Perhaps inevitably Heidegger’s last writings are in the form of poems. Wittgenstein also saw the true process of philosophy as a way of transcending or healing the effects of philosophy in the philosophical mind: philosophy is itself a disease, as Karl Kraus said of psychoanalysis, for which it purports to be the cure.
Merleau-Ponty, more explicitly than either, held out the hope that we could learn to see things again by a process of surréflexion, hyper-reflection, which would help redress the distorting effects of consciousness by making us conscious of them. This idea had already occurred to the Romantics.
At the end of his famous essay ‘On the Upper Theatre’, Kleist offers the possibility that the crippling effects of self-consciousness may be transcended through a form of still further heightened consciousness, by which we might regain a form of innocence.
‘Grace appears purest in that human form which has either no consciousness or an infinite one, that is, in a puppet or in a god.’
‘Therefore’, I said, somewhat bewildered, ‘we would have to eat again from the Tree of Knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?’
‘Quire right,’ he answered. ‘And that’s the last chapter in the history of the world.’
With that his essay closes. In this last phrase Kleist may be warning us, as Holderlin does, that what we crave can be had only in another world, where there are gods. But his essay also confirms that we can move only onward, not backwards, and that by doing so we might transcend our situation and in this way return to something lost.
[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and His Emissary, 451
Known
Humans, acting collectively, can make systems that might otherwise be complex or chaotic into known systems; we impose order through
laws and practices that have sufficient
universal acceptance to create
predictable environments.
On the negative side, the imposed structure can continue beyond its useful life.
In this domain we categorize incoming stimuli, and once categorized we respond in accordance with predefined procedures.
Leadership tends to a feudal model, with budget having replaced land as the controlling mechanism.
Knowable
We do not yet know all the linkages, but they can be discovered. This is the domain of
experts, whose expertise enables us to manage by
delegation without the need for categorization.
Again there is a human imposition of order but it is more
fluid than in the space of the known.
A major issue in the space of the knowable is entrainment of thinking. The very thing that enables expertise to develop, namely the codification of expert language, leads inevitably to entrainment of thinking. Exhortations to remain open to new ideas are unlikely to succeed.
Management of this space requires the
cyclical disruption of perceived wisdom. The common context of expertise is both an enabler and blocker to knowledge creation, and from time to time context must be removed to allow the emergence of new meaning.
In this space we sense and respond based on our expert understanding of the situation while the leadership models are oligarchic – requiring consent of the elders of the community and interestingly oligarchies are often less innovative than the idiosyncrasies of feudalism.
Complex
The nature of the complex domain is the
management of patterns. We need to identify the early signs of a pattern forming and disrupt those we find undesirable while stabilizing those we want. If we are really clever then we seed the space to encourage the formation of patterns that we can control.
These patterns are emergent properties of the interactions of the various agents. By increasing information flow, variety and connectiveness either singly or in combination we can break down existing patterns and create the conditions under which new patterns will emerge, although the nature of emergence is not predictable.
Entrepreneurs manage in this space instinctively while large organizations find it more uncomfortable. In this domain leadership cannot be imposed, it is emergent based on natural authority and respect but it is not democratic, it is matriarchal or patriarchal.
Chaos
Chaos represents the consequence of
excessive structure or
massive change, both of which can cause linkages to sunder. As such it is a space that requires crisis management and is not comfortable or entered with any enthusiasm by other than the insane.
However it is one of the most useful spaces, and one that needs to be actively managed. It provides a means by which
entrainment of thinking can be disrupted by breaking down the assumptions on which expertise is based.
It is also a space into which most management teams and all knowledge programs will be precipitated; however, regular immersion in a controlled way can
immunize the organization and create patterns of behavior that will pay dividends when markets create those conditions.
We also need to remember that what to one organization is chaotic, to another is complex or knowable.
In the chaotic domain the most important thing is to act, then we can sense and respond. Leadership in this domain is about power – either tyranny or charisma. Both models impose order, and if order is imposed without loss of control, then the new space is capable of being used to advantage.
[Dave Snowden]
'Complex Acts of Knowing: Paradox and Descriptive Self-Awareness'
The more orderly, less random, patterned, and narratized a series of words and symbols, the easier it is to store that series in one’s mind or jot it down in a book so your grandchildren can read it someday.
