This is available as part of a book offering that is free for community members of Cyb3rSynLabs. Please check here (https://www.cyb3rsynlabs.com/c/books/) for Second Order Cybernetics Essays for Silicon Valley. The e-book version is available here (https://www.cyb3rsyn.com/products/soc-book)
Wear a mask, stay safe and Always keep on learning…
In case you missed it, my last post was Copernican Revolution – Systems Thinking:
In today’s post, I am looking at “Copernican Revolution”, a phrase used by the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant is one of the greatest names in philosophy. I am an Engineer by profession, and I started learning philosophy after I left school. As an Engineer, I am trained to think about causality in nature – if I do this, then that happens. This is often viewed as the mechanistic view of nature and it is reliant on empiricism. Empiricism is the idea that knowledge comes from experience. In contrast, at the other end of knowledge spectrum lies rationalism. Rationalism is the idea that knowledge comes from reason (internal). An empiricist can quickly fall into the trap of induction, where you believe that there is uniformity in nature. For example, if I clapped my hand twenty times, and the light flickered each time, I can then (falsely) conclude that the next time I clap my hand the light will flicker. My mind created a causal connection to my hand clapping and the light flickering.
David Hume, another great philosopher, challenged this and identified this approach as the problem of induction. He suggested that we, humans, are creatures of habit that we assign causality to things based on repeat experience. His view was that causality is assigned by us simply by habit. His famous example of challenging whether the sun will rise tomorrow exemplifies this:
That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.
Hume came up with two main categories for human reason, often called Hume’s fork:
All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, relations of ideas, and matters of fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic … [which are] discoverable by the mere operation of thought … Matters of fact, which are the second object of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing.
Hume’s fork stipulates that all necessary truths are analytical, the meaning is predicated in the statement. Similarly, knowledge regarding matters of fact indicate that the knowledge is contingent on the experience gotten from the interaction. This leads to further ideas such as – there is a separation between the external world and the knowledge about the world. The knowledge about the world would come only from the world through empiricism. One can view this as the human mind revolving around the world.
Immanuel Kant challenged the idea of Hume’s fork and came up with the idea of a priori synthetic knowledge. Kant proposed that we, humans, are bestowed with a framework for reasoning that is a priori and yet synthetic. Kant synthesized ideas from rationalism and empiricism, and added a third tine to Hume’s fork. Kant famously stated – That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. Kant clarified that it does not follow that knowledge arises out of experience. What we come to know is based on our mental faculty. The mind plays an important role in our knowledge of the world. The synthetic a priori propositions say something about the world, and yet at the same time they say something about our mind.
How the world is to us depends on how we experience it, and thus the knowledge of the external world is dependent on the structure of our mind. This idea is often described as a pair of spectacles that we are born with. We see the world through this pair of spectacles that we cannot take off. What we see forms our knowledge of the world, but it is dependent on the pair of spectacles that is a part of us. Kant’s great idea is that our knowledge of the world does not conform to the world. Our knowledge of the world conforms not to the nature of the world, but to the nature of our internal faculties. To paraphrase Heinz von Foerster, we do not see the world as is, it is as we see it.
Nicholas Copernicus, the Polish astronomer, came up with a heliocentric view of the world. The prevalent idea at the time was that the celestial bodies, including the sun, revolved around the earth. Copernicus challenged this, and showed that the earth actually revolves around the sun. Kant, in a similar fashion, suggested that the human minds do not revolve around the world with the meanings coming into our minds. Instead, the world revolves around our minds, and we assign meanings to the objects in the world. This is explained wonderfully by Julie. E. Maybee:
Naïve science assumes that our knowledge revolves around what the world is like, but, Hume’s criticism argued, this view entails that we cannot then have knowledge of scientific causes through reason. We can reestablish a connection between reason and knowledge, however, Kant suggested, if we say—not that knowledge revolves around what the world is like—but that knowledge revolves around what we are like. For the purposes of our knowledge, Kant said, we do not revolve around the world—the world revolves around us. Because we are rational creatures, we share a cognitive structure with one another that regularizes our experiences of the world. This intersubjectively shared structure of rationality—and not the world itself—grounds our knowledge.
Systems:
We have assumed that the knowledge of the world, our cognition, conforms to the world. Kant proposes that all we have access to is the phenomena, and not the actual world. What we are learning is dependent on us. We use an as-if model to generate meaning based on our interaction with the external world. In this viewpoint, the systems are not real things in the world. The systems are concepts that we construct, and they are as-if models that we use to make sense of the phenomena. What we view as systems are the constructions we make and depends on our need for understanding.
Alan Stewart uses a similar idea to explain his views on constructivism:
The fundamental premise of constructivism is that we humans are self-regulating organisms who live from the inside out. As a philosophical counterpoint to naive realism, constructivism suggests that we are proactive co-creators of the reality to which we respond. Underlying this concept is that perception is an active process in which we ‘bring forth distinctions’. It is our idiosyncratic distinctions which form the structure of the world(s) which each of us inhabits.”
I will finish with a great lesson from Alan Watts:
“Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.”
To further elaborate, I will add that all meaning comes from us. From a Hume-ian sense, we are creatures of habit in that we cannot stop assigning meaning. From a Kant-ian sense we are law-makers, not law-discoverers.
From a Systems Thinking perspective, we have unique perspectives and we assign meanings based on this. We construct “systems” “as-if” the different parts work together in a way to have a purpose and a meaning, both of which are assigned by us. The meaning comes inside out, not the other way around. To further this idea, as a human collective, we cocreate an emergent phenomenal world. In this aspect, “reality” is multidimensional, and each one of us has a version that is unique to us.
