Forever Becoming: Langer

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Relevance

Out of an infinite number of potential differences, how do we choose which differences will make a difference? In other words, how do we decide which information is relevant?

It is context that defines relevance, and goals that define context. So it is our goals - the things we aim at - that confer sense, and that define the things that we see. Inasmuch as a 'context' is a kind of story, then it follows that we see what our stories allow us to see.

The realist believes that an object defines itself - in other words, it is a select number of inherent properties that make the object what it is, and it is these properties that we perceive. The object is not conditioned by the subject.

The pragmatist believes that the subject defines the object: that our goals - and the contexts that are conditioned by these goals - affect which information becomes relevant. The object is entirely conditioned by the subject.

There are an infinite number of ways to perceive or construe a given situation, and an infinite number of potential consequences of a given action or event […] Every “object” can be classified, even perceived, in an infinite number of manners. Every object must therefore be regarded as something infinitely complex – objectively, intrinsically.

We live in a virtual sea of complexity and uncertainty.

[…] how can a given entity be segregated from the parts that compose it, the situation of which it is a part, and the other entities to which it is related?

It has become painfully clear that whatever constitutes the definitive boundary of the objects that we manipulate both concretely and abstractly is not something simply intrinsic to those objects.
Events are simple and distinct only insofar as their relevant features are framed, a priori, by the constraints of an operative context.

We frame an object by cutting away vast swathes of information, indisputably associated with that object, but irrelevant to our current purposes, however those might be subjectively construed. Lacking subjectively determined constraint, therefore, even the most powerful information processors cannot compute the explosive complexity of the object – cannot even reliably define the edges of a regular solid, say, under changing conditions of lighting or position.

This means, to put it bluntly, that the concept of “object” itself is somewhat illusory. The world does not present itself neatly packaged into pre-existent categories, available for direct human perception and manipulation.

Nothing at all can be understood in the absence of a structured and subjective frame of reference.

[Jordan B. Peterson]
‘Complexity Management Theory: Motivation for Ideological Rigidity and Social Conflict’, in Cortex, December 2002, p. 432-3

Sokolov [...] noted that creatures exposed to novel or anomalous stimuli responded with eye movement, or alterations in galvanic skin response, or “depression of brain-wave rhythms,” [known as the ‘orienting response’] and believed that these alterations were not due so much to “incoming excitation” as to signals of discrepancy which develop “when afferent signals are compared with the trace formed in the nervous system by an earlier signal.”

It is difficult to determine how an organism might manage anything as complex as an orienting response – which, as Sokolov described, might be elicited by “the slightest possible change” in a given stimulus – without first constructing an elaborated and detailed model of the world.

A given entity or object is actually very difficult to “perceive” – not so much because things in themselves lack structure, as classical nominalists might have it, but because that structure is so rich and variegated that it may be endlessly and variously construed.

Although there appear to be certain “basic level” categories that “leap out at us, and cry out to be named,” in the developmental psycholinguist Roger Brown’s terminology – so we naturally apprehend the table, instead of each of its four legs and its single flat surface – we do not know precisely how our perceptual and cognitive systems manage this apprehension.

[...] two things differ and are the same in as many ways as there are potential things to which they might be compared: books in a library, for example, might be categorized by the total number of “e’s” they contain, or by their age, or thickness, or by the number of atoms of selenium on the first page of their preface, or by how closely they approximate the weight of the average book.

It might well be objected: such classificatory strategies are ridiculous – but the problem with that objection is that the lack of utility of a given strategy is a judgement of value, not a necessity drawn by logic or by any conceivable objective standard (as any “objective” judgement requires the a priori establishment of value-based criteria to judge by).

And, if it is judgement of value that determines the validity of classification (or even of perception), then it could easily be that functional utility determines the nature of the object.

A chair is not a chair because it shares a set or even a subset of identifiable objective properties. A chair is a chair because a person can sit on it. This makes a chair a tool, – a tool useful for specifically human purposes – and not a thing.

In the absence of a specific goal, or at least the possibility of a specific goal (which means in the absence of arbitrary and value-predicated constraint) the universe does not reveal itself as structured, or it reveals itself as too complexly structured, which is very much the same thing.

“Objects” are therefore not the simple constituent elements of the objective world, directly and simply perceived, but tools apprehended with difficulty, in the service of specific goals (and, furthermore, tools that may be perceived at very different levels of resolution).

[Jordan B. Peterson]
‘Complexity Management Theory: Motivation for Ideological Rigidity and Social Conflict’, in Cortex, December 2002, p. 434-5

[Jung] points out that there are two worlds. We might call them two worlds of explanation. He names them the pleroma and the creatura, these being Gnostic terms.

The pleroma is the world in which events are caused by forces and impacts and in which there are no "distinctions." Or, as I would say, no "differences."

In the creatura, effects are brought about precisely by difference.

In fact, this is the same old dichotomy between mind and substance.

We can study and describe the pleroma, but always the distinctions which we draw are attributed by us to the pleroma. The pleroma knows nothing of difference and distinction; it contains no "ideas" in the sense in which I am using the word.

When we study and describe the creatura, we must correctly identify those differences which are effective within it. The creatura is thus the world seen as mind, wherever such a view is appropriate.

And wherever this view is appropriate, there arises a species of complexity which is absent from pleromatic description: creatural description is always hierarchic.

[...] there are differences between differences. Every effective difference denotes a demarcation, a line of classification, and all classification is hierarchic.

In other words, differences are themselves to be differentiated and classified.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.461-3

The way we behave in any situation has a lot to do with the context. We whisper in hospitals and become anxious in police stations, sad in cemeteries, docile in schools, and jovial at parties. Contexts control our behaviour, and our mindsets determine how we interpret each context.

Many of the contexts that affect us most deeply are learned in childhood. For instance, our early visual exposure to the world may actually shape what we later see.

A controversial study of Euro-Canadians brought up in urban settings where buildings surround them with right angles, and with Cree Indians raised near tents and lodges that have many shapes and angles, suggested that the effects of early visual context may be lasting. In adulthood, right angles could be seen better than other line orientations by the Euro-Canadians. At the same time, they seemed to have less visual acuity for oblique orientations than the Cree. From the beginning, the Cree have a different mental landscape which may allow them to take in a greater variety of visual cues.

The location of context in our perception was vividly illustrated in an experiment conducted by psychologists David Holmes and B. Kent Houston. With the permission of the subjects, they administered mild electric shocks to a group of people, half of whom were told to think of electric shocks as new "physiological sensations." Those who thought of the shock in this way were less anxious and had lower pulse rates than those who were not given the prior instructions.

The same situation or stimulus called by a different name is a different stimulus. Roller coasters are fun but bumpy plane rides are not.

