ISSS-2025 “More than Science” ?

Just a brief consolidating post from dialogues at ISSS-2025 in Birmingham, UK

(Have many other notes from many sessions, but this is just to link to my own presentation and significant references arising in dialogue.)

“Rehabilitating the Value of Wisdom” (2025)

[ Follow-up to “The Tyranny of the Explicit” (2024) ]

The presentation is again simply to start a necessarily much more complex conversation by establishing a starting point that “there is more than science” and that we value the integrated application of BOTH science and not-science (wisdom / more-than-science) and why that honesty – not flattening all discourse into would-be “science” – is necessary.

The full “Psybernetic” agenda of Psybertron is much more:

Ultimately the goal is to establish a complex, self-adaptive systemic “ecosystem” for complex, self-adaptive, systemic thinking and decision-making. (That’s a PhD Proposal – that would benefit from updating). This is unashamedly at a meta-level of conceptual abstraction – thinking about thinking and decision-making, over and above thinking about designing interventions, over and above any “doing”. A necessary praxis for thinking.

The most immediate tangible deliverable representing this systemic-thinking-and-decision-making-ecosystem is essentially an Ontology – an epistemic ontology for systems thinking against which any and all ongoing interventions, methods and actions may be mapped. Such an epistemic-ontology is necessarily philosophical and indeed necessarily metaphysical – more than science.

[My metaphysics is process-relational and information-computational. The basis is neuroscientific and neuropsychological. The sources and thinking embodying that aim and deliverable are this 25 years of “Psybertron” research-blogging with associated discourse and 25 years of industrial information systems engineering and thinking before that. Too much to summarise here, but currently being organised into (a) the PhD-style Thesis, (b) a technical / non-fiction for a wider audience and (c) a magic-realism auto-fiction. Wish me luck.]

[And, as requested, I posted a personal summary on the ISSS Wiki.]

[End]

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[Notes]

Post Note: and immediately following that post, the “Epistemic Diversity” session with John Challoner, Mauricio Vieira Kritz, Rudolf Wirawan, Rob Young and Chris Smerald shows that we have a common project for this space (and time) to support multiple simultaneous diverse “views” of knowledge.

Post Note: As noted above my wider aim is a knowledge-sharing and decision-making “ecosystem” that supports such diversity of thinking and knowing and with an architectural view – eg how organised in open layers – of how it could work. Leah Bogen’s pitch is for a “platform” embodying the same “open” idea, independent of commercial and political biases.

[Anyone named who has a preferred link to their work – I will add.]

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Post Post Notes:

A counter view from Dave Snowden over on LinkedIn.

In working with and yarning with indigenous cultures over five decades now, one of the things I have observed is that they are deeply scientific in their approach to the land and survival. But their language is different from that of the Enlightenment. Designating them as “Wisdom Cultures”, implying that others lack wisdom, seems a perpetuation of the Manichæism of North Atlantic thinking.

I’m also concerned that the faux-mysticism of much thinking from the former colonial powers is creating a linguistic form that attempts to shift communication between different understandings of the world into that inauthentic dichotomy and detracts from equivalent knowledge which has been lost, or is being lost in those cultures (the concept behind the word Cynefin being one). In some ways, it’s a modern form of neo-colonialism and yet another manifestation of cultural appropriation.

Met too. Just left here as is. Good points to be addressed. This one – “shift communication between different understandings of the world into that inauthentic dichotomy and detracts from equivalent knowledge which has been lost, or is being lost in those cultures” – not so much about any body of knowledge being lost, but that aspect of different understandings, different worldviews being integrated into a better shared view – zero “dichotomy” at a practical level – as scientific as possible, but not more so (per my presentation above). It’s not that our former colonial cultures ever lacked wisdom, just that we deliberately excluded it from our working models – our ontologies and epistemologies. Dave’s Cynefin is indeed an exception to that.

And quite separately ..

Arising from the conference is a group (one of several) created by Chris Chase as a single FB Messenger thread conceived initially at least as an on-line analogue to the ISSS “Round Table” concept, conducted as a speaking-briefly-in-turn, uncritical listening session. I’m collecting my contributions to that thread (not including side-contributions with Chris directly) because I’m expecting an essay to come out of this. I will add to the voice-transcribed-text below. In good faith I’ve listened to every contribution by others, and refer to them in my contributions. (I have rules of discourse as you know.)

Just noticed from a cross-dialogue, that my identity of Ian Glendinning and Psybertron is confusing one or two – this is relatively recent pic of me:

(Added my personal section to the ISSS Wiki.)

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July 16 pm

Hi folks, so Chris hails “Wisdom Rising” – clearly an idea that appeals to me, my conference paper was “The Rehabilitation of Wisdom” (above) after all and I like the short-form listening format of the round table – keeping it simple whilst we improve the architecture of our collaboration space to collect and synthesise ideas … elsewhere?

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July 18 pm

Ian here. I seem to be having some audio problems so I’m just repeating one I’ve just done (and an earlier garbled one).

