Psybertron Asks

It’s a while since I did any actual “research” in the scientific sense, essentially all my work is with people and their outputs, written or otherwise, and at more abstract levels of principles involved in their observable actions. Last time I actually collected data and analysed it using objective and statistical scientific methods was probably my Master’s project and dissertation, and a few routine organisation / business / market research surveys since.

I’ve been following a movement that says proper scientific research should always be publicly & auditably pre-registered before actually being done, as a guard against researchers only publishing research that meet or directly, impinge upon their prior stated aims. (Example here from Dorothy Bishop @DeeVeeBee) Properly pre-registered, we get to see inconclusive and negative results – or absence of published results – that may often be more valuable to wider humanity than the original directed aims of the funded research. Not just negative findings notice, but even absent or inconclusive ones too – may tell us as much about the flawed philosophy implicit in the research question or the way the research was planned, as much as the explicit “content” of the research.

I just noticed it’s a practice I regularly follow here in my “pre-reviews”.

As I say almost all my work is reviewing and creatively synthesising the work of others and a habit I developed early on was to state pretty explicitly what I thought of the work (and its relevance to mine) before I actually read / viewed / listened to it. Often listing my presumptions / pre-impressions based on prior publicity or on skimming blurbs, intros and end-materials first. Quite independently of specific reviews and analyses, I also often do “position statements” about what I believe up to this point on a given topic. That way people – including myself – can check my honesty when reading and reviews and conclusions I do ultimately draw.

Keep me honest.

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Hold that thought.

I have held the view that Cybernetics (since 1946 Macy Conference) was always primarily about human systems involving the “Psyche” (hence my naming my efforts “Psybertron”) The fact that so much visible effort since then has focussed on automation and control of man made systems and “machines” – the easy bit – has completely skewed the wider conception – to the point of no return I fear – that anyone defending humanistic values in the 21st C would automatically (heh!) reject the language of Cybernetics (or Systems Thinking as I prefer it these days).

Someone (in the systems domain) suggested my view – and views of Wiener’s (1948) Cybernetics generally – were somehow contentious? Here I need refer only to his title.

“Cybernetics:
or Control and Communication
in the Animal and the Machine”

Animal before Machine, and control IN not OF the animal (or machine). He’s clearly talking about self-organising, living (self-sustaining) systems where control and decision-making arise internally.

By the time he came to write a new preface 13 years after his original work it is clear that the new discipline of control theory OF mechanistic (albeit complex non-linear) systems had taken centre stage, although he nevertheless reminds us he still has biology, psychology and sociology in his scope.

The original work had arisen within the Harvard Medical School. Despite the shift of focus in the preface to the second edition, the additional chapters in that edition are explicitly about learning, self-reproduction, brains and self-organisation, in addition to the original explicit topic titles of the nervous system, gestalts, psychopathology, language and society.

There is absolutely no doubt this topic was created with the understanding and well-being of the human animal in mind.

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Today is Jacob (Bruno) Bronowski’s (official *) birthday and Timothy Sandefur marked the day by sharing his daughter Lisa Jardine’s 2010 documentary “My Father, the Bomb and Me“. Lisa and Bruno are (were) both heroes to me and I’ve mentioned them many times here. Most relevant to that film documentary was Lisa’s Conway Memorial Lecture I blogged about back in 2014 (inc footnotes).

Watching the documentary again today I noticed something I’d not before.

My focus these days is the abstract version of Cybernetics I call Systems Thinking and one of the earlier incarnations was Operations Research. The last time I mentioned that was at this “Community Operations Research” event in memory of John Friend at Lincoln University. (And incidentally, the last time I mentioned Bruno was here at Hull University at last year’s annual Mike Jackson lecture. A number of personnel movements between these two institutions reflect changing fashions in Systems Sciences & Methods in the UK)

Anyway, I noticed that the statistical and Bayesian maths used by Bronowski, amongst others during wartime – to predict bombing damage and kill-rate effectiveness etc – were of course referred to in the documentary as the early days of Operations Research. Hull was his home institution at that time. Small world.

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This year’s 2024 Annual Mike Jackson Lecture at Hull University “What Are Humans?” with Charles Foster, 19th March 2024, 6pm. Hat tip Ben Taylor.

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(*) Official birthday because of the family history of escaping Nazi Europe from Poland via Germany, to start a new life in the UK meant they lost his actual birth-date and had to assign an effective new one – though Wikipedia doesn’t qualify the actual date. (h/t Tim Sandefur)

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Preamble?

How do I come to be writing this post right now?
See the Background “Postamble” at the bottom if necessary 😉

Straight Down to Business:

[START]

The Assertion – In one Sentence –

There are limits to science in the sense that some aspects of the world are beyond science.