It has long been known that values create a context that influences sense perceptions. In 1948, Leo Postman, Jerome Bruner, and Eliot McGinnies used a machine called a tachistoscope to flash words very quickly on a screen. These words were associated with various values.

For example, subjects were shown political words such as govern, citizen, and politics; religious words such as prayer, sacred, and worship; and aesthetic words such as poetry, artist, and beauty. Words were shown to subjects in random order.

Despite the fact that the chosen words were equally familiar, the speed with which subjects recognized the words varied as a consequence of the subjects' values, as measured by the same Allport-Vernon Scale given earlier to subjects.

The higher a subject's score on a particular value, the more quickly he or she recognized the word. Politically oriented subjects, for example, recognized political words sooner than the artistically oriented. The context created by the subjects' values appeared to affect their visual ability.

[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.35, 36, 38, 39, 40

A researcher named Jules Davidoff traveled to Namibia [...] where he conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe, which speaks a language that has no word for blue or distinction between blue and green.

When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they could not pick out which one was different from the others — or those who could see a difference took much longer and made more mistakes than would make sense to us, who can clearly spot the blue square.
But the Himba have more words for types of green than we do in English.

[...] Davidoff says that without a word for a color, without a way of identifying it as different, it is much harder for us to notice what is unique about it — even though our eyes are physically seeing the blocks it in the same way.

[Kevin Loria]
What is blue and how do we see colour?

A text is a place where the irreducible polysemy of symbols is in fact reduced because in a text symbols are anchored to their context.

The medieval interpreters were right: one should look for the rules which allow a contextual disambiguation of the exaggerated fecundity of symbols. Modern sensitivity deals on the contrary with myths as if they were macro symbols and - while acknowledging the infinite polysemy of symbols - no longer recognizes the discipline that myths impose on the symbols they involve.

Thus many modern theories are unable to recognize that symbols are paradigmatically open to infinite meanings but syntagmatically, that is, textually, open only to the indefinite, but by no means infinite, interpretations allowed by the context.

To recognize this principle does not mean to support the "repressive" idea that a text has a unique meaning, guaranteed by some interpretive authority. It means, on the contrary, that any act of interpretation is a dialectic between openness and form, initiative on the part of the interpreter and contextual pressure.

Medieval interpreters were wrong in taking the world as a univocal text; modern interpreters are wrong in taking every text as an unshaped world.

Texts are the human way to reduce the world to a manageable format, open to an intersubjective interpretive discourse. Which means that, when symbols are inserted into a text, there is, perhaps, no way to decide which interpretation is the “good” one, but it is still possible to decide, on the basis of the context, which one is due, not to an effort of understanding “that” text, but rather to a hallucinatory response on the part of the addressee.

[Umberto Eco]

The Limits of Interpretation, p. 21

There is no bottom line. Our choice of terms depends on the purpose for which we want to analyse the world at the time.

[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p. 195

Complex systems are usually open systems, i.e. they interact with their environment.

As a matter of fact, it is often difficult to define the border of a complex system. Instead of being a characteristic of the system itself, the scope of the system is usually determined by the purpose of the description of the system, and is thus often influenced by the position of the observer. This process is called framing.

Closed systems are usually merely complicated.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.4

[...] in any given social situation it is frequently the case that many different transactions are taking place at one and the same time between members of the same group. Not one game is being played, but several, and [...] the problem about real life is that moving one's knight to QB 3 may always be replied to with a lob across the net.

Even when we can identify with some certainty what game is being played, there is another problem. In real life situations, unlike both games and the examples in books about game-theory, we often do not start with a determinate set of players and pieces or a determinate area in which the game is to take place.

There is - or perhaps used to be - on the market a cardboard and plastic version of the battle of Gettysburg which [...] had this peculiarity, that a moderately good player taking the Confederate side can win. Yet clearly no player of war games is likely to be as intelligent at generalship as Lee was, and he lost. Why?

The answer of course is that the player knows from the outset what Lee did not - what the time scale of the preliminary stages of the battle must be, precisely what units are going to get involved, what the limits to the terrain are on which the battle is to be fought. And all this entails that the game does not reproduce Lee's situation.

For Lee did not and could not know that it was the Battle of Gettysburg - an episode on which a determinate shape was conferred only retrospectively by its outcome - which was about to be fought.

Jeffrey S. Milstein and William Charles Mitchell (1968) constructed a simulation of the Vietnam War [...] What is striking [...] is their response to their second source of failure, one which they do note themselves: their predictions were radically upset by the Tet offensive. The response of Milstein and Mitchell is to speculate as to how future studies might be extended so that the factors which led to the Tet offensive might be included.

What they ignore is the necessarily open and indeterminate character of all situations as complex as the Vietnam war. There is at the outset no determinate, enumerable set of factors, the totality of which comprise the situation. To suppose otherwise is to confuse a retrospective standpoint with a prospective one.

To say this is not at all the same as saying that all computer simulation is valueless; but what simulation cannot evade are the systematic sources of unpredictability.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.115-16

Everything and Nothing
A Difference that makes a Difference
Discrimination
Small Part, Large System

Closed / Open
Short Cuts
Context

Constellating

Levels of Meaning

Escaping Uncertainty

Certainty - Uncertainty
Solid - Liquid
Known - Unknown
Actuality - Potentiality
Closed - Open
Rest - Motion
Planned - Random
Control - Chaos
Simple - Complex

Mysteries are fertile, like soil. They are dark places, from which things grow and emerge, things that nourish us.

We have a tendency to want to solve mysteries, to shine light in the darkness and make the unknown, known. Taken to its extremes, this tendency believes that all mysteries can be solved, and that there is nothing that cannot be known. This is rationalism untrammelled, unhinged. To the rationalist mindset a mystery is akin to an open wound, a sore spot that niggles and itches, and begs to be healed.

Mysteries bring perspective, suggesting that there are things that cannot - or should not - be known. An acceptance of mystery is an acceptance of limitation, a drawing of borders around the expansive ego. Mysteries remind us that we cannot know it all, or have it all - that we are forever incomplete, never whole.

The Child craves certainty, and the Parent likes being certain. The Adult knows that few things in life are certain, and attempts to tolerate ambivalence.

The child in us is in constant search of a parent, someone - or something - that can relieve us from the anxiety of doubt, and the responsibility of having to think for ourselves. In this sense, a person who professes certainty can be magnetic, drawing us into their sphere of influence. In a public forum, the surest voice tends to be the most compelling.

Uncertainty is often mistaken for cowardice, or indecision; an unwillingness, or an inability, to take a certain position. The uncertain voice is subjective, and provisional, full of formulas that 'soften the boldness of our propositions' ('maybe', 'perhaps', 'seems to be'...).

