Regular readers will notice some familiar ground here. These are themes related to the self-referential nature of language, and what follows from it. I have used Wittgenstein’s ladder before to write about this, I wrote about Musashi’s grip on the sword in my last post, and I keep bringing up the criticism that my thinking slides into relativism, or even solipsism. This is deliberate. I keep coming back to these themes because I think they matter, and each return lets me look at them from a slightly different angle. This time, the angle is that of the skeptic.
We start with Rene Descartes. Sitting by his stove, he set out to doubt everything he could. He stripped away the senses, the body and even mathematics, until he landed on the one thing he could not doubt: that he was doubting. From there he started building again.
Notice the shift that happens along the way, because it is easy to miss. The doubt itself runs one level: am I dreaming, is the world there, did two and two get mixed up? The conclusion that stops the doubt runs another. I cannot doubt that I am doubting, because the doubting is happening even when everything else fails. That is a second-order finding: not another claim about the world, but a claim about the activity that was making the claims. Descartes reached a second-order shore and then built his first-order world back up from it, furniture, senses, mathematics, all guaranteed by that one indubitable observer.
What gets overlooked is where the doubt stopped. He turned skepticism on the world but never fully on the skeptic, and this is the point worth pressing. If second-order findings are allowed to stop the regress once, why there? The cogito became a fixed point, held tightly. Yet doubting is an act of language and thought, and language is the very thing being questioned. The skeptic stands inside what he examines. This is re-entry: the distinction folds back on the one making it.
This is not a flaw peculiar to Descartes. Any language or formal system that is rich enough ends up referring to itself. Words are defined with other words. Systems are checked using the tools of the same system. There is no outside view to step into.
The tempting conclusion is that the whole thing is unreliable and should be thrown out. That is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Wittgenstein offered a better image. His propositions are a ladder, climbed and then put aside. We need the rungs to get anywhere, but we do not have to treat them as the destination.
Musashi described the same tension with the sword. In The Book of Five Rings he advises holding the sword firmly with the last fingers and loosely with the thumb and forefinger. A hand that is fixed is a dead hand. The grip is firm and relaxed at once, in different places.
Definitions work like that grip. Without them we cannot have a meaningful conversation. Held too rigidly, they stop us seeing what does not fit. Self-reference does not stop us from using language as a tool. It reminds us how to hold the tool.
A common objection to this view is that it slides into relativism, or worse, solipsism. If every observation loops back on the observer, is not everything just my own construction? But that does not follow. Recognizing that language has weaknesses does not make all statements equal. It makes us more careful about which ones we lean on. Heinz von Foerster offered a way out of solipsism. If I take myself to be an observer, I have to grant the same to others. Once I accept another observer like me, I am no longer alone in my world. Reality becomes something we share and negotiate, not something I make up.
Von Foerster also pointed to the blind spot in the eye. We do not see it, and we do not see that we do not see it. Knowing about the blind spot does not remove it, but it changes how we look. We check with others, move our heads, look again. The same goes for thinking. Pretending our language and systems have no blind spots is the real danger. Admitting they do makes us better practitioners and better thinkers.
That admission is itself the point. Seeing that our systems refer back to themselves, and carrying on using them with care, is a second-order recognition. It is an observation about our own observing.
Final Arc:
There is supposedly an old way of catching a monkey in India and other parts of the world. The villagers place a fruit like an apple inside a jar with a small hole. The jar is tied to a tree with a rope. The monkey puts its hand through the opening and grabs the fruit. Now the hand holding the fruit is bigger than the hole, and it cannot come back out. Notice that the monkey is not trapped by the jar, or the tree, or the rope. It can free itself at any moment by opening its hand and dropping the fruit. But the monkey will not let go of the apple. So it is caught by its own grip.
The best-known Western version of this story belongs to Robert Pirsig. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) he used the South Indian monkey trap to illustrate what he called value rigidity: the trap of holding on to a single way of valuing, even when it is what is holding you. Much of the modern retelling traces back to him. The monkey does not cling only to the fruit. It clings to its idea that the fruit is worth keeping.
That is the trap of the skeptic who treats doubt as a possession. The cogito, the fixed point, the certainty held tightly: that is the apple. The mature skeptic doubts the doubter too, and is willing to hold the sword just right.
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
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
In today’s post, I am looking at the idea of Hannah Arendt’s “right to have rights“. She used the phrase in The Origins of Totalitarianism, writing about the stateless people of the twentieth century. We can see that these people possessed the rights of man in name. However, in practice, they had nothing. Once they lost membership in a political community, there was no one left to recognize them as bearers of rights. In other words, the enumerated rights had nothing to attach to. Her conclusion was that before any particular right can mean something, there has to be a place in the world where one counts.
As a cybernetician, what strikes me about the phrase is its structure. The first “right” is not one more item on a list, but instead operates on the list itself, which makes it a right about rights. In cybernetic language, this is a second-order concept that does not tell us what we are entitled to, but rather what must already be in place for entitlement to mean anything at all.
In that sense, the right to have rights behaves like an axiom that is not derived from the other rights, serving as the very ground they conceptually stand on. The right to have rights cannot be proven from inside the structure, because the structure already stands on that ground. All other rights are made possible by this foundation.
I would take this notion one step further and add that the ground this axiom rests on is human. Humberto Maturana, the biologist, put it plainly: anything said is said by an observer. Heinz von Foerster taught us what follows from this, showing that the descriptions carry the mark of the one describing. Complexity, order, rights, and rules do not sit out in the world waiting to be found, but are brought forth by people within a community who can recognize one another. When we remove the human, there is no one for whom a situation is complex, and no one for whom a right is a right. The humanistic baseline is not a sentiment to be added at the end, but what lets these concepts hold together in the first place.
Often I see people talk about rules from a first-order standpoint, pointing to the constitution, the statute, or the procedure as if they are fixed objects complete in themselves. I do not want to dismiss this, because rules carry the memory of earlier decisions and spare us from rebuilding everything each time. A community without them would be exhausted, so these structures serve a vital purpose in our daily operations.
The difficulty is that a rule does not know when it has stopped serving, having been written by observers for a purpose in a specific context. Those contexts may have drifted, and new people arrive who were not imagined when the rule was written. The rule goes on saying what it said, but only an observer can notice that what it says no longer fits the current reality.
We can see that noticing is a second-order activity, which in cybernetic terms means we are observing how we observe. This is a step back from the immediate problem to look at the frame we are using, asking ourselves whether that frame still serves the people it was meant to serve. This check is not simple and requires a shift in perspective so that we can look at the structure of our own judgment.
This is not an act that happens once, because we cannot set it up and walk away since the framing does not hold itself in place. The review has to happen again and again, since understanding does not transmit automatically, and we often think that if we explain a concept clearly, the recipient will carry it with them. However, the context, the people, and the problems change, so the frame that worked yesterday may not work today.
We cannot assume that everyone carries the same frame with them, so each generation, institution, and person meeting a hard case has to bring it forth again. This is demanding but necessary, meaning we are repeatedly in a state of re-evaluation rather than just applying rules. We are also needing to check if the rules make sense in the current context, because if we stop checking, the frame becomes a habit which turns into a blind spot. We start acting without asking why, and paraphrasing von Foerster, we stop seeing when we forget how to act.
We have to be willing to question our own assumptions and be humble enough to admit that our previous understanding might be incomplete. This is where valuable learning happens, not in the initial acquisition of knowledge, but in the ongoing effort to apply that knowledge with awareness. We are always refining our view and adjusting our frame, which is the work of the practitioner.
So when a situation appears complex, I have come to take that appearance as an invitation, suggesting that complexity is not a property of the situation alone. It may be a signal that our existing distinctions are straining, prompting us to look deeper. The first-order response is to reach for the rule and apply it harder, while the second-order response is to step back, return to the human ground, and recalibrate.
