Category Archives: Philosophy

Throwing the Fish Back into the Water:

In today’s post, I am refining my thoughts on reentry as a wonderful tool to tackle cognitive blind spots. A common saying goes that a fish does not know it is in water. The phrase is usually offered as a comment on unexamined assumptions. The fish is fully immersed in a medium that makes its life possible, and yet that very immersion renders the medium invisible. We the observers, standing outside the water, can easily point to what the fish cannot see.

The metaphor is useful, but only if we do not misunderstand what it implies. The problem is not ignorance in the sense of missing information. The problem is immersion, being inside the loop and not being aware of it. In other words, I am positing that cognitive blind spots arise not because we lack data, but because we fail to notice the conditions under which noticing itself takes place. We assume that observation is independent of the observer, and in doing so, we negate the very act that makes observation possible.

This negation is not accidental. It is built into many of our conceptual frameworks.

Cognitive Blind Spots and the Negated Observer:

In this view, a cognitive blind spot appears when a distinction is treated as if it exists independently of the act that produced it. We speak as though there is an object “out there” and an observer “in here,” and as though the observer merely reports what is already the case. This framing quietly removes the observer from the scene by denying that the act of description must re-enter the conditions it describes.

Once the observer is negated, the distinction hardens and begins to appear as a feature of the world itself. What began as a practical cut in experience is mistaken for something given rather than constructed. At that point, the blind spot is complete. There is nothing left to question because the conditions of questioning have disappeared.

This is precisely where re-entry becomes relevant.

Re-entry as a Mechanism for Error-correction:

Spencer-Brown’s notion of re-entry does not simply add complexity for its own sake. It forces a distinction to turn back upon itself. A form re-enters the space it distinguishes. The marked state is no longer allowed to pretend that the unmarked state is irrelevant or absent. Reentry is an attempt to bring the act of distinction itself into view.

Re-entry is uncomfortable because it breaks the illusion of a clean separation. It exposes the fact that every distinction carries its own conditions inside it. What we thought was a stable category now reveals its dependence on an operation. This is why re-entry is such a powerful tool for revealing cognitive blind spots. It does not offer a better description of the world. It shows how our descriptions are made, and what they quietly exclude in order to function. Once this lens is applied, certain familiar structures begin to look less secure.

The Subject/Object Split and Being in the Water:

The subject/object dichotomy is one such structure that we can use to expand on this line of thinking. It assumes that there is a knowing subject on one side and a known object on the other, connected by representation. From a Heideggerian perspective, this is already a distortion. We are not subjects standing over against a world of objects. We are always already being in the world.

The fish is not first a subject and then later related to water as an object. Fish and water show up together. The relation is not secondary. It is constitutive. Remove the water and the fish does not remain as a fish that merely lacks an environment. It ceases to be what it is.

Re-entry makes this visible. When the observing system is reintroduced into the observation, the subject object split begins to collapse. What remains is participation, involvement, and structural coupling. Observation is no longer a neutral act. It is an activity performed from within the medium it seeks to describe. We will use this line of thinking to examine another familiar idea in philosophy from Charles S. Peirce.

The Triad and the Problem of Firstness:

Peirce’s triad of firstness, secondness, and thirdness is frequently described as dynamic and non-linear. However, when examined through the logic of distinction and re-entry, the triad reveals a fundamental instability. That instability is most clearly exposed in the notion of firstness.

Consider a simple example: a red apple. Its redness is firstness, the immediate quality that appears without reference or comparison. The apple itself, as a physical object that resists gravity and interacts with us, illustrates secondness. The recognition that the apple is a fruit, part of a category, and meaningful within a broader system of relations exemplifies thirdness. Even here, we see the dependence of firstness on context; its pure quality only becomes intelligible through interaction and relation.

Firstness is described as pure quality, pure possibility, or pure feeling, intended to stand prior to relation, reaction, or mediation. What follows from this is not only an empirical difficulty but also a logical one.

From a Spencer-Brown standpoint, nothing can appear without a distinction. A distinction simultaneously produces a marked state and an unmarked state. There is no marked state by itself, just as there is no distinction that does not also imply what it excludes. When one speaks of “good,” the notion of “not good” is already present as its context. “Good” by itself has no meaning. Even our most absolute categories depend on what they deny, as the invention of God quietly presupposes the invention of Evil.

If firstness is spoken of at all, it has already been marked. The moment one says “firstness,” one has drawn a boundary around something and set it apart from what it is not. That act already presupposes contrast. It already invokes relation. It already smuggles in what Peirce would later call secondness and thirdness. The triad never leaves the water it claims to describe.

If there is no distinction, there is no information. Without contrast, there is nothing to register. Pure undifferentiated “information” is not information. It does not inform. It does not appear. It does not function. In that sense, pure firstness is not just unreachable in practice, it becomes incoherent in principle.

The problem is not one of interpretation but of structure. The triad depends on a move that collapses under re-entry. Firstness cannot exist in isolation, yet the triad requires it to.

Re-entry Exposes the Blind Spot:

Here is where the cognitive blind spot becomes “visible”. The triad purports to articulate the conditions of experience while remaining blind to the operation that makes them appear. Firstness is treated as if it could exist prior to distinction, while the very articulation of firstness performs the distinction it denies.

Re-entry forces the concept to confront its own conditions. When firstness re-enters the space of its own description, it collapses into relation. It cannot remain alone. It cannot stay pure. It cannot avoid invoking what it claims to precede.

In this sense, the triad is flatter than it appears. Not because it lacks movement, but because its movement never quite escapes the logic of classification. Re-entry reveals that the flow Peirce gestures toward is already constrained by the need to name and separate what is being described.

Final Words:

The point of this critique is not to replace one framework with another. It is to show how certain blind spots persist even in sophisticated theories. When distinctions are treated as if they precede the act of distinction, the observer disappears. When the observer disappears, responsibility disappears with it.

Re-entry restores that responsibility. It reminds us that our concepts are not mirrors of reality, but tools we use from within the world we inhabit. Like the fish in water, we do not escape the medium by describing it. We only learn to see it by noticing how our seeing works. That seems to be the deeper utility of re-entry. The goal is not to produce better categories, but to cultivate a deeper awareness of how categories emerge. It is not purity, but participation. It is not firstness untouched by relation, but the recognition that relation is always already present. Seeing the water does not mean leaving it. It means acknowledging that one was never outside it to begin with.

Stay curious and Always keep on learning…

Post script:

Further clarification on the following statement – Re-entry reveals that the flow Peirce gestures toward is already constrained by the need to name and separate what is being described.

Peirce presents the triad as something dynamic and flowing rather than static. Firstness flows into secondness, secondness into thirdness, and so on. However, when you apply re-entry, you see that this apparent flow is already limited by the act of naming the categories in the first place. The moment you say “firstness,” “secondness,” and “thirdness,” you have already separated what you claim is flowing. The movement is therefore happening inside a framework that has already been cut up by distinctions.

So the “flow” Peirce gestures toward is not free movement within experience itself. It is movement between pre-named compartments. Re-entry exposes that the triad cannot escape the logic of distinction because it depends on that logic to exist at all.

