This is available as part of a book offering that is free for community members of Cyb3rSynLabs. Please check here (https://www.cyb3rsynlabs.com/c/books/) for Second Order Cybernetics Essays for Silicon Valley. The e-book version is available here (https://www.cyb3rsyn.com/products/soc-book)
In case you missed it, my last post was Being-In-the-Ohno-Circle:
Discover more from Harish's Notebook - My notes... Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science.
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Harish's Notebook - My notes... Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science. 
A classic mistake to mix up concepts, with methods and tools. I genuinely believe many things are objectively real like the cup sat on the desk next to me, holding my morning brew. No matter who you are, most people would have the same “objective” experience of the cup. They may call it something different, a mug, but we’d all pretty much agree on what it is to the point that any leftovers would be, as Whitehead put it: endless wrangling over minor questions. My point is, that I experience the powermad, unlistening, validity mongers in the “Objectivity” camp and the half-arsed poorly thought out gum-flapping in the Objectivity camp. That’s because I’m probably some kind of Aesthetic Empiricist – you know that horrible type in between who don’t take anything at face value, until we’ve had a play with it and talked to other people who’ve played with it and then agree that “this is a good cup of tea” as opposed to a bad one. Let’s not go there with Thinking or “Thinking”. But come on, some things are simple enough to agree conceptually that Systems are real: like the infusion in my cup; how we come to understand them needs a method called modelling; which is a tool the human brain has done instinctively for about 250000 years; otherwise we wouldn’t be here. I think the only difference is “scale” we do meso really well, but as all systems are nested the “objectivity” is an inevitable part of “the” system when it’s macro, or micro. Lovely article again. Thanks 😘
LikeLike
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. The realness of the cup is explained as stable correlations in constructivism. Based on phylogeny, we would have similar framework to generate these correlations, from that standpoint we may experience the cup similarly and agree on the realness of the cup. For me, I am more interested in the experiential reality than just mere reality of things. I am more focused on how you experience the cup. The observer is the king of the queen. 🙂
-Harish
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think what you’re really talking about is the “infusion” not the cup, we can’t start everything at the atom, so accepting some real things means we can focus on the interesting bit that we cannot directly experience, ergo we model.
LikeLike
Thanks. I’ve always preferred to use the word system to refer to human made “systems”, like information systems. Or machines and computers. If one can decompose it and put the parts back an it functions again, it’s a system. If it doesn’t function again, don’t call it a system.
So animals, human beings, organizations, societies and climate shouldn’t be called “systems”. They’re “living”, “beings” or, – even better – “becoming”. Use in stead “organizing”, “socializing” and “climatizing” (it does sound weird, doesn’t it? But that’s exactly what changing one’s thinking includes: it’s unfamiliar.) By the way, I like your “-ing” construction; we don’t have it in Dutch and German. We have to use “in the process of …”. I’ll need this later.
I noticed that when somebody doesn’t understand something, (s)he tends to call it “a system”. I then asked, to explain it without using the word “system”.
Regarding systems thinking, I use the word as an adjective: as in systematic thinking. (I do the same with Learning Organisations: organizational learning). As one is thinking systematically, one decomposes – off course. So when somebody then says “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”, I usually say: “who started partitioning?”.
I treat my self as an observer in the same way: I’m observing. Use it as an adjective. Everything observed is observed by me (the same holds for you). In language one can make a fictitious (!) distinction between observer and observed, in observing one cannot.
It’s the same with making a distinction between “me” and “you” or “us” and “them”. One needs language to sustain the difference. I would even say that this is why dogs bark at strangers (normally wolves don’t bark when hunting, its scares away their prey): they have been taught to make a difference, a difference which only exists inside language.
You might now “see” our paradoxical use of language: we need a common a language to distinguish between each other. The paradox is beautifully sung by 10CC: “agree to disagree, but disagree to part” in “the things we do for love”.
Paul Watzlawick remarked that one can say “not”, but cannot do “not”. Thanks to language, we can make a distinction that’s “not”. I you see what I mean. Interestingly, people act as-if they can do “not”, or is it “cannot do”. One can’t.
