A simple line of questioning

As per one of my other blog posts, I have a very simple line of questioning here to illustrate the problem I’ve been thinking about.

Q. I am currently holding an apple in my hand. For all practical purposes, I know it’s an apple, but what is it, actually?

A. The apple’s made up of cells that were formed by the tree from which it came.

Q. Okay, but what are those cells?

A. The cells are made up of molecules, which are in turn made up of atoms.

Q. But what are those atoms?

A. Atoms are made up of sub-atomic particles like protons, neutrons and electrons. Those are then made up of quarks.

Q. So what are those quarks?

A. Well, we have some theories about what quarks are made of…

Q. So what is that apple?

A. Like I said, we have some theories…

So what is it that’s preventing us from saying what something is?

The origin of “one”

Mathematics, I think, is a language just like English or German or French. Think about the number one, for example. Where in the real world does the number one actually exist? Nowhere – it’s a concept in our heads. What I think we’re saying when we speak of one apple is the following: “what I am holding in my hand is stable enough to be considered distinct from its surroundings”.

What happens when you try to hold water in your hand? It spills out all over the place. With regard to the little bit that you have left in your hand: do you say that you have “one water” in your hand? Of course not! Without a container, we cannot consider water to be a relatively stable, distinct entity from its surroundings. If you place a certain amount of water into a jug perhaps you would be able to call it one litre of water, but what you’re saying there is that the jug is of a standard, relatively stable size such that it can contain a certain amount of water. The jug, then, is stable enough to be considered distinct from its surroundings.

What’s the point of this then? Well, what this means to me is that our concept of one is derived from a visceral experience. The concept two is both a logical extension of this experience and can also be a visceral experience itself (I can hold one apple in each hand, thus holding two relatively distinct clumps of matter). The number 10 billion, however, is quite a different thing. Have you got a visceral understanding of what 10 billion is? Have you ever been able to count 10 billion of something, such that you could recognise 10 billion of that thing when you see it? I hope not – I would imagine that to be a tremendous waste of time and energy.

So, numbers are derived from visceral experience – they are logical extensions of the concept of one. In a similar fashion, fractions are extensions of this visceral experience of one. We slice one apple up into two pieces, and thus we (approximately) have two halves of an apple, and so on.

[It's important to note here that I'm not discussing the historical roots of the concept of "one" - I am sure that other people have researched this topic extensively.]

Numbers as properties and mathematics as relationships

So, just like colour, or weight, or smell, numbers are derived from observable properties of physical phenomena – they are not the phenomena themselves.

Let me clarify that: when you say you have one apple, you are saying that the clump of matter you are holding in your hand is relatively distinct from its surroundings – you are describing properties of that clump of matter. The concept one defines how well the matter sticks together in a relatively stable form. In no way does it actually tell you what the apple is.

Mathematics as the language of science

It’s a well-known fact that mathematics is the language of science. For example, according to Newton’s laws of motion, the displacement that an object undergoes (s) is related to its initial velocity (u), its acceleration (a), and the number of seconds for which it travels (t) by the following equation:

s = ut + (1/2) a t²

This is a mathematical equation that tends to hold true at relatively low speeds for simple linear motion. Note how this equation says nothing of the object in question – it only defines the relationships between various observable properties of the object.

And why is it that it feels as though mathematics has an existence separate to our own, as if it lives in a different world? (Sir Roger Penrose, in The Road to Reality, calls this the “Platonic mathematical world”). I think it’s exactly because of the fact that numbers and formulae deal exclusively with properties of things, and not with the things themselves.

All languages fail in their ability to describe what things are – mainly because, in simple terms, the word apple is not the apple itself. This applies equally to mathematics.

What if things aren’t really separate?

As per this article which I wrote last year on the work of David Bohm, we have some evidence to show that “things” might not be as separate as they seem to be. What if, for example, everything (the entire universe) were an unbroken whole? Bohm calls this the Holomovement, and Pirsig calls it Dynamic Quality. What would this do to the validity of mathematics if one apple wasn’t really distinct from its surroundings on a deeper level?

For all practical purposes, being an engineer myself, I think mathematics is incredibly useful in helping us exploit our surroundings to our benefit. But as for unlocking the deepest mysteries of the universe, I think it is only as useful as any other language: in other words, not very useful at all. Towards understanding reality then, I think that we need to start to relate to reality in other (newer and older) ways in addition to languages (mathematical and otherwise).

[Along this line of thinking, I would highly recommend reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and "Lila" by Robert Pirsig, as well as "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" by David Bohm.]

Conclusion

So what hope is there then of science, in its present form which is heavily reliant on the language of mathematics, being able to tell us what things are? In my opinion: none.