We are always missing something. None of our systems - our theories, or beliefs - are ever sufficient enough to capture reality as it is. Certainty, then, can only be achieved by ignoring or disregarding (or 'defeating') conflicting data points; in other words, by closing the self off to certain aspects of reality, and narrowing the field.

The simpler our view of the world becomes - the more complexity we are able to purge from our constructs and concepts - the more certain we can be of things. On the other hand, the more variables we have to consider, the less sure we can be in our judgments or decisions.

Whenever we make something - be it a concept, a physical structure, or even a human life - we act against the tide of entropy, that ever present, on-going process that gradually reduces all wholes into their constituent parts, constantly complicating things. All creation is, in this sense, simplification.

In spite of the complexity of things, we must be certain enough to live; to act and create, to make decisions and affect changes in the world. At some point, in spite of the errant data points, we become certain enough to put our weight on our structures, trusting that they will hold us - trusting that those things that we left out are not crucial to our endeavours.

'Certain enough' may, then, be the best that we - with our necessarily limited view of things - can do. Only an unlimited view can provide true certainty, and this is where the notion of 'God' becomes useful. As humans, it may be that the closest we are able to come to 'certainty' is a high degree of probability, but with God behind us - the ultimate parent, the highest, broadest concept - we are afforded a firm guarantee; the backing we need to affirm or deny, with certainty.

"I'd almost forgotten the excitement of not knowing, the delights of uncertainty..."

['Dr Manhattan']
Watchmen, Chapter XII, p. 7

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge [...]

[Charles Darwin]

Mystery, or unknowing, is energy. As soon as a mystery is explained, it ceases to be a source of energy.

If we question deep enough there comes a point where answers, if answers could be given, would kill.

We may want to dam the river; but we dam the spring at our peril. In fact, since 'God' is unknowable, we cannot dam the spring of basic existential mystery. 'God' is the energy of all questions and questing; and so the ultimate source of all action and volition.

[John Fowles]
The Aristos, p. 27

Religious worldview - there is a mystery at the heart of everything. There is a ceiling to our ambition. Everything cannot be known. Man is finite, God is infinite.

Scientific worldview - all mysteries can be solved. There is no ceiling on our ambition, no limit to how high we can fly. Everything can be known. Man is infinite, God does not exist.

Everything has a secret.

Everything has an essence that cannot be known. On the outside everything seems to make sense, but on the inside there is a Godly spark that cannot be explained.

For all of us, there is a dimension which we can never grasp, the dimension that lies beyond our being.

[Tzvi Freeman]
'Secret Samech'

If the arts don’t hurt, why have them?

It’s only modern vanity which supposes that everything can be known or that only what is knowable has a claim upon our interest. The artist and the priest know that there are mysteries beyond anything that can be done with words, sounds or forms.

If we want to live without this sense of mystery, we can of course, but we should be very suspicious of the feeling that everything coheres and that the arts, like everything else, fit comfortably into our lives.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 21

What men really want is not knowledge, but certainty.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

[Bertrand Russell]
Interview in 'The Listener', 1964, and The Triumph of Stupidity

Disillusioned men do not make effective leaders.

[Thurman Arnold]

Certainty is the greatest of all illusions: whatever kind of fundamentalism it may underwrite, that of religion or of science, it is what the ancients meant by hubris.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 460

The majority of human beings are only too ready to follow a leader who professes complete conviction, since such a course relieves them from the anxiety inseparable from uncertainty, and from the effort of thinking for themselves.

It is not difficult to point to recent political examples of leaders exhibiting single-minded confidence of a comparable kind, however narrowly based.

As Norman Cohn demonstrated in The Pursuit of the Millennium, utter conviction lends charisma [...] to figures [...]

[Anthony Storr]
Freud, p.125

Lacan suggested that though we believe ourselves to be democrats, most of us are remarkably interested in finding (and then worshipping) authority figures who will promise us the earth.

We desire to have someone else in charge who can make everything OK, someone who is, in a sense, an ideal parent – and we bring this peculiar-sounding bit of our psychological fantasies into the way we navigate politics.

'Jacques Lacan'

To me utopia is an epistemocracy, a society in which anyone of rank is an epistemocrat, and where epistemocrats manage to be elected. It would be a society governed from the basis of the awareness of ignorance, not knowledge.

Alas, one cannot assert authority by accepting one’s own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge - we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.

Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genres. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 192

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.

[Bob Dylan]
"It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"

The separation from wife and children, the breaking up of a settled establishment, and the going from the certain to the uncertain - all this was for a moment painful, but I had inured myself to an uncertain life.

I think it is wrong to expect certainties in this world, where all else but God that is Truth is an uncertainty. All that appears and happens about and around us is uncertain, transient.

But there is a Supreme Being hidden therein as a Certainty, and one would be blessed if one would catch a glimpse of that certainty and hitch one's waggon to it.

The quest for that Truth is the summum bonum of life.

[Gandhi]
The Story of My Experiments with Truth, p.235

v

Of all the qualities in a manager conductive to innovation and initiative, a degree of uncertainty may be the most powerful.

If a manager is confident but uncertain - confident that the job will get done but without being certain of exactly the best way of doing it - employees are likely to have more room to be creative, alert, and self-starting. When working for confident but uncertain leaders, we are less likely to feign knowledge or hide mistakes, practices that can be costly to a company.

Admission of uncertainty leads to a search for more information, and with more information there may be more options.

[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.143

Without the random, there can be no new thing [...] creative thought must always contain a random component.

[Gregory Bateson]
Mind and Nature, p. 160, 200

[…] the Gaussian bell curve sucks randomness out of life - which is why it is popular. We like it because it allows certainties! How? Through averaging […]

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 237

To me, it’s the avenue to insanity, to presume if you keep studying you’ll find the answers.

As I got older, I was more able to accept the idea that you don’t have certainty of this earth; rather than make you more perplexed and worried, it actually lightens the load when you realize there are no certainties.

[David Bowie]

To be able to feel ambivalent about someone is, for Kleinians, an enormous psychological achievement and the first marker on the path to genuine maturity.

The child will gradually perceive that there is in truth no entirely good and no entirely bad breast, both belong to a mother who is a perplexing mixture of the positive and the negative: a source of pleasure and frustration, joy and suffering.

These complicated psychological realisations belong to what Klein called ‘the depressive position,’ a moment of soberness and melancholy when the growing child takes on board (unconsciously) the idea that reality is more complicated and less morally neat than it had ever previously imagined: the mother (or other people generally) cannot be neatly blamed for every setback; almost nothing is totally pure or totally evil, things are a perplexing, thought-provoking mixture of the good and bad…

Unfortunately, in Klein’s analysis, not everyone makes it to the depressive position, for some get stuck in a mode of primitive splitting she termed (somewhat dauntingly) the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’.

