – in fact in passing he uses both his intentional stance on the reality of free-will and his memetic analogy for genetic Darwinian natural selection at the social / cultural / intellectual level. (He references “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” as well as the much misunderstood and ancient (1991) “Consciousness (Not) Explained“. Like mine, Dennett’s thinking has continued to evolve through “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” (2017) and beyond. Lots of the same reading in his reference bibliography Jablonka, Maslow, Margulis, Penrose, Sperry, Schrödinger, Schumpeter, as well as all the evolutionary biologists Maynard-Smith, Mayr, Szathmáry and more justifying group effects and that still haven’t really been accepted as the orthodoxy at even the genetic biological level, let alone memetic culturally. Interestingly, in 2003, he already includes Laland (now part of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis) Also, obviously given the context, a strong systems and complexity representation. (Philosophically very light, no James, Whitehead, Wittgenstein … anyone really. Haldane (JBS), Koestler and Kuhn in there.)

So what does Corning say that’s new and future-proof?

Good news. As well as the simplest Aristotelian statement of his synergy position, he also – like myself – makes his own statement of non-originality. There is nothing new to be discovered under the sun, quoting both Proust and Dawkins, and all that any of us are doing is finding new words and word-order in order to see differently – share a different view of – what the ancients and aboriginals have always seen in nature in their own ways, with or without words.

Lots of good and wide-ranging examples in his early chapters on the reality and potency of synergies working together. From alloys and amalgams to organisms at every level from the smallest biological to the largest human collaborations and civilisations. As I say – no argument here. So what is his hypothesis for synergy as the engine of evolutionary innovation? Where are the causal mechanisms?

He calls it a Holistic Darwinism. As already noted with Koestler’s “beyond reductionism” – and Dennett’s warning to beware “greedy reductionism” – it’s holistic because it posits the reality and causality of the wholes not being reducible to their parts. Not just the selfish gene, but the selfish (or intentional) genome. He notes the general rejection of such ideas in science, but signs of acceptance of “group selection effects” and “Lamarckian effects” – yet, a stalking horse actually seen as a pariah by the mainstream orthodoxy.

Although he doesn’t mention ergodicity – see previous post – he does clearly see history as part of the holistic mechanism. One argument against reductive determinism (the end state of every part determining the state of a whole) is that their process / path through time and space is also “part of” the whole. We’d get no argument over the idea that both means and ends matter in a socio-cultural context (as I’ve said many times) but orthodox science really doesn’t accept this possibility. (Also – as per the Woodstock reference in the previous post – he’s prepared to cite the likes of Stewart Brand / Kevin Kelly  “Whole Earth Catalogue” in support of his case. Alternative / Eastern worldviews against the western orthodoxy.)

I have to say, Corning’s whole case – in his tying up loose ends & conjuring the future concluding chapter – reads more like a plea than an actual hypothesis – that we must accept the masses of evidence of “group effects” and “system effects” even though the orthodoxy rejects them (for their very lack of reductive objective determinism). And it’s a plea reinforced – like so many other writers – with a warning about how much we’re getting wrong in the world because of this ignorance. It’s where I started.

I see now that Kevin Laland may have gotten the inspiration for his book title from Corning who refers to “Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony” – though Laland makes no reference to Corning – maybe there’s was a common source?

We’re all on the same page – but what’s missing so far is that the scientific orthodoxy has no place for the holism – the causal intentionality of wholes as complex adaptive systems. Fortunately more recent systems thinkers do now have “computational” mechanisms for how this emerges – but it involves both metaphysics and subjectivity.

A metaphysics that says the fundamentals to which the entire cosmos may be reduced does not stop at the physical (spacetime, material and energy, their properties and laws) but that physics itself emerges from information – the stuff of computational processes. And, a subjectivity that says the causal intentionality of wholes emerges systematically from that same stuff.

Science can either continue the denial, defending and living within its orthodoxy, or accept the changes above. Given the massive 21st C investment in science-led objectivity in everything human, science and its STEM sponsors may find it too big a risk to be seen to contemplate such change? If it won’t there needs to be a new naturalism beyond science. Something has to give or we continue down that path to hell in a handcart.

Corning’s book is a great contribution to the argument that the current orthodoxy is missing something massively important – synergy as holistic Darwinism – in the progress of humanity in the natural world. This remains true, even if I don’t see any solution here beyond his plea. If you’re not on that page yet Nature’s Magic will be worth a read.