And what’s so important about knowing what things are anyways? Why don’t we just carry on with our lives, making the best of them with the understanding that we’ve gained from science? That, I suppose is the more pertinent question that arises from this essay. I personally think that to know what everything is will tell us something very deep and fundamental, if not why we’re here then at least in which direction we should be heading. For all practical purposes.

That’s one thing science has never been able to tell me: which direction to choose.

To their credit, their value proposition is actually twofold:

1. They give you discounts on a wide variety of consumer and household products and services through a virtual mall, where your purchases are delivered directly to you.
2. They facilitate the creation of what they call an “asset”: something which brings you money without needing your direct involvement, effectively freeing up your time. You build your “asset” by giving such presentations as I went to on Monday night, or bringing friends, family and acquaintances to such a presentation, and getting those people signed up. For everyone that you sign up, you get a small cut of their monthly shopping spend.

The first part of their value proposition is fine – it’s the second part that really creeps me out, and my reasoning here is very simple.

Ask yourself: why is it that you want more time? Most people would answer that they want more time to spend with their loved ones. The problem is, for the average person without an extensive personal network (like the average people that attend such meetings as I did on Monday), the only people you really end up signing up are your friends and family. They, in turn, end up doing the same with their friends and family, and so on (until of course there’s nobody willing left to sign up – but nobody talks about that possibility, they only talk about how this sort of thing has worked so well for the last 50-odd years).

So if I sign up to this thing, I’m basically taking a cut of my friends’ and family’s grocery bills every month, so that I can get more time to spend time with them? How many of these people still actually have real friends and close family relationships after duping them into signing up for this sort of thing? How would you feel if your friend got you signed up to this thing under the auspices that it would be good for you? I would feel used. This is exactly the opposite of what the second part of their value proposition seems to offer, and so, to me, is fundamentally contradictory.

It seems as though this is some kind of big secret that nobody in Network 21 likes to talk about. They’d rather not think about it and instead they’ve developed their own vocabulary to hide this truth, rather talking about their “assets”, their “local diamonds”, and so on. When the people who are involved in it talk about it to me, it sounds as though they’re still trying to convince themselves that it’s something good and it’s what they want, and they’re never direct about their intentions.

At the end of the presentation they paraded a whole group of people who’ve been highly successful in building their “assets” – none of them looked happy and content to me, and I’m not the only one who made that observation.

And the people who are probably making the most money out of this scheme have to be Network 21 themselves, profiting off of what looks to me to be collective and growing misery through tarnished friendships and family relationships.

If it looks like a cult, talks like a cult, sucks people in without teaching them to think for themselves by appealing to their selfish desires like a cult, has charismatic people preaching about the benefits of being part of it like a cult, and degrades the quality of life of those involved in it like a cult, it has to be… Network 21?

Paradigms

I think that the reason we haven’t found such a viable alternative is because the underlying paradigm from which we’re viewing the challenge of our co-existence is limiting. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

A paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that … can be assumed to have solutions. To a great extent, these are the only problems that the community will … encourage its members to undertake. Other problems … are rejected as metaphysical … or sometimes as just too problematic to be worth the time. A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the [familiar] puzzle form because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools which the paradigm provides.

My Paradigm Shift

My most significant personal paradigm shift (built on top of many other paradigm shifts over the past few years) came after reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and its sequel Lila, by Robert Pirsig. Unless you have been exposed to Pirsig’s philosophy previously (the “Metaphysics of Quality”) you will most likely struggle to understand the remainder of this article. That is the nature of paradigm shifts – your paradigm is the set of “mental pegs” onto which you pin information as you attempt to make sense of the world. When attempting to make sense of a particular phenomenon, should there be information missing from one or more of those pegs, your attention shifts to find things that could possibly fit onto those pegs. If you don’t have the pegs, as Kuhn pointed out, you won’t look for information to pin to them, and changing those pegs or adding new ones can often be rather painful because it suddenly calls into question all of the other neat little collections we’ve pinned to our old pegs.

To provide an incredibly brief summary of the Metaphysics of Quality: the source of everything, absolutely everything in the universe, according to Pirsig, is Quality. Quality is not an objective or a subjective phenomenon – it is the source of subjects and objects, and exists at their interface. Pirsig then divides Quality into static patterns of quality and Dynamic Quality, where Dynamic Quality is the leading edge of experience: the here-and-now. Dynamic Quality is all that there is, actually, but it can never be grasped intellectually because, by the time we think about the here-and-now, the here-and-now has already moved on. Pirsig has an amazing description of how we see reality: we sit, with our backs to the future, watching the past unfold before us. All we see is relatively stable or static patterns in Dynamic Quality, referred to as “static patterns of quality”. Pirsig divides static quality into four levels: inorganic, biological, social and intellectual. The Metaphysics of Quality could be outlined as in the following picture.