In other words, the triad looks process-oriented, but it still operates as a classificatory scheme. The flow is real only insofar as the categories have already been stabilized by naming and separation. That is the constraint.

On Self-Deception in Systems Thinking: A Kierkegaardian Mirror

AI Generated

In today’s post I want to spend time with Søren Kierkegaard. I have been interested in his ideas because he occupies an unusual place in the history of thought. He is considered a pioneer of existentialism, and yet he is also a man of faith. Most of the existentialist thinkers who followed him, including Sartre, built their philosophies around radical freedom and human responsibility without any reference to faith at all. Kierkegaard stands in the middle of this tension. He writes from a position of uncertainty and responsibility, but he also lets faith shape his understanding of what it means to be human. This combination gives his work a kind of depth that is difficult to classify. It also gives us a set of ideas that speak directly to the act of thinking, especially when we try to think in ‘systems’.

Thinking in ‘systems’ is often presented as an attempt to arrange the world into a coherent whole. We are encouraged to draw maps, diagrams, and loops that claim to show how everything is connected. These maps have their value, but they also create the illusion that understanding is a matter of fitting pieces together. They invite us to believe that if we only had the right model, the right picture, or the right mission statement, then clarity would follow. But the thinking domain is not the physical domain. Thoughts are not puzzle pieces, and ideas do not snap together neatly. There is no final picture on the box to guide. There is only the ongoing work of trying to understand a world that will not hold still long enough to be captured by a diagram.

Kierkegaard seems to have understood this difficulty quite well. He believed that the greatest danger in human life is self-deception. We long for the comfort of clarity, so we often rush to declare purposes and principles. For Kierkegaard, becoming a self is not a matter of adopting a slogan. It is a lifelong task shaped by inwardness, responsibility, and the willingness to face ambiguity without trying to escape it. Our authenticity comes from this attempt. This is why he would be deeply suspicious of systems that claim to explain everything. For him such ‘systems’ flatten the complexity of human experience. They offer a kind of intellectual reassurance, but they do not help us live.

One of Kierkegaard’s most striking ideas is that life can be understood only by looking backward, but it must be lived forward. Understanding in this regard is a retrospective act. It is something we do when we look back and discover patterns in what has already happened. But living is always forward. It takes place in a stream of uncertainty, where choices must be made without guarantees and where the meaning of those choices often remains unclear until much later. This observation challenges the entire idea of systemic coherence. Systems maps work backward. They create a picture of causality after the fact. They explain what has been, but they do not show us how to live into what is unfolding. They provide a sense of structure, but this structure is largely retrospective.

This backward–forward tension reveals why the search for a perfectly coherent system is misguided. Human life does not unfold according to a diagram. Thinking does not progress by assembling pieces into a single whole. We understand our experiences only after we have lived through them. The clarity we draw from models and mission statements can therefore be misleading. It can be useful as a reflection, but it should not substitute for the lived experience of confronting ambiguity in the moment. Kierkegaard’s insight makes the entire project of declaring a mission or a golden why feel somewhat naive. These declarations claim to give direction, but direction is not something that can simply be proclaimed. Direction must be discovered through the way we participate in the world.

Another of Kierkegaard’s central ideas is that truth becomes meaningful only when it is appropriated inwardly. Truth is not something imposed from above. It must be taken up, lived, wrestled with, and made one’s own. A beautifully crafted mission statement does not create meaning. A polished systems map does not create understanding. These are only starting points. Understanding arises only when individuals confront their own limitations, their own anxieties, and the tensions that shape their experiences. For Kierkegaard, this inward appropriation is the essence of responsible living. It is also the key to responsible thinking.

Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety deepens this idea. Anxiety is not simply fear. It is the feeling that arises when one realizes one must freely choose. It is the dizziness of possibility. In the context of thinking, anxiety shows up when we face the limits of our understanding, when we recognize that we must choose what matters, and when we realize that there is no system neat enough to relieve us of that responsibility. Many organizational declarations are attempts to soothe this anxiety. They create a picture of direction that allows people to avoid the discomfort of thinking for themselves. But Kierkegaard would say that this discomfort is precisely where thinking begins.

This gives us a different language for cognitive blindness. Blindness is not only a matter of not seeing. It is often a refusal to see, a retreat into the comfort of prefabricated clarity. Thinking asks us to approach our blindness with curiosity rather than defensiveness. It invites us to engage with the friction that reveals what we had overlooked. Systems thinking, when practiced responsibly, is not about drawing neat maps. It is about cultivating the openness required to encounter what does not fit and the humility to revise our sense of the world when confronted with surprise.

Final words:

In the end, Kierkegaard helps us see that thinking is not the work of fitting pieces together. It is the work of becoming a self, which requires inwardness, responsibility, and the willingness to live with ambiguity. He reminds us that life unfolds forward while understanding works backward. This simple observation exposes the limitations of any attempt to impose a coherent system on a world that is always in motion. Mission statements and golden whys can be helpful beginnings, but they often promise clarity without cultivating the character and perception that make clarity meaningful.

The point is not to reject purpose or systemic awareness. It is to hold our purposes lightly, to allow our thinking to be shaped by our experiences, and to accept that ambiguity is not a failure of insight but a condition of life. Systems thinking, when grounded in Kierkegaard’s lessons, becomes a stance rather than a diagram. It becomes a way of approaching the world with patience, honesty, and a readiness to see differently. This path is demanding, but it is also the one that keeps us awake to the depth and complexity of being human.

Stay curious and Always keep on learning…

On Diversity as a Cybernetic Necessity:

AI Generated

In today’s post, I want to explore an idea that often gets framed in moral terms but is actually a cybernetic imperative: the necessity of diversity for viable systems. Whether we are talking about societies, organizations, or even artificial intelligence systems, the principle remains consistent. A system that suppresses differences suppresses the very disturbances that give it life.

This insight comes from cybernetics, and it helps us understand why diversity matters beyond moral arguments.

The Cybernetic Case for Diversity:

A society’s resilience and therefore viability emerges more from difference than agreement. When I think about what makes communities sustainable over time, I keep returning to this basic insight from cybernetics: without variation, a system cannot absorb disturbance. This is of course a simpler rephrasing of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. Without challenge, a system cannot correct itself. Without friction, a system cannot renew its distinctions.

This becomes clearer when we think about information, distinction, and correction. Every observer draws distinctions. Every distinction creates a horizon of what can be noticed next. Every act of understanding sets the conditions for future understanding. For this reason, no observer, no community, and no language can remain viable without exposure to other perspectives. A view from nowhere is an impossibility.

Difference is not an obstacle to communication. Difference is what makes communication meaningful. As Gregory Bateson described it, information is the difference that makes the difference.

A community that supports only one way of thinking, one way of speaking, or one way of being slowly loses the very conditions that allow it to remain viable. When everyone thinks alike, quality begins to decay. Ideas become smoother but thinner. Creativity does not disappear because people stop trying. Creativity disappears because nothing pushes back. Nothing resists. Nothing surprises.