For many years, even into adulthood, these cursed people will find themselves unable to tolerate the slightest ambivalence: keen to preserve their sense of their own innocence, they must either hate or love. They must seek scapegoats or idealise.

'Melanie Klein'

Anomalies are unsettling because they represent everything that lies outside the domain of the understood world. Complexity lacks the simplifying and constraining boundaries defining the objects that characterize known territory.

In consequence, we have profound, a priori motivation to avoid anomaly, to ignore complexity, and to maintain the structural integrity of our belief systems.

Anything unexpected (new phenomena, new ideas, new people) re-introduces the overwhelming complexity that our beliefs simplify. This introduced complexity, in turn, threatens the stability and security that our beliefs tentatively confer on existence.

Freud described religious beliefs as illusions, motivated by wish-fulfillment. Such beliefs can be more accurately understood as culturally-shared and accepted strategies for pragmatically managing complexity.

[Jordan B. Peterson]
‘Complexity Management Theory: Motivation for Ideological Rigidity and Social Conflict’, in Cortex, December 2002, p. 455

One of the strongest motives in modern life is to explain everything and preferably to explain it away.

The philosopher Gabriel Marcel has distinguished a mystery from a problem in this way. ‘A problem,’ he says, ‘is something which bars my passage. It is before me in its entirety. A mystery is something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is therefore not to be before me in its entirety. It is a proper character of problems to be reduced to detail: mystery, on the other hand, i s something which cannot be reduced to detail.’

A character in Yeats’s play The Resurrection says: ‘What if there is always something that lies outside knowledge, outside order? What if the irrational return?'

The gist of the matter is: a problem is something to be solved; a mystery is something to be witnessed and attested.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 12

Application of the second law of thermodynamics to psychology produces the first major tenet of EMU, that uncertainty poses a critical adaptive challenge, resulting in the motive to reduce uncertainty.

In his groundbreaking book, What Is Life?, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1944) argued that living systems survive by reducing their internal entropy, while simultaneously (and necessarily) increasing the entropy that exists in their external environment.

Dynamical systems theorists therefore propose that stable information systems survive only insofar as they are able to effectively manage their internal entropy. Those that cannot effectively dissipate this entropy are destroyed, in a Darwinian fashion (Kauffman, 1993). One consequence of this process is that complex systems tend to return to a relatively small number of stable, low-entropy states (known as attractors; Grassberger & Procaccia, 1983). This is because the vast majority of states that these systems could theoretically inhabit do not provide effective entropy management and are therefore characterized by instability.

[…] entropy reflects the amount of uncertainty about a system: The greater the number of plausible microstates, the more uncertainty about which microstate currently defines the system [...] High psychological entropy occurs during situations in which there are multiple competing frames and behavioral options, none of which is clearly more strongly activated than the others.

[…] As a system’s disorder and uncertainty increase, its ability to perform useful work is hampered by reduced accuracy in specifying the current state, the desired state, and the appropriate response for transforming the former into the latter.

[Jacob B. Hirsh, Raymond A. Mar, and Jordan B. Peterson ]
'Psychological Entropy: A Framework for Understanding Uncertainty-Related Anxiety'

Simply stated, uncertainty and related disorder can be diminished by the direct artifice of creating a higher and broader more general concept to represent reality.

[John R. Boyd]
'Destruction and Creation', p. 6

A scientific theory is not one which explains everything that can possibly happen: on the contrary, it rules out most of what could possibly happen, and is therefore itself ruled out if what it rules out happens. So a genuinely scientific theory places itself permanently at risk.

[...] Other theories which claimed to be scientific [...] such as those of Freud and Adler, did not, and could not be made to, put their lives at stake in this way. No conceivable observations could contradict them. They would explain whatever occurred (though differently).

And Popper saw that their ability to explain everything, which so convinced and excited their adherents, was precisely what was most wrong with them.

Popper often pointed out that the secret of the enormous psychological appeal of these various theories lay in their ability to explain everything. To know in advance that whatever happens you will be able to understand it gives you not only a sense of intellectual mastery but, even more important, an emotional sense of secure orientation in the world.

Near the centre of Popper's explanation of the appeal of totalitarianism is a socio-psychological concept which he calls 'the strain of civilization' [...] We often hear it asserted that most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

Whether or not this applies to 'most people' there is, I am sure, a vital element of truth in it. Accepting responsibility for our lives involved continually facing difficult choices and decisions, and bearing the consequences of them when they are wrong, and this is burdensome, not to say alarming. And there is something in all of us, something infantile perhaps, which would like to escape it by having the load taken from our shoulders.

However, our strongest instinct being the instinct for survival, our strongest need is probably the need for security; so we are prepared to shift responsibility only to someone or something in whom we have greater confidence than in ourselves.

[...] Above all we want release from fear. And in the end most fears [...] are forms of fear of the unknown. So we are all the time pressing for assurances that the unknown is known really, and that what it contains is something we are going to want anyway.

We embrace religions which assure us that we shall not die, and political philosophies which assure us that society will become perfect in the future, perhaps quite soon.

These needs were met by the unchanging certainties of pre-critical societies, with their authority, hierarchy, ritual, tabu and so on. But with the emergence of man from tribalism and the beginnings of the critical tradition, new and frightening demands began to be made: that the individual should question authority, question what he has always taken for granted, and assume responsibility for himself and for others. By contrast with the old certainties, this threatened society with disruption and the individual with disorientation.

As a result there was from the beginning a reaction against it, both in society at large and [...] within each individual. We purchase freedom at the cost of security, equality at the cost of our self-esteem, and critical self-awareness at the cost of our peace of mind. The price is steep: none of us pays it happily, and many do not want to pay it at all.

So from the beginning of critical thought [...] the developing tradition of civilization has had running parallel to it (or [...] within it) a tradition of reaction against the strain of civilization, which produced accompanying philosophies of return to the womblike security of a precritical or tribal society, or of advance to a Utopia. Because such reactionary and Utopian ideals meet similar needs they have deep and essential affinities [...]

If you think society is going from bad to worse you will want to arrest the processes of change; if you regard yourself as establishing the perfect society of the future you will want to perpetuate that society when you get it, and this likewise will mean arresting the processes of change; so both the reactionary and the Utopian are aiming for an arrested society.

And since change could only conceivably be prevented by the most rigid social control - by stopping people from doing anything on their own initiative which might have serious social consequences - both are led into totalitarianism.