The paradoxes arises from this: “objective” opposes analogously “subjective”. Subjective is the alternative of objective. The digital denial of “objective” is “not objective”. Off course, “subjective is “not objective”. But, being “not subjective” doesn’t give you “objectivity”. “Alternative facts” – subjective – cannot be facts – objective. Yet in our use of language one acts as-if this can be.
An objective observer subjects objects. In language, objects can be treated as subjects, and the subjects can be subjected by language.
All concepts are fictitious, made-up, invented, ideas, unreal, real paradoxes, as one uses language tacitly to subject subjects. Even facts, as the word says, are made-up. If one wants to belong here, one has to conform. (I might have told that in Dutch the word “to belong” is “behoren” or “in the process of hearing”: one has to listen (“horen”) in order to belong). En-culturing cultivates subordinates.
We’ve been educated, trained in using the “container (or conduit) metaphor” – words “carry” meaning – in communicating meaning, because this enables one to dominate conversations and others. In communication theory, “meaning” has been excluded from the transfer of messages. Because it’s subjective.
Our use of language was adequate in the 19th century, when inventing machines, systems, control, cybernetics. In the 21-st century we need to communicate using the “toolmaker metaphor” (see: https://constable.blog/2007/11/09/how-our-autistic-friend-computer-can-really-help-us-about-conduit-and-toolmaker-metaphor/ ), inventing meaning as we’re in the process of communication.
In dealing with real reality, one uses two metaphors at the same time: from sensing one induces a metaphor-in-use and from one’s culture one invokes a metaphor-espoused. The first is objective – as one uses chair as a chair -, the second one is subjective, as a chair can be a stoel, Stuhl, chair or (used as a) table or ladder.
LikeLike
Thank you for your thoughtful comment as always. I enjoyed the reference to the wolves not barking. Never realized it before. 🙂
I see some similarities in our thinking and some differences too. I hope to write more on this (as much as my language allows) 🙂
LikeLike
You’re welcome. I think all our thinking is similar, just our uses of thinking – judging a situation – differ. I’ve always used thinking differently, to confuse, to create ambiguity.
In my way of thinking the questions are more important then the answer. I prefer the wrong answer on the right question over a good answer on the wrong question. And a right question has the answer “I don’t know”. Thinking, for me, is like groping in the dark.
I do think we think alike in metaphors: in moving around one needs a map, model to mind oneself in a situation. We differ in the use of language in thinking.
Thinking is the ability to use the situation as a map. That way, one doesn’t have to “draw” actual maps and remember them. Thinking constructs maps, models (and metaphors) in one’s “mind”. This explain why brains (and hearths, guts, limbs,…) are “structurally coupled” to bodies and a body to its domain ( a set of coherent situation). A fish doesn’t survive a desert for long and a camel is not an actual ship.
Language – this is what I think – used to be a tool in toolmaking. One makes tools out of objects. An object – as the word suggests to me – was originally used to throw (Latin: iacere) at towards (“ob”) a subject, subjecting by objecting. Which we’re still doing in courts and wars. (In Dutch we use the word “voorwerp” where voor means towards (or in fromt of) and werpen means to throw).
This used the ability to pro-ject, as in projectile, one’s “inner” on “outer”, which thinking already needed. Remember that any map is and has a “projection”, depending on its use. The awareness of objects in situation, changed thinking. looking became (fore)seeing. the next step was to adapt unfit stone for throwing into “fit for use”, developing “arms”. In making tools, one has to instruct and using sounds worked. Inventing language.
I assume other animals also already used sounds to recognize family members – seems sound. So language became both a tool for toolmaking and a tool for recognizing family, tribes, gangs, groups, … organisations.
We used to have a language and gradually language began to dominate thinking. And now “language has us”. We become subjects (ambiguity intentional) through language. That’s what I resist. I won’t let my thinking be dominated by language.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Systems Community of Inquiry.
LikeLike