(Or alternative prior statements in the background below – “there is more to the real (*1) world than science, some kinds of (real / worthwhile / valuable) knowledge – truths – of the world are more than science”)

The Argument – On one Page:

For now, we’re going to avoid arguing over definitions of words and things per se – and focus on the (multiple / variable / overlapping) criteria we use to distinguish between things (*2). We can come back to definitions when we need to record what if anything we think we’ve agreed. There is no point to dialogue / discourse unless we intend to progress and agree something (*3).

That said we will start with “orthodox” science, on the understanding that however I appear to use it here, implicitly or explicitly, it is moveable during the discourse (as it is under real life evolution of science itself). For now I’m seeing the orthodoxy being about predictable, repeatably observable, objectively measurable criteria either directly in terms of the objects of that science, or indirectly with logical relations between those and the observable objects. (Remember that’s just the distinction I’m making one side of the dividing line above, science itself – as a project and processes – definitively includes plenty of other human creativity, imagination and communication resources too.)

Also I’m talking here of the whole world as the natural world (*4) – everything known or conceived of in the world is natural, even supernatural fictions and myths are created by intelligent beings in the natural world. “Supernatural” effectively therefore means non-existent in the real world, we have no interest in them in this discourse other than as creations of minds in this world.

So as discussed above there are no attempts at definitive definitions in any of the blue, yellow, brown boxes, just descriptive statements. I’m sure we can all think of examples from our own experience, but maybe let’s just think of things that might be seen as subjective / spiritual / humanistic populating the brown box. We’re really focussing on that boundary.

Either there is a boundary, a distinction between what is science and what isn’t, OR you envisage everything subjective / spiritual / humanistic being accepted as being a valid part of an updated scientific orthodoxy. There are no other options. An exclusive or.

So if you go for the first option, that there must always be a dividing line between scientific and other knowledge, then you really ought to care about  the explanatory models for both sides and the nature of the relationship between the two – how they are interact or are related / integrated in real life.

Or, I contend, if you go for the option that simply applying – expanding – the term science to all knowledge, including the subjective (crossing Solms’ “Rubicon” completely), then equally you must care about the explanatory model that makes that so. If you don’t, by expanding your scientific criteria to encompass literally the whole world, you’re effectively saying “anything goes” when it comes to scientific criteria. It devalues the special case of scientific knowledge – it effectively says nothing to call knowledge scientific.

Any other option is denial or ignorance of the issue, or a retreat into the box that suits the practical aspects of your own life, which is fine as a personal choice, but gives you no resources to debate the boundary or what lies beyond.

Do Not Pass Go.

[END]

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*NOTES:

The notes can all be (and are) elaborated elsewhere, with references acknowledged, (there is nothing new under the sun, all writing is plagiarism at some level) but for now:

*1 – #OntologicalCommitment
We’re (hopefully, by intention anyway) only talking about the real world. But some of the things that are most fundamental to any world-view are the least well defined in practice. Even in science, time, mass, force, even causation are really only settled by convention. The truths of science are generally explanatory and predictive models of behaviour involving mathematical and often metaphorical objects, even if some of the metaphors eventually reify into reality. However much creativity, imagination and mathematical logic such truths and models involve, and however practically useful they are, the explanatory model is incomplete until properly evidenced assertion of that truth or theory can be followed by:

“and, for now,
that is how I believe
the world really is,
how it really works”

That’s stating the #OntologicalCommitment (after Goldstein). (Think Einstein’s rubber sheets for gravity, say. Quite a lot of science, especially some aspects fundamental physics are pretty well established at the mathematical and predictive / useful value level, but have still never achieved ontological commitment amongst their users, let alone wider public consciousness.)

*2 – #GoodFences
Even with most complex, systematic, apparently comprehensive (but never perfect) world models with a potentially infinite number of things and properties of / relationships between these, at any number of levels of abstraction, every distinction is binary. This not that. The point is not to divide the world – to be divisive – but to be able to recognise and account for all the relationships and processes in play. Every such dividing line or criterion, is one of many that will also intersect with many other, and is subject to revision, exception and re-evaluation. They are #GoodFences (after Robert Frost and G K Chesterton) not rigid barriers to progress. Some such divisions become historically significant, archetypes, ur-types, defining things that get named / symbolised in important theories and models that stand the test of time, but they may all exist in any discourse.

*3 – #RulesOfDiscourse
Beyond scientific, logical and mathematical rules that form causal and explanatory arguments within the evolving body of knowledge, the actual processes of developing and agreeing and evolving these, involves the full gamut of inter-subjective rhetoric, and there are many more rules of constructive behaviour, albeit rules that can be broken and evolved with creativity and good-faith. (See Rules of Engagement).

