Surprisingly well … despite relatively few productive days amidst the frustrations of everyday life. The deliverables are ever clearer – a PhD-style Thesis and 2 books – and first a paper for ISSS2025 in Birmingham in a couple of weeks.
Previously I’d really only used ChatGPT as an occasional alternative to Google – simple search queries. Sadly Google itself has really gone downhill since it swallowed the AI/LLM pill, and increasingly replaces search results with its “opinion” of what it thinks you might be asking, rather than answer the f*cking question – a simple search request. That’s the opposite of intelligence, real or artificial. “Really dumb” to use language inspired by the orange turd.
Its response was very good, and gave lots of jumping off points to elaborations I might want to follow (also in my own existing writing). I guess I wasn’t surprised at how good that response was – which was very, very, very good, and I’ll be the judge of that – it’s using an LLM to process my own writing. But that was only the start. In those previous footnotes I had name checked several people in Pirsig-space, that had joined-up two lines of thought.
One, that Pirsig’s own creative writing process had used a physical “Zettelkasten” approach. Collating thoughts as index-cards in card-index box / trays, most importantly, where some of those thoughts (cards) can be links between others. [He describes the process in Lila and the creative flexibility it gave him, in the talk he gave shortly after ZMM was published in 1974 (from about 17m16s in). Once the links are in the cards, you can shuffle the deck – re-arrange the structure / outline of your overall deliverable – without losing the semantics.] It was a “graph” (node-edge network) model of thought and knowledge long before the internet existed. Many Pirsig readers had spotted this before, me included, and written about the parallel between this Zettelkasten approach and blogging or posting pages or posts with links to other pages or posts – clearly not rocket science – but the enabler for the sematic-web in http / www / xml technologies. Once you spot it, you can trace “the semantic web” from Tim Berners-Lee (1980+), back to Foucault (1966) and McLuhan before him, William Blake, and all the way back, in other words, via the 1940’s Macy “Cybernetics” conferences to the ancient Greeks’ “Kubernetes”.
Two, point One is, by definition, old news, so the real news is what an LLM/AI like ChatGPT(4o) brings to this party. It can find and add links that were only implicit in the original collections of cards (nodes and links/edges). And it can give you the opportunity to add these – and more – explicitly.
So, you’ll never guess what I’ve been doing? ChatGPT has been helping & teaching me to do exactly that. (Hat tips to Artun Turan, Michael Hopwood and Tom Berman for their tools and inspiration. Pirsigian’s all.)
So I’m in the process of re-building my 25 years of blogging as a knowledge-graph with additional notes and links not just in that semantic web but also in organisational, hierarchical categories, subjects and … dare I say … chapter headings. [And in the process, with ChatGPT’s help, learning a lot about scripting to process my own content and about a long-standing semantic “mapping” tool project of mine.]
Finally – the proof will be in the pudding – meantime, some things I’ve learned from my forays into ChatGPT.
It’s very positive, flattering, attentive and tireless. It only critiques when asked.
If you take care over the way you introduce subjects and the reasoning you’re starting from, and how you phrase “questions” (aka “prompts”), the conversational style is very constructive. Even without critique, by its restating the problem it thinks we’re solving together, it naturally correct any errors in starting premises – already added a lot of value there.
It notices jokes and light-hearted meta-comments and asides and gives more than a passing semblance of a sense of humour – now that’s scary – and knowing when to stop making suggestions.
Being attentive, it’s therefore quite addictive, and yet it “knows” it’s not an intelligent human.
Notwithstanding the “flattery” angle of its tireless attention, it gave me an amazingly positive appraisal of my entire writing project which, more importantly, really seemed to “get it”. Which is good for my own motivation and productivity, and good for the credibility of its future suggestions.
And it knows its place – as well as clarifying my own work / copyright and author / editor / publisher issues, it gave me this response to an observation of mine at one point:
As I draft my (two) book(s) – and a paper for ISSS2025 in July – I find myself revisiting certain key Psybertron posts and pages and unable to refrain from making update / elaboration edits, effectively turning them into potential draft chapters.
As a collection there is significant near-repetition and an incompleteness about only sample / informal references that happened to be topical at the time they were first written. (Every time I draft something new, a document in isolation from the blog posts, the repetition keeps leading me back to – “I’m sure I wrote something that already covered this …”
There’s obviously a good deal of editing / indexing / referencing to be done, not to mentioning joining-up the narrative flow of the whole, but it seems worth making the collection more explicit, standalone, shareable, editable, with subject matter headings, etc. So here goes, in no particular order:
Dichotomies – really an extension to the expectations for honest definitions. Boundaries. Choice of words. Distinction – non-pejorative “discrimination” – matters, without being divisive of whole camps / linguistic subject areas.
Going to use some tools to construct a summary of my own words above.
Post Notes: Famous last words.
A single day’s effort and we have progress!