Figure 1. Outline of the Metaphysics of Quality

As mentioned in this article, biological patterning (e.g. cells) cannot exist without inorganic patterning (i.e. atoms, molecules); social patterning (see this article) cannot exist without biological patterning; intellectual patterning cannot exist without social patterning (see this article for details on how intellectual patterning arises from social patterning). This movement towards wholes that are in some way greater than a sum of their parts is also referred to as Holism. Pirsig considers higher levels prevailing over lower levels (the biological over inorganic, social over biological, intellectual over social) as moral, and Dynamic Quality prevailing over static quality as moral.

If you’ve made it this far into the article and you haven’t given up yet, I have to congratulate you and also recommend that you read Pirsig’s books for a thorough treatment of how he got to this understanding. It’s definitely worth the effort.

Fresh Perspectives, New Research Avenues

I believe that we can come up with new ways of co-existing by looking at the world from Pirsig’s perspective, and one of the key components of that is an understanding of power and social influence. I think that power, or social influence, is one of the major dynamics governing social patterning, and we’ve been overlooking it for many years now in favour of studying inorganic patterning (physics, chemistry, etc.), biological patterning (biology), and intellectual patterning (philosophy, and most of psychology it seems to me).

Surely, to understand how to best co-exist, we need to understand social patterning?

What the Heck are “Equal Opportunity” and “Freedom”?

In much talk related to democracy, there’s this concept of “equal opportunity” that keeps popping up. What exactly do we mean when we talk about “equal opportunity”? Some people seem to claim that it means that we must have the freedom to become whoever and whatever we want. What exactly is freedom though? A number of authors have pointed out that it is an essentially negative concept, defined in opposition to something else. Opposition to what? If no other people existed in the world apart from you, you would be free to do almost anything you allowed yourself to do, right? (Except, of course, defy physical laws). So freedom is defined in terms of other people and internally in relation to yourself.

Thus, you are free if other people allow you to be free, and if you allow yourself to be free. Who is it that allows you to be free? Those who are powerful over you, of course. People can coerce you into allowing them power over you by way of violence or the threat of violence and intimidation, or perhaps you identify with certain people you consider to be influential, or perhaps you allow someone to influence you by way of rational argument.

What I think we really mean by “equal opportunity”, which we haven’t been able to express until Pirsig gave us this new paradigm, is that we want the ability to challenge existing power/influence structures without the threat of violence.

To add some insight to the last part of that statement, I think that law is nothing but the threat of violence from existing authorities. What is the ultimate consequence of not obeying a particular law and blatantly defying the authorities? It is violence: the death penalty, people forcing you to submit to them by way of physical violence or otherwise eliminating you.

Not only this, but democracy seems to me to be an institutionalisation of the process of regularly allowing those who are not powerful to challenge those who are powerful. The powerful people allow those without power the opportunity to challenge their power without the threat of violence, as democracy is inherently legal in such systems. Democracy is therefore definitely an instance of the principle about which I am talking in this essay (having the ability to challenge existing power/influence structures without the threat of violence), but is it the only one? What obvious shortcomings does it have that will need to be remedied in the next “version” of our co-existence strategy?

The Fear of Freedom: the Fatal Flaw in Democracy

Taken at face value, the principles enshrined in our current idea of democracy seem desirable, but there is an inherent flaw in its implementation and execution. Erich Fromm wrote a book quite some time ago entitled The Fear of Freedom, in which he described our innate fear of being truly free. As people grew in an understanding of their individuality, they started to fear the loneliness that accompanied it, and so they would generally rather give up that freedom to another in order not to be alone. If enough people give up their freedom to one single person, that person becomes an incredibly powerful, influential individual.  Several examples of this are available from history, with the rise of Hitler, of course, being the most prominent. People simply gave up their own freedom to avoid the isolation (in not belonging to the group) which accompanies holding onto their freedom, and eventually had to give up their freedom to avoid violence.

Fromm’s solution to this problem is to forge on in the development of one’s individuality until one has the capacity to relate to the world through the spontaneity of love and productive work. How practical is such a state of existence for the average man on the street, whose isolation grows every day in an increasingly disconnected, complex society such as ours? I think it’s a pipe dream. What alternatives are available to us though?

The Market Economy Model

The great thing about the principle of being able to challenge established authorities without the threat of violence is that, being a principle, it can be used as a lens in a variety of contexts. Think of it in relation to the market economy: those companies that perform the best are the ones that deliver what their customers want (money, as a friend of mine once stated, is one type of portable representation of power). If we discover that they are not acting in our best interests, we remove power from them by way of not purchasing their products, or selling our shares in their companies, effectively reducing or eliminating their power.

Is there perhaps a lesson in the example of the market economy that can be extended to governing a country? Perhaps, but we have to acknowledge the dangers in such a situation. Once again, most people suffer from groupthink, and are all to eager to give up their freedom (read: power, influence, money) in exchange for being part of a group. What happens when too many people give too much power to one individual or small group of individuals, crossing that invisible threshold? Two words: Animal Farm.

