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How to ground the observer in second order cybernetics, autopoiesis and Luhmanns system theory

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Title: How to ground the observer in second order cybernetics, autopoiesis and Luhmanns system theory


1
How to ground the observer in second order
cybernetics, autopoiesis and Luhmanns system
theory?
  • Søren Brier
  • Copenhagen Business School
  • Departement of International Culture and
    Communication
  • Centre for Language, Cognition and Mentality
  • Ed. of Cybernetics Human Knowing

2
Krippendorff on constructivism
  • The task of constructivism ... is to describe a
    system's operation within its own domain of
    description and
  • account for the constitution of its identity and
    the conditions of its continued persistence in
    its own terms.
  • ... constructivists need to find a way of putting
    the knower into a known that is constructed so as
    to keep the knower viable in practice.
  • (Krippendorff 1991)

3
The observer and second order cybernetics
  • I have the theory of observing, I am myself an
    observer, so I am doing the observing,
  • I am including myself into the loop of
    argumentation. And in which way can I handle
    that?
  • So, my proposition here is now that in the
    second phase of cybernetic evolution a serious
    attempt was made to cope with the epistemological
    and the methodological Grundlagen propositions
    that appear if you begin seriously to include the
    observer in the descriptions of his observations.
  • With the first appearance of Maturanas
    autopoietic system for us all who were working in
    this field the suggestion was immediately made
    that for the first time we can start here with a
    biological theory of autonomy, because if we do
    not stipulate autonomy, observation is not an act
    of interaction or something like that,
    observation would just be a transducer "
  • (von
    Foerster, 1981, p. 104)

4
Problem, plot and conclusion of this talk
  • Neither cybernetics nor general systems, second
    order cybernetics or autopoiesis theory have
    produced a first person concept of mind as
    awareness and experience of qualia! Thus we have
    not managed to put the knower into a known !
  • We only have a informational theory of computing
    (Bateson) or circularity (HvF) or a
    bio-constructivist theory of observing
    (Maturana).
  • Luhmanns theory combines them in a social theory
    of communication!
  • To give a solution to the problem of awareness of
    the observer he invents a psychic
    autopoietic system and communicative
    autopoiesis.
  • He then attempts to integrate Husserls
    phenomenology in his theory.
  • He fails, but is unaware that his use of
    Spencer-Browns mystical theory of mind as
    Firstness based on a Buddhist -Christian
    panentheism as a foundation can save his project.

5
Norbert Wieners cybernetic world view
  • Information is information, neither matter nor
    energy.
  • Connect statistical information concept with
    thermodynamically entropy and information becomes
    negentropy (Schrödinger, Brillouin and Wiener)
  • Information as negentropy becomes the organizing
    and sometimes creative aspect of nature.
  • A probabilistic, thermodynamic and informational
    grounding.

6
Bateson Information and mind
  • Gregory Bateson developed a non-technical and
    more wide-ranging concept of cybernetic
    information as a difference that makes a
    difference for a cybernetic mind.
  • He linked information, mind and meaning in a
    cybernetic systems of circulating differences
    including the whole biosphere, as well as culture
    and social systems.

7
Cybernetics mind in Steps to an Ecology of Mind
  • 1. The system shall operate with and upon
    differences.
  • 2. The system shall consist of closed loops or
    networks of pathways along which differences and
    transforms of differences shall be transmitted.
    (What is transmitted on a neuron is not an
    impulse it is news of a difference).
  • 3. Many events within the system shall be
    energized by the responding part rather than by
    impact from the triggering part.
  • 4. The system shall show self-correctiveness in
    the direction of homeostasis and/or in the
    direction of runaway. Self-correctiveness implies
    trial and error.

8
Developed further in Mind and Nature
  • A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or
    components.
  • The interaction between parts of mind is
    triggered by difference, and difference is a
    nonsubstantial phenomenon not located in space or
    time difference is related to negentropy and
    entropy rather than to energy.
  • Mental processes require collateral energy.
  • Mental processes require circular (or more
    complex) chains of determination.
  • In mental processes, the effects of difference
    are to be regarded as transforms (i.e., coded
    versions) of events preceding them. The rules of
    such transformation must be comparatively stable
    (i.e., more stable than the content) but are
    themselves subject to transformation.
  • The description and classification of these
    processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy
    of logical types

9
Pan-computational philosophy.
  • Bateson develops the idea of the biosphere as the
    ultimate cybernetic mind and HvF widened the
    computational concept beyond Turing and imagined
    mind, life and matter a computational system.
  • We can call this Pan-computational philosophy.
  • Where is the phenomenological dimension of
    experience, qualia, emotions and free will in
    that? Wieners ontological foundation is not
    changed.

10
Von Foersters observer
  • Realizes that he sees and invents the universe
    from within.
  • That he is made of the same stuff as his brain.
  • That there has to be some partly independent -
    energy and structure in the environment.
  • There has to be other real observers to create
    reality and meaning in language.
  • We are observing in communication together and
    computing a reality.
  • Could be construed as radical social
    constructivIsm.
  • But where is first person conscious awareness?

11
Mind as circulating differences
  • Maturanas autopoiesis bases the observer in
    biology and behavioural science (coordination of
    coordinations of behaviour). But only let objects
    appear though language.
  • Both Bateson, von Foerster, Maturana and Luhmann
    do refer to human sense experience, qualia and
    emotion.
  • But my concern is these these concepts are not
    defined within their paradigms but just refer to
    common sense understandings of them and take them
    as theoretically given.
  • They take first person awareness as given, but
    the ontology produced does not allow subjective
    experience such as the phenomenological life
    world as foundational in the theory.

12
Luhmanns system theory
  • Luhmann allows social systems to observe each
    other and to communicate.
  • He differentiates his theory from both the
    information processing paradigm and pan-
    computational philosophy.
  • In his system theory the embodied psychic system
    is the indispensable environment for this
    socio-communicative system to function.
  • It is the vital environment for communicative
    systems.
  • As such, his theory is not only meta-biological
    but also meta-sociological.

13
Luhmanns meaning world
  • There is a biological system in Luhmanns system
    theory, but I am not sure that you can call it a
    body or the body.
  • Luhmann's revolutionary idea is to distinguish
    between biological, psychological and social
    autopoiesis.
  • Autopoietic operational closure creates a
    'meaning world' of its own that does not exclude
    outside influences, but selects them to have
    influence only according to the systems own
    inner world of meaning and survival.

14
AUTOPOIESIS
SOCIO-COMMUNICATIVE AUTOPOIETIC LANGUAGE GAMES
15
The psychic system
  • Luhmann identifies the psychic and
    socio-communicative autopoiesis to operate in the
    medium of meaning.
  • Thus psychic systems which are not the same as
    classical subjects - have a competitor in the
    social system, which has the ability to cognize
    through communication (circulating differences).
  • The psychic system only has its own closed world
    of meaning, thoughts and feelings.

16
Dynamics of meaning
  • The dynamics of meaning processing may be very
    different from the dynamics of information
    processing.
  • Meaning often has an existential component and is
    connected to the life world of individuals, as
    well as cultures as a whole where myth,
    religions and political ideologies contribute to
    the possible frameworks of interpretation.
  • While having specific meanings and communicating
    them can be considered as codifying information
    then the ability to produce meaning in itself is
    not informational.
  • To Luhmann meaning is the field in which we make
    the significant differences (that make a
    difference).

17
Ego and Alter
  • Luhmann has a concept of Ego connected to a
    concept of an Alter to characterize the psychic
    system, but his ego is observational and thus not
    a traditional subject.
  • It is nevertheless the basis for the creation of
    the person.
  • The person, in Luhmanns system theory, is only
    brought into existence as the social dimension of
    ego and alter.

18
Circulating differences -no center - no free will
  • Thus in this theoretical framework, we do not
    have a personal core with a free will, and a
    communication-independent great variety of qualia
    that controls the communications and actions.
  • Rather it is the other way round, that the
    communication creates conditions to which the
    psychic system can make a structural coupling,
    through interpenetration.
  • We are discussing an abstraction, in which one
    essentially separate out the communications that
    are occurring, as if nothing else existed, but
    communications as circulating differences.

19
The missing subject
  • For Luhmanns a human body-mind is not really a
    human being when it is without language.
  • There are no persons in his system theory -
    understood as embodied subjects with a conscious
    free will, having causal influences on both
    natural and social systems in system science

20
The root of subjectivity
  • But where natural science will not accept any
    concept of meaning, Luhmann builds his system
    theory in part on a Husserlian phenomenological
    foundation interpreted in a special way as
    communication.
  • Most of all Husserls phenomenology is known for
    a fundamental theory of subjectivity. But Luhmann
    has none! This I a paradox!

21
Phenomenological life world
  • To Husserl directed conscious experiences (the
    observer) is before any distinction between
    subject and object.
  • Subjectivity and experience is the basic reality
    and an outer world of independent objects is
    considered as an artificial constructed ontology.
  • The reality of subjectivity is a life world
    with in which the observer makes distinction in a
    horizon of the experienced world.
  • This has never really been connected with the
    world of natural science including biology
    cybernetic information theory, autopoiesis and
    system theory.

22
Spencer-Brownian observer
  • Luhmann cannot connect phenomenology and system
    science and leaves his ontology open, much like
    Maturana.
  • Still Spencer-Browns the observer making a
    distinction between system and environment is
    the epistemological foundation of their special
    brands of operational constructivism.
  • Spencer-Brown seems to works in a pure logical
    framework and does not systematically discuss the
    ontology necessary to support the epistemology of
    differences and form that he promotes in Laws of
    Form.
  • But he discusses it another of his less
    scientific works, written under the name James
    Keys It takes Two to Play This Game.

23
The timeless foundation of observing
  • Spencer-Brown addresses the emergence of form at
    that level where the observer, the universe and
    the distinction between universe and observer
    occur at once/together from 'the void'. He speaks
    of the first distinction between system and
    environment. He writes
  • Space is a construct. In reality there is no
    space. Time is also a construct. In reality there
    is no time. In eternity there is space but no
    time. In the deepest order of eternity there is
    no space. It is devoid of any quality whatever.
    This is the reality of which the Buddhas speak.
    Buddhists call it Nirvana. Its order of being is
    zero. Its mode is completeness.

  • Spencer-Brown (1974 p. 127 ).

24
Spencer-Brown (1974 p. 127)
  • It is known to western doctrine, sometimes as the
    Godhead or that which was in the beginning, is
    now, and ever shall be.
  • This way of describing it, like any other, is
    misleading, suggesting that it has qualities like
    being, priority, temporality. Having no quality
    at all, not even (except in the most degenerate
    sense) the quality of being, it can have none of
    these suggested properties, although it is what
    gives rise to them all.
  • It is what the Chinese call the unnamable Tao,
    the Mother of all existence. It is also called
    the Void.
  • In a qualityless order, to make any distinction
    at all is at once to construct all things in
    embryo. Thus the First Thing, and with it the
    First Space and the First Existence and the First
    Being, are all created explosively together.

25
Form and emptiness
  • Thus we are in that void from which mind, matter,
    time and space emerges.
  • This is the unity that is broken by the first
    indication creating the first distinction.
  • The Heart Sutra, which is central in Mahayana
    Buddhisms ontology says
  • "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form."

26
Connecting back to the ontology of science
  • This does not of course mean that the "big bang"
    theory that cosmologists suggest for the creation
    of the universe is the true one. The "explosion"
    into existence does not take place in time, and
    so from the point of view of time is a continuous
    operation. Thus the "big bang" theory and the
    "continuous creation" theory, like all famous
    "rival" theories in western culture, are both
    equally true.
  • Spencer-Brown (1974 p. 127)

27
Spencer-Browns trinity of distinction
  • The explanation of the Trinity in fact turns out
    to be simple enough.
  • When you make a distinction of any kind whatever,
    the easiest way to represent its essential
    properties mathematically is by some sort of
    closed curve like a circle.
  • Here the circumference distinguishes two sides,
    an inside and an outside.
  • The two sides, plus the circumference itself,
    which is neither the inside nor the outside,
    together make up three aspects of one
    distinction.
  • Thus every distinction is a trinity. Hence the
    First Distinction is the First Trinity.Spencer-B
    rown 1974 p. 128-129

28
Making a distinction is semiotics
  • Then there is thus a first observer and it is
    this very abstract observer.
  • The system as a whole the form in
    Spencer-Browns philosophy is form or sign
    producing as C.S. Peirce saw it and now has
    produced that inherited agency that was not
    accounted for in Luhmanns system theory.
  • Thus we have put the knower into a known that is
    constructed so as to keep the knower viable in
    practice, - and we have made a deep connection
    between cybernetics and semiotics
  • CYBERSEMIOTICS
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