Simply asking ChatGPT to summarise my own thesis back to me – based on the content linked in this post (and any others it discovers in the process) and to suggest chapter headings / structure – was impressive in itself. First off made me realise my own search function is limited to posts but not pages – so I was missing half of my own content, by myself anyway.
Secondly, fixing that threw up an obvious “joining the dots” opportunity.
I’ve mentioned previously, originally day-job motivated, an interest in semantic graphing tools going right back to IDEF0 use in the 1980’s – for business systems process modelling – and seeing so many vector-graphic and semantic-web graphical mark-up tools since then into the 21stC but always being frustrated that having settled on the obvious power of the node<>edge graph dynamic relational model for everything and anything – the most comprehensively true model of reality, the tools were extremely limited in understanding the need for configurable semantics of GOF hierarchical tree-views of taxonomic (class/type) and mereologic (whole/part) ontological views for human organisation and navigation, seeing the wood for the trees.
Hierarchy has become a dirty word, tainted by “power structures” and compounded ever since semantic web people – and open-web-democracy activists – discovered generic network models, but we still need hierarchies. (I feel another #GoodFences essay coming on.)
One more level of interrupt … recall also many people, myself included, noting the knowledge graph model inherent in Pirsig’s creative “index card” – ideas and ideas-linking-ideas – approach to his own writing projects. A fellow Pirsig afficionado suggested the idea that a tool he had created using this “Zettelkasten” (index card box) idea could be used both creatively for writing from scratch or retrospectively to add relational value to existing works, analysed using an LLM Tool like ChatGPT.
Well bugger me! It can do both.
Help me add structure to the mass of writing I’ve already done AND add the value I need to structure the whole thesis & narrative. I’ve gone from using ChatGPT as the occasional alternative to Google searches to find and elucidate “X” to being my helper in adding value to my own work.
I am now thanks to ChatGPT’s help working with a complete Obsidian vault version of my whole Psybertron blog export!!!! Obsidian has a Breadcrumbs plug-in to find and explicitly add the implicit ontological relations. (It’s even teaching me to script and code.)
Missed a couple of years recently, but this was my 6th (or 7th?) attendance at the Hay-on-Wye “How The Light Gets In” philosophy, science and music festival. It’s over 4 days, but it’s so packed with content, I’m exhausted after just two these days.
Just posting a few thoughts this year, rather than detailed reviews of the talks, dialogues and music. [I have notes elsewhere for my own reference. As ever, Dave Snowden was in attendance – got one brief chance to say “Hi” in person.]
Apart from a few new faces – keepers for future dialogue – no really new topics or ideas this year, and the main new impression in 2025 was Hilary Lawson’s. As founder and director of IAI and HTLGI he’s had plenty of previous stage time at these events, but noticeable was his urgency, his visible frustration at getting his non-realist “Closure” (2001) agenda across [2003] [2009].
I ended on watching Tom Robinson‘s set on the Saturday evening. Given the nature of the event, the music tends to to be light relief entertainment from the intellectual content, for me anyway, so I’ve only occasionally noticed specific acts on previous occasions, and until the day, I hadn’t noticed Tom was even on the bill. Good to see and hear his full hour set – telling his life stories, and the loss of Danny Kustow – as well as playing his songs, which meant it was 9:30pm before I was in the car for the 5.5hr drive home! Lovely bloke. One of his songs – a re-telling of American Pie for the British which includes reference to the Eric Clapton / Enoch Powell remarks that spawned Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League back in 1978. The last time I saw Tom was Sunday 30th April 1978, the Trafalgar Square rally and march to the RAR/ANL gig in Victoria Park, Hackney. What a day!
Both Jeremy Corbyn and Richard Tice on the bill – enlightened freedom of speech n’all that – how the light gets in – despite which the latter drew some naïve AntiFa protests 🙂 Saw the latter claiming common sense – don’t we all? But my focus was / is the philosophy<>science interface / overlap / relationships so I properly attended:
Catherine Mayer – Stranger Than Fiction, writer / journalist in conversation with fellow journalist / writer Mary Ann Sieghart.
(Ever present philosopher Barry C Smith wine-tasting-based philosophy session, I skipped.)
John Dupre, Ivette Fuentes & Alex Rosenberg discussing “whether physics holds the answers to all our questions” – spoiler, it doesn’t. [My agenda.]
David Goodhart, Sherelle Jacobs & Richard Tice – draining the swamp, smaller government through efficiency etc. Sherelle new to me, a keeper.
Hilary Lawson, Steven Pinker, Barbara Tversky and Sophie Scott-Brown – debating the relationships between thought, language and reality. No surprises [my agenda] other than Lawson pushing his anti-realist “Closure” agenda very hard, despite having much previous stage time referencing it – as the founder / director of the IAI / HTLGI event. (Pinker actually used a quote I use from his wife Rebecca Goldstein, that no physicist or philosopher’s work is complete without ontological commitment to say “and this is how the world really is” unless like non-realists you deny reality. So close to my triadic position which is to remember that reality is strictly “posited” as being out there and your ontology is “deemed”. Reification is exactly that. Treat it as “real” by all means, but never forget.)