I have written before about von Foerster’s ethical imperative to increase the number of choices. Here, I want to extend that thinking to show why diversity itself is a condition for viability, not merely a moral preference.

The Negotiable Space:

A society with many ways of speaking has many ways of seeing. It has many ways to reframe a problem, many ways to interpret events, many ways to challenge assumptions, and many ways to correct errors. It is able to sustain what I call a “negotiable space” in which ideas can be contested, sharpened, and sometimes abandoned.

This continual negotiation is what keeps concepts alive. It is what makes meaning robust. It is what makes a collective capable of navigating uncertainty.

The negotiable space is the environment in which language, ideas, and understanding evolve and error correction happens. It is created not by agreement but by the friction of difference. Human cognition is not viable in isolation. It is viable only when embedded in a world where every utterance is exposed to other minds – resisted, questioned, corrected, or refined.

I see this friction as the medium of viability. When someone challenges your idea, asks for clarification, or pushes back against an assertion, they are not merely disagreeing. They are sustaining the recursive loop that keeps understanding alive. Without friction, distinctions decay. Without challenge, knowledge becomes brittle.

A word is never alone. It survives only through the continual friction of conversation. It carries a lineage of previous uses and a horizon of possible future uses. It remains viable only because a social world holds it accountable.

When Homogeneity Replaces Diversity:

When we reduce the diversity of perspectives, the negotiable space begins to shrink and close. Without enough difference, language becomes flatter. Categories become rigid. Distinctions become dull. Error correction becomes weak. The collective loses the source of renewal that once made it resilient.

Attempts to homogenize societies have produced similar outcomes throughout history. They create environments that look orderly from the outside but are fragile from the inside. Homogeneity amplifies the illusion of stability while stripping away the mechanisms that produce actual stability. A system without variation becomes a system without resilience. It stops promoting learning and staying curious. It stops promoting error correction. Eventually it stops being able to sustain itself at all.

We see this pattern repeat across contexts. A social world in which every voice echoes the same pattern begins to collapse inward. Its range of distinctions shrinks. Its ability to adapt weakens. Its capacity to navigate uncertainty fades.

Recursion Requires Disturbance:

In cybernetics, stability is not the absence of disturbance. Stability is the capacity to absorb disturbance without collapse. This requires variation. It requires the presence of alternatives. It requires a dynamic interplay of perspectives.

A system that eliminates disturbance does not become more stable. It becomes brittle. Without contradiction, the recursive loop of understanding begins to stagnate. Without challenge, the distinctions that support cognition degrade. Without tension, the structures that produce meaning weaken.

Human cognition remains viable because its recursion is continually informed by a social world rich in disagreement. An individual does not refine understanding alone. Understanding is sharpened by exposure to other interpretations. These interpretations emerge from diverse backgrounds, diverse experiences, and diverse cognitive histories.

I want to now take this train of thought to Large Language Models.

The Case of Large Language Models:

Large language models are often described as systems that learn from vast amounts of data. But what they learn is not raw experience. They learn from the residue of human meaning-making. They learn from language that has already passed through the recursive loops of human correction. They inherit the stability produced by these loops, but they do not participate in the loops themselves.

At least, not in the same way.

An artificial intelligence does not inhabit a social world where its utterances are corrected by others. It does not participate in the negotiable space through which language evolves. It does not receive feedback proportional to the scale of its output. It does not face the resistances that keep human cognition aligned with the world. This is an important distinction that leads to interesting outcomes.

A human remains viable because every use of language is exposed to correction. An AI remains unchallenged because its output overwhelms the capacity for correction to flow back.

The Collapse of the Negotiable Space:

A living language depends on a balance between output and correction. Human linguistic communities have historically generated meaning at a rate the community can digest. New terms emerge. Old terms fade. Misunderstandings provoke clarification. Disagreements produce refinement.

This equilibrium gets disrupted. The scale of machine-generated text has exceeded the capacity of human communities to critique it. The negotiable space, the space where meaning is contested and corrected, is now flooded. Variations in meaning that once signaled novelty are now drowned in statistical smoothness. The framework receives too much of its own output and too little balanced resistance.

A framework that receives little correction cannot maintain the integrity of its distinctions. It will start to drift. It will begin to feed on its own unchallenged productions. The range of distinctions therefore shrinks. The recursive loop that once sharpened meaning begins to flatten it.

At first the effects are subtle. Over time, the trajectory becomes clearer. A structure that cannot renew itself through grounded critique will drift toward diminishing returns. More scale will not resolve this. Faster generation will only accelerate the loss of the very conditions that once made the system appear intelligent.

Here, we see what I call the amplification of constraints in action: the model grows in output yet declines in viability. It is simultaneously expansive and fragile.

The Coming Burst:

All this seems to indicate that the AI bubble may burst in the near future. The ability of LLMs to be trained fast and to generate fast may become their downfall. Paradoxically, the better the large language model becomes, the faster this downfall may approach. Each improvement accelerates the collapse of the negotiable space. Each refinement increases the volume of uncorrected output flowing back into the system. Each new iteration tightens the closure that limits its future.

This is also a cautionary insight for societies that reject diversity and embrace homogeneity. Any system that narrows its space of variation, whether a community or a computational model, risks collapsing under the weight of its own uniformity.

The burst may come not because the models are weak, but because they are strong in the wrong direction. They refine themselves into a narrowing corridor. They amplify a recursion that cannot sustain itself. They accelerate toward diminishing returns.

The Lesson for ‘Systems’ Design:

Human cognition has survived because it is recursive from the inside and is in a social realm. Artificial intelligence’s recursion is lifeless. This difference matters. A system that does not participate in the social negotiation that gives words their life cannot maintain the vitality of its distinctions. It cannot renew its closure through lived coordination with others. It can only repeat the patterns it has been given.

Large language models may not become artificial general intelligence by accelerating the very process that undermines their viability. They are not suited to replace the human capacity for negotiated meaning-making. Their true value lies in augmentation, not imitation. They support human thought. They do not replace the recursive, socially grounded, diversity-dependent mechanisms that make human thought viable.

Every viable system must remain open to disturbance. The observer must remain open to being surprised. The language community must remain open to contradiction. A system that avoids disturbance does not stabilize, it stagnates.

Final Words:

The warning is clear for both machines and societies: maintain openness, embrace difference, and preserve the friction that keeps life viable.

A system without diversity collapses.

A recursion without resistance decays.

A language without a negotiable space drifts into incoherence.

This is not merely about being open-minded or tolerant. It is about understanding the conditions that allow any system (biological, social, or computational) to remain viable over time. Diversity is a cybernetic requirement. Without it, we lose the capacity to correct ourselves, to adapt, and ultimately, to survive.

Always keep learning…

Wittgenstein’s Ladder in Complexity: Why We Need Tools We Must Abandon

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them as steps to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractus Logico-Philosophicus

In my recent post on the two dogmas of complexity science, I talked about ontological complexity realism and epistemological representationalism. These are the beliefs that complexity exists ‘out there’ to be measured and that our task is to create neutral representations of it. Today, I want to explore why these dogmas persist and why overcoming them requires something that seems paradoxical. We need conceptual tools that we must eventually abandon.