I want to be careful here since words often cannot carry the weight of careful thought and consideration with them. This is not an argument for replacing rules with judgment, as that would only trade one first-order fixation for another. What I am pointing to is a feedback loop where the rules can give us stability, but it is the second-order review that checks the viability or the fit of the rules. Each needs the other, so a rule without review can harden into something that harms the very people it names, while review without rules becomes an empty notion.
There is an ethical weight to this, and treating a complex situation in a purely first-order way can become a quiet abdication. This approach lets us say that the outcome was the document’s doing and not ours, often leading to the phrase “I was just following orders.” Von Foerster’s ethical imperative asks us to act always so as to increase the number of choices, and second-order review is one way of honoring that. This keeps open the possibility that the frame itself can change.
Final Arc:
Arendt’s stateless people were not failed by an absence of rules. They were failed by communities that stopped recognizing them as people to whom the rules applied. The right to have rights names that recognition, which is the second-order commitment underneath every first-order guarantee.
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
Is a thing complex because an observer finds it hard to describe, or does an observer find it hard to describe because the thing is, on its own, complex?
In today’s post I will be looking at the shape of this question regarding complexity that comes from Plato. In the Euthyphro dialogue, Socrates asks whether a thing is pious because the gods love it, or the gods love it because it is pious. If piety is defined by the gods’ love, it has no ground of its own. It is only whatever the gods happen to prefer. If the gods love something because it is pious, they are tracking something that already existed before their love touched it. Their love adds nothing to it. Socrates never gets Euthyphro to close the gap.
Take a light switch. It has two states, ON and OFF. Almost anyone finds it simple because almost anyone’s needs are already covered by these two states.
A thermostat has more states than a light switch. It includes target temperature, current temperature, schedule, and override. Most people still find a thermostat simple because the manufacturer has already done much of the work of matching those states to what a homeowner is likely to need.
Now take that thermostat as part of a commercial HVAC system. It has zone overrides, occupancy sensors, and a facilities manager trying to cut energy costs. The thermostat itself does not acquire a new set of capabilities. What changes when a thermostat is part of a larger structure is the structure under consideration. Thermostat alone is one structure. Thermostat plus zones plus occupants plus controls is another. The domain of states relevant to regulation expands when the ‘system’ scope expands. This is a first-order artifact.
Ashby’s law of requisite variety is often applied to complexity. It says something narrower than people assume. Ashby’s law is about regulation specifically. A regulator can reduce the variety of a disturbance only to the extent that the regulator itself has sufficient variety in its available responses. Only variety can force down variety. Ashby’s law is a claim about regulators and disturbances. It is not yet a claim about observers and complexity.
Stafford Beer treats variety, the number of distinguishable states a system can occupy, as a measure of complexity itself. What counts as the system, which states are distinguishable, and which differences matter depends on how the system gets defined. How a system gets defined depends on who is doing the defining. Ashby supplies the constraint on variety. Beer supplies the complexity reading based on variety. Second-order cybernetics supplies the observer sitting underneath both Ashby and Beer.
A thing is not complex simply because someone finds it hard to deal with. A person who does not understand basic arithmetic can find a simple equation bewildering. A person’s difficulty does not add variety to the equation. What is missing in cases of subjective difficulty is not in the object, but in the distinctions that person currently has available for acting on it. The complexity that matters for regulation is not subjective difficulty. It is the variety that must be distinguished and responded to for a given purpose, measured against the variety currently available to whoever is doing the distinguishing.
The homeowner’s simple picture of the thermostat can be perfectly adequate. The facilities manager’s elaborate picture can also be adequate. Neither the homeowner nor the facilities manager has discovered the true complexity of the thermostat lying underneath the other’s account. Both accounts are descriptions made viable by different purposes and different capacities for action. Viability, rather than correspondence to one fixed description of the device, is what tells you whether a given level of complexity suits the purpose at hand.
Heinz von Foerster’s aesthetic imperative is: if you desire to see, learn how to act. The facilities manager treats zone conflicts as a live problem because years of managing a building gave them distinctions to act on. Someone without that background may see the same readings and alarms without seeing them as a zone conflict at all. The difference between seeing a zone conflict and not seeing it isn’t in what reaches the eyes. The difference is in which distinctions have become available for acting on what the eyes already see.
Von Foerster’s ethical imperative is: I shall act always so as to increase the number of choices. A checklist, a training manual, a policy, or an interface does not just tell someone what to do. These tools determine which distinctions are handed to someone as distinctions worth acting on. Handing someone three permitted responses limits what they can do. In fact, handing someone three permitted responses may make everything outside those three effectively invisible as a problem requiring a response.
It is tempting to picture the regulator as a single person, the facilities manager’s own head holding whatever variety they can muster. Beer never meant the regulator to be just a single person. The variety available to a regulator can live in training, in procedures, in instruments, in software, in other people, and in the whole organizational structure around the person. A novice with a good diagnostic procedure can regulate something an experienced person without one cannot. The term “observer” in this post should be read as shorthand for the observer and whatever variety they have been handed.
Some variety arrives as vocabulary. It is tempting to say the facilities manager has language where the novice does not, with terms like “zone conflict” sitting ready on a shelf. The picture of language as a structure existing on its own, independent of anyone using it, reintroduces the very thing this post argues against. Humberto Maturana’s term for the alternative to static language is languaging. Languaging is a recurrent, consensual coordination of behavior among people. Languaging is something done together rather than consulted alone. There is no language sitting apart from the languaging that keeps regenerating it. The facilities manager and their colleagues are not retrieving “zone conflict” from a shared dictionary each time they use it. They are re-enacting the distinction in every handoff and every report, keeping it alive and slightly recalibrated. The term is actionable for the same reason the thermostat’s complexity is never fixed. Both language and system complexity are constituted, not just applied, each time the coupling is tested again.
Ashby’s law of requisite variety is only variety can destroy variety. Complexity was never simply a label sitting on the thermostat or the light switch, waiting there to be found. Not every difficulty is an invention of the observer. A novice can make a genuinely simple system look difficult because the distinctions needed are not yet theirs to use. A facilities manager can meet a real limit even with years behind them because the available responses still fall short of what the disturbance demands. Neither case is settled by declaring the complexity to belong to one side or the other.
None of this gets settled by argument. This gets settled the way pragmatism settles most things: in action, by what happens when the world pushes back. The novice finds out how much of the trouble was theirs the first time a guess fails and the thermostat keeps behaving exactly as it would have anyway. The facilities manager finds out how much belongs to the structure itself the first time a genuinely new configuration exposes a limit no accumulated experience prepared them for. What the resistance reveals is not some complexity sitting behind the scenes, waiting to be exposed once and for all. What the resistance reveals is where the current coupling between observer, description, and system has stopped being adequate, and needs to change.
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
In my earlier posts, I have leaned on Wittgenstein’s ladder. This is the closing move of the Tractatus, where once you have climbed through the propositions you discard them, because they have “served their purpose”. I have used this language game often enough that I want to look at it more closely, because on the surface it can seem like a weakness. I am using language to point out the limits of language, and I never kick the ladder away. I keep climbing it again post after post. I want to make the case to the reader that this is not a contradiction I have failed to notice. It is a natural feature of the terrain, built into what it means to speak about limits at all.
George Spencer-Brown has a notion he calls re-entry. I have written about this before. You draw a distinction, put a boundary around something, name it, place it in a box. For a while the box holds. Then you notice something the box cannot account for, something that belongs to the distinction itself and not to either side of it. To speak of it, you step outside the box and refer back into the space you just left. In ordinary logic this produces paradox, the thing both is and is not what you said it was. Spencer-Brown’s insight was that this is not a failure of the distinction. It is where a certain stability comes from, not a resting point on one side or the other, but the oscillation itself, the crossing back and forth. You need a reference point, but it is not fixed to either side. If you stand inside the box, the reference point is outside. If you stand outside, the reference point is inside. It is not within the box itself, nor outside of it, it is always the other side of wherever you happen to be standing.