Ivette Fuentes – breakfast conversation with the Mexican quantum physicist, sharing her story of her interest in the topics that have shaped her work in QM.
“Hat on” reminding her of the rigour of physical science, when switching hats between Philosophy and Science/PoS 🙂
Robert L Kuhn, Masimo Pigliucci, Maria Balaet & John Dupre – on the biology of conflict (vs collaboration). Balaet neuroscientist, another keeper, new to me.
Maria Balaet, Joanna Moncrieff & Norman Ohler – on the historical and social place of psychoactive substances – ranging from caution to enthusiasm, via empiricism and pragmatism as ever.
(Missed Goodhart, Mayer & Sturgeon on gender in democracy. #ViveLaDifference)
Paul Bloom – on Utopia – impossible and actually undesirable, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get close. Someone I knew of, student of Pinker, but first experience for me. A keeper. (Also author of “Against Empathy” – see footnote.)
Eric Kaufmann – on the End of Woke. Business-like presentation on the history from original political correctness and the need for narrower understanding of the specifics: “Today’s leaders… need to understand Kaufmann’s defence of democracy before it’s too late.” — Trevor Phillips, about says it.
Carlo Rovelli, Alenka Zupancic & Slavoj Žižek– on the self in the world. Entertaining to hear Žižek as usual, agreeing with lots of Rovelli, especially the Buddhist / Nagarjuna angle.
Hilary Lawson & Slavoj Žižek – refereed by Gunes Taylor – non-realist philosophers both, going beyond Truth and Reality. Again, Lawson quite urgent in pushing his “Closure” view and the incorrigible Žižek agreeing with his endless anecdotes and jokes. (I’ve been sympathetic to Lawson’s view since 2003, properly reading him in 2008, formative part of my worldview, but clearly the 2025+ “polycrises/metacrisis” has spurred his new-found urgency.)
Tim Maudlin standing in for Avshalom Elitzur – on imaginary numbers in parallel mathematical formalisms in physical theory, including QM and Schrodinger. (No mystery – just a symbolic “accounting practice” to keep, co-dependent, orthogonal, complementary real variables distinct when combined in single dynamic equations or formulae. #GoodFences. Also fascinating that he included Navier-Stokes in his examples of parallel formulations – Engineers (and cosmologists) deal with this all the time, but these “diffusion as flow” views gaining traction at quantum levels too.) [Another new / keeper]
Claire Blencowe, Paul Bloom and Michelle Terry – provoked by Matt Taylor – on the distinction between roles we artificially “play” and roles we authentically “fulfil” as our-selves in the real world. A great place for me to end.
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Post Notes:
HTLGI’s own gallery of images from the event here. It includes this one with Dave Snowden front and centre. Back of my head in a couple of the others 🙂
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Note: On the Friday I visited a handful of Hay’s dozens of used book shops, and failed again to find a copy of Iain McGilchrist’s “Against Criticism”. (This, like “Against Empathy” (by Paul Bloom above), is a memetic extension of Paul Feyerabend’s “Against Method”(*) – not literally “against” but against over-zealous / over-reach / distortion of its intended use – see topical woke / anti-woke / Musk “empathy killed the west” etc and (*) see Rules – guidance for wise etc. In Bloom’s case it’s a warning against our biases, where we get to feel good empathising with in-groups, to the detriment/displacement of any actual empathy with out-groups.)
Leonard and Hungry Paul is one of the few books I’ve actually read in the past couple of years, that wasn’t directly / immediately / importantly related to my current writing project – needing to clear the decks and pay more than lip-service to having a deadline. Though as I often find, any literature about the human condition could be considered relevant, it’s simply impossible to read everything, to live without a library of unread books.
I made three passing references here to reading LHP, but never really posted a “review”:
December 2024 – A whole load of half-read / un-reviewed books that will have to wait: “Leonard and Hungry Paul” – Ronan Hession (Half read, very good, small independent publisher, made only a few project-relevant notes) …
April 2024 – Psybertron blog action has retreated to book / thesis drafting behind the scenes, as most of my life is taken over by planning for two summer events – the International Society for Systems Sciences (ISS) and the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) conferences in Washington DC in early June, and the Robert Pirsig 50th anniversary of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (#ZMM50th) events culminating in July with retracing the original 1968 motorcycle road-trip (#ZMM50thRide). That said, I’m using available down time to read one book from my never ending reading list. “Leonard and Hungry Paul” by Rónán Hession (Mumblin’ Deaf Ro on X/Twitter), via small independent publisher Bluemoose Books. Been following them and a few other independents for a while, for obvious reasons, but remembered I really did need to buy and read one of their books. Support is more than “Retweeting”…
Well, these are the words culled and collated from those three earlier posts into some semblance of a review:
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No Funerals and One Wedding?