Stay safe and Always keep on learning…
In case you missed it, my last post was Hegel, Dialectics and POSIWID:
This is available as part of a book offering that is free for community members of Cyb3rSynLabs. Please check here (https://www.cyb3rsynlabs.com/c/books/) for Second Order Cybernetics Essays for Silicon Valley. The e-book version is available here (https://www.cyb3rsyn.com/products/soc-book)
Stay safe and Always keep on learning…
In case you missed it, my last post was Shingo’s Whys:
Shigeo Shingo is one of my heroes in Industrial Engineering. He had a great mind that thrived on curiosity. In today’s post, I am looking at Shingo’s whys. This is in contrast to Taiichi Ohno’s 5Why method. Ohno’s 5Why method is one of the tools in Toyota Production System to get to the root cause. When you see a problem, you ask “why did that problem happen?” When you get an answer to that question, you then ask “Why did that problem#2 happen?” and so on until you get to the root cause. When you eliminate the root cause, the problem is solved. This approach assumes a direct and linear cause and effect relationship. And depending upon the user’s expertise and experience, you can get different results. A tool like 5Why is user-dependent and one-dimensional. It is appropriate for necessary causes; it may not be appropriate for sufficient causes. Its usefulness certainly diminishes as complexity increases.
Shingo’s Whys are not in relation to Ohno’s 5Whys, but another set of questions, 5W1H. The 5W1H questions are:
These questions are the levers you can push to further our search for answers. It is said that the origin of these questions goes back to the great Aristotle (Source: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as the Original Locus for the Septem Circumstantiae – Michael. C. Sloan). Another source where the idea of the 5W1H was stated clearly is from Thomas Aquinas:
For in acts we must take note of who did it, by what aids or instruments he did it (with), what he did, where he did it, why he did it, how and when he did it.
The idea of 5W1H was also made famous by Rudyard Kipling:
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
The usefulness of this simple framework is also illustrated in the Job Methods program from the Training Within Industry initiative:
Shingo viewed these as the five elements of production. He noted them as:
In a simple example of producing a medical swab, perhaps the five elements of production are:
Shingo teaches us to ask “Why” to each of the five elements of production (Shingo’s whys):
He brilliantly explained:
The five elements of production just make up the status quo. If we want to improve the present situation, we must direct the question “why?” at each one of those elements repeatedly and relentlessly.
The obvious question this would lead to is whether we can ask a “Why?” question to the “Why?” itself. I will leave this question for the reader to ponder. The questioning with “why?” gets to the actual purpose behind the reasoning or rationale of a decision. It is an effective way to get to meta-analysis, a second-order activity.
Final Words:
Shigeo Shingo learned the ideas of making improvements from another giant, Lillian Gilbreth. Shingo learned from Ken’ichi Horigome, who learned from Jiro Kakuka. Jiro Kakuda learned the concepts and techniques of improvement at Gilbreth’s institute in the United States. Shingo wonderfully summarized the Gilbreth approach as (the emphasis is mine):
A keen student of Toyota Production System can identify the inspirations of continuous improvement in the steps detailed above. I will finish with wonderful words of wisdom from Shingo.
Time is merely a shadow of motion. Supervisors frequently put pressure on plant workers to speed up their work, to get jobs done more quickly. Yet simply working faster – without improving the motions that take up the time – will not speed things up in the final analysis. Time is merely a shadow of motion, and no matter how much we may complaint about shadows, nothing will happen unless we deal with the substance – motion – that throws the shadow.
Stay safe and Always keep on learning…
In case you missed it, my last post was Lillian Gilbreth’s Synthesist:
Lillian Gilbreth is one of my heroes in Industrial Engineering. I have written about her here and here. In today’s post, I am looking at Gilbreth’s idea of an analyst and synthesist. The term “analyst” is in common vocabulary, whereas the term “synthesist” is not. Even Microsoft Word is identifying that the term “synthesist” is incorrect.
In any introduction class to systems thinking, we get introduced to the idea of analysis and synthesis. As Russell Ackoff, the giant in Systems Thinking, teaches us:
A system is a whole which consists of a set of two or more parts. Each part affects the behavior of the whole, depending on how it interacts with the other parts of the system. To understand a system, analysis says to take it apart. But when you take a system apart, it loses all of its essential properties. The discovery that you cannot understand the nature of a system by analysis forced us to realize that another type of thinking was required. Not surprisingly, it came to be called synthesis.
Analysis… reveals structure— how a system works. If you want to repair an automobile, you have to analyze it to find what part isn’t working. Synthesis reveals understanding—why it works the way it does. The automobile, for example, was originally developed for six passengers. But no amount of analysis will help you to find out why. The answer lies in the fact that cars were designed for the average American family, which happened to be 5.6 at the time.
Lillian Gilbreth also talked about analysis and synthesis, back in 1914, in her book, The Psychology of Management. Gilbreth discussed ideas from the British psychologist, James Sully.
Analysis is defined by Sully as follows: “Analysis” is “taking apart more complex processes in order to single out for special inspection their several constituent processes.” He divides elements of thought activity into two:
(a) analysis: abstraction, (b) synthesis: comparison.”
Gilbreth further clarified what an analyst does:
ANALYST’S WORK IS DIVISION. – It is the duty of the analyst to divide the work that he is set to study into the minutest divisions possible.
She went on to describe the qualifications of an analyst.
QUALIFICATIONS OF AN ANALYST. – To be most successful, an analyst should have ingenuity, patience, and that love of dividing a process into its component parts and studying each separate part that characterizes the analytic mind. The analyst must be capable of doing accurate work, and orderly work.
