In today’s post, I want to write a basics post on cybernetic constructivism. This is something I have seen people grapple with when they are first introduced to constructivism. We all love and appreciate certainty, especially certainty in meanings. We have come to use words like epistemology and complexity, and the use of these words gives us an illusion. The more words we have, and the better we understand their meanings, the more certain we can be. This is also how the perceived agency of LLMs is formed. They give us fluent words with no history of contact behind them. But cybernetic constructivism is not based only in the linguistic domain. The word doing the work there is “cybernetic”. We construct our meanings inside us, and those constructions are tested outside us, against constraints. That loop of construction and testing is what makes this view a way of living instead of a word game. Constructivism of this kind is rooted in experience, and in how the world pushes back on us in the form of constraints.

When the power goes out at night, I can still find my way to the kitchen. My hand moves along the wall. My feet remember where the carpet ends and the wooden floor begins. I am not “seeing” the house. I am meeting it, one contact at a time, and adjusting as I go. When my toes find the edge of the chair I had forgotten about, I learn something, though not what the chair looks like. I learn that my way of walking did not fit.

That small walk in the dark is a fair picture of where cybernetic constructivism begins. We do not have direct access to our environment. By environment I mean everything outside the boundary of the body. Light reaches the retina, pressure reaches the skin, molecules reach the nose. What happens next happens inside us, in a nervous system that works with its own states. Maturana and Varela described the nervous system as “operationally closed”. Events outside can trigger changes in it, but they do not specify what those changes will be. The structure of the living being decides that. They called these outside events perturbations, and the word fits. A perturbation disturbs. A perturbation does not instruct.

At this point, I have to admit a common problem of self-reference with any formal structure as language. This post is caught in its own argument. I am using words to explain why words do not carry meaning from one head to another. What I am doing here is not handing over meanings. I am offering a perturbation. Whatever this post comes to mean is generated by you, the reader, from your own structure and your own history. If some of it fits, the fit will be with something you were already doing.

This raises a practical question before it raises a philosophical one. If I cannot step outside my own experience to check it against the world, how do I stay alive? How does any living being maintain itself as a unity, moment after moment, without a window to look through?

The answer I have to offer is that we did not have to solve this problem alone, or from scratch. Evolution solved enough of it before any of us arrived. Our bodies come with shortcuts already built in. Our senses respond to a narrow band of what is available. We see a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear a limited range of frequencies. Most perturbations pass through us unremarked. The ones our structure recognizes as actionable are the ones we work with.

Jakob von Uexküll had a word for the world that results from this filtering; Umwelt, the surrounding world as it exists for a particular organism. His well-known example is the tick. For the tick, the world comes down to a few signals. The smell of butyric acid from mammal skin, warmth, the texture of hair. Nothing else exists for the tick in any functional sense. The tick is not missing anything it needs. The tick has the Umwelt that keeps a tick viable.

We have a human Umwelt. Ours is richer than the tick’s, but it is the same kind of structure. From the perturbations we recognize, we construct meanings. A shadow moving at the edge of vision becomes a friend or a foe. A tone of voice becomes warmth or irritation. These constructions are not copies of what is out there. They are ways of acting that have worked well enough so far.

Ernst von Glasersfeld put this with a simple image. Our knowledge fits the world the way a key fits a lock. A key that opens the lock is viable.

The key tells us nothing about the shape of the lock beyond the fact that this key works, and many differently shaped keys could open the same lock. What we learn when a key fails is that this key does not fit. That is my toes and the chair.

So the process is ongoing. Meanings that continue to work are kept. Meanings that stop working fade, or are revised, or are dropped. Nothing here requires a final picture of the world. The process requires only that we keep going.

Humans do something further. We do not only construct meanings. We become able to reflect on how we construct them. Gregory Bateson called this deutero-learning, or learning to learn. A child does not only learn that this particular stove is hot. The child learns something about how hot things behave, and something about how to find out. Heinz von Foerster gathered the same concern under the phrase “understanding understanding“. The meaning-making process becomes something we can examine and adjust. We find ways to make meaning-finding itself meaningful. The process that builds our world is turned back on itself, and becomes part of the world it builds.

Here the usual objection arrives. If everyone constructs a world of their own, is anything true? Does this not slide into relativism, where every view is as good as any other? Or even worse, solipsism, the notion that only we exist and everything is inside our mind.

My tentative answer is that there is a relativism here, but it sits at a different level than the objection assumes. Our human way of knowing is relative when set against other species. The bat, the tick, and the octopus each have an Umwelt that works for them. None of these is the correct view of the world, and neither is ours. Our knowing is relative to the kind of creature we are.

Within the human species, though, something corrects us. There are two things, I think.

The first is the environment itself. The environment cannot tell us what it is, but it can refuse us. A construction that does not fit eventually meets a refusal it cannot absorb. The bridge falls, the crop fails, the patient does not recover. Glasersfeld himself was more careful with his words than I am being with mine. The point he kept returning to was that we learn of the world through its constraints, through the places where our expected sequences are blocked and our keys do not turn. This is not correspondence, because a refusal never arrives with a description of the world attached to it. But it is not anything goes either.

The second corrective is other people. I am not the only observer. Others are constructing their worlds alongside me, from similar bodies, with similar shortcuts, in shared language. When my construction rubs against theirs, I am perturbed again, and I adjust. Maturana described language as a coordination of coordinations of behavior. Through language we build what he called consensual domains, regions of shared meaning that hold because we keep acting together within them. I should say plainly what conversation is doing here, since I already told you that words do not travel from one head to another. A conversation does not transfer meanings. It coordinates actions. Two people talk, adjust, and find that they can walk together and hear each other’s footsteps. Calibration happens in that coordination.

The second corrective has its own weakness. Groups calibrate toward coordination, not toward correctness. A whole community can agree on something that does not fit. That is why both correctives matter. The world’s refusals keep social agreement honest, and social agreement lets us notice refusals that one observer alone would miss or explain away. With both in place, relativism may not be the right word anymore. Relational may be closer. Views are not competing pictures of the world. They are competing ways of staying viable, and the world and other people both get a say in which ones survive.

This carries over to organizations and the people who manage them. W. Ross Ashby gave us the vocabulary. His Law of Requisite Variety is depicted as only variety can destroy variety. An organization faces far more variety from its environment than it could ever match, so it filters. Beer gave this filtering its name, attenuation. Every report, metric, and dashboard is an attenuator. The filtering our senses do for us, organizations do with forms and meetings. A manager’s picture of the organization is a construction, built from whatever got through the filters. The picture is not the organization. The 1970 paper by Conant and Ashby carries the memorable title every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system. Taken carefully, the theorem is close to a tautology and says nothing about truth. I want to go one step further than the theorem goes, and I want to say so openly. The model inside the regulator does not have to be true. It only has to keep things viable.

Stafford Beer built his Viable System Model on this ground. In his scheme, System 1 does the current work that keeps today alive. System 3 looks after the inside and the now. It monitors the work and forces coherence on the daily operations. System 4 looks after the outside and the then. It watches the environment, imagines futures, and prepares for change. The two pull against each other. Too much attention to the inside and now, and the organization grows rigid and gets blindsided. Too much attention to the outside and then, and the work of today falls apart. The balance between them is not computed anywhere. It is a running argument. Above both sits System 5, whose job is to hold the identity of the whole while that argument runs.

When I think about this balance, I think of Miyamoto Musashi. In the Water Book of Go Rin no Sho, The Book of Five Rings, Musashi describes how to hold the long sword. Grip it with a floating feeling in the thumb and forefinger, the middle finger neither tight nor slack, and the last two fingers tight. A grip that is tight everywhere is stiff and slow. Musashi had a name for that. Fixedness means a dead hand. Pliability is a living hand. A grip that is loose everywhere loses the sword. The firm fingers keep hold of the now. The light fingers stay ready for what comes next. The middle finger sits between them. I do not want to push the mapping too far, but the hand Musashi describes looks a lot like what Beer wanted between System 3 and System 4.

All of this rests on a shift from first order to second order. In first-order thinking, the observer describes a situation as if from nowhere. In second-order thinking, the observer is included in what is observed. Maturana put this plainly; everything said is said by an observer. Von Foerster took the next step and asked us to observe our own observing. A third recognition follows, and it carries the ethics. Other observers are doing the same thing. They too are constructing, filtering, and calibrating. Their constructions are not errors to be corrected toward mine. They are other ways of staying viable. This is also why an LLM can sound convincing without ever having been refused. It has fluent words, but no body that pays anything when a construction fails.

If I cannot claim that my view is simply how things are, I cannot hand off responsibility for my view to the world. What I see, I am responsible for seeing. And if others are observers in the same sense I am, their constructions make a claim on me. Maturana described love, in a biological sense, as accepting the other as a legitimate other in coexistence with oneself. Von Foerster offered an ethical imperative, in the first person; I shall act always so as to increase the number of choices. Both point the same way. Where no one has direct access, the decent thing is to keep the conversation open and leave others room to see.

Final Arc

Imagine a village on a hillside where the fall fog comes down so thick that no one can see their own feet. The villagers still have to get home from the fields. Each carries a small lamp. The lamp does not show the path. The lamp shows a circle of gray, a few stones, a patch of grass. No one in the village has ever seen the whole hillside in the fog, and no one ever will.

Over the years they have learned to walk this way. Each person keeps one hand steady on the lamp and lets the feet test each step. When the ground gives way under someone, that person calls out, and the others shift. When two lamps drift apart, the walkers call to each other until their voices come closer. The path they walk is not drawn on any map. The path is whatever has held, so far, for people walking together.

One evening a child asks her grandmother how they know they are on the right path. The grandmother thinks for a while. “We know when we are on the wrong one,” she says. “And we know because someone tells us.”

Then she lifts her lamp a little higher, not to see further, but so that the others can see her.

Stay Curious and Always Keep on Learning…

If you liked what you have read, please consider my book “Second Order Cybernetics,” available in hard copy and e book formats. https://www.cyb3rsyn.com/products/soc-book