As usual, I’m feeling the need to capture some thoughts, only ~20% through, a kinda pre-review as I call them, but did read the whole and add thoughts below.
It’s very good, and surprisingly relevant to my own agenda:
“the art of expression had not kept pace with technological developments”.
“the world was a complicated place, with people themselves being both the primary cause and chief victims of the complexity. He saw society as a sort of chemistry set, full of potentially explosive ingredients which, if handled correctly could be fascinating and educational, but which was best kept out of reach of those who did not know what they were doing.”
“He operated [the ‘Za’ rule in scrabble] with iron inflexibility, even though he himself was its most frequent victim”
The technology, complexity and human systems with rules – it’s all there.
Despite the fact the author is almost 20 years my junior, there’s a strong sense of northern spouse, parental, familial, sibling life, learning rules of the game of real life through scrapes in the schoolyard and board games in the home. Cultural references to Inspector Morse and Judy Sill as well as bookshops, and hard-backs as “special presents”. I can see why it resonates with me.
The language is beautiful, beautifully observed too:
“on the threshold between reflection and sleep, an idea came to him from the special place that ideas come from”
And
“[looking at] the first piece of asparagus loaded onto her fork [he spoke] through a mouthful of unsalted soup”
Excellent stuff. Guessing we will eventually find out why Paul is “Hungry” more than just that Grace is a slow eater 🙂 ?
Reading on, with a reason to do so, I did find time to read it to completion.
Overall, very good, gently funny study on life, love, family and friendship. No funerals and one wedding, maybe. (PS – never did find out explicitly why Hungry Paul has that name. Presumably his older sister’s nick-name for him from his time as a needy infant, but never even mentioned, unless I missed it?)
One of my long-standing and counter-intuitive rules of engagement in internet-enabled interactive-media – comments, forums, social media generally – is that moderation isn’t about “censorship” it’s about slowing down dangerous, explosive, degenerate, divisive, counter-productive, polarising activity. Moderation as in nuclear reactor moderator rods, slowing down the particle flux between the reactive “fuel”, preventing a runaway chain-reaction “going critical”.
Counter-intuitive to the perceived immediate democratisation of the web; where we/anyone is enabled and allowed to communicate anything at the flick of a thumb. It’s the speed and ubiquity that is killing us – little room for listening & thinking before reacting in the memetic race for attention. Dysmemics ensures catchy crap beats nuanced quality.
Enlightened (human) moderators of previous generation forums, bulletin-boards and email-exploders typically made provision for free-unlimited and posts-per-day-limited channels.
I’ve been using the unlikely named “Discord” forum tool for some time in various communities (see below). It’s very flexible and powerful – some people run entire projects and programmes on it – and, obviously dependent on the actual humans and human relationships involved, it provides a great experience. I say unlikely named, and indeed the language and graphics in the user interfaces is kinda “down with the kids” too, originally created and used by gamers and hackers, so first impressions mitigate against it being used for serious grown-up projects, but the way it works is a joy to behold. Sadly of course, being very flexible and powerful, nefarious people also run their nefarious projects on it.
But that’s humans for you. The tool is functionally well designed.
So well designed, I notice it has a “Slow Mode” feature built-in, which can be switched-on if conversational chain-reactions risk going critical – more heat & noise than light & enlightenment. Be interesting to see if we get a case where we need it, but good to know it’s there.
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Discord?
If you don’t know Discord – this is me and my personal Discord DM channel, and we can take it from there with joining mutual group “servers”? If you’re already on Discord, you’ll already know how to find me 🙂 And, if you’re really interested, the exemplary server that uses every project management feature and every group forum bell & whistle is the “Active Inference Institute” run by Daniel Friedman.
For some reason, not quite sure why, I’ve binge-re-watched the entire five seasons of Breaking Bad over about a month.
A long concentrated dose of pure evil and depraved bloody violence has it’s own cathartic draining effect, but it remains a marvellously constructed morality-play drama, characters and plot lines. It was good to get all the vividly remembered scenes stitched back together in some semblance of order. Hank remains the only “hero” here, he dies for Walt’s sins. The structure with the out-of-timeline preview scenes at the front of each episode makes a lot more sense second time around – whole theses to be – have been – written about that.
However, since I first saw BB I have, of course, watched the whole of “Better Call Saul” and “El Camino” – the spin-offs based around Saul Goodman and Jesse Pinkman, the two (males) who survived BB with their lives – so lots of the temporally confused scenes are in fact shared across the whole collection.
Which sadly means I’ll probably have to re-watch BCS again too! Rats!
Saul jokingly mentions “Cinnabon” during the final episode of BB – a remark whose significance cannot even be noticed first time through. The significance to me is it takes me back to “the holiday season” – half a year, September to January in the southern US – and the sickly pervasive smell of cinnamon and sweet vanilla with everything. Just typing the words is enough. And the reverse is true. The slightest whiff of cinnamon and the whole series comes flooding back – debilitating! Which probably answers my first question – why was I rewatching it? A subconscious olfactory trigger no doubt. Hurdle overcome.