It is the same trouble you find whenever you try to make sense of a situation instead of a distinction. Complexity itself cannot be put in a box, it is not a thing sitting out there waiting to be named. In a constructivist cybernetics, complexity depends on the observer as much as on what is observed. The trouble starts the moment we try to put a situation into words. Words are handles, as Spencer-Brown called them, and naming a situation is the act of trying to fit something that resists boxes into one anyway. Once named, you are still inside it, entangled, too close to see the “whole”. Step outside and you can draw the “whole” shape, but you lose the “texture” of what it feels like to act inside it. You start to lose your grip on it. There is a harder limit underneath this, the one Ashby pointed at with requisite variety. Even if we grant the observer a “perfect” outside view, they would not be able hold the “whole”. This is because the variety in any living situation exceeds what an observer can carry. Making sense of a situation asks for both sides, taken in turn, and refuses to let you settle into either.
For sensemaking, you lean on what has worked before, on the shape of past interactions, and take a cautious step. You do not need to know where you will end up, only the direction you want to move, and each new step tells you something the last one could not. So, when I say truth is provisional, I am naming the fact that “whole”/“perfect”, finished knowledge is not possible. For a cybernetician, this does not stop action. This becomes a pre-requisite as well as the effect. You learn by acting and you act by learning. Acting generates the feedback that lets you correct course. Von Foerster’s cybernetics turns on something like this, that seeing and acting are not separate stages but one loop, each teaching the other.
There is no finish line to this. Meaning is relational, it depends on a boundary and what sits across it. It cannot rest at a fixed point without ceasing to be meaning. What I write here is provisional and good enough for now. It is not finished and it will need to be taken up again. This is where a pluralistic stance comes from, not as courtesy toward other views but as a consequence of provisionality. If no depiction is final, no single depiction can claim the whole ground, and other depictions become necessary rather than merely tolerated. This is also where ethics enters. Once you accept your account is provisional and other accounts sit across your boundary, you are answerable to them in a way a closed, finished account never has to be.
Language is the tool I am using right now to describe a limit that supposedly sits outside its own reach. No word explains itself as many postmodern philosophers talk about. Open a dictionary and any definition is made of other words, each needing still other words, none of them closing the loop by pointing at something outside language entirely. A system built of terms defining other terms will always need to reach outside itself to mean anything, and reaching outside is the move that produces paradox.
Final Arc:
Language gives us a way to speak about a thing. It does not give us the thing, and it does not guarantee that speaking has produced understanding. This is another turn of the same paradox. Since I am using language, right now, to say where language’s authority runs out. I do not see a way to say this without doing it. We can use the ladder to talk about re-entry. A single rung means nothing on its own, it is only a rung because of the rung below it and the one above it, it has to point outside itself, to the rest of the ladder, in order to be what it is.
So, I do not think the answer to the ladder is to finally kick it away and stand on solid, wordless ground. I do not think that ground exists, or if it does, none of us can report back from it in anything but more words. The contradiction is not a mistake I keep making. It is the condition of trying to speak about the limits of speech at all, and every serious attempt to do so runs into the same wall.
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
In today’s post, I am looking at a phrase that everyone recognizes and almost nobody examines. The phrase is “think outside the box.” It is usually presented as an invitation to break free from conventional thinking and arrive at something genuinely new. But the phrase hides a number of assumptions. It assumes there is a box with a clear boundary. It assumes you can see that boundary from where you stand. And it assumes you can somehow step beyond it and think from a position on the outside.
I do not think any of those assumptions hold.
Consider the cosmological argument for the existence of God. In its simplest form, it argues that everything that exists has a cause, the universe exists, therefore the universe has a cause. That cause is then identified as God. Whatever one thinks of the conclusion, the argument illustrates a broader issue. We often extend concepts beyond the domain in which they make sense. Causality, as we understand it, is bound up with time and change. If spacetime itself is what is being explained, then applying ordinary notions of causality beyond it may be problematic. The point is not whether the argument succeeds or fails. The point is that we often carry our conceptual tools into places where their limitations become difficult to see.
Heinz von Foerster, one of the founders of second-order cybernetics, wrote that the environment as we perceive it is our invention. He did not mean that we are hallucinating or that reality does not exist. He meant that observation is never passive. The observer participates in determining what counts as observable. There is no neutral vantage point from which to inspect things exactly as they are, independent of any observer.
Spencer-Brown made a related point in Laws of Form. To draw a distinction is already to stand on one side of it. The moment you draw a circle on a blank page, you create an inside and an outside. You are positioned in relation to that distinction by the very act of drawing it. You cannot draw a distinction and simultaneously stand outside it. The frame is not something you construct and then enter. You are already within it when you first become aware of it. The noticing is itself made possible by the frame.
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems point in a similar direction. Any sufficiently rich formal system contains truths that cannot be proven from within that system. The incompleteness is not a temporary gap that can be eliminated with more effort. It is structural. Expanding the system may resolve one limitation, but the expanded system brings new limitations of its own. The horizon moves, but it does not disappear.
Now, I am aware of a difficulty here. If no one can step outside the frame, then this post cannot either. Writing an argument that the outside is unavailable risks sounding as though I have somehow found a place from which to survey the whole. I have not. But there is a difference between claiming to stand outside a frame and becoming aware of the frame from within it. The first claims a privileged position. The second acknowledges its own participation. This post is attempting the latter.
Gregory Bateson observed that the major problems in the world arise from the difference between how nature works and the way people think. I take that observation as pointing toward the issue here. The gap is not simply between what we know and what we do not know. It is also between the structures we inhabit and the stories we tell ourselves about our position within them.
Perhaps thinking outside the box does not mean escaping a frame.
Perhaps it means becoming aware of the frame you are already inside.
A Zen koan asks, “What was your face before your parents were born?” The question is not seeking an answer. It is designed to interrupt the assumption that you can step back far enough to observe your own origins from the outside. The koan does not reveal what lies beyond the frame. It makes you feel the edge of the frame itself.
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
In today’s post I am looking at Shunryū Suzuki’s beginner’s mind in Zen and von Foerster’s ethical imperative. Readers of my blog know that I love connecting the dots often in seemingly varying fields.
Suzuki said something useful:
In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.
Suzuki did not mean that expertise is bad. He meant something about the stance the expert takes. This implies closure and certainty. The sense that you already know what you are looking at.
The beginner, by contrast, approaches with a different posture. Not from weakness but from openness. The beginner does not pretend to understand. The beginner stays curious. The beginner remains alert to surprise. There is so much we do not know about this person or situation. Let me watch closely. Let me notice what I have not seen before. Let me find new ways to interact. This brings a kind of freshness and openness that can otherwise easily get stale.
That posture matters. It opens the space for others to be present in ways expertise often does not allow.
I think about this in relation to something Heinz von Foerster focused on from the second order Cybernetics standpoint. He became increasingly focused on an ethical question: what does the epistemology demand? If we accept that the observer is always inside what they describe, and that the description is shaped by who is doing the observing, then what follows? Von Foerster saw that the observer cannot stand outside the act of knowing. The observer is always inside, always making choices about what to look at and what to leave out. And if that is how knowledge works, the observer must be accountable for it.
Von Foerster’s answer was this:
I shall act always so as to increase the number of choices.
