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.
[The 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 “textbook” and (c) a magic-realism auto-fiction. Wish me luck.]
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Post Note: and immediately following that post, the “Epistemic Diversity” session with John Challoner, Mauricio Vieira Kritz and Rudolf Wirawan shows that we have a common project for this space and time to support multiple simultaneous diverse “views” of knowledge.
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Thanks Ian. One important thing that dropped into place just after this session is that it is important to distinguish between ontologies that are observational vs ones that are heuristic. They are easily confused. Mauricio’s is definitely observational because he maps out as much of what is going on as he can. It helps with detection, though it could be a source of heuristic thinking. But when i talk to people about what systems are they often pull out some heuristic building blocks that are useful, but less functional as diagnostics. Does this make sense? Useful to me in at least as i have been focusing on the former but most talk about the latter and now I am less confused and more optimistic now.
Thanks for the feedback Chris. My own (intended) ontology is epistemological in the sense that what exists in the ontology includes multiple ways of knowing – which could be different “views” (perspectives in John’s model) – and that would include loose and tight forms of definition depending how formally / informally the knowledge is come by. In fact the “processes” of knowing are very much part of the underlying process metaphysics. I hope I understand your distinction and believe we have ways of handling it. (I have quite strong views about “definitions” after Dan Dennett and Anatoly Levenchuk – loose and only as tight as necessary – too tight too soon is problematic)