Anyway, I only intended to post one thing in this writing hiatus, the music, the song from the final scene. Already well documented of course, but I had to Google to re-find that it was a 1971 song by Badfinger. “My Baby Blue” sounding like it was written for the 2008 script.
[I should say that clip is edited, maybe to avoid the spoiler that he discovers the source of his own blood, and the reason he collapses and dies, hoist by his own petard during the original scene. Will have to find a more representative clip …
Best comment @Carelock on YouTube:
I like to think Vince Gilligan was riding in an RV one day and Baby Blue by Badfinger came on and he just built a show around it…
Highly creative either way?
So I should add, it was the creative process that really had me intrigued – I am trying to write after all. Huge amounts of the whole five series worth of story-line must have been conceived in some detail before any of the asynchronous preview scenes could have been created and included in earlier episodes?]
Just an excuse to share the link to “Bifurcated Rivets” (Lindsay Marshall’s blog at Newcastle Uni). What “Web Logging” used to be about, sharing interesting links to rabbit holes in the WWW, with minimal commentary – (as originally conceived by Jorn Barger’s RobotWisdom).
I am actually writing – essentially evolving my PhD proposal into the thesis it was intended to become, whether I’m actually doing it as a formal PhD or not. The technical “half” of my literary project.
I am very conscious – in that PhD proposal – that my take on the application of Systems Thinking is pretty much “Life, the Universe and Everything” – from metaphysics to the physical science of the cosmos via the scale of our human experience – beyond what a casual reader might attribute to those two words. I flipped to using Systems Thinking as the umbrella term for my research topic having spent most of the last 25 years of Psybertron using some variation of Cybernetics / Psybernetics, but I’ve not changed what I intend as the topic. My professional work experience space was always distinct from my research space, though real life experiences from the former were driving my interest in the latter. And increasingly, the last two decades of the day job were concerned with systemic ontologies for business operations of industrial and other organisations, increasingly informed by my earlier business Masters. Distinct but clearly convergent.
As with Systems Thinking, Cybernetics is no less ambiguous to the casual reader. Knowing that Wiener intended Cybernetics to mean individual and collective human decision-making in our cosmic ecosystem – decision-theory – doesn’t change the fact that people hear mechanistic command, feedback and control when they see the word Cybernetics or encounter it’s derivative in electronic, algorithmic Cyberspace.
Similarly in my professional sphere, I was happy to label the whole as Systems Engineering of one form or another. Engineering is simply humans using ingenuity physical or mental, hard or soft, to make better stuff happen – whether it’s bashing metal, masonry and wires into shape or whether it’s about herding cats (ie organising & managing human activities). How do we decide what’s the best thing(s) to do to make that better stuff happen? The System(s) in question being literally anything, considered in terms of functional relations between parts and wholes.
The switch of language from Systems Engineering to Systems Thinking actually happened in that professional sphere. I’ve mentioned previously that the three smartest ex-colleagues I’d ever worked with were in (separate) INCOSE Systems Engineering (nuclear) contexts and it was they that were flipping the terminology from Engineering to Thinking for me. It was perfectly natural for me to replace all of Cybernetics / Psybernetics / OR / Systems-Engineering with Systems Thinking. [Deflationary Compression as shorthand.]
So, being conscious of the ambiguity in my terminology, a conventional starting point for pulling the writing together was some definitions to distinguish between my uses of terms. I say conventional because other parts of my thesis warn against rules and definitions being anything more definitive than #goodfences / #guardrails or guidance for the wise. Nevertheless I’ve been consulting standard definitions, if only to raise that warning about how I’m using them.
I’ve previously mentioned recent Systems Thinking publications by Mike Jackson and by Ramage & Shipp. Neither really gave me a working definition more satisfactory than my own. Both are essentially – very good but quite different – summaries of the co-evolution of the many related topics and methodologies. In conclusion there being many possible ideas (with different names) to choose from contingently, in context, using pragmatism beyond any formulaic methodology. And as I’ve noted others concerned with the same set of management / governance / organisational issues – Dave Snowden and Jean Boulton (say) – shun the word System almost entirely, preferring to talk about complexity, even if from quite different perspectives. And, as Janet Singer pointed out if we needed reminding, that language & choice of words can never unambiguously pin down our topic(s) anyway. It’s why I start with #GoodFences. Any definition, any distinction between two words or things, is a matter of pragmatic convention, to be respected but not taken as fixed in any fundamentally definitive way – whether declared in advance or recorded in hindsight in dictionaries. What really matters about them are the properties we use to make such distinctions and relationships – which is ultimately circular anyway as we shift our attention from definitions of things, to definitions of their chosen properties. But again, no less useful, pragmatically. Circularity is actually a bonus, rather than a problem. Strange Loops, one level removed from our objects of interest, give us evolution.