To get the most pleasure and profit from his work he should realize that his great, underlying purpose is to relieve the worker of unnecessary fatigue, to shorten his work period per day, and to increase the number of his days and years of higher earning power. With this realization will come an added interest in his subject.
Gilbreth defined the role of a synthesist as follows:
THE SYNTHESIST’S WORK IS SELECTION AND ADDITION. – The synthesist studies the individual results of the analyst’s work, and their inter-relation, and determines which of these should be combined, and in what manner, for the most economic result. His duty is to construct that combination of the elements which will be most efficient.
The qualifications of a synthesist was explained as:
QUALIFICATIONS OF THE SYNTHESIST. – The synthesist must have a constructive mind, for he determines the sequence of events as well as the method of attack. He must have the ability to see the completed whole which he is trying to make, and to regard the elements with which he works not only as units, but in relation to each other. He must feel that any combination is influenced not only by the elements that go into it, but by the inter-relation between these elements. This differs for different combinations as in a kaleidoscope.
The relationship between the analyst and synthesist was best explained by Gilbreth as:
If synthesis in Scientific Management were nothing more than combining all the elements that result from analysis into a whole, it would be valuable. Any process studied analytically will be performed more intelligently, even if there is no change in the method. But the most important part of the synthesist’s work is the actual elimination of elements which are useless, and the combination of the remaining elements in such a way, or sequence, or schedule, that a far better method than the one analyzed will result.
Final Words:
Lillian Gilbreth’s ideas, as the cliché goes, were truly ahead of her times. We have all benefited from her brilliance. Gilbreth viewed a synthesist as a conserver of a valuable elements as well as an inventor involved in invention of better methods of doing work, such as tools or equipment. She also said that a synthesist is a discoverer of laws because they have the ability to understand why the parts are working the way they are, in relation to one another. A systems thinker fuses analysis and synthesis. Moreover, a systems thinker should be able to find differences among apparently similar things and similarities among apparently different things.
I will finish with further ideas from the 18th century French Philosopher Victor Cousin:
The legitimacy of every synthesis is directly owing to the exactness of analysis; every system which is merely [sic] an hypothesis is a vain system; every synthesis which has not been preceded by analysis is a pure imagination: but at the same time every analysis which does not aspire to a synthesis which maybe equal to it, is an analysis which halts on the way.
On the one hand, synthesis without analysis gives a false science; on the other hand, analysis without synthesis gives an incomplete science.
Stay safe and Always keep on learning…
In case you missed it, my last post was The Truths of Complexity:
The Covid 19 pandemic has given me an opportunity to observe, meditate and learn about complexity in action. In today’s post, I am looking at “truths” in complexity. Humans, more than any other species, have the ability to change their environment at a faster pace. They are also able to maintain belief systems over time and act on them autonomously. These are good reasons to call all “human systems” complex systems.
The Theories of Truth:
Generally, there are three theories of truth in philosophy. They are as follows:
Sensemaking Complexity:
From the discussion of truth, we can see that seeking truth is not an easy task, especially when we deal with complexity of human systems. Our natural tendency is to find order as pleasing and reassuring. We try to find order in all we can, and we try our best to maintain order as long as we can. In this attempt, we often neglect the actual complexity we are dealing with. A common way to distinguish complexity of a phenomenon is – ordered, complicated or complex. We can say a square peg in a square hole is an ordered phenomenon. The correspondence theory of truth is quite apt here because we have a one to one relationship. We have a very good working knowledge of cause and effect. As complexity increases, we get to complicated phenomenon where there is still somewhat a good cause and effect relationship. A car can be viewed as a complicated phenomenon. The correspondence theory is still apt here. Once we add a human to the mix, we get to complexity. Imagine the driver of a car. Now imagine thousands of drivers all at once. The correspondence theory of truth falls apart fast here.
The main source of complexity in the example discussed above comes from humans. We are autonomous, and we are able to justify our own actions. We may go faster than the speed limit because we are already late for the appointment. We may overtake on the wrong side because the other driver is driving slowly. We assign meanings and we also assign purposes for others. We do not always realize that other humans also have the same power.
We have seen varying responses and behavior in this pandemic. We have seen the different justifications and hypotheses. We agree with some of them and strongly disagree with others depending on how they cohere with our own belief systems. The actual transmission of the virus is fairly constrained. It transmits mainly from person to person. The transmission occurs mainly through respiratory droplets. Every human interaction carries some risk of becoming infected if the other person is a carrier of the virus. However, the actual course of the pandemic has been complex.
Philosophical Insights to Sensemaking Complexity:
I will use the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and William. V.O. Quine to further look at truth and how we come to know about truth. Nietzsche had a multidimensional view of truth. He viewed truth as:
A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
He emphasized on the abstract nature of truth. One comes to view the abstractions/metaphors as stand in for reality, and eventually falsely equate them to reality.
Every word immediately becomes a concept, in as much as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal.
Nietzsche advised us against using a cause-effect, correspondence type viewpoint in sensemaking complexity:
It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed ‘in itself’, we act once more as we have always acted—mythologically.