[Bryan Magee]
Popper, p. 43-5, 87-90

Certainty is also related to narrowness, as though the more certain we become of something the less we see.

To put this in context of the neurophysiology of vision: the fovea of the human eye, a tiny region in the retina at the centre of the gaze, is the most pronounced of all the primates. Here resolution is about 100 times that at the periphery.

But it is only about 1 degree across. The part of the visual field that is actually brought into resolution is no more than about 3 degrees across. This is where the narrow focussed beam of left-hemisphere attention is concentrated: what is clearly seen.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 83

The key notion […] was graded memberships. A set could have members who belonged to it partly, in degrees.

The classic example in the fuzzy canon is tall men. Suppose Tom is 5’11”. Does he belong to tall men? Conventional sets ask, “Is Tom tall?” And erect a fence at, say, 5’10”. Tall lies above this height, not tall below. Thus, at 5’11”, Tom is tall. In contrast, fuzzy sets ask, “How tall is Tom?” The answer is a partial membership in the fuzzy set, such as 0.6. So Tom is 0.6 tall.

Fuzzy sets discriminate much better and supply more information. They are, ironically, more precise.

[Daniel McNeill & Paul Freiberger]
Fuzzy Logic, p.34-5

--

More precision = less certainty
The more you know, the less certain you can be.

Precision diminishes the likelihood of truth, but often increases the pragmatic value of a belief if it is true - for example, in the case of [two glasses of water, one of which is wholesome while the other contains typhoid - to the naked eye both look the same, but under the microscope their crucial difference can be discerned].

Science is perpetually trying to substitute more precise beliefs for vague ones: this makes it harder for a scientific proposition to be true than for the vague beliefs of uneducated persons to be true,
but makes scientific truth better worth having if it can be obtained.

[Bertrand Russell]
'Vagueness', The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 1:2, p. 91

The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed.

The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.

In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape.

[William James]
'The Present Dilemma in Philosophy', Pragmatism and Other Writings, p. 15

A word or two about why [alchemical] language is so obscure. One thing is that they spoke a secret language, and a secret language is necessary for keeping secrets; and secrecy is a necessary activity for people engaged in rituals.

Whether the ritual is lovers with each other, children with each other, artists about their work, or religions - there is a secret language that occurs.

Gabriel Marcel, a French existentialist, said that secrecy is an ontological state, an existential state - that there’s a special condition happens when you’re using secret language or when you’re keeping secrets. A special kind of being happens.

So lovers have secret language and secret trysts, and a realm which creates sacred space through their secrecy. Children have secret games and secret hiding places, and secret little rituals that they do. And artists find it troublesome to talk about their work, or to open up about what they’re in the middle of doing - they may talk about what they were doing, but they don’t want to talk about what they are doing, because they have to keep that secret and closed.

You get all sorts of private double-talk and arcane language and shorthand between people who are very close to each other or who are in some kind of ritual together.

This is partly what the alchemists meant about not opening the vessel, not talking about what’s going on. And the ability to stand the secrecy has something to do with the strength of the vessel. Robert Bly says it in Iron John, not ‘giving away your gold’. The naive male gives away his gold.

To know for sure what was going on would be to verify it, and to verify it would mean opening the secret to the public, thereby destroying it - and they would no longer be engaged in a mystery. The Greek mysteries of Eleusis went on for a thousand years and to this day we do not know what went on.

The idea was that if it was told you would die - whether you take that literally or not isn’t the question, the point is that it would die if it were opened up.

So this question of an arcane language and secrecy and so on is evidently an important part of the work and that’s why the texts, it seems to me, are so very peculiar and very difficult.

[James Hillman]
'Alchemical Imagination'

[...] the loose thinker can achieve certainty and can reach judgments that have an air of finality, whereas a more scrupulous reflection would have much less to show for itself and might result only in tentativeness and doubt.

[Herbert Butterfield]
The Whig Interpretation of History, p. 97

The zeal and subtlety, I might even say slyness, with which the problem ‘of the real and apparent world’ is set upon all over Europe today makes one think hard and prick up one’s ears; and anyone who hears in the background only a ‘will to truth’ and nothing more, certainly does not enjoy the best of hearing.

In rare and isolated cases such a will to truth, some extravagant and adventurous courage, a metaphysician's ambition to maintain a forlorn position, may actually play a part and finally prefer a handful of certainty to a whole cartful of beautiful possibilities; there may even exist puritanical fanatics of conscience who would rather lie down and die on a sure nothing than on an uncertain something.

But this is nihilism and the sign of a despairing, mortally weary soul, however brave the bearing of such a virtue may appear.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 10

The alleged fact that philosophy 'had been cultivated for many centuries by the best minds that have ever lived and that nevertheless no single thing is to be found in it which is not a subject of dispute and in consequence is not dubious' led Descartes to what amounted to the ‘withdrawal from wisdom and the exclusive concentration on knowledge as firm and indubitable as mathematics and geometry.

While traditional wisdom had considered the human mind as weak but open-ended, that is capable of reaching beyond itself towards higher and higher levels, the new thinking took it as axiomatic that the mind's reach had fixed and narrow limits, which could be clearly determined, while within these limits it possessed virtually unlimited powers.

[…] while traditional wisdom had always presented the world as a three-dimensional structure (as symbolised by the cross), where it was not only meaningful but of essential importance to distinguish always and everywhere between ‘higher' and 'lower’ things and Levels of Being, the new thinking strove with determination, not to say fanaticism, to get rid of the vertical dimension.

How could one obtain clear and precise ideas about such qualitative notions as 'higher' or 'lower'? Was it not the most urgent task of reason to put into their place quantitative measurements?

Neither mathematics nor physics can entertain the qualitative notion of 'higher' or 'lower'. So the vertical dimension disappeared from the philosophical maps, which henceforth concentrated on somewhat far-fetched problems like 'Do other people exist?' or 'How can I know anything at all?' or ‘Do other people have experiences analogous to mine?' and thus ceased to be of any help to people in the awesome task of picking their way through life.

[E. F. Schumacher]
A Guide for the Perplexed, p.18-20

Pornographic pleasure is narcissistic. It derives from the immediate consumption of an object that is offered naked. Today, even souls, like genitals [das Geschlecht], are offered unveiled. The loss of any capacity for illusion, semblance, theatre, play, drama – that signals the triumph of pornography.

Porn is a phenomenon of transparency. The age of pornography is the age of unambiguousness. Today, we no longer have a sense for phenomena such as secrets or riddles.

Ambiguities or ambivalences cause us discomfort. Because of their ambiguity, jokes are also frowned upon. Seduction requires the negativity of the secret. The positivity of the unambiguous only allows for sequential processes.