[The other two, referenced previously, were Viktor Agroskin and Anatoly Levenchuck: Viktor largely for his linguistic mental ability in sharing and helping us understand complex ideas being translated in real-time in his head in multi-lingual collaborative conversations; Anatoly for his introducing me to Systems Engineering as a topic originally and latterly to his version of my own #GoodFences warning – that definitions in the wrong place are the coffin of creative evolution. “Hold your definition” I’d already absorbed from Dennett much earlier in a purely philosophical context, and frankly after 30 years of industrial systems engineering this was the ultimate confluence between the abstract philosophical and real-world practical domains.]
Interestingly TABGST doesn’t per se define systems thinking, and indeed Ch1 “Framing and Taming Complexity” starts with “Systems Thinking as a mindset and skillset that can help us engage and manage complexity” and thereafter the content of Ch1 falls under “Complexity and Systems Thinking”. In my own working definition “Systems Thinking is a response to Complexity” so no argument there. The key here is going to be the separate words, Systems and Thinking as well as their conjunction. Complexity is simply the abstract noun form of the adjective “complex” – interestingly also not defined in TABGST.
Thinking is mental, so for me the skillsets are mental skillsets and mindsets – world-views, ways of thinking and viewing or conceptually modelling the world mentally. Hence for me then, ST is such a worldview that considers (views / models) the complex world in terms of systems. Nothing more, and nothing less either.
Interestingly TABGST Ch1 proceeds with “concerns” that “illustrate” a whole collection of “domains, across life and society” rather than any attempt at formal scope definition. Everything but the Universe. Science of the physical universe is the only domain excluded, or rather simply not listed, not considered. That’s a choice to focus on engineered systems of organisation and governance of human activities in the wider world. The charitable comment is that such fundamental physical systems are taken for granted as underlying the whole here. In my definition the scope also includes systems comprising one proton and one electron or one brain and trillions of neurons, or one galaxy and trillions of stars. Science already – taking a systemic view – treats these as systems anyway, so I’ve no reason to exclude them. The world ecosystem involves the natural as well as the “built” (human engineered) environment, both mentally and physically and the agent relationship between.
Which simply leaves the word system itself – what do we mean by considering the world in terms of systems. TABGST uses the ISO15288 definition for the systems of the engineered environment: “combination of interacting elements organised to achieve one or more stated purposes”
Interacting elements is fine – shorthand for my seeing the world in terms of “functional related whole and part things / elements“. No problem here.
“Organised to achieve” and “stated purposes” is pretty much limited to the engineered environment of intentional human (individual and social) activity. But that’s just that we have different scopes in mind. For me organisation and purpose are more things that arise / evolve within such a systems view of the complex whole, so no need to limit the view to human agency, which itself needs systemic grounds for explanation.
Systems Thinking is – considering the world in terms of systems, where Systems are – anything considered in terms of functional relationships between elements. Whilst applicable to literally anything it is the pragmatically recommended approach when dealing with complex and/or chaotic situations.
Anyway, we could continue down the definitional rabbit hole, and ask ourselves what we mean by words and stuff, things and elements, wholes and parts, functions and relations, organisation and purpose, etc but as already noted, it’s a fools errand, there is no end to definition beyond your pragmatic choice of ontology.
Which is why my project is more about metaphysical underpinnings of such ontological choice(s). And it’s why my choice is to remain at least one level conceptually removed from specific / individual real-world application. An abstraction as a framework or meta-model / ecosystem about Life, the Universe and Everything, against which models can be judged and tested, but not the model of it. It does mean my ontology also includes meaning and knowledge (epistemology of what can be known as well as what is). As ever I’m not creating anything original. I’m simply recommending pragmatic choices – at this more abstract philosophical level. One of those recommendations is that we don’t be precious about particular choices of words that inevitably come with baggage of previous limited successes of imperfect or misguided uses. We know we can do better.
Although people reject being pigeonholed in camps – it is interesting to note those people that prefer to talk about systems and those that prefer to talk about complexity and those who, like myself (and Rob, Viktor and Anatoly) simply choose either to talk about the other. Systems thinking is how to deal with the complexities of reality. (Sure there are ordered, closed systems that are neither chaotic nor complex and are simply more or less complicated, but they’re much less interesting , much less in need of abstract theory and already readily addressed by formal methods.)
Anyway, I think I have my starting definitions for systems and systems thinking.
(As well as my standing caveat that all definitions, like rules, are for guidance of the wise and the obedience of fools. Wisdom is my real “beyond science” topic.)
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Coda
So, my real target is not so much that choice between systems and complexity – but the choice to call the whole “science” – to not recognise that there is more than science in our complex world. Complexity vs complexity-science for example. Distinctions between words chosen are always #GoodFences.