*4 – #Naturalism
It might seem natural to a scientist, to treat the whole world as the natural world, after all science was the name given to what was previously seen as natural philosophy. In fact it is a choice – a metaphysical choice – to nail nature to the mast, at the top of our edifice. The act of placing it in that position above all, against which we will judge the world and our knowledge of it, gives it paramount / overarching significance in our world view. To emphasise that some even dare to call it #SacredNaturalism. It’s a premise so deep – the turtle on which everything else stands – that to change one’s mind at this point would be more than a Kuhnian paradigm shift, everything would need to be re-written.

(*5 – #SomethingFromNothing
Our discourse above so far avoids any concern for the remaining fundamental question of why and how-come something / anything rather than nothing exists, or what the smallest “atom” of significant difference might be, something rather than nothing. Whether it’s even a meaningful question. But depending on where the discourse goes, the question might arise, so this is just-in-case a placeholder.)

(*6 – #PostPostModernism / #PoPoMo
Again not yet come up in the discourse above, so a just-in-case placeholder. People raising concerns for the brown box above in the context of validity of wider takes on knowledge would typically be branded Post-Modernists or plain weirdos in contrast with the de-facto received-wisdom of Modernists who see the whole as a scientification project. In reality we PoPoMo’s are aiming to reconcile and integrate the two.)

(*7 – #MonismOrDualism
Another just-in-case placeholder. There are many different possible monisms and dualisms, but anyone retreating into one box, may simply be saying the world is actually fundamentally and permanently divided between this box and the vestiges of other box, and it makes no sense to consider relationships between the two.

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Post Note: Continuing the original dialogue:

Dennis: My real strength is my experience of relating to and working with people of diverse cultures and mindsets.

Ian: And would you call that science?

Dennis: Absolutely not (laughs).

Ian: So in fact there is real, valuable humanistic stuff beyond science, some might call it wisdom?

QED.

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Background / Postamble:

I previously covered this topic – limits to science – pretty comprehensively albeit at a high level of abstraction in a presentation I gave to ISSS in November 2022 – it’s even highlighted in the bullets on the Agenda on page 3. (Now in January 2024, I’d probably update those two bullets under “Focus Mainly About Language” to include not just the ever expanding inconclusive talk on “new” or “definitive” systems definitions and methodologies, to add increasing talk of humanistic, subjective and/or spiritual aspects of systems that fail to connect with those listening in orthodox science mode.) A problem for an IS whose scope is SS – Systems Science(s).

Then at Teesside Skeptics in the Pub (TS-SitP) in December 2022, I delivered a talk entitled “Is Scientific Skepticism Enough” using just two slides and wrote it up as an 8-page “page” here on Psybertron. I’ve since shared the same piece on Academia.Edu as a putative paper, part of formalising more of my existing writing.

In the TS-SitP context at the time, it was a response to a topical question about what it means to “be” – to identify as – a Skeptic, and apart from the identity question, my main thrust was a plea that:

in championing scientific knowledge against ideology and pseudo-science and the like, Skeptics should beware falling into scientism, being ideologically committed to science being the only true answer to anything and everything.

(eg in that still current TS-SitP context / environment, in topical language, Anti-Woke is almost as bad as Woke).

The above includes the basic assertion that there is more to the real world than science, some kinds of (real / worthwhile / valuable) knowledge of the world beyond science. That assertion never goes away, in the sense it keeps cropping up in any debate about the world and our knowledge of it. So, following one such conversation a couple of nights ago, this post is a one page reworked extract of that paper focussing on just that assertion.

(More preamble on worldviews / prior-assumptions etc implicit in the above pieces? Better if read the post and ask questions?)

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Post Notes:

Taking the dialogue forward with ISSS and/or SitP?
(Past attempts noted above.)

ISSS Washington conference – maybe a paper or led-discussion workshop?

“Finding Language to join-up those with focus on the science and implementation technologies with those focussing on the humanistic (intuitive / tacit / spiritual / subjective) aspects of systems-in-action.”

Maybe seeing the International Society for Systems Sciences (ISSS) evolving to being the “International Society for Understanding Systems” (ISUS)

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Just a link holding post. Mentioned several times that I consider Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” a great piece of work, being about life, the universe, (God) and everything and yet have failed to get very far through his other famous tome.

Hat tip @RoseDiel for sharing this 2005 review of reading War and Peace by Laura Miller in Salon. Despite the obvious historical and fictional narratives, it’s clearly also about life, the universe and everything.

Me previously on Psybertron (2016):

Anna Karenina is one of those great works, like Tolstoy’s other magnum opus, that I must have started, even read up to a handful of chapters, half-a-dozen times. Already familiar with his “unhappy families” and even Vronsky at the horse race – but always too distracted to read on through the patronymics, familials and informals to actually get the point of greatness. And of course I must have seen two or three film and TV dramatisations over the years, not to mention the meme of recalling Anna everytime I’ve set foot on a snowy windswept railway platform, typically for some reason at Slependen, Oslo, in my memories. Meme upon meme.