We rarely read poems any more. Unlike a popular crime novels, they do not contain a final truth. Poems play with fuzzy edges. They do not admit of pornographic reading; they do not possess pornographic sharpness. They resist the production of meaning.

Political correctness also condemns ambiguity: 'So-called "politically correct" practices … request a form of transparency and lack of ambiguity - so as to … neutralize the traditional rhetorical and emotional halo of seduction." Ambiguities are essential to the language of eroticism.

The rigorous linguistic hygiene of political correctness makes erotic seduction impossible. Today, eroticism is stifled by political correctness as well as by porn.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.86

Porn pervades the neoliberal dispositif as its general principle. Under the compulsion of production, everything is being presented, made visible, exposed and exhibited. Everything is subjected to the relentless light of transparency.

Communication becomes pornographic when it becomes transparent, when it is smoothed out into an accelerated exchange of information. Language becomes pornographic once it no longer plays, once it only conveys information.

The body becomes pornographic when it loses all its scenic aspects, when it is simply required to function. The pornographic body lacks any symbolism. The ritualized body, by contrast, is a splendid stage, with secrets and deities written into it.

Sounds, too, become pornographic if they lose their subtlety and allusiveness, and are only there to produce affects and emotions.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.88

In Latin, meat is caro. In the post-sexual age, pornography is so intensified as to become carography.

What destroys sexuality is not the negativity of prohibition or deprivation but the positivity of overproduction. The pathology of today's society is the excess of positivity. It is a 'too much', not a 'too little', that is making us sick.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.89

Efficient / Redundant

Constellating

Order       - Chaos
Simple - Complex
Few - Many
Life           - Death
Known    - Unknown
Complete       - Incomplete
Conscious - Unconscious
Light - Dark
Procedural - Creative
Conventional - Novel

Data - Information

Literal - Metaphorical

Global - Local

At the centre things are known, the ground is firm. Data points have been firmly connected, woven into enduring stories that are continually repeated. Procedures are accepted and followed without question. Code is run, not created. In the centre we accept what is known and we help it endure by repeating the requisite forms and patterns.

The periphery edges onto an infinite roiling sea of chaos. We are confronted by an infinity of unconnected points, units, data. At the periphery our role is creative - we must make connections, join dots, weave parts into wholes. We create new stories, and if they are good enough, useful enough, then these stories may one day become embedded at the centre.

Dreams, religious experience, art, love - these were the phenomena that still had power, Bateson thought, to undermine the rash/rational purposeful mind.

Of these four, art enjoyed the special role of fusing different "levels of mind" together:

there was necessarily consciousness and purpose in the decision to create, but creativity itself involved openness to material from the unconscious, otherwise the work would be merely schematic and transparent.

Discussing a Balinese painting that at the most immediate level shows a cremation procession, but can also be read as a phallic symbol (the tall cremation tower in the centre has an elephant on each side at the base) or as an account of Balinese social organisation (the etiquette and gaiety of the funeral crowd smoothing the turbulence of grief), Bateson remarks that the painting is profound because not "really" about one or the other, or even all three, but about their connectedness. "In a word, it is only about relationship and not about any identifiable relata."

Similarly, a novel whose characters develop in a mutually defining play of identities, each changing in response to the others, expressing together a collective ethos of which none is fully representative - one thinks of the Karamazov brothers and their appalling father - undermines the notion that anyone can grasp the overall pattern of which they are a part.

So, quite apart from any political content, narrative can induce a contemplative respect for the mysterious interconnectedness of the world, something that, hopefully, might lead to more cautious behaviour and a little less enthusiasm for dramatic intervention.

[Tim Parks]
Everything is connected, article about Gregory Bateson published in The Guardian. Can be found here.

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them.

Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense.

Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan

Such is the power of the Narrative Fallacy — the backward-looking mental tripwire that causes us to attribute a linear and discernable cause-and-effect chain to our knowledge of the past.

[...] there is a deep biological basis to the problem: we are inundated with so much sensory information that our brains have no other choice; we must put things in order so we can process the world around us. It’s implicit in how we understand the world.

What might we be missing?

It is very difficult to understand cause-and-effect chains, and this is a simple example compared to a complex case like a war or an economic crisis, which would have had multiple causes working in a variety of directions and enough red herrings to make a proper analysis difficult.

Stories of how businesses rise and fall strike a chord with readers by offering what the human mind needs: a simple message of triumph and failure that identifies clear causes and ignores the determinative power of luck and the inevitability of regression.

'The Narrative Fallacy and What You Can Do About It'

Simple facts are meaningless out of some context. [They] tell us nothing intrinsically useful, and we always need to weave them in some kind of story to make sense of them.

There can be good stories and bad stories, valid stories and invalid stories, stories we like and stories we dislike, and there is certainly a hyuge market in the political world for spinning simple facts into ridiculous stories that satisfy agendas. Even physics is a way of wrapping physical observations into sophisticated mathematical stories about the behavior of materials.

One can have a fallacious narrative, but one must have a narrative of some sort to make reasoning possible.

[Ted Wrigley]

'What is the narrative fallacy?'

Another important characteristic of perception is the tendency towards closure, that is, towards identifying a comprehensible figure.

Provided data, we will instinctively try to make meaning of it or to create some sense of understanding or familiarity.

A circle of unconnected dots, for example, will become a complete, bounded image when the perceiver mentally fills in the gaps.

[Herb Stevenson]
'Paradox: A Gestalt Theory of Change'

The ability to make or spot analogies has long been of interest to people who try to judge intelligence. Candidates for graduate work in certain fields, for instance, must take an exam called the Miller Analogies Test, which contains multiple-choice questions such as the following:

Lion is to Pride as Horse is to:

Vanity
Herd
Corral

In making an analogy, we apply a concept learned in one context to another one. Such a mental operation is in itself mindful. Architects who can see how one setting, say, a hospital, resembles another, say, a hotel, can come up with designs more responsive to complex needs.

Intentionally mixing metaphors with an eye toward finding similarities can spark new insights. Comparing people, businesses, and religions, across and within categories, for example, can lead to a greater understanding of both sides of the comparison.

Jean Piaget wrote that his work on the child's conception of time, motion, and speed was inspired by Albert Einstein's work in the domain of physics and relativity. According to the physicist Gerald Horton, one of Einstein's many contributions was to generate ideas that lent themselves to "further adaptation and transformation in the imagination of similarly exalted spirits who live on the other side of disciplinary boundaries."

This ability to transcend context is the essence of mindfulness and central to creativity in any field.

[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.130, 131

The Principle of Correspondence

This principle embodies the truth that there is always a Correspondence between the laws and phenomena of the various planes of Being and Life. The old Hermetic axiom ran in these words: "As above, so below; as below, so above."

