Three Sigma Systems

This post was composed as a reply to a protracted LinkedIn discussion regarding the nature of systems. I posted on my blog because of its length.

NOTE: To Charles and Michael, and other Participants in the LinkedIn Systems Thinking thread initiated by Spyros Bonatsos. If, after reading this, you remain interested, I suggest reading my sticky post about 3-sigma and a theory of knowledge.

First, despite appearances, I do not think that the exchange between Charles Weatherford and myself was very far a-field from the central topic. In my final exchange with Charles (last night PST), he took issue with my suggestion that Western societies are the embodiment of a cultural system grounded in Social Darwinism. In other words, it is grounded in an ill-formed vision of Darwin’s theory in which Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” governs human relations.

At the same time, Michael Ervick posted a simple yet profound question. “Do systems learn?”. Michael has posed this question in the past on other forums, and it has always intrigued me, but the effort required to propose an answer kept me from trying. In this post, I am going to try to respond to the questions posed by both Charles and Michael. I want to caution readers that this is not easy ground. Thinking about thinking is as challenging as it gets, but nothing could be more on-topic when exploring “Systems Thinking”. Wish me luck!  (I will happily return to the thread-in-point if the discussants decide to reply on LinkedIn.)

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A theory of knowledge suggests that “systems” do not exist as facts in the world “out there”. For example, the objects we identify in the world, we deem systems. Trees and chairs are systems and individual instances of each are both representative of those systems and systems in themselves. One is deemed natural (tree) and the other is deemed unnatural (chair), but this apparent difference is of no consequence when thinking about knowing. Beyond philosophical speculations over ages (”All is flux”, Heraclites) the evidence supporting this view has become increasingly abundant in systematic inquiry into the relationship between matter and energy. I will not go into the evidence at length. My hope is that readers will be familiar enough with the body of evidence that demonstrates that the boundary conditions we observe of trees and chairs are completely relative to our view of those seemingly discrete systems.

Briefly, upon closer examination of trees and chairs, we discover several things. First, at the atomic level, all that seems discrete is in fact blended. These things are no more than transient energetic patterns that persist long enough to be of use to humans.

For example, what if an observer lived in a different time bandwidth? What if a year in our time was a second for this other observer? To that observer the tree and the chair would be no more than wisps of whirling dust, momentarily discernible and then gone. The tree and chair would be of no use to such a being. Their world would be made up of persistent patterns that gave practical evidence of stability on a different time scale altogether. The notoriously short-lived Mayfly experiences and behaves in a world beyond our imaginative powers.

The second thing we discover is that our systems, tree and chair, are energetically intertwined with everything else, interacting to produce patterns at many levels—forests, timberlands, meeting rooms and recliners. We see ongoing relationship between our tree, the soil, the air, other trees, the weather, etc., ad infinitum. We humans, as knowers of patterns stable enough to be of use, hide behind the tree, climb the tree, hew the tree, cut it up and assemble its pieces into chairs, who’s form has no meaning other than the meanings we assign to it in terms of its utility to us. Mayflies have no use for chairs.

At the heart of this conception is the idea of human purposes by which we assign to events in the world the status of stability relative to our experience in time and in place. These are the systems we construct. They are the imaginative products of our industrious minds.

While creatures without the faculty of knowing make their way in the world amidst the ebb and flow of flux, we humans are pattern recognition machines with the ability to symbolically represent those patterns, but we can only perceive as discrete objects and relations—-systems— those patterns that have relevance to our purposes.

If (a big IF) we can agree that there are no “systems” “out there”—that systems are constructs by which we represent patterned events and to which we assign a purpose or aim relative to our action in the world, then we must ask ourselves, What is the nature of this symbolic stuff? Where does it come from and by what process does it emerge?

A careful study of these questions indicates that the emergence of the process of representing objects and relations in the world, relative to our purposes, occurred in interaction among individuals making up social groups of humans. Various scenarios are envisioned by which animal sign behavior (reactive triggering) common to all social creatures, becomes transformed into symbolic behavior in which abstract representation of classes of objects and conceptual representation of relations between objects, come into being. I subscribe to the school of thought suggesting that representation of objects and representation of their relations are inseparable. To keep things simple, let’s just say that the process of prediction is likely the most important faculty that was selected-for in the evolutionary process and this faculty requires that the representation of objects and their patterned interactions (relations) be concomitant.