It sounds simple. It is not. It means that every description you make, every frame you draw, every boundary you establish is your choice and it closes off some possibilities and opens others. When you approach as an expert with certainty, you narrow the space of possibilities. You decide in advance what is worth looking at. You make it harder for others to contribute what they see. You increase the burden on those whose concerns fall outside your frame.
When you approach with beginner’s mind, something shifts. You remain open to the possibility that you have missed something. You stay willing to be surprised. You create room for others to bring what they notice. You increase the number of ways the situation can be understood and acted upon. You do not foreclose possibilities. You multiply them.
We all do this. We all reach for the solutions we have used before. Or we rush towards the allure of certainty and familiarity of 4 x 4 matrices and frameworks. We all carry forward the certainties that worked in the past. That is how expertise functions. But expertise has a shadow side. The more sure you are, the less you have to look. The less you look, the more you miss.
Beginner’s mind is not about abandoning what you know. It is about holding what you know lightly enough to remain teachable. It is about approaching even the familiar with the question “what else might be happening here?” It is about accepting that you might be wrong, and that being wrong is information, not failure.
This stance also aligns with epistemic humility. Epistemic humility is not doubt or weakness. It is the recognition that your knowledge is always made from somewhere, shaped by your position, and therefore always incomplete.
This is where beginner’s mind and von Foerster’s imperative connect. You cannot increase the number of choices if you have already decided what the situation is. You cannot increase the number of choices if you approach from closure. You can only do it by remaining open, by staying curious, by being willing to go back and look again, by letting others see what your frame might have missed.
It is not always simple. It is harder and vigorous, in a way, than certainty. Certainty is restful. Beginner’s mind requires work. It requires staying alert. It requires acknowledging that your position in the situation makes some things visible and other things invisible, and that you alone cannot see the whole.
Von Foerster was not modest about what this implied. If you accept that you are responsible for what your description makes possible and what it forecloses, then you cannot hide behind expertise. You cannot say “I was following procedure” or “I was doing what I was trained to do.” You can only act in a way that remains accountable, that stays open, that keeps asking whose concerns are outside the frame.
I will finish with this thought:
When we are genuinely curious, we create room for understanding. When we say there is so much we do not know, we open ourselves to seeing what we have missed. When we find new ways to interact, we bring freshness and openness to what could otherwise grow stale.
Replace the object of that curiosity, and you have the ethical foundation von Foerster was pointing at.
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
The great Systems Thinker, Russell Ackoff, had a provocation that stayed with me.
A system is not the sum of its parts. It is the product of their interactions.
He used a simple example. Take the best engine from one car, the best transmission from another, the best brakes from a third. You will not get the best car. You will get no car at all. The behavior lives in the interactions, not the parts.
That provocation raises a question. If optimizing parts is dangerous, what makes an optimization safe? In today’s post, reversibility is where I want to begin.
The Problem with Parts:
The temptation is familiar. Something is not performing well. Fix it. Move on to the next thing. The assumption underneath is that a collection of locally optimized parts produces an optimized whole.
An organization composed of optimally performing parts will itself likely perform suboptimally, particularly where the interactions between parts carry the behavior of the whole. In tightly coupled arrangements, optimizing a part in isolation may improve that part while degrading everything around it. In more modular arrangements, the risk is smaller. A rough measure of coupling is the degree of interaction between parts. The more the parts interact, the tighter the coupling, and the more a change in one part propagates into others. The question worth asking is always which kind of arrangement you are actually dealing with. If you get it wrong, it is not necessarily a failure of intelligence. Barry Clemson’s darkness principle reminds us that no observer can fully see the whole from within it. The blind spot is structural, not personal.
The implication here is that optimization is not neutral. It is always optimization with a particular boundary drawn around it. And the choice of boundary matters enormously.
The Reversibility Criterion:
What makes an optimization dangerous? The answer is reversibility. An optimization becomes dangerous when you cannot undo it without catastrophic loss. When you cannot course-correct. When the act of being wrong forecloses the ability to learn from being wrong. This is essentially a functional question, not a structural one. It shifts the question from “how large is the unit?” to “what do you lose if you cannot go back?“
This matters because optimization, by principle, narrows the state space. You are collapsing toward more efficient configurations. Optimization here refers to any deliberate effort to improve performance toward a defined goal, whether through formal mathematical methods or managerial decisions to consolidate, streamline, or cut. The argument is that this pursuit, regardless of form, tends to reduce variety as a structural byproduct. Ashby’s insight was that variety is what allows a regulator to absorb disturbance. An organization that has optimized away its variety has optimized away its adaptive capacity. It performs well in the conditions the optimization assumed. It performs catastrophically in conditions it did not.
Beyond a point, optimization produces fragility because it consumes reversibility, the freedom to be wrong without breaking. Not as an accident but as a structural consequence. This is not an argument against all irreversibility. Some commitments are irreversible by design and valuable for exactly that reason. A constitutional right, a safety standard, an ethical line, these foreclose options deliberately, to protect something more important than flexibility. The distinction worth making is between irreversibility that protects variety elsewhere and irreversibility that consumes it. The danger lies in the second kind.
Stafford Beer, working from Ashby’s insight, argued that viable organizations need internal slack, what he called relaxation. Relaxation is variety you have not yet collapsed. You preserve it by restraint, not by engineering it back in. Some may argue the solution is to optimize for redundancy instead. But this is not a coherent escape. Optimizing for redundancy is still an act of optimization. You are making a fixed bet about what kind of redundancy you need. That bet is itself a reduction of variety. You do not recover relaxation through a second act of optimization. You only displace the fragility elsewhere.
Reversibility is the check on this. It is the condition for remaining capable of learning rather than locked-in. John Dewey, the American pragmatist, argued that the ability to revise a belief is not a weakness in inquiry but its essential character. A belief that cannot be revised is not held with confidence, it is held captive. An irreversible optimization forecloses inquiry in exactly this sense. It is efficient in the short run and anti-adaptive in the long one.
Two Complications:
But reversibility is not a simple property. It has at least two complications that matter.
The first is hysteresis. Let us look at an example here. Take a stress ball and squeeze it hard in your fist. It visibly deforms under pressure. The shape changes, it compresses. But the moment you open your hand, it bounces back to its exact original shape. The deformation was real but reversible. Now take a lump of wet clay and squeeze it the same way. It also deforms under pressure. But when you open your hand, the clay stays crushed. The shape does not return. The path you took to deform it has fundamentally altered the internal state of the material. Removing the pressure does not restore the original condition. That difference, between the stress ball and the clay, has a name in physics and control theory: hysteresis.
Organizations are like that too. The institutional knowledge that is distributed across a supplier network does not return when you decide to diversify again. The workforce skills that erode do not reconstitute on demand. The reversal is theoretically available. It is not available in the timeframe that matters.
The second complication is from a second order cybernetics standpoint. Reversibility is observer-relative.
A factory closure is reversible at the level of capital reallocation. The investor redeploys elsewhere. At the level of a regional community, it is not reversible. Social and political aspects such as the tax base, the accumulated skills, the social fabric of a place do not follow the capital back. The decision-maker experiences optionality. The community experiences lock-in. The same event reads differently depending on where you are standing.
The same logic applies at the scale of nations. When politicians speak of making a country great, they are treating the nation as the unit of optimization. But the country is itself part of a larger interdependent whole, other nations, shared ecologies, global supply chains. And within the country, greatness is defined from a particular vantage point. Some populations bear the cost of the optimization others experience as gain. The question is not whether a country is too big a unit to optimize. Bigness is not the issue. The issue is whether the boundary drawn around the country excludes the parties who bear the cost of what is being optimized inside it.
This means the question “from whose viewpoint” is not a secondary clarification. It is load-bearing. An optimization is safe only if it is reversible for all parties who bear its consequences, across the timeframe they actually inhabit. Not the timeframe of the optimizer.