Challenging Authority

So let’s think about the mechanisms by which people challenge authority, and the common path followed by these people. One of the small-scale mechanisms of removing power from individuals is gossip (see this article). Gossip acts on reputation, and reputation is probably the fundamental “currency” or “backbone” of social patterning. Unfortunately it only exists in people’s heads, and is very difficult to quantify into something portable like money. It takes much time to be built up, and can be destroyed very quickly by careless chatter (hence the old adage: “if you can’t say anything nice about someone, don’t say anything at all” – a static intellectual pattern showing that we’ve learned, as a society, about the long-term impacts of carelessness in social patterning). Although, gossip can be useful in dealing with corrupt, yet influential individuals: newspapers publish stories on such corruption, and then people natter about it over dinner with friends, at the office with colleagues, etc. This is a key mechanism to our survival as a species. Without it, we would not be able to identify, track and then root out the unsustainable, harmful elements in our midst.

But what happens on a larger scale when it comes to removing power from individuals or groups of individuals? I think of it as in the somewhat-archetypal diagram below.

Figure 2. Establishment of new authorities

This is blatantly evident in the political scene in certain emerging economies and throughout history in the tales of kings and kingdoms, but it is also evident in business. Microsoft establishes itself as an authority, and Google arises to challenge it, to a certain extent overcoming it, and becoming the new authority. Facebook then emerges to challenge Google, overcomes it to a certain extent, and establishes itself as a new authority. Round and round we go, and where are we ultimately heading? According to Pirsig, we are heading towards Quality.

Efficient, Effective Allocation of Power

As I mentioned before, I don’t personally have a model yet for how we should conduct ourselves, but I feel that this line of thinking could be fruitful in developing such a model. What I do know, because we will never rid ourselves of power/social influence dynamics, and people, on average, will probably take many decades to come to accept their individuality, is that the model will have characteristics that lay out a framework for co-existence that allows for the efficient, effective allocation of power towards the sustainability of the human race.

Such a model will need to be re-evaluated regularly to ensure its relevance.

Living Close to Dynamic Quality

The whole point of such a principle, as outlined in Bret Victor’s talk, is to allow one to live as close to Dynamic Quality as possible, as I believe that the whole cycle in Figure 2 is only necessary because the establishment of an authority represents the establishment of a set of static patterns, and then the re-establishment of new static patterns more in line with changing circumstances. The more static patterns in which one gets trapped, the greater the chances of potentially veering away from Dynamic Quality and thus towards inevitable destruction. It is inherently moral, however, to live closer to Dynamic Quality.

To live close to Dynamic Quality, one must be willing to continually re-evaluate and interrogate one’s static patterning – especially intellectual patterning such as a new framework to replace democracy (this is where I find the postmodern/poststructural movement so valuable). It seems to me that, the simpler the principle, the less often it needs to be updated to keep in line with Dynamic Quality. The new framework must thus allow for the framework itself to be challenged, just as the Metaphysics of Quality itself is open to being challenged.

[The ultimate principle, I believe, is simply "love", in the Agape sense: "seek that which is best for yourself and others." "Best" here implies a movement with and towards Dynamic Quality. It is quite difficult to operationalise such a principle, and it seems to me as though each generation needs their own operationalisation principle derived from the "love" principle. My aim in writing this essay is to stimulate thought towards the development of an operationalisation principle for our current generation, because I believe that the principles that are currently in place are too complex and are tainted by too many individuals' immoral agendas.]

Developing Individuality

Fromm’s proposal of relating to each other and the world through the spontaneity of love and productive work is certainly practical, and forces one to live in very close proximity to Dynamic Quality, but only once one has reached a certain level of development of one’s self to be able to cope with such proximity and the loneliness through which one must first pass (almost as a rite of passage). It is this that we should be focusing on in our education system – not just teaching children static intellectual patterns, but actually facilitating the development of their individuality. People need to be encouraged in as many ways as possible to think for themselves (allow themselves the freedom to think their own thoughts). This, I believe, is already taking shape in the postmodern/poststructural movement, and needs to be encouraged.

Conclusion

To recap: my own paradigm shift came about after reading Pirsig’s philosophies, allowing me to place more emphasis on social phenomena such as power and social influence than has previously been emphasised. In thinking about new ways of co-existing (rather than “new systems of government”), I believe that Pirsig’s perspective is not only practical, but necessary for the long-term sustainability of humanity.

We have moved past the point where a single individual or small group of individuals should be able to unjustifiably hold on to power for extended periods of time, and many people have been growing in their own individuality and confronting the lonely path associated with that growth. We are currently entering a period of tremendous uncertainty, given the complexity of globalisation and increasing interdependence amongst different groups of people.