Now here’s where things get really interesting, (are you listening Michael?) The emergence of symbolic behavior is generally accepted as a social process that is contingent upon shared meanings (objects and relations). Another term for this is “theory”, which is by definition, predictive (if this, then that). But if we use the idea of theory, we need to be careful not to confuse theory in this sense with theory as it is applied in the scientific method. In the broader sense, we mean that all human symbolic behavior is predictive (theoretical). Theory in this sense operates at many levels. We have evidence to indicate that in many tribal societies a theory of hunting was part of a whole, coherent mythical construction (a story) that explained relations between the tribe and the world as a whole. This quality of coherence is important. It suggests that we do not create many independent theories, but that theory employed at many levels of awareness is interconnected and interdependent. When one element of the edifice of shared meaning collapses, it threatens to undermine the entire construction. Such anomalies force communities of shared meaning to either reconcile observational discrepancies (revision) or transform their theoretical foundations (revolution). We see the former taking place on a daily basis. The later tends to occur in longer swaths of human history (inter-generational). Read Thomas Kuhn, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. Both revision and transformation of theory constitute learning. The process is basically a symbolic dialectic and can be represented schematically by Deming’s PDSA.

So where do these shared meanings reside? It “feels” like they reside in my head and by extrapolation, it seems reasonable to me that they also reside you the heads of others. But that imagery of reduction may not be the best way to look at it. If our experience of knowing is contingent on “shared” meanings, then those meanings must reside in relations between knowers. In other words, it is not in my head or in your head. It must lie between us, in our relations.

As Michael astutely observed, it is not too difficult for us to see shared knowledge in the artifacts of a culture, so long as we keep shared meanings in mind. Books and other media are such cultural artifacts. So are buildings. Come to think of it so are chairs. Are trees also artifacts? Of course they are, because the meaning of tree differs from one culture to the next and from one time to another. As with all knowledge, the meaning of tree is contingent upon a theory of the world, which is contingent upon the questions we ask, which are contingent upon our purposes.

What about the spoken word? Is that an artifact? Yes and no. Rules of grammar, yes. But the act of speaking (communicating) is best characterized as a process. In the simplest sense, we speak to another or others, or even to ourselves as objects, and the sounds we make are propagated in the air and to the auditory receptors of others. But where is that shared meaning? Is it the property of the individuals—sender and receiver? Or is it the property of the group? Allow me to suggest that knowledge is not a property of individual knowers. Knowing itself is a group property. Knowing only exists in the context of the group—and that can be understood as a system.

Do systems learn? Of course. Is this idea of a communal process of knowing as a system difficult to wrap you mind around? Yes! And I continue to struggle with the implications vis a vis a theory of consciousness.

At last I can return to the questions posed by Charles regarding a consensus of aims. Your example of the German people during the wars of the 20th Century was apropos. Throughout history, the nature (theory) of warfare has undergone many revolutions. In a very general sense, the trajectory of this transformation in Western culture has followed an arc from ritualistic forms of war toward mechanistic forms of war. As I mentioned earlier, culturally held theory tends toward coherence. The process of transformation from the ritualistic to the mechanistic runs in lockstep with the overall transformation in world view that characterized the Western “Enlightenment” (the rise of reductionism as a world view).

Some historians cite our Civil War as a milestone between ritualistic warfare and mechanical warfare. That is an interesting idea when considering the uniquely American experience. What is not in doubt is that in Germany prior to and during WII, there was a uniquely mechanistic theory at work in society and in war-making. I am currently reading “The Third Reich at War” in which the author makes an attempt to get into the German cultural mindset during WWII. Central to the cultural theory was the scientism of Eugenics that came to be widely accepted as common sense. In addition, the German mechanism of war-making was quintessentially “scientific”. On the whole, the German people accepted the logic of such science and the German mindset infused all of the combatants with a similar mindset.

Despite that “scientific” mindset, there was a fascinating anomaly. In the calculus of scientific war-making, we would (and did) expect combatants to capitulate when the math turned bad. Hitler’s generals predicted that the British would capitulate in 1940. They did not. Those same generals expected the capitulation of Russia in ‘41. Also wrong. The Allies expected German capitulation in 44. Wrong again! It seems that there are some problems with the “scientific” theory of war in which rational calculation supposedly begets “rational” action. This sounds suspiciously like the recent anomalies posed by the scientific theory of free-market economics.

Today we are fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, in which our science of war as classically explained by Clausewitz, is not producing predicted results. A reading of Sun Tzu might be somewhat more useful. More to the point, today’s battles are being fought between one knowledge system, based in what I have called the Western world view (paradigm, to introduce yet another related concept) and another knowledge system that we Westerns are very hard put to understand. Do Western knowledge communities see these wars in exactly the same way? Not exactly, but on the whole, they are operating from a particular system of knowing that is irreconcilable with those of their enemies, so defined.