The Kybalion, Chapter 2: "The Seven Hermetic Principles"

On the same great agility and power of transmission of their brains depends precisely the fact that, with them, every thought so readily evokes all those that are analogous or related to it.

In this way the similarities, analogies, and relations of things in general come so rapidly and readily into their minds, that the same occasion that millions of ordinary people had before them brings them to the thought, to the discovery.

Other men are subsequently surprised at not having made the discovery, because they are certainly able to think afterwards, but not before.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.29

We chose to know more about less and less. We may have expanded what we as a society know - but it was at the price of no single individual being able to truly know it all.

Now we obviously require specialized experts (as opposed to dilettantes) to solve specific problems [...] Even though the information storage capacity in our brains is vast, we eventually bump up against what we can truly understand - or we just can’t hold all the relevant knowledge in our heads.

[...] machines can help, acting as partners in generalism [...]

As knowledge grows, we must increasingly rely on computers. This is not a new insight; in 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote the seminal “As We May Think” essay in The Atlantic describing the need for a machine:

But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends.

The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers — conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial…

The difficulty seems to be… not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.

The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

The problem of hidden knowledge continues to grow. And now we have the Internet, and search, and big data which both surface, and hide, knowledge. As a way of addressing this problem of growing knowledge, Bush proposed a “memex” device, a type of rudimentary web browser.

[Samuel Arbesman]
Let’s Bring The Polymath — and the Dabblers — Back

I have my own problems with 'hidden knowledge'.

Take my music collection. Because it has become so easy to amass large quantities of music I now have a (digital) record collection that extends beyond my ability to interact with it effectively. I find myself having to come up with 'ways in' to it; methods by which I can access those songs that otherwise will never get played. These include playlists, shuffle mode, and limiting my access through arbitrarily defined boundaries (such as only playing artists that begin with the letter 'A'). It is too big; too complex.

This blog offers another example. As I write, there are a total of 526 posts on foreverbecoming. I do my best to link posts up to one another; and in so doing create threads - or constellations - that make (to my mind) greater sense out of the information.

These threads act in much the same way as a playlist in itunes. By linking things up - gathering separate elements together to make larger wholes - we create a higher, more abstract layer on top of that which already exists. I see this as akin to building a pyramid, where every subsequent layer of blocks gets larger and fewer in number.

It culminates in a single block at the top - the capstone - which is akin to a universal binding truth (such as the golden rule, "harm no one, help others as much as you can"). A true capstone is something that can in some way encapsulate everything beneath it, albeit in a very general way. It contains no details. I'm not sure what the capstone of foreverbecoming is, although I think the golden rule is as good as any. Maybe it is something like "L O V E."

The process of linking posts to each other is very similar to the process of creating constellations. It is also similar to a dot-the-dot puzzle, albeit one with many dots and no numbers. Essentially, I am using specifics to get at generalities. Every star is a picture - a constellation - in itself; but by joining stars to one another we gain access to a new level of understanding.

But inevitably posts get lost. Many of the posts on this blog will have no "Related posts:-" They are 'hidden knowledge', lost until they can be weaved into a bigger picture. They are like those towns and villages that haven't yet been linked up to the arteries of the modern world; those that aren't near a motorway, and don't have a train station. They get no traffic, and have terrible hit-counts. Advertisers go nowhere near them.

Looked at from that angle, perhaps they would prefer to stay hidden after all ...

This is artificial general intelligence (AGI), with the emphasis on “general”. In his vision of the future, super-smart machines will work in tandem with human experts to potentially solve anything.

“Cancer, climate change, energy, genomics, macroeconomics, financial systems, physics: many of the systems we would like to master are getting so complex,” he argues.

“There’s such an information overload that it’s becoming difficult for even the smartest humans to master it in their lifetimes. How do we sift through this deluge of data to find the right insights?

One way of thinking of AGI is as a process that will automatically convert unstructured information into actionable knowledge. What we’re working on is potentially a meta-solution to any problem.”

[Demis Hassabis]
The superhero of artificial intelligence: can this genius keep it in check?

When people ask for education they normally mean something more than mere training, something more than mere knowledge of facts, and something more than a mere diversion. Maybe they cannot themselves formulate precisely what they are looking for; but I think what they are really looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them.

When a thing is intelligible you have a sense of participation; when a thing is unintelligible you have a sense of estrangement. “Well, I don't know' you hear people say, as an impotent protest against the unintelligibility of the world as they meet it. If the mind cannot bring to the world a set - or, shall we say, a tool-box - of powerful ideas, the world must appear to it as a chaos, a mass of unrelated phenomena, of meaningless events. Such a man is like a person in a strange land without any signs of civilisation, without maps or signposts or indicators of any kind. Nothing has any meaning to him; nothing can hold his vital interest; he has no means of making anything intelligible to himself.

All traditional philosophy is an attempt to create an orderly system of ideas by which to live and to interpret the world.

‘Philosophy as the Greeks conceived it,' writes Professor Kuhn, 'is one single effort of the human mind to interpret the system of signs and so to relate man to the world as a comprehensive order within which a place is assigned to him.'

The classical-Christian culture of the late Middle Ages supplied man with a very complete and astonishingly coherent interpretation of signs, i.e. a system of vital ideas giving a most detailed picture of man, the universe, and man's place in the universe. This system, however, has been shattered and fragmented, and the result is bewilderment and estrangement […]

Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live. Even the greatest ideas of science are nothing more than working hypotheses, useful for purposes of special research but completely inapplicable to the conduct of our lives or the interpretation of the world.

If, therefore, a man seeks education because he feels estranged and bewildered, because his life seems to him empty and meaningless, he cannot get what he is seeking by studying any of the natural sciences, i.e. by acquiring ‘know-how'. That study has its own value which I am not inclined to belittle; it tells him a great deal about how things work in nature or in engineering: but it tells him nothing about the meaning of life and can in no way cure his estrangement and secret despair.

[E.F. Schumacher]

Small is Beautiful, p.68-9, 71

Fresh analogies allow all of us, not just jurors and judges, to understand, if not quite sympathize with, different contexts and experiences.

If grounded in the particular and concrete, unfamiliar analogies also allow us to see connections among things ordinarily conceived as different. Unexpected analogies, especially those making connections across contexts, "scrape off barnacles of thought" and "challenge views so settled that they are not thought to be views" (Minow 1987, 87). Metaphors can make an obvious contribution to this process because metaphors are like compasses: one leg is anchored in the familiar, the other free to float and connect with the unfamiliar (Hayles 1990).