I dare say we are entering a period of human history where Humanity will take on a mind and character of its own, if it has not already, and the individual, like a cell in a body, will not be capable of understanding the mind and character of that superorganism – let alone controlling it. Any attempts at centralised control will result in tremendous destruction and suffering. All that is left for the individual, therefore, is to do that which is best for him/herself and those with whom he/she interacts (relating to the world through the spontaneity of love and productive work), and allow Dynamic Quality, with which the vast majority of people are already practically acquainted, to guide Humanity toward Itself.

The One Thing We Learn From History…

As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in Outliers, someone’s success is not independent of their history. For example, Bill Gates had already built up over 10,000 hours’ experience by the time the opportunity to start Microsoft came along, and there are probably a number of examples of people who had similar experience to Gates but were just “one year too early or late”. Success is obviously a combination of both hard work and opportunity.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me state why I think Facebook’s strategy was so successful – I’ll get to why Google+ wasn’t. The closest answer to mine that I could find was this one on Quora (see point 1 of Todd Perry’s answer relating to “attacking hubs”). Yes, Zuckerberg had the right amount of technical expertise, but that isn’t the chief reason why their strategy was successful – many people have similar or even greater levels of technical expertise, but haven’t started Facebook. Yes, the owners have been aggressive about growing the site – show me someone who isn’t aggressive about growing their business. Yes, Facebook appeals to a side of ourselves that struggled to find expression prior to the existence of social media – MySpace, Friendster and countless others (including Google+) all do similar things, yet where are they today, really, in comparison to Facebook?

Zen and the Art (and Science) of Business Strategy

The answer, in my opinion, can be best articulated using terminology from Lila, the sequel to the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, as well as an understanding of social influence (power). This is a bit philosophical (abstract) at points, but I guarantee you it’s worth understanding if you’re in business.

In Lila, Pirsig divides reality into four “levels” of patterning: inorganic, biological, social and intellectual. Biological patterning (such as cells) cannot exist without inorganic patterning (the molecules that make up those cells). Social patterning (immediate, pre-intellectual gestures and responses between biological organisms, and social influence/power) cannot exist without biological patterning. Intellectual patterning cannot exist without social patterning (for a discussion of how we think mind emerges only from social interaction, see this article).

One thing we’ve been missing out on in our understanding of business is a thorough understanding of power and its role in society, and my opinion is that Facebook inherently managed to leverage the right amount of social influence at the right times to slingshot them to success.

How exactly did they do it? It was both easy and difficult (easy for Zuckerberg, difficult for the rest of us). Think about it: the first institution whose members were up on Facebook was Harvard – one of the most powerful, influential institutions in the world, with their students being incredibly influential people in society. Several other influential institutions followed, and before they knew it, everybody who was anybody was on Facebook. It was only a matter of time before the nobodies (such as myself) were on Facebook. (By the way, I’ve since deactivated my account, for a variety of reasons).

Where Google+ Went Wrong

According to this perspective, therefore, I (being a nobody) should not have received an invite to the Google+ Beta version, but I did! Who the heck am I in the bigger scheme of things? Apart from being a few years too late to jump onto the social bandwagon, this was Google+’ single biggest failing. Their entry strategy was flawed from the beginning. According to this article, Facebook has around 850 million users at the moment – Google+ has around 10% of that (90 million – and even that might be an optimistic estimate). (And no, I’m not on Google+ either, for a variety of reasons).

Conclusion

I am not at all discounting the value of incredible technical skill – it’s an essential component to getting your business up and running, and is mission-critical for high-tech businesses. You simply cannot afford, as a small start-up, to have your site/application fall over just when people start liking it, because then, just as quickly, they stop liking it. Also, I am not at all discounting the value of getting the right amount of start-up capital, if you can’t bootstrap your business, at the right time, or addressing the real customer need/desire, or having the right people, etc. Facebook certainly got a lot of those things right too.

What I am saying is that a successful strategy seems to be one that also takes into account social influence. Start off by convincing the right users – those with the most social influence – to use your product/service, and you’ll find it’ll be much easier to convince everybody else to do the same. That could be an incredibly easy or hard task, depending on how connected you currently are, and Zuckerberg was fortunate enough (this is the “opportunity” component of the opportunity/hard work mix about which Gladwell talks) to have direct access to some of the most influential people in the world to promote Facebook for him.

Nowak writes of “cooperation” as if it were some sort of fundamental force or property in the universe: that the universe has this tendency towards the cooperation of “parts”. For example, atoms cooperate to form molecules, molecules cooperate to form RNA, RNA combines in interesting ways through the evolutionary chain to eventually form single- and multi-celled organisms, all the way up to our planetary ecosystem. In society, we cooperate to form interest groups such as “organisations”, cities, countries, and “humanity”.