I’ve just finished reading the Penguin Classics Pevear & Volokhonsky translation, whose cover blurb includes:

“[T]he vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and meaning to his life – and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.”

We probably all know Tolstoy as a “devout Christian” and of course I’m an atheist, rationalist, humanist, so it would be easy to be prejudiced against Levin’s (ie Tolstoy’s) enlightenment. But it’s an enlightenment I feel I share.

I know in fact.

The word may translate as God, but it is God as in “the good” – no superhuman, supernatural, omniscient, omnipotent, causal agent here. Church too, but not as organised religion or ritualised superstition, simply as socially shared knowledge of the good. And knowing that it is good in the collective action of individuals and not in any disembodied rational conception of scientists and philosophers. Beyond words. Rationality is our most powerful tool, but love is greater, being neither thing nor tool.

Good philosophers know this. Good people enact it. “The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ” anyone? Jeez – even good humanists know this.

There’s a lot of agriculture and “what about the workers?” in Karenina. Oh, and – spoiler alert – sadly, Anna doesn’t make it through her paranoia. Too great for me to do it justice in any actual review or selection of quotes.

Simply, a great book.

So, on to “War and Peace“? Maybe after some writing.

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This is my third post of 2024 and the previous two already referred to my reading of Andrea Wulf’s “Magnificent Rebels“. The second of hers I’ve read, after “The Invention of Nature“. The connection between the two is the overlap of explorer / scientist Alexander von Humboldt, his brother Wilhelm and his wife Caroline intersecting with thinkers clustered in and around Jena and the German / Prussian “states” of the time. The intersection is impressive enough – Goethe, Fichte, Hegel, the Humboldts, Novalis, Schelling, Schiller, the Schlegels, Schleiermacher and Tieck – the union is frankly the whole of European, North and South American and Russian politics and thought in the arts and sciences – and government, in the aftermath of the French revolution. Too many leaders to name-drop again, but well-connected and influential to say the least.

I read “Magnificent Rebels“ to a conclusion about 4am one night, excitedly covered in post-it notes. The notes I’m extracting are for my philosophical / metaphysical purposes, and it’s hard to exaggerate how much momentous thinking happened in Jena. I originally said 1750-1850 (1749-1854 spanning their lives) but the action all happened in a decade from 1796 when the Schlegel’s arrived in Jena and 1806 when Napoleon rolled through.

I’m not going to have bandwidth for a full review of all those notes, they’re back on the shelf for future reference alongside the Humboldt book.

Just a couple of general historical observations.

Women and Marriage. What with the Holy Roman Empire and the myriad of little states and principalities each with their feudal hierarchical arrangements, the rules about who could marry who were culturally tangled well beyond the individuals involved. Ditto the rules for divorce. Perhaps therefore not surprisingly, many of the couples understood they weren’t married to the right person and had by mutual agreement open relationships with any number of lovers and partners, including coveting their brother’s/sister’s wives/husbands. Only social propriety – and the consequences of being caught rule-breaking – maintained discretion, but within the walls of “liberal” Jena, who cared? That the women “helped” their male partners with their thinking and writing, at the very least editorially if not co-authored was openly acknowledged in that liberal environment. Even when the whole was explicitly authored by the women and advertised as such by their men, only the men’s names made it through the wider publishing process.

Disease and Death. It was very easy to die in those days. Ignoring the ever-present violence of governance and war, and travel – on horseback, carriage or on foot (the distances they walked!) – the death of a child and/or the mother in childbirth, death of children who survived birth, death of anyone contracting any number of prevalent diseases we’d consider minor in the 21st C, were all a part of daily life. Medicine was crude and often more harm than good, infection hadn’t been recognised yet. They’d all better live their best life and produce their best work today, they might be dead tomorrow.

Amazing work done in Prussia / Germany before anywhere else UK, US or continental Europe under the most adverse conditions. Anyway, enough for now, a dozen other reads – inevitably – added to my virtual reading list, whilst I am still in writing-not-reading mode.

Both wonderful books by Andrea Wulf, highly recommended.

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Previously on Psybertron

“So this is 2024” (3/4/5 Jan 2024 – “Friday I’m In Love“) A round up on my resolved priorities for 2024, where my first mistake was to start reading “Magnificent Rebels“.

“2024 – Another day” (6 Jan 2024 – “Saturday I’m still in love“) ever deeper into “Magnificent Rebels”

“Humboldt – Pictures with Everything” (11 Sep 2023) My original reading of Wulf’s previous work “The Invention of Nature“.

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