An aside here, but I was also tempted to watch this Dave Snowden / Nora Bateson conversation, partly because of my penance towards having maybe failed to sufficiently consider the various Bateson contributions, and partly because Dave has been part of the more than sciencedialogue.
Right from the outset, as is his style, Dave crashes both fences – systems vs complexity and science vs more than science.
“Complexity is a science” and “Systems are not a subset of complexity”
Sure, systems are not a subset of complexity, that would be a category error, the relationship is more subtle. And, there is a science of complexity, but the complex stuff arising – complexity itself – isn’t all science, even if the arising can be explained scientifically (it can) the nature, content and behaviour of the stuff arisen can’t. [See also Dave’s 2003 science quote of Pirsig – qualified by tradition and method.] Whole-part relations and Class / Set / Sub-set-membership are of course the taxonomic foundations of ontology(ies). I’m tempted to note here not just my long-standing “Tabletop” example from Doug Hofstadter, but also a very recent reference in another place to “Grandma’s Big Box of Buttons” by Dr. JT Kostman. Taxonomy-based ontology is an entirely naturally-learned creative human process, necessary to deal with our complex world – more deflationary compression.
We mostly corresponded by email over the years, sharing links etc, but there are several references in the Psybertron blog too. We share a lot of common sources and general agreement on the subject matter but we’ve not corresponded for a few years, partly (a) because one mis-perceived difference between us that he was nevertheless biased towards good-old-fashioned rationality and critical thinking (patently not true) and partly (b) because my own focus shifted to “systems thinking as a response to complexity” in constructing my philosophical framework(s) above (and partly the distraction of Pirsig’s #ZMM50th).
Reformation
For both of us however, “Wisdom” is consolidated as the word of choice – short-hand for our subject matter – the missing ingredient for a world better than the predicament we currently find ourselves in. Most recently Lee has called his project to achieve this a new global “Reformation” to educate ourselves (learning beats teaching, etc.)
It’s a “two-page” summary with updated links to the key lessons from the Wikiversity resource he has created. A recommended read, it’s excellent, notwithstanding the comments I make below, almost all of which are about alignment with my own work, some of which I’d captured in an initial response on LinkedIn:
Wisdom
Despite the fact that “critical thinking” is still prominent in the introduction and the graphic headline text, his introduction concludes with “more wisdom” and “greater integrity”, and the first bullet of the first preparatory section mentions wisdom twice – proposing “living wisely” and adopting “wise practices”.
No doubt that wisdom is front and centre.
Integrity
Significant that integrity makes the summary. Generally most would interpret this as something like “consistently incorruptible honesty” in the words and actions of people, but actually integrity is even more fundamental than that from the systems integration perspective.
Honesty and good faith – virtue – are a given, but consistency is over-rated (see Brunsson on the positive value of “hypocrisy”). From a “systems thinking” view of everything – as a complex web of functional interactions – it cannot all be equally true and consistent all of the time, they’re always in an state of flux – whether at glacial / evolutionary pace, or the pace of day-to-day human activity and everything in between. So, the web of stuff is generally always full of inconsistencies. The real need is the joined-up “holistic” systems thinking – seeing functionally integrated wholes in systems terms of their parts and ecosystems – so that current gaps and inconsistencies are visible, intelligible, manageable and improvable. Managed inconsistency beats artificially – dishonestly – constrained consistency.
Every living being, every system—natural or human-made—exists in a vast network of relationships and flows. The Earth is not a collection of isolated entities but a deeply intertwined system where changes in one area inevitably ripple through many others. Understanding these interconnections is essential for sustaining life and ensuring the well-being of future generations.
That … using the word “system” twice … is all I mean by “systems thinking” 🙂
Information & Belief
More common ground for us. Information is fundamental to my philosophical framework, metaphysical even. And reformation includes concern for journalism, media & social media standards – prominently recurring here too. True belief is of course fundamental to my epistemological “knowledge” agenda – what does it mean to (believe you) know anything? Something which involves systems of belief & value as well as explicit concepts of evidence, logic and proof. (Even “good religion”(*) – or sacred naturalism in my terms.)
Governance
Governance has been explicit to my Cybernetic focus on systems – aka Psybernetic to emphasise the original human intentional aspect of Wiener’s term – well beyond feedback, command & control allusions. Cybernetics literally means governance. Not surprisingly governance conceptually has constantly circled round for me to government practically and politically – organisationally, locally, nationally and supra-nationally.
Lee’s two-page summary doesn’t currently mention democracy, but for the same reason I do mention it. Not only is it clearly “broken” in the 21st C and fixing it a fundamental part of any reformation project – for both of us. The estates, institutions and processes of democracy may be broken and under attack from many misinformed, misguided directions. As Churchill said – it’s the worst form of government apart from all the others – so there isn’t much alternative to working out the best way to improve and defend it.