Smuts wrote way back in 1927 that he observed this strange tendency of the universe to form “wholes”, whose properties were somehow greater than a simple linear sum of their constituent parts. It is quite interesting to look at the universe from this perspective: instead of organised wholes (such as you and me) being purely coincidental by-products of perchance encounters between smaller constituent parts, what if there is some sort of intrinsic law in the universe which drives constituent parts towards forming “wholes”? These wholes are then often said to exhibit new types of properties (emergent ones) which cannot simply be inferred from the properties of their constituents.

To me, it looks as though there’s quite a bit of overlap between Nowak’s “law of cooperation” and Smuts’ “holism”. From what I can remember, Nowak doesn’t cite Smuts as a reference, and so it’s really interesting to me that this paradigm has been developed by two quite different individuals in different time periods. Could this be yet further rumblings of an emerging field of inquiry, which by its very nature is interdisciplinary and holistic, making its way over the scientific horizon?

Several questions pop up in my mind (so far) after thinking about these sorts of things, reflecting against other thinking in emergence and complexity.

1. Can all of the emergent properties of the whole be accounted for by linear and non-linear relationships (i.e. mathematically) between the parts of the whole, or is there perhaps something else, intrinsic to “interaction” itself, which produces the emergent properties? [In what we understand to be human consciousness, for example, does consciousness only look as though it's emergent as a result of our inability to measure certain attributes of individual neurons and/or derive accurate mathematical formulae to represent the relationships between neurons, or is there genuinely something in the "fabric" of the interaction between neurons that we're omitting when we're developing our mathematical models?]
2. Following from the previous question, what exactly is “interaction”? (Or is this just another futile attempt at developing a blanket term for things which should not be categorised together?).
3. Do different types of “interaction” produce different types of emergent properties? If so, can we establish useful, repeatable patterns in the different interactions which produce different emergent properties? If so, what are these patterns?
4. In what ways do the “materials” that are “interacting” have an effect on these emergent properties?

These are, no doubt, pretty big questions. I’m not sure yet if they have answers. Any takers?

The production line

Think of a modern manufacturing line: the line assembles one or more types of products, and today it’s possible to have the line do so with very little human interaction at all, except for the occasional programming and maintenance. We then churn out as many products as there is demand in order to make a profit.

Figure 1. Car production/assembly line

Many web-based businesses are set up like this too: think Facebook, Google, Groupon, etc. And with artificial intelligence, we’re most likely going to start needing even less human intervention. The only time human beings are really needed on the business side is when things go wrong, or one needs to do things that are outside of the system’s programming, or one needs to teach someone else how to use the system.

The nice things about systems are that, in general, they can be controlled, they can be optimised (see The Goal by E. Goldratt), and, if set up properly, you don’t need highly skilled people (like the original developers of the system) to watch over the operation of the system. It’s only in times of serious crisis that the original developers are called back in. This is certainly appealing, especially when it means being able to cut your operating costs, developing economies of scale, to the point that the money just rolls in without you, as the original architect, having to lift a finger.

The organisation as a system

Many people advocate looking at an organisation holistically as a system (for example, Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline) – one whose purpose is to produce profit. So we come up with elaborate organisational designs and incentive schemes to encourage the various “parts” of the system (i.e. you and me) to act in such a way that the whole system produces this profit. We even try to get the organisation as a whole to “learn”. Often, the long-term aim of the entrepreneur who establishes such a system is to reduce the organisation’s dependence on him.

Figure 2. Traditional organisational chart

The appeal of this kind of perspective, at least in theory, is clear: the smartest person (the entrepreneur) designs the money-making machine, putting all the necessary cogs, wheels, etc. (the “not-so-smart” or highly specialised employees) in place and connecting them in appropriate ways (hierarchies, incentive schemes, etc.), and the entrepreneur cracks the whip (in whatever form that may be) to get them to work together. Out pops a continual stream of profits, and the entrepreneur plays golf all day and goes on long, frequent overseas holidays. (Note: “entrepreneur” here could also refer rather to “shareholders”).

Of course, the employees are not so dumb any more, and they know when they’re being taken for a ride, so we’ve established all sorts of elaborate psychological schemes (read here: human resource management, internal branding, team-building, etc.) to basically trick people into thinking that “the company really cares”. Sure it does: if its cogs break down, the stream of profit stops, and the shareholders have to cut their overseas holidays short to come home and fix the system.

Not everyone’s a greedy, profit-hungry blighter

Not all companies, I admit, are solely focused on profit – many of them have products or services which are truly beneficial to humanity. But seriously, do we really need another iPad? Click here for a pictures of what need looks like. Surely we should all be working together towards fixing this?

Some companies do a lot of good. The non-profit arm of a company I used to work for, the Praekelt Foundation, is using technology in novel ways that’s helping solve serious social issues. I’m sure there’s a whole range of other companies out there trying really hard to do similar things.

People are getting smarter

Back to the systemic perspective. So it’s all fine and well when you’ve got a simple product line with a relatively stable demand and a work force that’s happy with being kept unempowered in exchange for a mere pittance of a salary. What happens though when the people you employ, as an entrepreneur with this systemic perspective, are smarter than you? Perhaps they’ll find ways around your incentive schemes and systems to screw you over? Perhaps they’ll figure out how to start a company just like yours, only better? You’ll probably end up regretting that you treated them like idiots or in ways that made it seem as though you were stepping on them.

Markets are shifting more rapidly

Not only is the composition of the “organisation” changing, but people are getting smarter (especially in first-world countries), the amount of consumer choice that we have is growing at a dizzying rate, and attention spans are shortening (largely, I think, due to social media and a lack of discipline in its use), so it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep people satisfied. Their wants and desires are becoming ever-more fickle, and so the days of setting up production lines that pump out hundreds of thousands of black model-T Fords are most likely over.

The trouble with the system in this case is that even though the market shifts, the system stays facing the same way it was “programmed” to face. If this system is a monstrous organisation with 100,000 employees, and its product or service demand shifts significantly and rapidly enough, imagine the upheaval and distress this would cause! (And the obscene sums of money made by change management consultants in the process of trying to get everyone to work in the new direction).

Towards new ways of organising

We need to start looking at new ways of organising. A friend of mine pointed me towards this site this morning: http://unboss.com/. “UnBoss yourself” is the idea behind it. Quite a simple, powerful idea, but I think it’s rather impractical when you’re part of a completely under-educated work force and can’t do much more than drill holes, wield a spanner and phone the engineers when things go wrong (like huge numbers of people in many factor- and efficiency-driven economies).

Newer ways of organising, such as that seen in Semco and most likely advocated by UnBoss, as far as I can currently see, are most likely only applicable to a highly educated, skilled work force. These are much “flatter”, more networked, emergent approaches to organising together. These models assume that the people in these networks can think for themselves – at least to a certain degree, and with at least some individual and collective creativity.

The trouble, I think, comes in with people who cannot yet think critically, and have been oppressed and suppressed and disempowered by the “system” for so long that it would be a mammoth task to free them. I know for a fact that public schooling in South Africa is downright broken at the moment, with us being ranked 127th out of 142 countries in the 2011-2012 Global Competitiveness Report in terms of the quality of our primary school education, and 133rd in terms of the quality of our overall education system. How are we going to be relevant in 20 years’ time as a global player if things keep going this way?

In conclusion

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for an appropriately-placed and appropriately-maintained system. We need to admit to ourselves the limitations of these systems though, as well as what we, as humanity, can truly control.

I think that the economy of the future is going to struggle to incorporate docile employees with very specific skill sets such as just Java programming or bookkeeping. We are going to need people who can think critically and creatively for themselves, on top of having a variety of useful, practical skills, and who can network both in the real and the virtual worlds. All of our education systems are most likely going to have to change and evolve to facilitate this. This, I think, is as close to a definition of “true empowerment” that I can get, given our current context.

Not only this, but we will have to rethink our work – that is, what we do on a daily basis – and the ways in which we organise together to accomplish this work.

• “Black Tuesday”: There’s more where that came from
• Evading the questions with Big Mac
• Info bill: who voted how (the names will surely be publicised today)
• ANC smiling over “Secrecy Bill” (think about the headline)
• Zapiro cartoon: Black Tuesday and the end of democracy in South Africa
• Zapiro cartoon: Dr Jacob and Mr Hide
• Twitter #SecrecyBill

The first thing that popped into my mind was this: according to what we know about social influence (a.k.a. power), there are two major mechanisms that society uses to remove it. Those mechanisms are gossip and ridicule. The moment we perceive those in power to not be acting in our interests any more we employ these mechanisms, and from the little I can see at the moment, it would seem as though the middle/upper class in South Africa is using them against the ANC. (The middle/upper class minority is generally the only group with access to this sort of media and voice in South Africa at the moment – and you will see clearly from the people commenting on the various news articles that it is no longer just “white” people who make up this group).

Some of the most prominent spokespeople and organisations in South Africa are also chiming in:

• Secrecy Bill Insults South Africans – Desmond Tutu
• Protection of State Information Bill – an expression of concern from the Mandela Centre of Memory
• Secrecy and Tyranny – Helen Suzman Foundation
• Business urges rethink on secrecy bill – Business Unity South Africa
• Statement by Media Monitoring Africa

It will be interesting to watch how things play out here. The middle/upper class minority doesn’t have much by way of voter might, but what else does this minority control? How else can it flex its own power? Nothing draws a disjoint, individualistic society like our middle/upper class together like a common enemy. The media just might have the influence to be able to co-ordinate this.

Although, we do have a reputation for sitting comfortably and quietly behind our 3m-high walls, security gates and laser beams inside our security estates when the going gets tough (largely because we feel our actions won’t make any difference whatsoever, saying: “who are we to go up against the under-educated masses who vote for whichever politician sings the best tune or dances the best dance?”). We point out that the ANC constantly acts against the interests of those who voted them into power and those most vulnerable in society. (By the way, if they’re not acting in the interests of the masses, and the minorities are also indicating, by way of gossip and ridicule as pointed out, that the ANC is not acting in their interests, in whose interests is the ANC really acting?). We sit and gossip to each other about how little the government actually works for us, and recount hundreds of tales of incompetence, and of being inconvenienced and insulted. We complain about paying relatively exorbitant taxes in exchange for poor or non-existent service delivery. We’re tired of hearing about how R20 of every R100 in our hard-earned taxpayer money goes to greasing the palms of corrupt politicians and public servants – and how they’re now, with a “secrecy bill”, going to be able to legally cover it up (an opinion which, admittedly, might just be blown out of proportion at the moment). We then still live in blissful ignorance, telling ourselves: “don’t worry, everything’s going to carry on just as it’s always carried on”.

Perhaps, by the time we’re moved by worsening circumstances to take any serious action, leveraging our collective influence, it will be too late.

Correspondence, coherence and pragmatic utility

Kvale writes of a number of perspectives on validity and truth, where the most precise definitions seem to contain some measure of correspondence, coherence and pragmatic utility. Traditionally, valid or true statements exhibit all three.

• Correspondence – does the statement/knowledge correspond to objective reality? (Think: realism, positivism, pretty much most of modern science).
• Coherence – does the statement/knowledge have some sort of logical, internal consistency? (Think: mathematics).
• Pragmatic utility – can we actually use the statement/knowledge in some practical way? (Think: pragmatism).

Especially from a postmodernist point of view, saying that a statement corresponds to reality is highly dubious. (See this lecture by Rick Roderick on Derrida’s work). The view that correspondence is a real possibility is known as a positivist view, which says that reality can be known directly. For most people’s everyday practical purposes, this is certainly not a bad world view – people seem to have gotten by just fine on this view for ages.

It’s only when slightly odd people (such as myself) start asking too many questions, drawing them into the details, that this view starts to unravel:

This apple I’m eating is really sweet. I wonder what it’s made of?

A variety of different types of cells.

Hmmm, interesting. What are those cells made of?

Molecules, which are made up of atoms.

Cool. But what are atoms made of?

Subatomic particles: protons, neutrons and electrons. And those are most likely made up of quarks.

Wow, I didn’t know quarks could be so tasty! What’re quarks made of?

We don’t really know, but we’ve got a couple of theories about what they could be made of.

Wait a minute… So what the hell am I eating?

Good question. Nobody really knows. Like I said, we’ve got some theories…

Reductionism and correspondence

The reductionists hope that by isolating smaller and smaller bits of things we’ll eventually come up with a true description of “objective reality”, i.e. correspondence. They obviously haven’t read Sapolsky and Balt’s paper entitled Reductionism and Variability in Data: a Meta-Analysis (published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 39(2), 1996 – I had to personally contact Professor Sapolsky to get hold of a copy of it).

One of the major assumptions in reductionist philosophy is that “noise” or variability in experimental data will vanish as we get closer and closer to “objective reality” by examining finer and finer levels detail. In Sapolsky and Balt’s paper, they test this assumption: they gathered many years’ papers on the subject of testosterone and aggression and organised them into six “levels”: organismal, organ systems, single organs, multicellular, single-cellular, and sub-cellular papers. They then catalogued the variability in each and every paper, plotting the six levels’ variability against each other.

The expectation: a decreasing trend in variation as they zoomed in more.

The result: no observable trend.

The interpretation: reductionism is helpful, but only to a certain extent. At this point, your options pretty much include moving on to chaos/complexity theory. You’ve come too far down the rabbit hole to go back to positivist thinking.

Conclusion

For many practical purposes, however, we can talk of apples and the effects of testosterone on primate behaviour, but practical purposes are something quite different to correspondence. As for coherence, that’s a topic for another day, because I’d have to convince you that mathematics, similar to English, is just another language, rooted in and emergent from interaction between people in society (see this blog article).

Going forward, I’ve given up on being able to expound “what things are”, and especially on being able to write “truth” down or speak about it. Instead, I’m focusing much of my energy on discovering/coming up with relatively stable guiding narratives (knowledge, statements, etc.) that I will test and put to practical use in different contexts, tweaking the narratives depending on the desired results – my personal view of what research should be.

We can’t hold on to the promise that someone’s going to give us the ultimate answer. I think we’ve each got to seek it out for ourselves, relentlessly and carefully questioning our own and others’ internal assumptions.