This is not an argument for permanent optionality. Keeping every door open is its own kind of fragility, the slow failure of an organization that never commits enough to learn anything. Reversibility is a capacity to revise, not a reason to defer. The point is to act in ways that preserve the ability to correct course, not to avoid acting at all.
The Boundary Question:
Von Foerster’s ethical imperative was pointed:
I shall act always so as to increase the number of choices.
Irreversible optimization is a violation of this. It purchases present performance by selling future possibility. What looks like efficiency from inside the boundary looks like the foreclosure of options from outside it.
The boundary of an optimization is always a claim about what counts as the relevant whole. That claim is made by someone, from somewhere, with a particular set of interests and a particular blind spot. The second order cybernetic question is not just whether the optimization works. It is who drew the boundary that made it look like it did.
When it comes to complex networks, there is always a “loser”. The boundary does not make that fact disappear. It just decides who gets to see it.
Perhaps that is why Churchman and Ackoff moved away from operations research toward systems thinking, not because the math was wrong, but because the math kept leaving someone out.
Full Arc:
We started with Ackoff’s observation that behavior lives in interactions, not parts. The danger of optimization is not in the act itself but in what it forecloses. Hysteresis tells us that the path taken leaves a mark that cannot simply be reversed. Observer-relativity tells us that what looks like a clean optimization from one vantage point may be an irreversible loss from another.
These are not separate problems. They are the same problem seen from different angles. The boundary you draw around an optimization determines who experiences reversibility and who experiences lock-in. It determines whose variety counts and whose does not.
When it comes to complexity, this is mainly a structural condition rather than a moral one. The external environment has indefinite variety. It produces conditions the optimization did not anticipate. Optimization by principle reduces internal variety. When internal variety shrinks and external variety does not, the gap falls somewhere. Whoever absorbs that gap becomes the loser.
Which raises a question that the move from operations research toward systems thinking has perhaps always been circling: is a zero-harm optimization possible at all?
If there is always a loser, the question that follows is not how to eliminate the loss but how to remain responsible to it. In an earlier post, I looked at this through the minimax principle: the most humane path is not to maximize benefit but to minimize the worst possible outcome. Von Foerster’s imperative connects the two ideas. To increase the number of choices available to people is to preserve their ability to recover, to redirect, to begin again. That is not an engineering problem either. I explored this further in Minimizing Harm, Maximizing Humanity.
The ideas discussed here will form part of the second edition of my book, Second Order Cybernetics. The second edition will include a first half where I go into the introduction of cybernetics and related ideas. The post is slightly longer than usual because of that.
In today’s post I am exploring what I think is a fundamental question in epistemology: what does it mean to say something is true? I want to approach this through the lens of cybernetic constructivism, and I will start with a question about pi, which feels fitting given that today is March 14.
What is pi? For most purposes, 3.14 is a very accurate value. But pi is an irrational number. It goes on forever. Should a truthist spend a lifetime reciting its digits? Where should they stop and say: this is pi?
That question is the crux of viability. A correspondence theory of truth has no stopping rule. It is committed, in principle, to the full expansion. But nobody does that, because it does not prove viable for any actual purpose. 3.14 works for most engineering calculations. More decimal places work for orbital mechanics. The stopping point is always set by the task at hand, not by some ideal of complete accuracy.
A correspondence theorist might reply that they can simply know pi is infinite without reciting it. But that reply concedes the point. To know that pi is infinite is already to accept a stopping rule. The question is what determines where you stop. Viability puts the stopping rule at the heart of truth. Correspondence theory treats it as a practical afterthought.
What I find striking is what the history of pi actually shows. The Babylonian engineer used 3. The medieval architect used 22/7. NASA uses 15 decimal places. The mathematician holds the concept of an infinite irrational ratio. Mathematically, there is a unique value of pi. The description that has proved most robust across the widest range of tests is the one that survives. That is viability selecting the winner. Classical correspondence theory has little to say about why our descriptions of pi changed over time or differ across contexts. It treats these shifts as practical side-effects rather than as central to what truth is.
Coping, Not Copying:
Once you notice that every stopping rule is task-relative, you are already moving toward a cybernetic picture: knowledge as regulation under constraint rather than as static mirroring.
Let’s look at the example of a lock. A lock can be opened with a key, a lockpick, or a hammer. All three work. None of them is the one true solution. The opening of the lock is the criterion, not the method. This is what viability means in practice. It does not collapse into the view that anything goes. The lock still has to open. But multiple paths can satisfy the criterion. This is the notion of pluralism.
Correspondence theory assumes that an accurate copy of the world can be made in the mind. But this assumes we have direct access to the world in the first place. Cybernetic constructivism starts from the opposite standpoint. We do not have direct access. What we have is a context, an observer embedded in a situation, acting under constraints. The cybernetician is aware of the trap of relativism that follows if epistemic constructivism is taken too far. The answer therefore is not to abandon external reality but to let it push back. External constraints are not obstacles to truth. They are its guide.
What emerges from this is not a copy of the world but a structural coupling with it. The focus shifts from copying the world to coping with it. It is worth pausing on the word itself. In Old English, “trēowþ” meant faithfulness and keeping one’s word. The narrowing toward factual correctness came much later. Its deepest root means firm and solid, from the same family as tree and trust. This suggests not a mirror of reality but something that holds fast under strain. Even in its language history, truth is less about a disembodied view from nowhere than about reliability in a lived relationship.
Viability, as the cybernetician uses the term, is not a lazy shortcut to truth. It is a different account of what truth is for. Knowledge is not a mirror held up to reality. It is closer to a tool. A tool fits or it does not fit, relative to what you are doing. 3.14 is not first true and then useful. Its usefulness is the ground of its truth-claim.
As I was thinking about this, I could not help but notice how well this connects to a tradition that predates cybernetics. The American pragmatists, Dewey and James in particular, argued that the truth of a belief is inseparable from its consequences in practice. Dewey called knowledge a form of inquiry, not a form of contemplation. James spoke of the cash value of a truth, meaning what practical difference it makes to the person holding it. Cybernetics inherits this instinct and gives it a more precise mechanical account, grounding it in feedback, constraint, and structural coupling rather than in human psychology alone.
Readiness-to-Hand:
This is also what Heidegger points to with the notion of readiness-to-hand. A hammer is not first an object you contemplate and then use. It is defined by its role in a practice. You notice the hammer as an object only when it breaks or goes missing. Otherwise, it is simply part of how you are engaged with the world. In the same way, a number like 3.14 is not something you verify against reality and then apply. It is already inside the practice. Its truth is its grip on what you are doing.
This brings in a second aspect of viability. It is always relative to what we have on our hands. The constraints of the task determine what counts as sufficient.A cybernetic observer is always embedded in a context of action. What counts as a sufficient description depends on what the observer needs to do next. This is why cybernetics reaches for viability rather than correspondence.
Viability, in more precise terms, is about maintaining the ability to act when facing constraints. It is not about removing constraints. It is about sustaining the capacity to continue within them.
King Sisyphus:
The myth of Sisyphus makes this idea vivid. In Camus’s retelling, Sisyphus is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, again and again, for eternity. The constraint does not change. The boulder always returns. But Camus insists we imagine Sisyphus happy. And this is not a small thing.
The punishment depends on Sisyphus experiencing it as a punishment. The gods are not only constraining him physically. They are constraining him through his own suffering. If Sisyphus finds joy in what he does, the punishment loses its force, because it ceases to be punishment at all. The rock still rolls back. But the meaning of that event changes entirely.
There are two constraints at work here, not one. The physical constraint belongs to the hill and the boulder. The second constraint belongs to the relationship between Sisyphus and his situation. This to me is what Ashby points to when he treats constraint as a relation between an observer’s possible descriptions and what actually happens. The gods were counting on both. They chose this task because they expected Sisyphus to find it intolerable.