As Maureen Finnigan notes in her wonderful essay, Nietzsche’s Perspective: Beyond Truth as an Ideal:
As truth is not objective, in like manner, it is not subjective. Since thinking is not wholly rational, disconnected from the body, or independent of the world, the subjective perception, or conception, of truth through the intellect alone is impossible. “The ‘pure spirit’ is pure stupidity: if we subtract the nervous system and the senses—the ‘mortal shroud’—then we miscalculate—that is all!” Inasmuch as the individual is not independent from the world, one can neither subjectively nor objectively explain the world as if detached, but must interpret the world from within. Subjective and objective, like True and apparent, soul and body, thinking thing and material thing, intellect and sense, noumena and phenomena, are dualities that Nietzsche aspires to overcome. Thus, although Nietzsche is not a rationalist, this does not mean he falls into the irrationalist camp. He does not abolish reason but instead situates it within life, as an instrument, not as an absolute.
With complexity, we should not look for correspondence but coherence. Correspondence forces categorization while coherence forces connections. This follows nicely into Quine’s Web of Belief idea. Quine’s idea is a holistic approach. We make meanings in a holistic fashion. When we observe a phenomenon, our sensory experience and the belief it generates do not standalone in our entire belief system. Instead, Quine postulates that we make sense holistically with a web of belief. Every belief is connected to other beliefs like a web.
For example, we can say Experience1(E1) led to Belief1(B1), and Experience2(E2) led to Belief2(B2) etc. This has the correspondence nature we discussed earlier. This view prefers the ordered static approach to sensemaking. However, in Quine’s view, it is more dynamic, interconnected and complex. This has the coherence nature we discussed earlier. The schematic below, inspired by a lecture note from Bryan. Van. W. Norden, shows this in detail.
The idea of Web of Belief is clearly explained by Thomas Kelly:
Quine famously suggests that we can picture everything that we take to be true as constituting a single, seamless “web of belief.” The nodes of the web represent individual beliefs, and the connections between nodes represent the logical relations between beliefs. Although there are important epistemic differences among the beliefs in the web, these differences are matters of degree as opposed to kind. From the perspective of the epistemologist, the most important dimension along which beliefs can vary is their centrality within the web: the centrality of a belief corresponds to how fundamental it is to our overall view of the world, or how deeply implicated it is with the rest of what we think. The metaphor of the web of belief thus represents the relevant kind of fundamentality in spatial terms: the more a particular belief is implicated in our overall view of the world, the nearer it is to the center, while less fundamental beliefs are located nearer the periphery of the web. Experience first impinges upon the web at the periphery, but no belief within the web is wholly cut off from experience, inasmuch as even those beliefs at the very center stand in logical relations to beliefs nearer the periphery.
The idea of degrees rather than a concrete distinction between beliefs is very important to note here. Additionally, Quine proposes that when we counter an experience contradicting our belief, we seek to restore consistency/coherence in the web by giving up beliefs that are located near the periphery rather than the ones near the center.
Final Words:
The dynamic nature of complexity is not just applicable to a pandemic but also to scientific paradigms. This is beautifully explained in the quote from Jacob Bronowski below:
“There is no permanence to scientific concepts because they are only our interpretations of natural phenomena … We merely make a temporary invention which covers that part of the world accessible to us at the moment”
Our beliefs shape our experience as much as our experiences shape our beliefs in a recursive manner. The web gets more complex as time goes on, where some of the nodes become more distinct and some others get hazier. We are prone to getting perpetually frustrated if we try to apply a static framework to the dynamic everchanging domain of complexity. It gets more frustrating because patterns emerge on a continuous basis providing an illusion of order. The static and rigid frameworks break because of their rigidity and inflexibility to tackle the variety thrown upon them.
With this in mind, we should come to realize that we do not have a means to know the external world as-is. All we can know is how it appears to us based on our web of belief. The pragmatic tradition of truth advises us to keep going on our search for truth, and that this search is self-corrective. The correspondence theory fails us because the meaning we create is not independent of us, but very much a product of our web of belief. At the same time, if we don’t seek to understand others, coherence theory will fail us because we would lack the requisite variety needed to make sense of a complex phenomenon. I will finish with an excellent quote from Maureen Finnigan:
Human beings impose their own truth on life instead of seeking truth within life.
Stay safe and Always keep on learning… In case you missed it, my last post was Korzybski at the Gemba:
In today’s post, I am looking at the ideas of Alfred Korzybski, a Polish American philosopher and the father of General Semantics. General Semantics is a doctrine and educational discipline intended to improve the habits of response of human beings, to their environment and one another. Korzybski wanted to understand humanity and why we don’t always get along.
If a visitor from Mars should come, Korzybski showed, and on a tour of inspection should see our bridges, our skyscrapers, our subways, and other engineering feats, and were to ask, “How often does one of these collapse?” man here would say that if the engineering of these projects were correct in all respects, the material used in their construction carefully inspected, and the work well done, they would never collapse.
Taken to our libraries the visitor from Mars, he declared, shown the histories of the world, would be appalled that the same men who could engineer non-collapsible bridges and skyscrapers could build a civilization which was collapsing at some point every year. And the reason, he pointed out, for the difference, lay in the fundamental beginnings of the logic that had built each.
Korzybski is most famous for his idea – the map is not the territory. He wrote his magnum opus “Science and Sanity” in 1933. In reading his ideas, we can find many aspects of systems thinking. Korzybski’s main idea can be expressed by one word – “abstraction”. His view was that what we know is based on the structure of our nervous system and the structure of our language (dependent on the nervous system). Our brain cannot directly access the world outside. Our brain understands the world outside through our sensory organs. Our sensory organs do not directly transfer the “what”, but the amount of the stimuli received. The brain abstracts meaning based on all the previous correlations. The brain selects the data to make the most meaningful abstraction at that point in time. For example, the eyes do not tell the brain that there is a black cat on the mat. The entire experience of sensory data is abstracted into “black cat”.