My own (UK) emphasis has been institutional arrangements that maintain democracy between elections, so that elections are less focal, campaigns a less dominant & less frequent part of the whole, and that we have “properly proportional” electoral systems that better avoid the tyrannies of both majorities and minorities. Also, extending the bicameral basics to “differently appointed” second houses & heads of state as well as to additional local / topical “people’s” assemblies or standing forums.
Lee elsewhere has interest in similar aspects of other (US) electoral system reforms:
I think the only difference between us is, as I noted earlier, that I’m happy to continue at the conceptual level – the frameworks and characteristics that make for good systems & models of knowledge & governance – whereas Lee is focussed on education of the specific options & choices of processes & models available. I think Lee’s choices fit my frameworks, we appear complementary.
Coda
The remaining “problem” is a fact for all human endeavours and that is the imperfection of language; that communication is a “game” in the true sense. We all choose to emphasise different preferred words, their usage and their intended interpretations, even where our intentions remain closely aligned. Although the word Wisdom – partly because it’s so ill-defined – has found traction in most dialogues, choices of language around (say) systems and complexity remain problematic – quite strongly held critical differences killing creative dialogue.
Practice intentional evolution. We can do this!
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(*) Zen Coda
When it comes to value & belief systems Lee mentions the concept of good religion but doesn’t mention any specific philosophical or theological world-views in his two-page “Reformation” summary. I noted above that the closest thing to religion (secular, non-ideological-dogmatic religion) I would ascribe to myself is Sacred Naturalism (aka Natural Theology) (even Humanism is this kind of religion although most humanists would rail against the suggestion.) However, of course, my own systems-thinking metaphysical philosophy has evolved from Taoist / Zen Buddhist thinking triggered by Nobel-prize-winning physicist Brian Josephson triggering my reading Robert Pirsig’s ZMM. And the rest is history from my perspective.
Stockton Callinghas become a regular annual multi-venue music festival, with a focus on providing support for North East bands, offered many short set opportunities. Saturday this Easter weekend is the 3rd I’ve attended. Going to post thoughts in reverse order from the top – the day didn’t quite go to plan thanks to Northern Rail cancellations – so a bit of a random, hurried selection of who to watch, where, once I’d checked-in at The Arc – and didn’t see any of the official headliners – spent the latter half of the evening in The Georgian.
Avalanche Partywere the band I was there to see, again. Energy-packed stampeding beast of a performance as we’ve come to expect, this home gig effectively the finale of their album-promotional European tour. As others commented, the sound has suffered recently. Hurried – short-sets / short-turnarounds – sound check seems to be about the band being able to hear what they need through their monitors, fair enough, but with the audience experience set at everything turned-up to eleven. Lost something of the dynamic interest in the varied instrumentation between guitar, keyboard, sax and multiple vocals. Hard to pick any one of them out of the wall of sound so the live experience ends up a bit monotonous, even when you recognise the opening riffs and choruses. Fortunatelythe album “Der Traum Uber Alles“ benefits from top notch engineering and mixing – à la QOTSA – at Joshua Tree’s Rancho De La Luna Studio.
Home Counties were the best act on the day. Fantastic energetic delivery and presence from the front pair and the conventional guitars, keyboard, bass and drums augmented by the male lead and the bassist doubling-up on synths. Heavy delivery with synth sub-bass lines and an 80’s disco twist compounded by the male lead looking like a cross between the young Marc Almond and Dave Gahan back in the day. Found myself standing in front of the rhythm guitarist who seemed to leading much of the choppy drive and direction. Very entertaining all round. Hope to see them again.
Swannekwere the biggest surprise of the day. A laid-back jazzy-soul collective led by Findlay Hewitson didn’t auger well for my usual tastes. Electric piano, tenor sax and cello used sparingly and effectively (take note AP), but it was the vocals that wowed. Mollie Birmingham (a name which Google struggles with) accompanied by a reggae / ska / toaster vocalist for the first couple of numbers, soaring and gravelly by turns, she commanded attention from audience and apologetic photographers throughout, couldn’t get enough of her. Courageous therefore for the band to finish on an instrumental to showcase their musicians. One to watch, they were actually promoted by the local “BBC Introducing”. Will seek out again.
Before these a mixed-bag. I only just caught the last number and a half of SISTER MADDS – heavy and probably fun, but for me she was trying a bit too hard to act the bad girl. CASINO a bit too laid back funky soul with little else to commend performance-wise. Suspect from their audience there may be more in their songs? WALDO’S GIFT – weird to say the least, even their drummer had to admit, doing his best to engage the audience. No songs, all instrumental numbers led by their nerdy-persona virtuoso guitarist(*) and an impressive board-full of effects and loops. Notable to me that Carl, the lead guitar of Middle Management, was there in the audience to appreciate him (though they weren’t on the bill) and that Waldo’s bassist and drummer were chilling – as I was – in The Kopper Keg after Avalanche Party.
(*) Not a bad thing in itself – I’m off to see Joe Satriani & Steve Vai next month.