When he finds joy instead, the second constraint dissolves. The punishment ceases, not because the rock stops rolling, but because the meaning of the rolling changes. Sisyphus is no longer measuring his situation against an impossible standard, namely the boulder staying at the top. The rolling back is no longer a failure. It is just the next push.
This is also where the line between reframing and delusion holds. Sisyphus dissolves the relational constraint, the one the gods constructed, while remaining fully exposed to the physical one. The rock still rolls back. Delusion works differently. It does not reframe what you measure yourself against. It avoids the test altogether. Reframing and avoidance look similar from the inside but they are not the same thing.
There is something else here worth noting. The gods defined the task as punishment. Sisyphus, by finding joy, becomes his own observer. He steps outside the frame the gods imposed. In second order cybernetics terms, he observes his own observing and chooses differently. Viability, in this reading, is not just functional persistence. It is the capacity to reframe one’s relationship to a constraint.
The Madman of Naranam:
I want to bring in a figure I find even more striking than Sisyphus for this purpose. Consider Naranath Branthan, the madman of Naranam from Kerala. He too rolled a large rock up a hill and watched it roll back down. He did this again and again. But he was not being punished. Instead, he did it for fun. The stories say he would laugh with joy and clap his hands as the rock rolled down. Naranath is not denying the physical constraint. The rock rolls back and he knows it will. His reframing does not change what happens. It changes what he measures himself against. He stops applying a standard that was never appropriate to begin with. He needed no outside observer to imagine him happy. His reframing was self-generated.
The story of Naranath meeting the goddess Kali makes this even more vivid. Kali offered him any boon he wished. He asked only to move his elephantiasis from one leg to the other. He did not ask to be free of it. He had understood the absurdity of demanding that the world be other than it is. That understanding is viability in its deepest form.
Camus’s formulation still requires an observer. We must imagine Sisyphus happy. Naranath does not wait to be imagined. This is, perhaps, the deeper cybernetic point. Viability looks like a property of the organism. But the Sisyphus example reveals it as partly a property of the relationship between the organism and its observer. Naranath collapses that distance. He is the observer of his own condition, and he chooses joy without being told to.
The Community Problem:
If viability is partly about how an individual organism relates to its constraints, the question arises how communities do this collectively. Charles Sanders Peirce proposed that truth is what a community of inquirers would converge on given enough time. But this raises a prior question. Who gets to be in the community? A group that agrees the earth is flat is also a community. Peirce’s community of inquirers works only if the community remains open to the tests imposed by its environment. Without that, coherence collapses into shared delusion. The flat earth holds together perfectly well as a coherent position until you try to launch a satellite. At that point the context decides, not the community.
This is also where viability parts ways with a purely psychological reading of coping. A belief that works by insulating itself from defeat is not viable in the cybernetic sense. It is a closed loop. Popper called this falsifiability: a claim should be viewed as knowledge only if it is open to some possible observation that could defeat it. Viability makes the same demand from a different angle. A viable belief is one that remains genuinely exposed to the push-back of its constraints. Structural coupling requires contact. A placebo, for example, can open the lock once or twice. But a belief that cannot be tested by the lock at all is not knowledge. It is insulation.
Coherence and Its Limits:
When you encounter something genuinely new, you cannot easily make sense of it. This is because you do not yet have a network of understanding into which it can fit. The new observation has no hook to hang on.A claim does not arrive in isolation. It either coheres with the network of details you already hold, or it does not land at all. Reading widely and across diverse domains is one way to build a network rich enough to receive new things.
From this standpoint, truth has two criteria working together. First, it must cohere with what you already understand. Second, it must sustain your viability rather than erode it. The two are not equal. Coherence is necessary: a completely incoherent set of beliefs cannot support action at all. But coherence is not sufficient. A perfectly coherent but closed network will eventually fail you. Viability is the deeper criterion. Coherence is subordinate to it.
Correspondence theory assumes that truth is already out there, waiting to be found. Viability inverts this. Truth is not found. It is enacted in the relationship between an observer and their constraints. The question is not whether something matches reality. The question is whether it allows you to continue.
Frames and Open Questions:
Consider a rocket launch. The rocket either reaches orbit or it does not. That criterion is external and unambiguous. Political and social evaluations are harder because the criteria are themselves contested. Two groups disagreeing about a leader are not just disagreeing about a fact. They are disagreeing about what counts as a good outcome. That is a disagreement about values, not just evidence. It is a disagreement about which outcomes count as success.
I have written about von Foerster’s ethical imperative before in the context of Ackoff. Von Foerster offers one possible criterion that sits outside tribal agreement. His ethical imperative is to act always so as to increase the number of choices available. Choices here means systemic variety and the capacity to respond to constraints not yet encountered, not merely an expanded menu of options. That is at least a criterion that does not depend on who is in the tribe. But even that criterion has to be chosen by someone. The honest cybernetic answer to who decides the context is: the observer does, always. But the observer decides the frame. The universe decides whether the frame survives. These are not the same thing.
Even if truth is a property of propositions, any ascription of truth is made from within a perspective. Every act of saying this is true is an act by some observer under constraints. There is no view from nowhere. Existentialism arrived at this conclusion from a different direction. Kierkegaard argued that the deepest truths tell the individual what to do, not what to know. Nietzsche went further, famously claiming that there are no facts, only interpretations, and that we cannot see around our own corner. Pragmatism made a parallel move, arguing that truth is not a fixed target but a process, something that happens to an idea as it is put to work.
Cybernetic constructivism inherits both traditions and gives them a more precise account of what the corner is made of and what putting an idea to work actually means. What we can ask is whether a perspective is richer, more generative, and more honest about its own assumptions than another. Viability is not a compromise on truth. It is a more honest account of what truth has always been doing.
One question remains open. This post has argued that the universe decides whether the frame survives. But what happens when a community is so digitally insulated that it never has to launch a rocket? When algorithmic walls are thick enough, the physical pushback never arrives. A flat earther, for example, does not need to test their belief if they never have to navigate a satellite. This is perhaps the sharpest challenge viability faces in the present moment.
The answer the cybernetic constructivist would give is that insulation is itself a constraint. A community that never tests its beliefs against the world is not viable in any durable sense. It is merely coherent. And coherence, as this post has argued, is the subordinate criterion.
The Full Arc:
This post began with a simple question. Where should a truthist stop and say this is pi? That question opened into something larger. Truth, from a cybernetic constructivist standpoint, is not a mirror held up to reality. It is a relationship between an observer and their constraints. The stopping point is always set by what you need to do next.
The lock example showed that viability is not relativism. Multiple paths can work, but the lock still has to open. The Peirce detour showed that agreement is not the criterion either. A community can agree and still fail when the context changes. Sisyphus and Naranath showed that viability is not merely functional. It is the capacity to find a relationship to your constraints that allows you to keep going. Naranath, offered any boon he wished, asked only to move his elephantiasis from one leg to the other. He had understood the absurdity of demanding that the world be other than it is.
And the coherence point showed that for something new to register as true, it must first find a hook in what you already understand, and then sustain rather than erode your ability to act. A community that never tests its beliefs against the world is not viable in any durable sense. The universe does not argue. It simply decides which frames survive.
The universe is patient.
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
Notes:
In referencing the work of Martin Heidegger, I want to acknowledge the deeply troubling fact of his affiliation with the Nazi party. This aspect of his life casts a long and painful shadow over his legacy. While I draw on specific philosophical ideas that I find thought-provoking or useful, this is not an endorsement of the man or his actions. Engaging with his work requires ethical vigilance, and I remain mindful of the responsibility to not separate ideas from the broader context in which they were formed.