Korzybski stated:
The only link between the verbal and objective world is exclusively structural, necessitating the conclusion that the only content of all “knowledge” is structural. Now structure can be considered as a complex of relations, and ultimately as multi-dimensional order. From this point of view, all language can be considered as names for unspeakable entities on the objective level, be it things or feelings, or as names of relations. In fact… we find that an object represents an abstraction of a low order produced by our nervous system as the result of a sub-microscopic events acting as stimuli upon the nervous system.
Image source – WIkipedia
An important outcome of this idea is that objective reality is lost in translation. All that we have and can have access to are abstractions. Thus, two observers can come to two different conclusions while witnessing the same phenomenon. Both may have some access to the same phenomenon but not to each other’s abstractions. This idea is very well articulated in the famous “the map is not the territory.” Korzybski came up with a structural differential, a multilayered structure for abstraction. The higher you are on the structure differential, the closer you are to the phenomenon/event and the closer you are to the “reality.” The further down you go, the level of abstraction increases. The loss of the data was shown by holes in the structure. We use words to express real things, forgetting that the words are not the real things. They are abstractions.
Korzybski wrote:
‘Say whatever you choose about the object, and whatever you might say is not it.’ Or, in other wordsː ‘Whatever you might say the object “is”, well it is not.’
When we assume that an abstraction is a real thing, it leads to “allness”. We start to believe that we have access to the Truth and that we know all there is to know about something. We also engage in taking things apart, falsely assuming that the collective holistic meaning is maintained. Korzybski called this elementalism. Korzybski advised that we should not verbally separate what we would not empirically separate. The ideas of holism/reductionism in Systems Thinking can be viewed here. Elementalism leads to false dichotomies and linear thinking. “If you are not with me, you are against me.” Or “If I put the best players, we will have the best team.”
Korzybski believed that humans are time binding. This meant that as a species, we are able to transfer knowledge that allow us to stand on the shoulders of the giants and build on what others have done so far. Korzybski wrote:
“All human achievements are cumulative; no one of us can claim any achievement exclusively as his own; we all must use consciously or unconsciously the achievements of others, some of them living but most of them dead.”
This is also applicable for the individual. I build my ideas based on what I already know from the past. An important idea from this is to understand that a thing from yesterday is not the same as the thing from the present. Similar to the Heraclitus quote, “you cannot step into the same river twice”, Korzybski adviced that we should not mistake that things would remain the same. Some of the ideas he proposed to address this were:
When we become aware of the structure differential, we can influence how we make meanings and how we react to things. Some more ideas he proposed in this regard were:
Final Words:
Philosophers tends to take positions such as the correspondence theory of truth (our experience should correspond to the actual reality of the world), and the coherence theory of truth (our experience should cohere with what we already know). It appears to me that Korzybski’s ideas are a mix of correspondence in terms of structures and coherence in terms of the holistic notions. We are all different and alike at the same time depending on the abstraction level we use. Korzybski’s ideas resonate wonderfully with the ideas of Soft Systems theory. We humans cocreate the social reality. The purpose and meaning for an individual should not be stipulated by another. I will finish with wonderful reminders from Korzybski. I see them as his ‘ethical imperatives.’
Any organism must be treated as-a-whole; in other words, that an organism is not an algebraic sum, a linear function of its elements, but always more than that. It is seemingly little realized, at present, that this simple and innocent-looking statement involves a full structural revision of our language.
Korzybski, in 1933, called his theory “general semantics” because it deals with the nervous reactions of the human organism-as-a-whole-in-environments, and is much more general and organismally fundamental than the “meanings” of words as such, or Significs.
To regard human beings as tools — as instruments — for the use of other human beings is not only unscientific but it is repugnant, stupid and short sighted. Tools are made by man but have not the autonomy of their maker — they have not man’s time-binding capacity for initiation, for self-direction, and self-improvement.
Stay safe and Always keep on learning…
In case you missed it, my last post was Storytelling at the Gemba:
I also encourage the reader to check out the ideas of Korzybski and General Semantics.
You may also want to check out my related posts:
Newton’s Eye/Bodkin Experiment and the Principle of Undifferentiated Coding:
In today’s post, I am looking at storytelling. We are sometimes referred to as Homo Narrans or humans who tell stories. Storytelling, oral or otherwise, is part of our culture, and part of who we are. Joseph Campbell, the American literary professor, talks about the universal nature of all stories in his famous book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell’s thesis, like those of the ancients—and as put forth also, but in different ways, by Freud, Jung, and others—is that by entering and transforming the personal psyche, the surrounding culture, the life of the family, one’s relational work, and other matters of life can be transformed too. Campbell’s ideas have been distilled into the famous Hero’s Journey. Loosely put, this story structure describes a hero who starts off as ordinary, faces adversities, goes through a transformation, and in the end becomes triumphant. I am inspired by Campbell’s work, but I am looking at the ideas I learned in Cybernetics.
Variety:
One of the most important ideas in Cybernetics is that of variety, a brainchild of the brilliant Ross Ashby. Ashby described variety as:
Given a set of elements, its variety is the number of elements that can be distinguished.
For example, if we consider a set of elements in {g b c g g c}, the variety is 3. Another easy example to consider is that of a light switch. A light switch has a variety of two (ON or OFF). Ashby created his most famous Law of Requisite Variety from this simple idea. The Law of Requisite Variety can be simply stated as “only variety can destroy variety.” If the regulatory agency of a system does not have the requisite variety to match the variety of its environment, it will not be able to adapt and survive. Ashby explained this using the example of a fencer:
If a fencer faces an opponent who has various modes of attack available, the fencer must be provided with at least an equal number of modes of defense if the outcome is to have the single value: attacked parried.
