> Don Mikulecky writes:
>
>>Yes, we need to keep plugging away. But do we need to keep trodding
>>the same old worn paths? I keep seeing us dragging this legacy of Cartesian
>>Reductionist science up the hill with us and then having us fall back
>>down due to its weight. We ARE in the middle of a revolution, but we
>>behave as if the way to deal with it is with the old ways. We deal
>>with an amazing set of revelations about complexity, systems, super-
>>organisms, etc. and then set out to proceed as if the world were
>>the machine like thing Descartes saddled us with.
>
> Exactly! This is the nature of the problem on which we might, with
> cybernetic ideas, make more progress.
But why JUST CYBERNETIC IDEAS???? I find that kind of statement one of
the key ways in which science mimics religion. Lets try ecumenicism!
>
>> I have to admit that i don't really know what cybernetics
>>is, nor do I really want to!
>
> You have got to be kidding! Aren't you a neurophysiologist involved in the
> study of ecological problems? I do not claim to be a total expert, but I
> think you probably do understand many of the principles of cybernetics, but
> perhaps under a variety of different names in various sciences e.g.
> homeostasis, hormonal relationships, neural nets, etc. etc.
Notice how you split my thought. I am not saying I do not want to know
the CONTENT and METHODS used in cybernetics. I just don't see any
reason to be put in a box. The next was the thrust of my thought.
>
>>Disciplinary boundaries are artificial and are of limited usefulness.
>
> Right. This precisely why cybernetics is important. So your suppositions
> about cybernetics perhaps involve both a misconception and a contradiction!
> If you think that artificial boundaries are part of the problem then it
> would follow that you need a more coherent and inclusive frame of
> reference. Cybernetics provides this interdisciplinary framework. This is
> not the place, nor am I the person, to spell this out in detail. But I
> think it is one of the tragedies of our time that cybernetics has so
> largely been seen in terms of narrow technological applications.
What are my suppositions about cybernetics?
>
> I am a physician, and I see that biological organisms function on
> cybernetic feedback principles, as do ecological systems. How can you not
> want to recognize, exploit and and optimize this in your work!! For me,
> postgrad work in psychiatry, and then in management sciences, policy
> analysis and administration, followed by years of multi-level
> responsibilities in medical schools and government at the higher levels,
> convinced me that Peter Drucker and Buckminster Fuller and Karl Popper,
> among others (Wiener, Ashby et al) were on the right track in keying in on
> cybernetic concepts (although not always in the same words) as the way to
> understand how the world works.
Feedback principles are our invention to describe complexity in systems.
I wrote a book on the application of NETWORK THERMODYNAMICS to problems
in biology. It is replete with the kind of thing you ask why I don't
want to use. Why are the ideas you are talking about necessarily CYBERNETIC
principles? How did you like Fuller's Synergicity? Was that cybernetics?
>
>>The issue I am trying to confront is to see if we can at least begin to
>>understand what is going on. I know that my computer, the
>>internet, recent writings on complexity, etc. have profoundly
>>changed me in ways I never intended. I also know that the
>>seeds for those changes were already there due to a variety of
>>ideas and experiences from the past. I suspect that the revolution
>>proceeds because of events like those I am experiencing. It seems
>>to be very regresive for us to pretend that our task and our
>>goals remain the same. In fact, these are, in a big way, ALSO being
>>shaped for us whether we like it or not. Just for an attempt to
>>be more specific, I'd suggest we consider:
>>
>>1. Erasing the distinction between hard and soft science, and even
>>between scientific and nonscientific approaches. There is a lot of
>>stuff out there being dismissed because of these distinctions.
>
> Agreed. To do this, though, we need an alternative framework for perceiving
> and conceptualizing experience in which we can have confidence, viz.
> cybernetics. Cybernetics may have originated as the science of
> communication and control in the animal and the machine, but its principles
> are even more widely applicable e.g. to organizations of all kinds, as
> well as to the processes of perception and mind through which we organize
> ideas and values.
>
>>2. Working hard to understand how our questions and answers are
>>shaped by our biases (training is a part of this). We see what we
>>were trained to look for, and more important, fail to see much
>>of the rest.. . .
>
> Agreed. We need conceptual systems within which we can more clearly see the
> relationships among the parts, in terms of which different disciplines can
> communicate, to understand how they relate to the whole. We can't afford to
> reduce everything to subjective experience (e.g. the "feeling of freedom"),
> or to particular theories, whether of perception or behavior or
> psychoanalysis or brain physiology or physics and chemistry or whatever.
> All these things are important parts not just of an overall theory but of
> existence.
>
>>3. Realizing that we are not going to predict and control as much
>>as we had hoped, and therefore we will be seen as less useful to
>>those who thought it important to support what we do. This
>>may be the tough one!
>
> Right again. An analogy suggests itself. Rather than imagine we could
> send a rocket directly to the moon, planners realized that it was necessary
> to take into account orbital motions and the various changing gravitational
> fields. By doing this they could achieve success that otherwise was quite
> impossible.
>
> Those who support scientists may well be influenced more by demonstrable
> feasibility than simpler hopes and conjectures. Perhaps cybernetic
> approaches can make more projects feasible.
>
I guess as a physician you were trained in the Flexnerian mode. Science
was the only thing on which medicine was to be based. That idea is
changing very rapidly. The reasons seem economic to me, but the
rationalizations are being couched in educational jargon and a "new"
philosophy of medical education "the generalist initiative"
It all fits the superorganism, end of reductionist dominance, etc
which we seem mostly in agreement about. You don't have to convince me about
new approaches, but they don't seem to be the "property" of any one sect
(cybernetics).
Best wishes, Don Mikulecky