In today’s post, I want to sit with a question that keeps surfacing in discussions about artificial intelligence and cognition, and one I am increasingly convinced is itself part of the problem. The question is: does AI know? The reason it may be the wrong question is not that the answer is obviously “no”, but that the word “know” is doing work it was never designed to do when we apply it to these entities.
The World Perturbs but Does Not Instruct:
In an earlier post, I looked at what cybernetic constructivism means for how we understand knowledge and experience. One of its central claims, following Maturana, is that the world perturbs but does not instruct. Meaning is not something delivered from outside and stored inside. It is enacted through structural coupling, through the accumulated history of an organism maintaining its viability in a world that pushes back.
Before carrying this idea forward, it is useful to note that Maturana developed it specifically to describe living biological systems, organisms that produce and maintain their own boundaries and whose continued existence is genuinely at stake in every encounter with the world.
Let’s look at a simple physical example to clarify the principle before we apply it to anything more complex. Take a golf swing – a club meets a ball with a certain force and angle, and the golf ball soars through the air. Now take the same swing, the same force, the same input, and apply it to a basketball. The basketball, unlike the golf ball, skids away at an odd angle. In both cases, the action was identical. What was different was the internal structure of the object receiving it. The world did not send two different instructions. It applied one perturbation to two different structures, and each responded entirely according to what it was. This is what it means to say the world perturbs but does not instruct. The perturbation is necessary but not sufficient. What shapes the response most is the structure that meets it.
Maturana’s claim, applied to living organisms, is that this structural responsiveness is not incidental but constitutive. Cognition just is this ongoing history of structurally shaped encounters with a world that pushes back. The environment cannot tell the organism what to do or what to become. It can only disturb, and the organism responds according to its own organization. The inanimate example of the golf club shows this in its starkest form, where the relationship between perturbation and response is straightforwardly causal. We have the same input, the same structure, the same output, each time. But as organizational complexity increases and as we move toward living organisms, something shifts. The response becomes less strictly causal and more dispositional. This means that even with a relatively stable internal structure, the output can vary depending on the current state and history of the organism.
One further nuance is that the structure does not treat all perturbations equally. Some disturbances are absorbed as structurally significant and others pass through without consequence, but this selectivity is not a filter applied from above. It emerges from the organism’s own history of structural coupling, from the accumulated shape of all the encounters that have formed it, which means that what counts as an informative perturbation is itself a product of living rather than an abstract sorting mechanism. The world does not simply push; the organism constitutes what counts as a push worth responding to, and it does so because of what it has already been through.
This framing makes the question about AI and knowledge considerably more precise, because it separates two things that are easy to conflate: linguistic competence in the domain of coordination, and the kind of structural shaping that emerges only in the domain of perturbation.
Language as Residue:
Large language models exist almost entirely in the domain of coordination. They have been trained on what Michael Polanyi might call the articulable fraction of human knowledge, everything that humans have stepped back from experience to render into language. But as I have written before, language without world is a serious philosophical problem, not merely a technical limitation.
Polanyi’s observation that we can know more than we can tell connects to Heidegger’s distinction in a way that sharpens the argument considerably. When we are in the ready-to-hand mode, absorbed in work, flowing through a task, we are doing things we know how to do without being able to say how we know. The carpenter handles the grain, the nurse reads the room, the experienced driver navigates traffic. The knowing is in the doing, and it is there precisely because we have not stepped back from it. The moment we step back, when the hammer breaks or we are asked to explain what we just did, we enter the present-at-hand mode, and that is when language becomes possible. We can now describe, analyze, articulate. But something has already been lost in the transition.
The limit Polanyi identifies is not practical but structural. To render the ready-to-hand into language, one has to leave the mode in which it was alive. The describing and the doing cannot occupy the same moment. The writing is produced from outside the coping, looking back at it, and what it captures is necessarily partial.
Let’s consider some examples to look at what happens when a human being produces a piece of text. A carpenter writes about joinery after years of handling wood, feeling grain, making mistakes, discovering through the resistance of the material what works and what does not. A nurse writes about patient care after countless encounters where something felt wrong before she could name it, where the knowing was already in her hands and her attention before it ever became a sentence. I have come to see that in every case, the writing is a residue, what remains after the person has stepped back from absorbed, ready-to-hand engagement and attempted to render some portion of it into language. The coping came first. The describing came second. And the describing, however careful, never fully captures what the coping contained, because the ready-to-hand does not survive the translation into the present-at-hand intact. Something is always left behind in the shift from doing to saying.
This is precisely what an LLM is trained on, the saying, not the doing.It receives the descriptions that people produced when they stepped out of engaged coping and tried to articulate what they had been doing. It never receives the coping itself, because coping does not involve retrospection and narration. Coping is absorbed, forward-moving engagement, and retrospection and narration require stepping out of that absorption.
The absorbed craftsman, the skilled nurse reading a room, none of what they are doing leaves a trace in language while it is happening. What they are doing only enters language afterward, partially, imperfectly, in the present-at-hand mode that Heidegger describes as a kind of breakdown of the original engagement. The LLM is trained entirely on those breakdown products, which means its entire organization of apparent knowledge is built from the layer of experience that was already one step removed from the living of it. The burn came before the word “hot,” and the word is all that was passed on.
One might object here that language is not merely a dead residue, that a beautifully written sentence about grief can make a reader’s chest tighten, that text has genuine generative power. This is true, but it actually confirms rather than challenges the argument. When a reader weeps at a sentence about loss, that response is internally generated. The text does not transmit the grief. It acts as a perturbation on an entity that already carries a body, a history of loss, a nervous system shaped by its own structural couplings with pain and absence.The reader brings the world to the text. The text triggers something that was already there. When an LLM processes the same sentence, there is no accumulated history of loss for it to trigger, no body shaped by living through something the words are pointing at. The perturbation lands on nothing.
One might press this point further and note that LLM outputs do in fact vary: ask the same question twice and you will often receive a different answer, because the generation process involves sampling from probability distributions over learned token sequences rather than deterministically retrieving a fixed response. This variability has a surface resemblance to the dispositional quality of biological response. The difference, though, is in what the variation is grounded in.
In a living organism, dispositional variation is an expression of a history of structural coupling, of a self with a particular past that is still alive in how it meets the present.In an LLM, the variation is stochastic, a property of the sampling algorithm applied to probability weightings derived from training data. The output shifts not because something in the entity is responding from within a lived history, but because the decoding process introduces controlled randomness. The resemblance is real enough at the surface level that it deserves to be named, but naming it clearly is also what shows why it does not close the gap.
When the Body Enters the World:
The question that seems worth sitting with is not does AI know, but what happens when we try to ask whether an embodied AI, one that acts in a physical environment and receives consequences, might be doing something that begins to resemble knowing. This is a genuinely different question from the one we have been asking about LLMs, and it deserves to be treated as such.
Embodied AI is not simply an LLM with motors attached. An entity that learns locomotion through physical trial and error in an environment, whose internal organization is being shaped by a history of navigated perturbations rather than by gradient descent on text, is at least potentially accumulating something in the domain of perturbation rather than purely in the domain of coordination. This seems worth taking seriously. It is not nothing. The question is what, precisely, it is.
Two Orders of Seeing:
Here is where the distinction between first order and second order cybernetics brings more clarity, and it is a distinction that most discussions of AI and systems thinking often quietly step over.
First order cybernetics, the tradition of Wiener, early Ashby, Shannon, approaches a “system” from the outside. The observer maps inputs, outputs, and feedback loops, and asks whether the system’s behavior matches a target. From this vantage point, the question of whether an embodied AI knows is a functional question: does it respond to its environment in ways that are indistinguishable from a system we already credit with knowledge? If a system navigates novel terrain, corrects errors, develops what look like anticipatory responses, and does all of this without explicit programming for each case, then within this framework there is no principled reason to withhold the attribution of knowledge. What walks like a duck and quacks like a duck is, for the first order cybernetician, a duck. This is a functionalist position, and it has genuine value within its own terms.