In each of these cases the purpose of using concrete imagery and metaphors is to induce the explainer or interpreter to "see it fresh" by recognizing that criteria used to identify "similar" and "different” reflect the particular shared experience from which they are formulated.

Metaphors and analogies become specially necessary when explainer and explained do not share a common tradition. Far from abstracting from context, the aim of vivid, detailed narrative is precisely to bring the background of a forum - its context - to the fore and make it the issue being explored.

Once we recognize the astronomical multidimensionality of human experience and the context-dependence of dynamical self-organization, we can use vivid detail and fresh analogies to explain action. Doing so highlights the complexity of human behavior instead of abstracting it away to simplicity.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p.239

The orderly context in which the components are unified and embedded constrains them. Constraints are therefore relational properties that parts acquire in virtue of being unified - not just aggregated - into a systematic whole.

For example, the physical link between the tibia and the peronei on the one hand and the knee joint on the other systematically constrains the movement of the lower leg [...] In this example, a constraint represents a contraction of the lower leg's potential range of behavior: the lower leg has less freedom of movement, given its connection with the knee, than it would have otherwise. Limiting or closing off alternatives is the most common understanding of the term "constraint."

But if all constraints restricted a thing's degrees of freedom in this way, organisms (whether phylogenetically or developmentally) would progressively do less and less. However, precisely the opposite is empirically observed.

Some constraints must therefore not only reduce the number of alternatives: they must simultaneously create new possibilities.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p.133

Within the category delineated by turlku there are, of course, more precise words for different kinds of objects, but Pintupi usage emphasizes the underlying commonality of the referents as manifestations of a story, The Dreaming.

This view expresses a fundamental feature of Western Desert thought [...]: Sacred objects, country, or songs become the embodiment of events, of activity that has, in a sense, turned into these objects.

Second, Pintupi mythology consists mainly of narratives of beings traveling from place to place. Consequently, all the places visited may be part of one larger story or myth. Each place is discrete and separate, but also is part of a continuous series of places linked by the one story.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.59

Human memory is a narrative, an account; forgetting forms a necessary component. In contrast, digital memory is a matter of seamless addition and accumulation. Stored data admit counting, but they cannot be recounted.

Storage and retrieval are fundamentally different from remembering, which is a narrative process.

Likewise, autobiography constitutes a narrative: it is memorial writing. A timeline, on the other hand, recounts nothing. It simply enumerates and adds up events or information.

Memory constitutes a dynamic, living process; here, different levels of time intersect and influence each other. Memory is subject to constant rewriting and rearrangement […] the past - as something that remains self- identical and is always to be retrieved in the same form - does not exist.

Digital memory consists of indifferent - as it were, undead - points of presence. It lacks the extended horizon constituting the temporality of the living. This means that digitalized life lacks animacy. Digital temporality belongs to the undead.

[Byung-Chul Han]
Psychopolitics, p.67-8

Big Data opens up the prospect of absolute knowledge. Everything can be measured and quantified; the things of the world reveal correlations that were previously hidden. Even human behaviour is supposed to admit exact prediction. A new age of insight is being announced.

Correlations are replacing causality. That's-how-it-is stands where How so? once wavered. The data-driven quantification of reality is driving Spirit from the realm of knowledge.

A strong correlation between A and B means that if A changes, a change also occurs in B. But when a correlation holds - however strong it may be - one still does not know why this is the case. It just is that way. Correlation represents a relation of probability, not of necessity. It declares: A often occurs together with B. That is the difference between correlation and causation, which is distinguished by necessity: A causes B.

But causality does not stand at the highest level of knowledge. Reciprocity represents a more complex relation than causal relation. It declares: A and B condition each other mutually.

The concept is the higher context surrounding A and B, which provides the foundation for the relationship between A and B. Thus, A and B stand as 'moments of a third, higher [whole]'. Knowledge becomes possible only at the level of the Concept […] Only from the all-comprehending Concept C is complete comprehension of the correlation between A and B possible.

In contrast, Big Data affords only extremely rudimentary knowledge, that is, correlations in which nothing is comprehended. Big Data lacks comprehension - it lacks the Concept - and thus it lacks Spirit. The absolute knowledge intimated by Big Data coincides with absolute ignorance.

The Concept is a unity that in-cludes and com-prises the elements of the whole that it is. It takes the form of a conclusion in which everything is comprised and comprehended. 'Everything is a syllogism' means 'Everything is a concept."

Absolute knowledge is an absolute syllogism: everything takes conclusive form within it.

The 'definition of the Absolute' is 'that it is the syllogism' - i.e., the conclusion. But constant addition yields no conclusion, no syllogism, no 'putting-together'. Syllogism is not addition, but narration. The absolute con-clusion ex-cludes any further addition. As narration, syllogism represents the opposite of addition. Big Data is purely additive; it never comes to an end, to a conclusion.

In contrast to the correlations and additions that Big Data generates, theoretical thinking represents a narrative form of knowledge.

Ultimately, the 'end of theory' that Chris Anderson has trumpeted means taking leave of Spirit. Big Data makes Spirit - that is, thinking and thought - wither and die. Human science - Geisteswissenschaft - that is purely data-driven is, in fact, no longer human; it has no Geist, or Spirit.

Totalized data-knowledge amounts to absolute ignorance: the absolute zero of Spirit.

[Byung-Chul Han]
Psychopolitics, p.68-70

The asymmetry of linguistic relationships is also a precondition for the development of metaphor. To say that A is a B (he is a pig) does not imply that B is an A. However, most terms are primarily constituted by their relationships to their immediate neighbours (‘red’ by its relationships to ‘yellow’, ‘blue’, ‘green’ ‘purple’, etc.).

Long-range interactions are mediated by intermediaries, often resulting in metaphors.

When the metaphor has become fixed, it means that the network has altered its structure to such an extent that the words have become neighbours (in the sense of network topology).

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.124

[Mary Hesse] argues that metaphor is a ‘fundamental form of language, and prior (historically and logically) to the literal.’

An emphasis on metaphor and analogical reasoning shifts the focus of the philosophy of science from deductive reasoning to the problems of categorisation and clustering.

Using Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances, she argues that we gain cognitive knowledge not by exhaustively calculating all the logical relations at stake in a particular instance, but rather by finding enough analogies to place this instance relative to others we are already happy with. Clustering together things with related characteristics is of course exactly what a self-organising neural network does.

Although Hesse does not explicitly use connectionist terms, she does work with the concept of a ‘resemblance network’, and many of the points she makes are commensurable with a connectionist model of complexity. That much is clear from her advocation of a moderate scientific realism, of knowledge that ‘turns out to be particular rather than general, local rather than universal, approximate rather than exact, immediately describable and verifiable rather than theoretically deep and reductive.’

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.131

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