How does this come into play with stories? Stories are interesting only if there are conflicts. The villain is shown to have more variety than the hero. This puts the villain in control of the situation because to be in control means to have the appropriate amount of variety over the situation. The hero has to somehow overcome the lack of variety he has. In a superhero movie, if the superhero has more variety than the supervillain, then the story is not at all interesting. Per the Hero’s Journey structure, the superhero has to face adversities to make the story more interesting. This brings up the idea of variety engineering, proposed by another brilliant mind, Stafford Beer.
We can depict the varieties as below. The supervillain has much more variety than the superhero. This is shown by the larger font size for “v” depicting the variety. We can see that the variety of the supervillain is much more (>>) than that of the superhero. This is the major adversity that the superhero must overcome. This conflict makes the story interesting.
As Stafford Beer might say, the superhero has to find ways to attenuate or reduce the variety of the supervillain, and at the same time find ways to amplify his own variety. This allows him to have the requisite variety to overcome the supervillain. The squiggly line towards right in the schematic below shows the attenuation of the variety coming from the supervillain, while the curved line with the triangle on it shows the amplification of the variety from the superhero. In the below schematic, the varieties are shown to match, as indicated by the same font size for “v” in the middle. This also is an important part of the story since the final fight should not be easy for the superhero. Now we have a good superhero story. The attenuation of the variety may be achieved by not getting scared by the antics shown by the villain. The amplification may be achieved by the use of valuable information that the villain does not have access to, or by coming up with a plan that allows the hero to use his special skill.
The same structure can be seen across many of the blockbuster movies or TV shows. The interesting part is always how the variety engineering is done, and how the requisite variety is achieved by the hero, whether it is a Marvel superhero movie or “The Last Kingdom” or “Rick and Morty.”
Role of the Observer:
Ross Ashby gives further insight into this. He brings in the importance of the observer. He noted:
If two observers differ in the distinctions they can make, then they will differ in their estimates of the variety.
An easy example is to consider the set, {b a c c C a B a}. Depending on the observer, the variety of the set can be said as 3 (3 letters) or 5 (3 lowercase letters and 2 uppercase letters). The idea is easily illustrated in a Sherlock Holmes story, where the same crime scene is witnessed by Holmes and Watson. Holmes is able to make more distinctions than Watson, allowing him to achieve the requisite variety needed to solve the crime. One of the most important definitions of information in the light of distinctions come from Gregory Bateson, who described information as the difference that makes the difference. Bateson noted:
What gets onto the map, in fact, is difference, be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in population structure, difference in surface, or whatever. Differences are the things that get onto a map.
Bateson’s idea of difference that makes a difference was possibly introduced as part of an Alfred Korzybski lecture. And of course, the observer determines which differences are meaningful to be selected, and which selected differences must be further amplified. Uncertainty can be described as the lack of useful information. With this idea, the observer can reduce uncertainty by making useful distinctions.
Abstractions, an act of attenuating variety, allow an observer to identify that two things are similar, or that the two same things are different. There is no contradiction here because abstractions are not equivalencies. All we have and can have access to are abstractions. Thus, two observers can come to two different conclusions while witnessing the same phenomenon. Both may have some access to the same phenomenon but not to each other’s abstractions. This is exemplified in the Alfred Korzybski’s quote – “The map is not the territory” or the Alan Watts’ quote – “The menu is not the meal.”
We can use a great piece of advice from the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer to further understand variety and uncertainty:
“Reality” always stands in a horizon of desired or feared or, at any rate, still undecided future possibilities. Hence it is always the case that mutually exclusive expectations are aroused, not all of which can be fulfilled. The undecidedness of the future permits such a superfluity of expectations that reality necessarily lags behind them.
From the observer’s standpoint, we realize that the most powerful tool to manage variety becomes the control of information. If one is able to not allow or hinder the other person’s ability to make distinctions, he can control the narrative and be in charge. We see this played out in real life too often.
People Principle:
Another important idea that comes from all of this is that the requisite variety always come from the people on the front, in the midst of facing adversities. We can notate this as:
People Principle: In any organization, the requisite variety always come from the people.
The organizational structures lack the variety needed. The requisite variety is provided as needed by the front-end employees, if they are able to.
Final Words:
“Story can mend, and story can heal.” (Joseph Campbell – The Hero with a Thousand Faces)
We are storytellers. We live and live on in stories. Make yours a good one.
I will finish with excellent advice on tackling writer’s block from one of my favorite storytellers, O. Henry (William Sydney Porter). He puts a nice “Go to the Gemba” touch:
Yes, I get dry spells. Sometimes I can’t turn out a thing for three months. When one of those spells comes on, I quit trying to work and go out and see something of life. You can’t write a story that’s got any life in it by sitting at a writing table and thinking. You’ve got to get out into the streets, into the crowds, talk with people, and feel the rush and throb of real life–that’s the stimulant for a story writer.
For those interested, I have shared some of my really short stories or Flash fiction here.