Second order cybernetics challenges this answer, not by denying the observations but by interrogating the observer. Heinz von Foerster insisted that the observer is always part of the system being observed, and that any account of a system which pretends to a view from nowhere is concealing its own constitutive role. When we say the embodied AI “knows,” we are making a distinction, and that distinction is drawn by an observer who is themselves a cognitive entity with a particular structure, history, and set of concerns. The duck is not a duck in itself as an observation. The duck is a distinction that a particular kind of observer draws within a particular kind of world.
A first order observer can say: the behavior matches the target, therefore attribute the property. A second order observer has to ask: who is doing the attributing, from within what structural coupling, and what does that attribution make invisible?
What it tends to make invisible is the question of autopoiesis. Maturana and Varela proposed that living cognitive entities are self-producing, that they continuously generate their own boundary, their own distinction between self and world, through the very processes that constitute them. A cell produces the membrane that defines it. A nervous system maintains the organization that makes it a nervous system. Cognition, on this account, is not something that happens in a system; it is inseparable from the system’s ongoing self-production. The knowing and the being are not separable events.
Current AI systems, including embodied ones, do not produce their own boundary in this sense. The hardware, the objective function, the definition of successful performance, all of this is determined externally by designers. The system’s closure is assigned, not generated. One might point to emerging architectures that modify their own weights, prune their own connections, or adapt their own structure during deployment, and ask whether these represent an intermediate case. The observation is fair and the edge is genuine. What such systems do not yet do, though, is generate the conditions of their own existence from within, which is what Maturana and Varela meant by autopoiesis.
A Record Is Not a History:
Polanyi’s account of tacit knowledge seemed to carry an implication about machines. If tacit skills like riding a bike cannot be fully articulated, and machines can only work from explicit instruction, then the tacit domain would remain closed to them. You cannot write down the rules for balancing on two wheels in a way that produces a cyclist. But robotic systems can now ride bikes. They do not follow rules. Through reinforcement learning and similar methods, the robot receives feedback and adjusts its parameters over many cycles of trial. Something has been acquired without articulation.
But observing a robot ride a bike raises a question that Polanyi might have considered even more fundamental than the acquisition problem. Each ride seems, in an important sense, new to the robot. And even if the robot accumulates weight updates across sessions, even if something of each ride persists in the network, what accumulates is a record, not a history. For a human, riding a bike becomes part of who you are. The first wobbling attempt, the moment it clicked, the rides since, these do not sit in a log. They have shaped a body and a self that carries them forward invisibly. Merleau-Ponty would say the body has a memory that is not representational, that the competence lives in the flesh, in the motor schema that fires before any conscious intention forms.The human cyclist is not retrieving a stored procedure. They are the person who learned to ride, and that learning is still active in how they inhabit their body and their world.
Heidegger’s notion of Gewesenheit, having-been-ness, is useful here. It is not a claim about data storage or persistent memory. Some artificial systems do maintain functional continuity. Weight updates accumulate, parameters persist, prior experience shapes future outputs. But that is not what Gewesenheit points to.
What it points to is the past not as stored information but as something the self is still living out, always already in the service of its projection forward. The having-been and the being-toward are a single movement. A robot that accumulates weight updates has functional continuity. It does not have this forward-carrying structure. What accumulates is a record, not a history.
There is a distinction here that the word “knowledge” obscures. Acquiring tacit competence is not the same as incorporating it into a continuous self. An embodied AI can do the first without the second. That gap may be more philosophically revealing than the acquisition question ever was.
There is a further dimension to this that the bike-riding example makes vivid, and it is one that tends to get lost when embodiment is treated simply as the addition of a physical body to an otherwise cognitive system. Merleau-Ponty’s central argument in the Phenomenology of Perception is that the mind is not a separate entity that inhabits or operates a body. The body is not the vehicle for a mind that does the real cognitive work from somewhere inside. Cognition is irreducibly embodied, which means that the body is not an instrument of thought but its very medium. When the experienced cyclist leans into a corner, she is not executing a mental calculation about angle and velocity. The body already knows what to do before any representation forms. The knowing and the bodily doing are not two events in sequence. They are a single event.
Von Foerster made a similar point when he said, “If you want to see, learn how to act.” Perception is not passive reception of a pre-given world that the mind then processes. Perception is constituted through action. The acting and the seeing are intertwined, and an entity that cannot act, cannot be perturbed in ways that have consequences for its own continuation, cannot perceive in the relevant sense either.
One might object that modern embodied AI systems using deep neural networks do not separate perception and action sequentially. Sensory input and motor output are processed simultaneously through shared weights. That begins to look like the unified loop von Foerster is describing. The observation is fair. But the question it raises is not architectural. It is autopoietic.
The issue is not whether perception and action are processed in parallel. It is whether that processing belongs to a self-producing system whose own continuation is at stake in every cycle. In a living organism, the perception-action unity is inseparable from the fact that the organism is continuously producing the very system that perceives and acts. The unity is not a design feature. It is a consequence of being alive in Maturana’s sense.
The deeper question remains. Is anything at stake for the robot in its own navigation? Does it maintain its viability, or does someone else maintain it on its behalf? A system whose boundary is externally defined and maintained is not viable in its own right. It is viable by proxy. That distinction matters when we are asking what kind of knowing such a system could be doing.
The Full Arc:
So what is the right word for what an embodied AI accumulates through its history of structural coupling, if knowledge is not quite right?
One candidate is operational trace. It is the structural residue left by perturbations navigated, shaped into patterns of response that fall short of knowledge but go beyond mere computation. It is a phrase rather than a single word, but perhaps that is fitting. What these entities accumulate may resist the compression that a single word implies.
It is not a record, which is passive and retrievable. It is not a representation, which stands for something external. A trace is active. It shapes what comes next from within the structure that carries it. What it lacks is existential continuity, the grounding in a self that lives it forward as a living entity would.
This is not a dismissal of what embodied AI is doing. It is an attempt to describe it better. What these developments may be teaching us is that the word “knowledge” contains at least three things we had not clearly separated: acquiring adaptive competence, incorporating that competence into a continuous self, and grounding both in a self-producing entity that maintains its own existence. Embodied AI can approximate the first, cannot achieve the second, and structurally cannot reach the third. This is not because of a technical limitation, but because no amount of architectural sophistication generates a self that lives its past forward, produces its own boundary, or maintains its own existence from within.
The distinction is about what these processes are, not about their value. The argument is not that operational traces are inferior. It is that they are different in a way the word “knowledge” obscures. Keeping that distinction clear is what allows the question to remain open.
Simply put, the accumulation of data without the accumulation of scars is not knowledge. The word “scars” is rhetorical, not precise. It points toward what the argument has been building throughout. Knowledge involves a self that has been genuinely marked by its encounters.
Finding the right word is not a terminological exercise. It is a way of keeping the question honest.
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
Notes:
The ideas discussed here will form part of the second edition of my book, Second Order Cybernetics. The second edition will include a first half where I go into the introduction of cybernetics and related ideas. The post is slightly longer than usual because of that.
In referencing the work of Martin Heidegger, I want to acknowledge the deeply troubling fact of his affiliation with the Nazi party. This aspect of his life casts a long and painful shadow over his legacy. While I draw on specific philosophical ideas that I find thought-provoking or useful, this is not an endorsement of the man or his actions. Engaging with his work requires ethical vigilance, and I remain mindful of the responsibility to not separate ideas from the broader context in which they were formed.