As Peter remarks, no reason for Chris to apologise for what is after all an experiment. I think we have to accept though, that whilst modelled on the round-table, all listening (uncritically) in turn, then the remote asynchronous nature of using a technology platform like this is never going to recreate the real time listening experience, interspersed (as it is) with daily distractions of real life, and I notice Chris himself has already posted some longer form written pieces in between.

I still like the short voice format for its listening focus, that has its own value, and dialogue forms generally of course, and I think we need to be realistic about what we think a collaborative development platform needs to be over and above this one format – and was it ever the point of the real time in-person ISSS Round Table anyway?

As I say it (my earlier contribution) appeared to have been a bit garbled, but we are not the first group of people to do this, so we do need to look outside, if that (the collaborative ideas development) is indeed the object of this channel? [And in that earlier garbled input I gave a plug to Leah Bogen’s pitch at the conference for a collaborative platform supporting our systemic development work.]

Until next time. Bye.

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Jul 20 (pm)

(Shared a location photo as suggested by Chris and Alexander.)

(Roelien shared her Triathlon, well-being and food texts and photos.)

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July 24 1:40pm

Hi folks Ian here again. I’ve been distracted by a few days of tree surgery in my mother’s garden, but I’ve now caught up with a couple of messages from Chris as well as from Peter and Alexander, since I last contributed.

Sounds like there’s just the 4 or 5 people active here, so whether we refresh this round table or create another primary voice listening channel by invitation, I’m in and willing to volunteer to lead or moderate for a week at a time, it’s just that it can’t be this coming week for me. Like Peter we have some family / school vacation commitments.

I looked up Joanna Macy after Chris mentioned her in the conference, in hospice before she died, and I recognised the EcoDharma work, but never followed her closely or had any contact. Personally I was intrigued by the surname from Francis Macy her husband, but no relation to the Macy Foundation that sponsored the early Cybernetics Conferences (which itself is unconnected with the Macy family department store business). You live and learn. And I’ve written before about the Capra and Bateson connections, that Chris mentioned too.

It’s very much my agenda to integrate the so-called “classic” systems SCIENCE views with more ancient, indiginous, aboriginal, so-called “romantic” world-views – wisdom in shorthand – including the humanities, spirituality and the arts. As well as opening more people to practice of (say) Buddhist mindfulness in our participation in the world, there is actually good 21st century work supporting integrated world-views including Epistemology, Neuro-Philosophy and Neuro-Science, that wasn’t available when Alan Watts and Robert Pirsig brought the Zen Buddhism of Suzuki and Katagiri to popular culture in the west back in the 60’s and 70’s. Something I’m itching to talk about at some point, but another time I guess. Bye for now.

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July 26 6:12pm

Peter is right, I was joking with Chris in another channel, that having documented online media rules over many years, one of my rules of discourse, the overriding rule, is the old adage that “Rules are for guidance of the wise and the obedience of fools.” So as a rule Wisdom says rules are there to be broken and new ones evolved … with care. So no disagreement there.

My only concern is that we are now expecting this dialogue to evolve new understandings and new ways of working and that sort of thing, it’s almost certainly going to involve misunderstandings, competing alternatives and disagreements, requiring clarifications and elaborations and they’re going to involve more critical debate than the uncritical listening format that ISSS had branded its round-table, so it just seems odd to me to keep calling it that?

But hey ho, I’m up for new dialogue new rules, not sure that a single threaded messenger chat is up to the complexity that is likely to arise, but I think we can cross that bridge of rules, when we come to issues that might arise.

Anyway, onwards and upward. Until next time. Bye for now.

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July 27 8:36am

OK, so we now have two contributions where Victor as well as Chris are promoting the Adaptive Cycle of Panarchy Theory.

[Rules change, per Chris prompting, to more critical discourse / constructive dialogue. Lots of reading required beyond the pretty pictures.]

I’ve said in several conversations I have no problem with this at the macro scale as a heuristic, but it’s a descriptive, historical, after-the-fact, heuristic rather than an explanatory theory – at the macro scale as Victor says. Worrying thing is at that scale there is talk of an elite “they” as opposed to “the rest of us” presumably. The othering of them and us. We have no agency, no systemic inputs at this macro scale – we are not a benevolent god-like dictator outside this “system”.

That’s why my focus is on WE (all of us) as individuals and collectives like this messenger group or any identifiable groups and constituencies, and how “we” make better decisions, Using explanatory theories that better justify and predict the outcomes of decisions at levels where “we” have agency in our participation in the world.

If anything, what I’m hearing is reinforcing my fears – the othering. This is not a cycle we need to break once – by bloody revolution, say – but one where we need to evolve the internal decision and action processes – our own better adaptive cycles PLURAL – that would counter the emergent drive of unbalanced elite power etc. Self Governance – ironically the original (Macy) Cybernetics intentions.

Since I already have this strong view, formed over decades of research, I’ll need to see some inputs addressing my position. I’ll probably stay in listening mode for a while. This is also reinforcing my point that we have some complex differences of understanding between us, that are going to require some subtle discourse to resolve.

In my model social media is part of the problem 🙂 Thanks folks.

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