With so many brain cells - one hundred billion (and counting) - the attic is quite large, so the difficulties probably do not arise from storage capacity limitations, but may be just indexing problems. Your conscious, or working, memory, the one you are using to read these lines and make sense of their meaning, is considerably smaller than the attic. Consider that your working memory has difficulty holding a mere phone number longer than seven digits.
Change metaphors slightly and imagine that your consciousness is a desk in the Library of Congress: no matter how many books the library holds, and makes available for retrieval, the size of your desk sets some processing limitations.
Compression is vital to the performance of conscious work […] By finding the pattern, the logic of the series, you no longer need to memorise it all. You just store the pattern.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 68
System 1, the experiential one, is effortless, automatic, fast, opaque (we do not know that we are using it), parallel-processed, and can lend itself to errors. It is what we call “intuition” […] It produces shortcuts, called “heuristics,” that allow us to function rapidly and effectively. Dan Goldstein calls these heuristics “fast and frugal.” Others prefer to call them “quick and dirty.”
System 2, the cogitative one, is what we normally call thinking. It is what you use in a classroom, as it is effortful, reasoned, slow, logical, serial, progressive, and self-aware (you can follow the steps in your reasoning). It makes fewer mistakes than the experiential system, and, since you know how you derived your result, you can retrace your steps and correct them in an adaptive manner.
You have to make an effort (System 2) to override your first reaction. Clearly Mother Nature makes you use the fast System 1 to get out of trouble, so that you do not sit down and cogitate whether there is truly a tiger attacking you or if it is an illusion. You run immediately, before you become “conscious” of the presence of the tiger.
Emotions are assumed to be the weapon System 1 uses to direct us and force us to act quickly. It mediates risk avoidance far more effectively than our cognitive system.
Note that neurobiologists make, roughly, a similar distinction to that between System 1 and System 2, except that they operate along anatomical lines. Their distinction differentiates between parts of the brain, the cortical part, which we are supposed to use for thinking, and which distinguishes us from other animals, and the fast-reacting limbic brain, which is the centre of emotions, and which we share with other animals.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 82
'Inattentional blindness' - we do not see what we do not expect to see.
The most anybody [...] will scan of the available data before you make a decision is about five percent. That’s on a good day, if you’re really focused. If you’re Chinese it is ten percent (there are actually different evolutionary processes in the brain as a result of symbolic as opposed to non-symbolic language).
You then make a decision based on a first-fit pattern match privileging your most recent experiences - that’s called conceptual blending. You scan five percent of the data, that causes trigger of memories of your own experience - things you were taught, things you learned from other people in narrative form - you blend that together and you come up with a unique form of action.
That’s how you make decisions - unless you’re fully autistic. The only people who make rational decisions by assessing all available data are autistic, which is why they can’t operate.
If you think about it in evolutionary terms, you can see why this happens. If you imagine the first hominids on the savannahs of Africa, something large and yellow with very sharp teeth runs toward you at very high speed. Do you want to autistically scan all available data, look up a catalogue of the flora and fauna of the African veldt, and having identified ‘lion’ look up best practice case-studies on how to avoid lions?
We evolved to make decisions very quickly based on a partial data scan, privileging our most recent experiences.
In modern cognitive science we don’t call these biases, we call them heuristics. Evolution doesn’t produce things that have no utility. So-called biases are actually heuristics that allow us to make decisions faster.
[Dave Snowden]
'Dealing with unanticipated needs – Dave Snowden'
Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this - the most superficial and worst part - for only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness.
In brief, the development of language and the development of consciousness (not of reason but merely of the way reason enters consciousness) go hand in hand […] The human being inventing signs is at the same time the human being who becomes ever more keenly conscious of himself. It was only as a social animal that man acquired self-consciousness—which he is still in the process of doing, more and more.
My idea is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to man's individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; that, as follows from this, it has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility.
Consequently, given the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, "to know ourselves," each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but "average.” Our thoughts themselves are continually governed by the character of consciousness - by the "genius of the species” that commands it - and translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be.
This is the essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them: Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface and sign-world, a world that is made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalisation.
Ultimately, the growth of consciousness becomes a danger; and anyone who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease.
We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called “utility” is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
The Gay Science, 354
Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong.
Consciousness gives rise to countless errors that lead an animal or man to perish sooner than necessary, "exceeding destiny," as Homer puts it. If the conserving association of the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies with open eyes, of its lack of thoroughness and its credulity - in short, of its consciousness; rather, without the former, humanity would long have disappeared.
Before a function is fully developed and mature it constitutes a danger for the organism, and it is good if during the interval it is subjected to some tyranny. Thus consciousness is tyrannized - not least by our pride in it.
One thinks that it constitutes the kernel of man; what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, and most original in him. One takes consciousness for a determinate magnitude. One denies its growth and its intermittences. One takes it for the "unity of the organism."
This ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness has the very useful consequence that it prevents an all too fast development of consciousness. Believing that they possess consciousness, men have not exerted themselves very much to acquire it; and things haven’t changed much in this respect.
To this day the task of incorporating knowledge and making it instinctive is only beginning to dawn on the human eye and is not yet clearly discernible; it is a task that is seen only by those who have comprehended that so far we have incorporated only our errors and that all our consciousness relates to errors.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
The Gay Science, 11
The purpose of consciousness is to create coherence in your perceptual representations, remove conflicts, predict the future, [and] construct counterfactual representations so that you can coordinate your actions and so on.
[Joscha Bach]
'Joscha Bach: Nature of Reality, Dreams, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #212'
When the reformers tell us that society can be improved by education, by increasing men's knowledge, by projecting the correct program and then taking action to realize that program, they are wrong because men in society do not act that way.
Their actions, their socially decisive actions, spring not from logical but from non-logical roots.
Pareto not only shows that non-logical conduct is predominant; his crucial point is that the conduct which has a bearing on social and political structure, on what he calls the “social equilibrium," is above all the arena of the nonlogical.
What happens to society, whether it progresses or decays, is free or despotic, happy or miserable, poor or prosperous, is only to the slightest degree influenced by the deliberate, rational purposes held by human beings.
Taboos, magic, superstition, personified abstractions, myths, gods, empty verbalisms, in every culture and at every period of history express man's persisting non-logical impulses. The forms change, but the fundamentals remain.
Gods and goddesses like Athena or Janus or Ammon are replaced by new divinities such as Progress and Humanity and even Science; hymns to Jupiter give way to invocations to the People; the magic of votes and electoral manipulations supersedes the magic of dolls and wands; faith in the Historical Process does duty for faith in the God of our Fathers.
[James Burnham]
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, p.158-9, 63
Humans are capable of reason yet most of our thinking is intuitive and emotional, both prone to systematic confirmation biases and various other heuristics.
Empirical data has proven David Hume right, that reason is the slave of the passions. The vast majority of reasoning proves to be post-hoc justification for decisions already made by instinctual intuition. Furthermore, our relative blindness to these heuristics leads to a systematic overrating of our capability, our contributions to projects, our capacity to assess risks, and our capacity to predict the future.
Humans are thus guilty of endemic hubris, which likely explains why the tale of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, was codified into a narrative by ancient wisdom.
[Academic Agent]
'Groyper Meta-Analysis Part 2: Replying to Keith Woods'
In a truly
distributed representation, the informational content of any specific weight is the result of such a dispersed process that it cannot be said to constitute anything specific. There are definitely not different kinds of weights (nomic, constitutive, inductive, etc.).
It is also a misunderstanding of the nature of distributed representation to think that it implements concepts or features by using clusters of components. That would merely be a refinement of a system of local representation. Instead of having one set of symbols with specific semantic interpretations, you now have another, perhaps with more symbols. Distributed representation allows you to discard this whole theoretical framework.
Instead of working with concepts or clusters of concepts, you work with a system of relationships at a sub-conceptual level that cannot be given, or rather, is not in need of a semantic interpretation at all.
'Distributed representation does not give you an
invariant, context-independent representation.’ Since the initial state of two systems may vary, they will never be able to represent exactly the same concept. This is of course only a problem if you think that invariant, context-independent representations are necessary or should exist.
Postmodern or post-structural theories of meaning deny this by claiming that both synchronic and diachronic contexts are not only necessary, but constitutive of meaning. Since there are no theoretical limitations on the amount of information that can be fed into a network (given that the network has sufficient capacity), one can include as much of the context as one wishes.
Moreover, since the information is distributed, no explicit distinction between concept and context has to be made - they are encoded together; context is always already part of the representation.
Adding up the characteristics of distributed representation we have now worked through, it becomes clear that the very notion of representation has been undermined.
A distributed representation is not a representation in the conventional sense of the word. It dispenses with all the components of a representational system. There are no symbols that 'stand for’ something, there are no grammatical relationships between them, and the system itself has no need of a semantic level of interpretation at all.
Most philosophical positions throughout the Western intellectual tradition have been sceptical about the
spontaneous emergence of order and structure.
In the absence of a rational explanation for such emergence,
some kind of organising agent - God (as the ultimate designer) or some other a priori principle - was usually postulated. Yet self-organisation is neither a mystic process nor a random one, and should not be in conflict with any of our normal sensibilities [...] We need neither a central processor nor an outside observer.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.71-2, 89
A self-organising system reacts to the state of affairs in the environment, but simultaneously transforms itself as a result of these affairs, often affecting the environment in turn. Processes in the system are therefore neither simply passive reflections of the outside, nor are they actively determined from the inside. The very distinction between active and passive, as well as that between inside and outside, comes under pressure.
In a complex system, control does not emanate from a single source. Should this happen, the system would become degenerate, lose its adaptability and survive only as long as the environment remained stable.
Since the certainty with which the future can be predicted has been greatly reduced, any plan of action has to be adapted continuously.
If the plan is too rigid - too much central control - the system will not be able to cope with unpredictable changes. On the other hand, it will also be disastrous if the system tries to adjust itself to every superficial change, since such changes may easily be reversed without notice. The system will waste its resources in trying to follow every fluctuation instead of adapting to higher- order trends.
Being able to discriminate between changes that should be followed and changes that should be resisted is vital to the survival of any organisation (or organism).
This is achieved optimally when the control of the system is not rigid and localised, but distributed over the system, ensuring that the positive dynamics of self-organisation is utilised effectively.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.108, 110
Does a theory of self-organisation claim that it is possible to describe human behaviour without recourse to a general system of values? If this question refers to values that are separate from, or prior to, the contingency of our existence, the answer has to be yes.
There is, however, another understanding of values which is not only compatible with a theory of self-organisation, but which can be viewed as a result of it. In this view, values are understood as emergent properties of the social system.
We have seen that distributed, decentralised control makes a system more flexible, and therefore increases its survivability. If we apply this notion to social systems,
it would seem that we have an argument against rigid, centralised control mechanisms in, for example, the management of a company or the running of a state. Once again, this kind of critique against autocratic management or a fascist government is based not on the idea that these things are 'bad'
per se, but rather on the knowledge that
they will ultimately lead to the degeneration of the system in question.
Do these properties imply an ethics of self-organisation? I would be very hesitant to use the word 'ethics' here, unless it is an ethics in the sense of ‘principles that
constitute a system', closer to the way in which Levinas would use the term.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.111
"The great activity is unconscious". Consciousness merely expresses the relation of certain reactive forces to the active forces which dominate them.
Consciousness is essentially reactive; this is why we do not know what a body can do, or what activity it is capable of.
It is inevitable that consciousness sees the organism from its own point of view and understands it in its own way; that is to say, reactively. What happens is that science follows the paths of consciousness, relying entirely on
other reactive forces; the organism is always seen from the petty side, from the side of its reactions.
What makes the body superior to all reactions, particularly that reaction of the ego that is called consciousness, is
the activity of necessarily unconscious forces: "This entire phenomenon of the body is, from the intellectual point of view, as superior to our consciousness, to our spirit to our conscious ways of thinking, feeling and willing, as algebra is superior to the multiplication table".
The only true science is that of activity, but the science of activity is also the science of what is necessarily unconscious. The idea that science must follow in the footsteps of consciousness, in the same directions, is absurd. We can sense the morality in this idea. In fact there can only be science where there is no consciousness, where there can be no consciousness.
[...] Nietzsche wished to remind consciousness of its need for modesty: its origin, nature and function are wholly reactive.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.41-2, 113
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