This is where Wittgenstein’s ladder becomes particularly relevant for complexity work. When reentry per Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form is needed to achieve second-order understanding, the ladder offers a path through what might otherwise be an intractable problem.

The Reentry Problem in Complexity:
When talking about complexity, we often overlook the point that the observer cannot be separated from what they observe. Every attempt to map or measure complexity changes the observer-system relationship, which changes the ‘complexity’ itself. This creates what George Spencer-Brown called reentry: when a distinction folds back on itself.

Consider the Ashby Space framework I critiqued earlier. The moment we try to plot an organization on its coordinates, we encounter reentry. Who determines where the organization sits on the ‘variety of stimuli’ axis? The organization itself, through its own distinction-making processes. What counts as ‘variety of responses’? Again, this depends entirely on the distinctions the observer can make about meaningful action.

The framework cannot escape this recursion. It treats as measurable quantities what are actually dynamic processes of distinction-making between observer and observed. This recursion is not a bug to be fixed but a feature of complexity itself.

As I explored in my post on the form of decency, reentry reveals contradictions in systems that try to maintain rigid boundaries. When xenophobic ideologies apply their own criteria to themselves, when the form folds back, they collapse under their internal logic. The same dynamic occurs when complexity frameworks attempt to map the very processes of distinction-making that generate complexity.

Why Reentry Creates a Need for Ladders:
If our tools for understanding complexity are themselves subject to reentry effects, how do we develop more sophisticated ways of thinking about complex systems? We cannot simply abandon all conceptual tools, yet we cannot treat them as neutral representations either.

This is where we need to recognize a crucial distinction about when ladder consciousness becomes necessary. When we engage with situations in ways that generate significant recursive coupling between observer and observed (when our distinction-making substantially shapes what we are trying to understand, when our interventions change the system which changes us which changes our interventions), then treating our models as stable representations becomes counterproductive.

Consider the difference between using a roadmap to navigate familiar streets versus using a systems model to understand organizational dynamics. The roadmap engages with relatively stable relationships such as the streets that rarely change position because we are looking at the map. But organizational systems modeling involves high degrees of recursive coupling. The very process of creating models changes how participants see their organization, which changes how they behave, which changes the organizational dynamics, which requires updating the models.

When we are complexifying our relationship with a situation through high degrees of recursive engagement, our models must become ladders. They cannot remain permanent reference tools because both we and the situation are co-evolving through the modeling process itself.

This is where Wittgenstein’s ladder becomes relevant. The ladder offers a way to use conceptual tools while remaining aware of their provisional nature. We need frameworks to help us think about complexity, but we also need mechanisms for transcending the limitations of those same frameworks.

The ladder works through what might seem like a contradiction: we use conceptual distinctions to develop awareness of the limitations of conceptual distinctions. We employ frameworks like Ashby Space not because they represent reality accurately, but because they can help us recognize how our own distinction-making processes shape what appears as ‘complex’.

This creates what Heinz von Foerster called second-order cybernetics, observing observation. First-order thinking assumes we can step outside the system and create objective maps. Second-order thinking recognizes that we are always already participants in the systems we are trying to understand.

The Ladder in Practice: From Tools to Meta-Awareness:
Consider how this works in organizational consulting. When we facilitate a systems mapping exercise, we might begin by treating the resulting diagram as if it represents the ‘real’ organizational structure. This first-order approach focuses on improving the accuracy of the map.

But when we are engaged in recursive coupling with the organization (when the mapping process itself changes how participants understand and enact their organizational reality), ladder consciousness suggests a different approach. The map becomes valuable not when it accurately represents the organization, but when the mapping process helps participants recognize how their own distinction-making participates in creating organizational dynamics. We use the tool to develop meta-awareness of how we collectively complexify organizational life.

This shift points to the very needed meta-awareness. Instead of asking ‘Is our systems map accurate?’ we ask ‘How does the process of creating this map reveal and reshape our current ways of making distinctions about organizational life?’ The tool serves its purpose when it points beyond itself toward the processes that we participate in creating organizational reality, then becomes disposable once we have developed more direct awareness of our participation.

This principle applies across complexity frameworks. When we use any analytical tool, ladder consciousness means recognizing that we are not discovering objective properties but enacting particular ways of making sense that bring certain possibilities into view while obscuring others. The framework becomes useful when we can use it to examine our own sense-making, then let it go.

Beyond Tools: What Emerges After the Ladder:
This raises an important question. What happens after we kick away the ladder? What replaces our conceptual tools once we have transcended their limitations?

The answer is not the absence of structure but a different relationship to structure. After using and abandoning frameworks, what can emerge is what John Dewey called ‘inquiry’, a more fluid, responsive way of engaging with situations that draws on conceptual resources without being constrained by them.

Dewey’s conception of inquiry is particularly relevant here because it transcends the subject-object dualism that creates many of our analytical problems. Instead of treating thinking as something that happens inside our heads while we observe an external world, Dewey understood inquiry as a transactional process between organism and environment. The inquirer and the situation inquired into are parts of a single unfolding transaction.

This means inquiry is not about representing a pre-existing reality but about transforming problematic situations into more settled ones. When we encounter what we call a ‘complex situation’, inquiry suggests we are not discovering complexity ‘out there’ but participating in an ongoing transaction that we might call ‘complexifying’. The situation becomes complex through our engagement with it, just as we become complex through our engagement with the situation.

For Dewey, genuine inquiry involves what he called ‘learning by doing’ coupled with reflection on that doing. We act, observe the consequences, and adjust our future actions based on what we learn. This creates a recursive cycle where our understanding evolves through engagement rather than through detached observation. The goal is not to achieve final truth but to develop more intelligent ways of acting within ongoing situations.

This approach naturally incorporates ladder consciousness. We use conceptual tools as hypotheses for action rather than as final descriptions of reality. We test these tools against their consequences in lived experience, keeping those that prove helpful and abandoning those that constrain effective action. The tools serve inquiry rather than replacing it.

This post-ladder engagement is characterized by several qualities. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list by any means. Just like the ladder, this should serve as an intuition pump.

• Responsiveness over methodology: Instead of applying predetermined frameworks, we develop sensitivity to what each situation calls for. We maintain access to various conceptual tools while remaining free to abandon them when they no longer serve.
• Process awareness: We become more conscious of how our own sense-making participates in creating the realities we encounter. This is not relativism but what Donna Haraway called ‘situated knowledge’: knowledge that acknowledges its own positioning.
• Provisional commitment: We can act decisively based on our current understanding while remaining open to revision. This allows for second order approach to wisdom, intuitive knowledge of the limits of knowledge.

The Ethics of Temporary Tools:
There is an ethical dimension to ladder consciousness that connects to my earlier post on reentry and xenophobia. When we hold our conceptual tools too tightly, we risk treating our provisional distinctions as absolute truths, our temporary boundaries as permanent walls. This is one of the main reasons why we must discard the ladder rather than hold onto it.

The ladder teaches a different relationship to our beliefs and frameworks, firm enough to guide action, light enough to avoid becoming weapons. This balance is crucial and deserves deeper exploration.

What does it mean to hold beliefs firmly enough to guide action? It means we must be able to act decisively based on our current understanding, even while acknowledging that understanding is provisional. Without some degree of commitment to our frameworks, we become paralyzed by infinite doubt. We need enough conviction to move forward, to make choices, to take responsibility for our actions.

But what does it mean to hold these same beliefs lightly enough to avoid weaponizing them? It means maintaining what Keats called ‘negative capability’. This is the ability to remain in uncertainty and doubt without irritably reaching after fact and reason. It means recognizing that our strongest convictions might be wrong, our clearest insights might be partial, our most cherished frameworks might be limiting us in ways we cannot yet see.

This creates a paradoxical situation that the ladder helps us navigate. We must act as if our current understanding is enough to work with, while remaining open to its revision. We must commit without clinging. We must form strong opinions, but hold them lightly.

This becomes particularly crucial when working with others who hold different frameworks. Instead of engaging in battles over whose map is more accurate, ladder consciousness invites us to explore how different ways of making sense might serve different purposes. It asks us to treat our frameworks as offerings to collective inquiry rather than as territories to defend.

The ethical imperative here connects to von Foerster’s principle: ‘Act always so as to increase the number of choices’. When we hold our tools lightly, we create space for others to contribute their own sense-making resources. When we avoid weaponizing our frameworks, we keep possibilities open rather than shutting them down.

Our role becomes less about providing definitive maps and more about helping develop capacities for making better distinctions in the face of uncertainty. This suggests designing interventions that increase what von Foerster called ‘the number of choices’ rather than narrowing them down to predetermined solutions.

Climbing Toward Participatory Knowing:
This brings us back to my critique of complexity science’s foundational dogmas, but with an additional insight that shifts how we use language itself. We typically use complexity as a noun (‘this system has complexity’) or an adjective (‘this is a complex situation’). But it may be time to recognize complexity as a verb, something we do rather than something we encounter.

When we complexify a situation, we are not discovering pre-existing complexity but participating in an ongoing process of distinction-making and sense-making that brings complexity into being. The situation becomes complex through our engagement with it, just as we become complex through our engagement with the situation. Complexity emerges from what I have called epistemic coupling: the recursive interaction between knowing systems and their environments.

This verb-oriented understanding aligns with Dewey’s transactional thinking and Spencer-Brown’s emphasis on the observer’s role in creating distinctions. It suggests that when we say a situation is ‘complex’, we might more accurately say we are ‘complexifying’ our relationship with that situation through the particular ways we choose to engage with it.

This reframing has practical implications. Instead of asking ‘How can we manage this complex system?’ we might ask ‘How are we complexifying this situation, and how might we complexify it differently?’ Instead of treating complexity as a problem to be solved, we recognize complexifying as an ongoing process we participate in creating.

This perspective naturally leads to ladder consciousness. If complexity emerges from observer-system interactions, then studying complexity must include studying how we study. We cannot step outside the epistemic coupling that generates complexity in the first place.

The ladder provides a way to work with this recursion constructively. It allows us to use conceptual tools to bootstrap ourselves into meta-cognitive awareness, then abandon those tools once they have served their purpose of revealing our own participation in constructing what we take to be reality.

Final Words:
Wittgenstein’s ladder offers more than a philosophical metaphor for complexity work. It suggests a practical approach to navigating situations where traditional analytical tools reach their limits. In a world facing unprecedented challenges that resist conventional problem-solving approaches, we may need frameworks that can help us think more clearly while remaining open to possibilities we cannot yet imagine.

The ladder teaches us that sometimes the most sophisticated response to complexity is paradoxical, using our best analytical tools while remaining prepared to abandon them in favor of more direct engagement with emerging situations. Sometimes deeper understanding comes not from having better maps, but from developing better capacities for navigation in unmapped territory.

This suggests a form of wisdom that seems well-suited to our current historical moment: recursive and reflective, provisional and purposeful. Each of these qualities that represent a cybernetic Constructivist approach deserves elaboration.

Recursive wisdom acknowledges that we are always inside the systems we are trying to understand. It recognizes that our attempts to make sense of complexity are themselves part of the complexity we are trying to navigate. This leads to what we might call ‘meta-learning’: learning about how we learn, thinking about how we think. Recursive wisdom asks us to include ourselves in our analyses, to observe our own observing.

Reflective wisdom suggests that effective action in complex situations requires ongoing consideration of our own assumptions, biases, and blind spots. But this is not the paralysis of infinite self-doubt. Rather, it is the cultivation of the ability to think about what we are doing while we are doing it, to adjust our approach based on emerging feedback from the situation itself.

Provisional wisdom means holding our current understanding as our best guess given available information, while remaining genuinely open to revision. It means acting with conviction while maintaining epistemic humility. This is what we can call as ‘fallibilism’, the recognition that any particular perspective, no matter how well-supported, might be incomplete or mistaken.

Purposeful wisdom suggests that this openness to revision is not aimless but directed toward some vision of beneficial outcomes. It means using our provisional understanding to work toward flourishing, justice, and expanded possibilities for all participants in the situation. Purposeful wisdom asks us to take responsibility for the worlds our actions help create.

Together, these aspects suggest an approach to complexity that is both humble and decisive, both open and committed. It invites us to use our best tools while holding them lightly, to think systematically while remaining open to surprise, to act decisively while staying curious about the consequences of our actions.

Perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that we are not outside observers of complex systems but participants within them. The ladder helps us climb to a perspective from which we can see this participation more clearly. And then, if we choose wisely, we can kick it away and engage more consciously with the complexity we help create.

Stay curious and Always keep on learning…

The Arbitrariness of Objectivism:

The readers of my blog might be aware that I appreciate the nuances of cybernetic constructivism. Cybernetic constructivism rejects the idea that we have access to an objective reality. It does not deny that there is an external reality independent of an observer. However, we do not have direct access to it. Additionally, the external world is more complex than us. As part of staying viable, we construct a version of reality that is unique to our interpretative framework. This takes place in a social realm, and error corrections happen because the construction occurs in the social realm.

Heinz von Foerster, the Socrates of Cybernetics, formulated two imperatives that provide insight into this framework. The first is the ethical imperative that states “act so as to increase the number of choices.” The second is the aesthetical imperative that states “if you desire to see, learn how to act.” I welcome the reader to check out previous posts on these concepts. This worldview supports pluralism, the idea that there can be multiple valid versions of reality. This emerges primarily because the external world being more complex than our cognitive apparatus, we maintain viability by constructing particular versions of reality rather than accessing reality directly.

Common Mischaracterizations:

A primary criticism I encounter involves misrepresenting this worldview as relativism or solipsism. Critics suggest that acknowledging multiple perspectives means that anything goes, or that nothing is shared between observers. This represents a caricature rather than a substantive critique.

Precision is necessary here. Some forms of relativism claim that all views are equally valid, including contradictory ones. In that model, if claim A asserts “only A is valid,” then relativism must also treat that assertion as valid. It has no mechanism for comparison or critique. The result is a flattening of all claims into mere equivalence, where strength, coherence, or context carry no weight.

Solipsism advances an even more extreme position. It claims that only one’s own mind is knowable, denying shared reality altogether. It discards the very possibility of meaningful intersubjectivity. No systems thinker, and certainly no pluralist, takes this position seriously.

Pluralism as a Distinct Position:

Pluralism is neither relativism nor solipsism. It does not claim all views are valid. Rather, it asserts that no view is valid by default. Pluralism insists that perspectives must be made visible, situated in context, and evaluated through dialogue. It resists automatic authority, including authority derived from its own assertions.

Consider what objectivism accomplishes by contrast. It selects a single claim and declares that only this claim is valid while all others are not. But on what basis does it make this selection? Often, no external justification is offered. The grounding remains internal, context-bound, or inherited, yet it is presented as if it were neutral, universal, and self-evident.

This selection process reveals a potential arbitrariness of objectivist claims. The view appears arbitrary because its assumptions may remain hidden from examination. Without transparent justification for why one view should be privileged, objectivism risks the appearance of arbitrariness. What presents itself as necessity may simply be preference in disguise. From a pluralist standpoint, this represents concealment rather than clarity.

The Paradox of Objectivist Authority:

Paradoxically, this form of objectivism begins to mirror the very relativism it claims to oppose. Relativism declares that all claims are valid, including any particular claim A. Objectivism declares that only claim A is valid while offering no method to interrogate why this should be so. Each approach shuts down evaluation through different mechanisms. Relativism dissolves differences into sameness. Objectivism excludes all but one view from consideration at the outset.

This dynamic reveal what objectivism risks becoming, not solipsism in the strict philosophical sense, but functional solipsism. When a worldview refuses to acknowledge its own perspective and denies legitimacy to all others, it ceases to see the world. It sees only itself, reflected and reinforced. This represents the erasure of other ways of seeing under the illusion that one’s own interpretative lens is the world itself.

The Hidden Nature of Objectivist Claims:

The danger of objectivism lies in its method: selecting a single view, designating it as truth, and treating alternatives as error, noise, or confusion. It dresses up a personal, historical, and situated position as universal and eternal. This approach is not more objective than pluralism. It is simply better concealed.

Frameworks that prioritize ontology over epistemology tend to overlook the epistemic humility that characterizes pluralism. When we claim to know what reality is before examining how we come to know it, we bypass the very process of inquiry that might reveal the limitations and situatedness of our perspective. This ontological presumption becomes particularly problematic when it denies its own epistemological foundations.

Pluralism does not collapse into solipsism. Objectivism risks this collapse precisely when it denies that it operates from a particular perspective. The refusal to acknowledge one’s interpretative framework does not eliminate that framework. It merely renders it invisible to examination.

Pluralism is not weakness, indecision, or relativistic drift. It represents a disciplined humility and a refusal to collapse complexity into certainty prematurely. It does not reject standards but demands that they be made visible, questioned, and held accountable to the context in which they arise.

Pluralism increases the space for dialogue, choice, and possibility. It reminds us that what we do not question becomes invisible, not because it is true, but because it hides within the taken-for-granted assumptions of our frameworks.

In a world increasingly polarized between loud certainties and quiet disillusionment, pluralism offers something increasingly rare: the courage to remain open, to ask how we know what we claim to know, and to stay in conversation with perspectives we might otherwise reject.

Final Words:

Not everything is permissible under pluralism. But no single view should escape questioning. The cybernetic constructivist position maintains that our constructions of reality emerge from our particular biological, cognitive, and social constraints. These constructions prove viable not because they correspond to an objective reality we cannot access, but because they enable us to navigate the complexity we encounter.

I will finish with a quote from Heinz von Foerster:

Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer.

The task before us is not to eliminate the observer but to acknowledge the observer’s role in every observation. This acknowledgment does not lead to relativism or solipsism. It leads to a more rigorous understanding of how knowledge emerges from the interaction between observer and observed within particular contexts and constraints.

Always keep learning.

When Cybernetics Replaced Philosophy – Heideggerian Insights into Systems Thinking – Part 3:

SPIEGEL: And what now takes the place of philosophy?

Heidegger: Cybernetics. [1]

In today’s post, I am wrapping up the series of posts on the Heideggerian insights by tying his later ideas with Cybernetics. You can view my earlier posts here and here.

Heidegger realized that the reliance of modern times on technology is leading humanity away from thinking itself. He went on to say that cybernetics has replaced philosophy. Cybernetics, particularly in its early days (first-order cybernetics), proposed the idea that the world could be understood and controlled through feedback loops, systems, and control mechanisms. This approach brought about the view that systems could be analyzed and optimized by focusing on information flow, communication, and control.

For Heidegger, this shift was significant because it represented a transformation from philosophical reflection on being to technological thinking that prioritizes efficiency, control, and calculation. The concern was that cybernetics, as a science and as a philosophy of systems, would replace the deeper, reflective inquiry into human existence, nature, and being. Instead of focusing on the questions of meaning, existence, and our relationship to the world, cybernetics focuses on problem-solving, control, and optimization.

Cybernetics and the “Standing-Reserve”

Heidegger’s main critique of technology is that it reduces everything (nature, people, even time itself) to a “standing-reserve” (Bestand), something to be used, optimized, and controlled. Cybernetics (especially first order cybernetics), as a way of organizing systems (whether biological, mechanical, or social), fits perfectly into this framing.

In this context, cybernetics offers a model of system control, where everything is measured, processed, and optimized. Heidegger feared that this would become the dominant worldview, replacing the deeper ontological reflections of philosophy with purely functional, instrumental thinking. The philosophical inquiry into what it means ‘to-be’ would be overshadowed by the technological mindset, where the world is treated not as a place for human reflection but as a set of interlocking systems to be controlled. It has become quite normal to consider humans as resources. It would be abnormal to not have a human resources department in any organization.

Heidegger believed that the core of philosophy, especially in the existential tradition, was to ask questions about being, meaning, and human existence. It was about understanding the world in a way that was not reducible to mere calculations or control. Cybernetics, in his view, represents a shift towards quantitative, calculative thinking that bypasses deeper reflections on human existence. When Heidegger says that cybernetics could replace philosophy, he warns that the dominant mode of thought in the future might be one that prioritizes instrumental control over reflection. By doing this, we are reducing human life to a set of inputs and outputs rather than exploring the more profound questions of existence and meaning.

Philosophy’s traditional role, the search for wisdom, would be replaced by functional, managerial thinking: “How do we optimize? How do we stabilize systems? How do we predict outcomes?” In that world, humans themselves risk becoming just another kind of standing-reserve, resources to be managed, data points in systems, not beings questioning their existence. This brings in questions about ethical thinking that is rarely considered in terms of managerial thinking. Here is where second order cybernetics comes into play. Second order cybernetics aligns very well with the later ideas of Heidegger.

The World as a Picture

Heidegger argues that modernity transforms the world into a representable object: a picture that stands before a human subject.

The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.[2]

This transformation does not just add new tools; it redefines what the world is. Everything becomes a resource, available for control and calculation. Cybernetics, particularly in its first order form, mirrors this tendency. It maps systems, constructs models, and aims for control. But second order cybernetics, which emerged in the 1970s, turns inward, asking: “Who is doing the observing? What does it mean to know?”

Second order cybernetics, shaped by thinkers like Heinz von Foerster and Humberto Maturana, breaks from the God’s-eye view. The observer is no longer external to the system. They are part of it. Observation itself becomes an action, a construction, an intervention. We are not out there looking into a pre-given world; rather, we are disclosing the world through care, through being-in-the-world. Knowledge, then, is not correspondence but involvement. It is not about having a picture in the head, but about being attuned to a situation, about knowing how to go on in the world.

We do not navigate life by carrying internal maps. We act skillfully because we are already attuned to the world, through our bodily presence and history of engagement. We are always already involved in what we observe. There is no “view from nowhere”.

Von Foerster – The Map Is All We Have

Von Foerster sharpened this critique of representation when he said, “The map is all we have”. This was a nod to Alfred Korzybski’s famous dictum – “the map is not the territory”. von Foerster goes further with this and says that there is no access to the territory outside of our mappings. However, this does not imply that we carry mental blueprints.

Instead, cognition is about structural coupling. When a system is perturbed by its environment and it responds according to its structure and its history of past interactions. This knowledge did not arise from accurate representation, but from historically tuned participation. We are bringing forth a world through interaction, not mirroring it.

This is also why von Foerster said: “If you want to see, learn how to act”. Understanding emerges from doing. Seeing is not prior to action. It is shaped by how we move, respond, and care. Like Heidegger’s hammer that is ready-to-hand, our understanding is practical, not theoretical. The “map” then is a trace of engagement, not a neutral diagram or mental map. This brings up the keen ethical insight of constructivism – we are responsible for the worlds we bring forth. There is no neutral observation, only involvement. We do not just see; we enact distinctions, and those choices matter.

How to Proceed?

Heidegger’s answer to technological enframing is releasement (Gelassenheit). This is not withdrawal but a posture of openness—a “letting-be” of beings. It is both a refusal to dominate and a readiness to engage differently.

Releasement echoes the ethic of second order cybernetics – a recognition that control is never total, that knowing is always situated, and that ‘systems’ are too rich to be fully grasped. It is a call to humility, responsibility, and care. We do not stand apart from the world, looking at it as if it is just “out there” and complete, just waiting to be ‘represented’ in our minds. Instead, we bring forth the world through our involvement, through practical activity, care, concerns and relationships.

When we place Heidegger and second order cybernetics side by side, a powerful ethical sensibility emerges that is often missing from modern managerial thinking. We should act as an observer who matters. Our observations shape what becomes real. We must opt for situations where future possibilities are protected. Freedom is about future possibilities. We must resist the reduction of everything to resources. We must balance calculative and meditative thinking. Cybernetics may offer powerful tools, but it must be nested within deeper questions of meaning. We should learn to dwell and not to dominate. Our task is not to master the world but to participate wisely in it.

Final Words:

In his 1966 Der Spiegel interview [1] (published posthumously), Heidegger made his famous statement:

Only a god can save us.

He was not advocating that we should pray for divine intervention. He was imploring us to realize that we need a fundamental shift in how we think, see, and act. And perhaps second order cybernetics, rightly understood, can help us return to that question. Treating the world as picture blinds us to other modes of revealing—poetic, responsive, ethical. Second order cybernetics, in turn, reminds us that every act of observation is also an act of construction. This reframes truth, not as correspondence, but as coherence within a relational, historical process. Meaning arises from engagement, not representation. We ultimately bear responsibility for how the world comes into view. Both Heidegger and cybernetics are inviting us to move beyond prediction and control—toward participation, humility, and care.

Always keep learning…

[1] “Only a God Can Save Us”: The Spiegel Interview (1966)

[2] The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, M. Heidegger, translated by William Lovitt, 1977.

Note:

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.

An Existentialist’s View of Complexity:

Art by NightCafe

In my post today, I am looking at the idea of complexity from an existentialist’s viewpoint. An existentialist believes that we, humans, create meanings for ourselves. There is no meaning out there that we do not create. An existentialist would say, from this viewpoint, that complexity is entirely dependent upon an observer, a meaning maker.

We are meaning makers, and we assign meanings to things or situations in terms of possibilities. In other words, the what-is is defined by an observer in terms of what-it-can-be. For example, a door is described by an observer in terms of what it can be used for, in relation to other things in its environment. The door’s meaning is generated in terms of its possibilities. For example, it is something for me to enter or exit a building. The door makes sense to me when it has possibilities in terms of action or relation to other things. This is very similar to the ideas of Gibson, in terms of “affordances”.

In existentialism, there are two concepts that go hand in hand that are relevant here. These are “facticity” and “transcendence”. Facticity refers to the constraints a subject is subjected to. For example, I am a middle-aged male living in the 21st century. I could very well blame my facticity for pretty much any situation in life. Transcendence is realizing that I have freedom to make choices to stand up for myself to transcend my facticity and make meaning of my own existence. We exist in terms of facticity and transcendence. We are thrown into this world and we find ourselves situated amidst the temporal, physical, cultural and social constraints. We could very well say that we have a purpose in this world, one that is prescribed to us as part of facticity or we can refer to ourselves to enable us to transcend our facticity and create our own purposes in the world.

In the context of the post, I am using “facticity” to refer to the constraints and “transcendence” to refer to the possibilities. Going back to complexity and an observer, managing complexity is making sense of “what-is” as the constraints, in terms of “what-it-can-be” as the possibilities. We describe a situation in terms of complexity, when we have to make meaning out of it. We do so to manage the situation – to get something out of it. This is a subject-object relationship in many regards. What the object is, is entirely dependent on what the subject can afford. When one person calls something as complex, they are indicating that the variety of the situation is manifold than what they can absorb. Another subject (observer) can describe the same object as something simple. That subject may choose to focus on only certain attributes of the situation, the attributes that the subject is familiar with. Anything can be called as complex or simple from this regard. As I have noted before, a box of air can be as complex as it can get when one considers the motion of an air particle inside, or as simple as it can get when one considers it as a box of “nothing”. In other words, complexity has no meaning without an observer because the meaning of the situation is introduced by the observer.

A social realm obviously adds more nuance to this simply because there are other meaning-makers involved. Going back to existentialism, we are the subject and at the same time objects for the others in the social realm. Something that has a specific meaning to us can have an entirely different meaning to another person. When we draw a box and call that as a “system”, another person can draw a different box that includes only a portion of my box, and call that as the same “system”. In the social realm, meaning-making should be a social activity as well. It will be a wrong approach to use a prescribed framework to make sense because each of us have different facticities and what possibilities lie within a situation are influenced by these facticities. The essence of these situations cannot be prescribed simply because the essence is brought forth in the social realm by different social beings. A situation is as-is with no complexity inherent to it. It is us who interact with it, and utilize our freedom to assign meaning to it. I will finish off with a great quote from Sartre:

Human reality everywhere encounters resistance and obstacles which it has not created, but these resistances and obstacles have meaning only in and through the free choice which human reality is.

Stay safe and always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Plurality of Variety:

How Blank is Your Paper?

Art by NightCafe

This is available as part of a book offering that is free for community members of Cyb3rSynLabs. Please check here (https://www.cyb3rsynlabs.com/c/books/) for Second Order Cybernetics Essays for Silicon Valley. The ebook version is available here (https://www.cyb3rsyn.com/products/soc-book)

Stay safe and always keep on learning… In case you missed it, my last post was OC Curve and Reliability/Confidence Sample Sizes:

Cybernetics and the Stoics:

In today’s post, I am continuing on my thoughts on stoicism through the lens of cybernetics. In Cybernetics, we call regulation the act (art) of responding to external disturbances in order to maintain selected internal variables in a range. For example, our body maintains the internal temperature in a specific range. We have internal regulations built in through evolution to ensure that this is done. In the language of cybernetics, regulation refers to the act of countering the external variety. In order to counter the external variety, we must have requisite variety. As noted in the last post, only variety can absorb variety. If the external temperature goes up or goes down, our body should have a mechanism to react so that the internal temperature is maintained in a specific range. If it is not able to do this, we will not stay viable. The goal of requisite variety in this instance is about maintaining the status quo.

There are mainly two types of regulations in cybernetics as Ross Ashby noted – direct and indirect regulation. Direct regulation is the type of regulation where there is an established framework of counteractions that the agent can use. In the case of body temperature, heat loss can be promoted in a hot environment by many different mechanisms such as sweating or by reduction of muscular activities. Similarly, heat loss can be minimized in a cold environment using several mechanisms such as shivering or other activities to improve body insulation (reducing blood flow to the skin). There are several other mechanisms used by our bodies that are not listed here. These activities come under direct regulation because these happen without any oversight from us. Our bodies have evolved to do these things. Direct regulation is obviously limited in what it can do. For a low complex organism such as a wasp, direct regulation is adequate for survival. When the environmental conditions change or become extreme, direct regulation will no longer be able to provide requisite variety. In this case, we need indirect regulation. Indirect regulation refers to our ability to achieve requisite variety through second order activities. This involves learning mechanisms. For example, when it gets cold, we learn to move to a warmer location or to put on more clothes or to start a fire. We learned to create warm clothes or generate fire at will. This type of regulation did not come through evolution. What did come through evolution is our ability to learn to adapt. The second order refers to the ability to learn. Direct regulation is first order in nature. Second order is where you realize that the current specification is not working and that we need to change what we are doing or change the specification altogether. First order is simply realizing that there is a gap between the current state and where we want to be, and upon this realization continue on an already prescribed path.

We can see that indirect regulation has much more impact for our continued survival than direct regulation. Both types of regulation involve attenuation and amplification of variety in order to achieve requisite variety. As noted before, external variety is always higher than internal variety. Variety is directly correlated to complexity. The impact that the complexity in the world can have on us is ever increasing mainly because we are getting connected to the world in unprecedented ways. What I am typing here at my home can reach someone else in the farthest corners of the world in a matter of seconds. Something that happens locally in one location can have a direct impact on the entire world, as evidenced by the Covid 19 pandemic. How can we ensure our viability in these conditions?

Stoicism provides a lot of guidance for us in this regard. Stoicism provides us guidelines for us to improve our indirect regulatory activities. I am not discussing the dichotomy of control here since I discussed it last time. Instead, I will look at what Stoicism says about adversities in life. Most of our trouble comes from the fact that we do not orient ourselves properly. We give into direct regulation such as freeze, flight or fight. This worked for our ancestors, but this will not work, say for example, in a workplace environment. It is not easy for us to orient because we are not expecting the variety of the adversity that was thrown at us. It could be that we were put in a challenging situation where we have put ourselves or our company at a huge risk condition. Or something drastic happened that requires immediate action or our lives are in danger. How does one improve our internal variety in these conditions? How does one learn to attenuate the external variety so that we don’t focus on the noise? How do we amplify our variety so that we concentrate only on what is needed?

Stoics talk of a great tool that will help us here. It is called “premeditatio malorum”. This stands for “negative visualization”. When we start our day, think of the many ways, the day could go wrong. Think of driving in the traffic and someone cutting us off or getting into an accident. What can we do in this situation? Think of going into the important meeting and you saying something that would be perceived as silly. What would you do in this situation? Meditating on this is in many regards a way to prepare ourselves to better prepare in case such things do happen. It is obviously easy to go wild with this exercise, so we should keep it as practical as possible.

Another key insight from the stoics is the idea of seeing every experience as an opportunity. Every adversity or challenge that we face is an opportunity to learn. The big project that we are embarking upon work is an opportunity to improve ourselves. The challenges that are thrown at us actually make us better when we welcome them as challenges to finetune our skills. Many a time, stoicism is badly represented as being detached from reality. When something bad happens, the stoics are expected to be emotionless. On the contrary, stoicism is about being able to ground ourselves to reality and reorient ourselves so that we can use every experience as a learning opportunity. As with the premeditation malorum, we must exercise caution and not go out of our way looking for challenges. Instead we must take on the challenges that come our way and not run away from them. We must learn to be practical with the theory.

Seneca presents us with a paradox of fortune and laments those who were not fortunate enough to have gone through any misfortunes:

I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent—no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.

Epictetus asks us who Hercules might have been without any of his adversities:

“What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar – and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges?

Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So, by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules.

And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir into him action?”

Perhaps, at this juncture the reader is reminded of resilience and maybe of antifragility. From a cybernetics standpoint, resilience is a matter of maintaining status quo after a setback. This can be done mainly through first order activities and through second order activities as needed. Antifragility, on the other hand requires second order activities which leads to post traumatic growth (PTG).

I will finish with some wise words from the philosopher king, Marcus Aurelius:

Our actions may be impeded . . . but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

If you are interested in Stoicism, you might like:

https://harishsnotebook.wordpress.com/2017/08/27/meditations-at-the-gemba/
https://harishsnotebook.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/senecas-on-shortness-of-life/

Stay safe and always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Cybernetics and the Dichotomy of Control:

Cybernetics and the Dichotomy of Control:

This is available as part of a book offering that is free for community members of Cyb3rSynLabs. Please check here (https://www.cyb3rsynlabs.com/c/books/) for Second Order Cybernetics Essays for Silicon Valley. The ebook version is available here (https://www.cyb3rsyn.com/products/soc-book)

If you are interested in Stoicism, you might like:

https://harishsnotebook.wordpress.com/2017/08/27/meditations-at-the-gemba/
https://harishsnotebook.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/senecas-on-shortness-of-life/

Stay safe and always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was The Phenomenology of Informationally Closed Beings: