Human Freedom & Cybernetic Principles by Dr. Bruce Buchanan

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Bruce Buchanan, M.D., D Psych., is a physician recently retired after a career in medical practice, public health, psychiatry, university teaching, and in governmental policy studies and management, with a lifelong interest in philosophy and cybernetics.

Prepared for presentation to the Gaia Preservation Coalition meeting, Toronto, Canada, Spring 1997. Now been published - in the Proceedings of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome (April, 1997) -- See http://infoweb.magi.com/~jrennie/buchanan.html. (July 27, 1997)

The inquiries described herein are on-going, and any comments, questions or suggestions, or references to related work, would be greatly appreciated

Keywords: consciousness, values, evaluation, epistemology, constructivism, experience, human freedom, responsibility, cybernetics, ethics, environmental ethics, scientific methods, feed-back, sociocybernetics,
second-order cybernetics, Gaia, Karl Popper.

This perspective is wonderfully accurate. We depend upon experience for what we can know, but we can never really know the world in itself.

E.F.Schumacher, the economist who wrote Small is Beautiful, also wrote A Guide for the Perplexed, in which he makes many interesting observations. In Small Is Beautiful he argued for an "intermediate technology" that would result in a lessened economic growth but provide for basic needs. In A Guide for the Perplexed he points out the crucial importance of what he calls the adequacy of the human observer and thinker.

(1) The understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known. We recognize all life through our own life, and consciousness through our own.

What this means is that we must have enough mental and emotional resources to enter adequately into the details of what we want to understand. For such reasons we cannot expect a child to do psychotherapy; he or she cannot have enough of the categories of experience necessary to make sense of what he may encounter.

In cybernetics this is known as the Principle of Requisite Variety. The idea is that if we need a map drawn on a grid of 10,000 pixels we will not get an adequately detailed picture from an array of 10 x 10 i.e. 100. Even as competent housekeepers and technicians we must grasp the limitations of the equipment we use.

(2) Schumacher says also it can be a source of evil if he who is neither good nor wise is fully satisfied with himself.

This means that each of us should be trying to develop and improve, but can never conclude we finally have the final truth. If we believe we have the right answers, and are mistaken but not subject to the correction of errors, we become destructive without knowing how or why. We then bemoan the problems of the world without realizing our role in causing the problems.

We must always be open to new experiences and new lessons. We need to keep trying to have a picture of the world that takes account of all the really important factors. This is not so much a prescriptive moral judgment and directive as it is a description of requirements for success in coping with life's problems.

Skilful physicians, management consultants, systems scientists and skilled problem-solvers try as a first step to survey the overall situation, and to get the facts straight, and also to remain open to reconsideration of this picture as they learn more. If you own a computer and have had it crash, you will have ready examples to bring to mind. The required systematic procedure is to consider the problem and situation, collect all relevant facts, and arrange causal factors, inputs and outputs in a logical order. Only then is it really useful to focus down, to magnify the details which may be key to particular difficulties, and to trace out particular causes and effects.

When we do this we begin to realize that our role and procedures in approaching our observations, in troubleshooting the situations we encounter, will determine what we can find and how successful we can be.

These ideas are of very general applicability and have implications for such things as our understanding of the nature of causation, and indeed of scientific theories. This is not the place and there is not the time to go into details of this, but I might make a couple of important points.

There is in psychology a principle, which is a result of observation, that human beings are limited in their capacity for immediate memory to a span of about 7 items, e.g. digits, give or take a few. We can increase this on occasion by grouping items in sets, and over time by use of longer term memory, but we are all inherently limited by capacities of our brains to retain items and to see relationships.

Now it is fairly obvious that nature and the external world is not limited in this way. The world is not limited in a linear way to one or a few dimensions, but consists of multidimensional relationships and interactions which have evolved over time in complex ways utterly beyond our puny powers of understanding. So what we can see and remember can be no more than a tiny fraction of what is actually going on around us, and we probably miss most of what is important.

The point I want to emphasize is the crucial importance of a certain humility and a readiness to learn, to correct errors. To repent is to acknowledge error and to change. From the point of view of cybernetics, the feedback of evaluative information is necessary for the ongoing correction of errors, for the ability to keep steering in the right direction.

But let me take a few moments to say more specifically what cybernetics is, what the notions of feedback and error-correction involve, and what cybernetics means to those most involved in its study.

There are many definitions of cybernetics and many individuals who have influenced the definition and direction of cybernetics. Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, engineer and social philosopher, coined the word "cybernetics" from the Greek word meaning "steersman." He defined it as the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine. For others, cybernetics is the science of management and government. For philosopher Warren McCulloch, cybernetics was an experimental epistemology concerned with the communication within an observer and between the observer and his environment. Stafford Beer, a management consultant, defined cybernetics as the science of effective organization. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson noted that whereas previous sciences dealt with matter and energy, the new science of cybernetics focuses on form and pattern. And cybernetics is also sometimes used as an umbrella term for a great variety of related disciplines: general systems theory, information theory, system dynamics, dynamic systems theory, including catastrophe theory, chaos theory, etc.

However, a field of particular interest to those most concerned about people and the environment is what has been called second-order cybernetics, based on biological discoveries, especially in neuroscience, interested more in the interaction between observer and observed than in the objects of observation alone. Such studies have led to a re-evaluation of many of the tenets of mainstream philosophy of science, which had been implicitly based on a rather mechanistic and Newtonian clockwork image of the universe. This approach, which reflects human and social concerns, emphasizes epistemology--how we come to know-- and explores theories of self-reference to understand such phenomena as autonomy, identity, and purpose. Some cyberneticians seek to understand how people and their environment have co-evolved, and how to help create a more humane world.

Thus cybernetics provides a rigorous intellectual foundation for, and has developed a concern with, a wide range of processes involving people as active organizers, as sharing communicators, and as autonomous, responsible individuals.

Some of you will wonder: Are artificial Intelligence and cybernetics the same thing? The answer is emphatically No.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes for granted that knowledge is a commodity that can be stored inside of a machine, and that the application of such stored knowledge to the real world constitutes intelligence .

In contrast, cybernetics uses epistemology (the study of how we know what we know) to understand the workings and limitations of the media and environments (technological, biological, or social) within which we live, to develop useful descriptions leading to effective management. Cybernetic descriptions of psychology, language, arts, performance, or intelligence (to name a few) may be quite different from more conventional, hard "scientific" views. Many researchers have worked solidly within the tradition of cybernetics without necessarily using the term, including R. Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead and others.

The views of many philosophers of modern times are seen as consistent with many of the ideas of cybernetics; such thinkers include Whitehead and Popper. Such thinkers share a "constructivist" view of the world, which sees that our so-called objectivity really derives from shared agreement about meaning, and where information (or intelligence for that matter) is an attribute of an interaction rather than a commodity which could be stored in a computer.

AI's "realist" perspective assumes and accepts the world-as-it-is. The cybernetic perspective is "constructivist", and sees that the world of human civilization is created by an intelligence acting in a social tradition.

The fact is that modern science has the limitations of even those talented human beings who have conceived and make use of it. Every theory we have is an imperfect and provisional view, useful for some purposes, but of limited scope and possibly misleading in other respects.

The theory of evolution is useful for explaining some aspects of nature, but may be suspect as Social Darwinism, as a rationale for social organization based upon competition for survival.

The theory of relativity is useful for understanding some aspects of space and time, but the implied notion of the universe fixed as an unchanging Block in space-time, in which the future is already completely determined, laid out in advance (as Einstein was said to have thought), does not fit the facts in other areas of human experience.

For such reasons we cannot really expect to find in any science, including cybernetics conceived only as a formal discipline, the answers to our quest for a view of human existence within which we can finally see all things in their proper relationships. This realization should reconcile us to the fact that the idea of a truly comprehensive view, an understanding of the whole, an appreciation of the Holy if you will, has the nature of a quest. Such a goal can never be fully captured by human thought. The claim to be able to do this, an illusion designed to cope with anxieties, can eventuate in dogma, ideology, idolatry and the hubris which leads to destruction.

A proper humility points us to limitations which stretch on to infinity. We step into the future, which will continue to unfold and present new opportunities to human experience indefinitely. A holistic view is not a specified goal but a quest.

I am trying to describe aspects of thinking about systems and cybernetics which deal with the nature and limitations of knowledge, and with ethical implications. Of course, systems dynamics as a theory and intellectual tool has many specific and concrete applications in the study of trends and prediction of events in the world, and for these purposes must be applied in a rigorous fashion. But, while systems approaches make possible highly useful formulae and applications, they really depend upon the deeper insights into nature and human thought that they reflect.

Some of you may have heard of George Soros, the financier and philanthopist who is reputed to have made over a billion dollars by speculating on currency markets prior to the devaluation of the British pound. What you may not know is that Soros at one point in his career aspired to be a philosopher, and spent two years developing a systems theory he called Reflexivity. Sensitive to such complexities, Soros attributes some of his insights to his ability to take into account the effects of human anticipation on the unfolding of events.

Essential conditions of human freedom lie in the capacity for anticipation, but also in the creation of new conceptions and alternatives. Yet many people think of freedom more simply as the absence of contraints, with the addition of such enabling means as education, technologies and money, and so on. Yet most of us also, as we progress beyond adolescence, realize that, while such independence is necessary, it is not sufficient. So the question may be asked: what are the other essential ingredients of human freedom?

A key requirement seems to be a raising of consciousness which leads to the realization - the making real of - human ideals and values as active organizing principles of human futures. Too many people are driven automatically by instinct and mechanical habits, forces from the past which they may not understand and over which they do not have control, and cannot really be responsible. Genuine freedom involves informed choices, and responsibilities for consequences. Its exercise requires faith and work towards the future, with adequate knowledge, anticipatory thought insofar as we are able, and values which take creative account of the whole. Values of freedom and fairness which can be creatively applied to shape changing circumstances play a crucial role.

How does all this relate to respecting Gaia, and sustaining and improving humankind's relationships with the environing whole? Let me briefly point in one direction for possible answers. Interdependencies tie possible human freedoms to the health and future of the earth. Now, we do have many of the basics in place for human freedom. But many problems are not yet resolved in providing for all the education and the skills required to cope successfully in today's world.

The point is that we will not be able to manage all our problems if there is not full opportunity for all to contribute, and for all to benefit fairly. This is surely elementary but it is not always what happens. A world divided more and more into rich and poor also cannot be a sustainable world, and cannot properly address more specific problems of population, food supply, water resources, climate and the rest. Theories of freedom interpreted as laissez faire must also be evaluated and will be found wanting on their own terms, and are a significant aspect of the problems we confront in relation to Gaia.

It is my view that systems approaches which provide for clear discussion of shared objectives, and make error-correcting feedback and periodic adjustments to missions and goals part of the procedure, can help society enhance the opportunities which flow from the values of free inquiry, creative choices, and fairness.

As long as large number of people think they will find their salvation in the faith of scientific technocracy alone, or any other limited faith, each with its own set of self-supporting but limited and isolating values, modern life will continue to be fragmented, arts and intellectual pursuits will be without a centre of gravity, and politics will not be properly related to the real human problems or to continuing human existence in the long run.