I also welcome the readers to check out the following posts that are applicable to the topic on hand:
Purpose of a System in Light of VSM:
OODA Loop at the Gemba: (OODA loop also looks at how preventing the adversary to generate new useful information puts you in control)
Stay safe and Always keep on learning…
In case you missed it, my last post was Hermeneutics at the Gemba:
In today’s post, I am looking at Hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a branch of philosophy that deals with interpretation. It started off as a study of interpreting religious texts. The word has its origin from the Greek God Hermes, who was also the messenger of the Gods (herald) to humans. Hermes’ job was to interpret the words of the many Greek gods to humans. As you go back in time, there was only one interpretation to a religious text, and it was usually provided by the chief priest in charge. The common folk were not allowed to read or contemplate the text and try to interpret the meaning. As time went by, this view changed. The readers were encouraged to be in the shoes of the author and try to interpret the meaning by contemplating what the author meant by trying to be in the same mindset as the author. Important contributions from philosophers such as Heidegger and Gadamer emphasized the role of the observer or the interpreter in seeking understanding. This meant that the prejudices, biases, belief systems, traditions etc. of the interpreter are important in the act of interpretation. It is meant to be a tango, rather than merely watching a solo dance. My post is heavily inspired by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer.
One of the ideas in Hermeneutics is that of the Hermeneutic circle. A good example to explain this is to imagine an interpreter reading a sentence of a text. He starts with a word and as he reads the word, he is trying to figure out what the word means in the context of a sentence. He has an idea of what the word means. As he finishes reading the sentence, he re-evaluates the meaning of the word in the context of the full sentence, and he gains an additional understanding of the word, which in turn yields an additional understanding of the sentence. Contrast this with the idea of the parts to a whole. Understanding a part provides an understanding of the whole, which in turn provides an understanding to the part, and so on the circle goes. One can use the same idea with a sentence and the paragraph, a paragraph and the chapter, and a chapter and the book. The meaning is truly holistic and greater than the sum of individual meanings of the words. The order of the words matters very much in the final meaning of the sentence. The relationship of the part to the whole is depicted in the hermeneutic circle below. Analysis is the act of taking things apart, while synthesis is the act of putting things together.
Today, hermeneutics does not stand for interpreting texts alone. It has come to represent the art of interpreting to improve understanding. This could be in relation to what another person is saying or related to learning a subject and so on. The most important act of hermeneutics is the act of asking questions. From this standpoint, the guiding principle to keep in mind is that the most important question is the one that has not yet been asked. This aligns with the hermeneutic circle, in the sense that we have to keep going back and forth to generate improved understanding. This is an ongoing process and never meant to be just one iteration. I like the representation of the hermeneutic circle as a spiral, where the spiral gets smaller and smaller, indicating a churning or generation of improved understanding. I have also seen it as a diverging spiral where the coil gets larger and larger to indicate an expansion of understanding.
The circle or the spiral depicts a dialectic movement that the interpreter has to take. Each turn of this movement should result in a better understanding of both the part and the whole. Gadamer was strongly against the idea of viewing this as an objective act where the text author is outside and the meaning of the text can be obtained objectively without engaging in introspection. Gadamer wanted the interpreter to bring his prejudices, pre-understanding, fore-meanings etc. to the act of understanding. Above all, Gadamer wanted the interpreter to have openness to meaning.
Gadamer believed that the prejudices or fore-judgments are the source of all our learning. This does not mean that the act of learning will leave the prejudices untouched. The act of learning will in turn modify/update our prejudices for our next hermeneutic act. Gadamer did not belive prejudices to be bad or assign the negative connotation that we normally project.
One analogy that Gadamer used in his hermeneutics was a “horizon.” Much like in the horizon of a landscape that we see, Gadamer used the horizon to depict the limits of our understanding. Gadamer expressed the horizon as the totality of all that can be realized or thought about by a person at a given time in history and in a particular culture. Gadamer said:
The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point… A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence overvalues what is nearest to him. On the other hand, “to have a horizon” means not being limited to what is nearby, but to being able to see beyond it
The concept of horizon suggests itself because it expresses the superior breadth of vision that the person who is trying to understand must have. To acquire a horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand – not in order to look away from it but to see it better.
Similar to the landscape, the epistemic horizon changes depending on where we stand and what our perspective is. Where we are situated is based on our tradition, history, belief system etc. and is also bounded by the cultural and societal underpinnings. One may have an urge to see the horizon as a constraint holding us back, but Gadamer, similar to his view or prejudices, expresses horizons as fertile constraints enabling us to further our understanding rather than limiting our understanding. We are bringing something to the new understanding, something that is internal to us rather than relying solely on the experts or the people around us. This is the idea of Hermeneutics for Gadamer. An important idea that Gadamer talks about is the fusion of horizons. This is such a beautiful expression. We should resist the urge to explain this away as simply combining two different horizons or perspectives or the larger idea swallowing up the smaller idea or the weak idea giving way to the stronger idea. Gadamer views the fusion as a transformation which is prompted by the differences in the horizons. Gadamer wants input from both horizons to generate the fusion. This can happen only if we are open and willing to understand while at the same time not ignoring that we have our own perspectives that might need to be changed to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon in question.
Contrast this with the view of just doing as we are told or learning subjects in a rote fashion. Gadamer wants us to bring something from us, our horizon to the hermeneutic act. We should do so, so that we can change ourselves in the process. Gadamer wrote:
What I described as a fusion of horizons was the form in which this unity [of the meaning of a work and its effect] actualizes itself, which does not allow the interpreter to speak of an original meaning of the work without acknowledging that, in understanding it, the interpreter’s own meaning enters in as well.
We will never be able to stand in another person’s shoes or try to interpret their perspective in an objective fashion. Gadamer is pointing out that we have to do it from our own horizon since that is all that we have access to. When we hear about “respect for people”, we should start with the question, “what does it mean to me?” What does it mean from where I am situated right now? With an open mind, if I start reading about this subject, I may gain a better understanding. This understanding is made better when I allow my horizon to be transformed. The transformation also requires the understanding of what “respect for people” means to Toyota. I cannot ignore my prejudices but rather I should use them to my benefit. The label “handle with care” does not mean that I should not handle the box at all. But rather that my interaction or my handling of the box should be with care. The hermeneutic act is dynamic, personal and perpetual.
I will finish with a quote from Gadamer to reflect further:
“Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it. We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said.”
Stay safe and Always keep on learning…
In case you missed it, my last post was Newton’s Eye/Bodkin Experiment and the Principle of Undifferentiated Coding:
I work in the field of ophthalmic medical devices. I recently came across one of Sir Isaac Newton’s set of notes at the Newton project. In the notes, one particular experiment stood out to me. Newton pushed against his eye ball using a bodkin (a blunt needle) and recorded the optical sensations produced by the pressure on the eye. The schematic below drawn by Newton himself denotes the experiment. He noted:
I took a bodkin gh and put it between my eye & the bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could: and pressing my eye with the end of it (soe as to make the curvature a, bcdef in my eye) there appeared several white dark & colored circles r, s, t, &c. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub my eye with the point of the bodkin, but if I held my eye & the bodkin still, though I continued to press my eye with it yet the circles would grow faint & often disappear until I renewed them by moving my eye or the bodkin.
He went on to note that there were different colors and types of sensations depending on if he was in a dark room or a well-lit room. I enjoyed reading through his notes because of my profession and also because it was an opportunity to peek inside a genius mind such as Newton. The experiment remined me of another great idea in Cybernetics called ‘the principle of undifferentiated coding’. This idea was proposed by another brilliant mind and one of my heroes, Heinz von Foerster. Von Foerster said:
The response of a nerve cell does not encode the physical nature of the agents that caused its response. Encoded is only ‘how much’ at this point in my body, but not what.
The brain does not perceive light, sound, heat, touch, taste or smell. It receives only neuronal impulses from sensory organs. Thus, the brain does not “see light,” “hear sounds,” etc.; it can perceive only “this much stimulation at this point on my body.” The practical consequence is that all perceptions, let alone “thoughts,” are deductions from sensory stimuli. They cannot be otherwise. All observations are therefore partly the function of the observer. This situation renders complete objectivity impossible in principle.
Ernst von Glasersfeld, the proponent of Radical Constructivism stated:
In other words, the phenomenological characteristics of our experiential world – color, texture, sounds, tastes and smells – are the result of our own computations based on co-occurrence patterns of signals that differ only with regard to their point of origin in the living system’s nervous network.
Cognition is an autonomous activity of the observer. The state of agitation of a nerve cell only codifies the intensity, not the nature of its cause. What is understood or constructed is unique to the observer. This goes against the idea that if we provide information to a person, he or she will understand what is being provided. Von Foerster would say that the hearer not the utterer determines what is being said. In Newton’s experiment, the sensations were not caused by the eye seeing lights, but due to the physical interaction on the eye. This idea is further explored by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela with the idea of autopoiesis. As an autopoietic being, we are all organizationally closed and any information generated is an autonomous activity of our cognitive apparatus.
Bernard Scott expands this idea further:
Von Foerster begins his epistemology, in traditional manner, by asking, “How do we know?” The answers he provides-and the further questions he raises-have consequences for the other great question of epistemology, “What may be known?”
there is no difference between the type of signal transmitted from eye to brain or from ear to brain. This raises the question of how it is we come to experience a world that is differentiated, that has “qualia”, sights, sounds, smells. The answer is that our experience is the product of a process of computation : encodings or “representations” are interpreted as being meaningful or conveying information in the context of the actions that give rise to them. What differentiates sight from hearing is the proprioceptive information that locates the source of the signal and places it in a particular action context.
Another key aspect to add to this is the idea of circularity, where the output is fedback into the cognitive apparatus. We continue to learn based on what we already know. Thus, we can say that learning is a recursive activity. What we learn now helps further our learning tomorrow. There is no static nature when it comes to knowledge and learning. The great French philosopher Montesquieu said, “If triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.” The properties of the world (seen and unseen) are dependent on the constructor/observer. The construction/observation is ongoing and reflexive. Montesquieu also said, “You have to study a great deal to know a little.” In other words, the more you learn, the more you realize how less you know. Or simply put, “the more you know, the less you know.”
I will finish with a wonderful von Foerster story from Maturana.
Maturana tells of a time when Heinz von Foerster and the famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead went to visit Russia. While there, they went to visit a museum. Mead was using a walking stick at that time. At the entrance they learned that she could not carry her walking stick inside. Mead decided that she would not go in since she could not walk long without using the walking stick. Von Foerster convinced her to go with him. He suggested that he would hide the stick in his clothing, and once inside he would give the stick back to her. His thinking was as follows:
ln this country, whether by perfection or by design, people do not commit mistakes, therefore, any guard that sees us Inside with the walking stick will be forced to admit that we were granted a special permit because otherwise we would not be Inside with it.’
As the story goes, they were able to visit the museum without any problems. Maturana concluded:
Heinz, by not asking beyond the entrance whether they could or not carry a walking stick, behaved as if he considered that through his interactions with the guards he could either interact with the protection system of the museum as a whole, or with its components as Independent entities, and as if he had chosen the latter. He, thus, revealed that he understood that the guards realized through their properties two non-intersecting phenomenal domains, and that they could do this without contradiction because they operated only on neighborhood relations. This allowed Heinz and Margaret Mead to move through the museum carrying what a meta- observer would have called an invisible forbidden walking stick.
Stay safe and Always keep on learning…
In case you missed it, my last post was The System in the Box:
