The “Mind Projection Fallacy” in Systems Thinking:

Of course the idea of a mind separate from a body is also a fallacy.

Harish's Notebook - My notes... Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science.

In today’s post, I am writing about the wonderful Bayesian E. T. Jaynes’ idea of “Mind Projection Fallacy” (MPF) with respect to Systems Thinking. He explained MPF as asserting one’s own private thoughts and sensations as realities existing externally in nature. Jaynes noted – One asserts that the creations of his own imagination are real properties of Nature, and thus in effect projects his own thoughts out onto Nature.

Jaynes used the English language to delve into this further. In Logic, we say that If A is B, then B is A. However, when we apply this in our language, we will have issues. He used the old adage of “knowledge is power” as an example. If we then say “power is knowledge”, then we have said something that is fantastically absurd. The trouble here is with the verb “is”. As Jaynes pointed out:

These examples remind us that the…

View original post 996 more words

HvF’s Ethical Imperative:

Enjoy

Harish's Notebook - My notes... Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science.

“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you” – Carl Jung

In today’s post, I am looking at Heinz von Foerster’s ethical imperative. He explained this as follows – ‘I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices’. This might seem as a strange choice of words. I will try to explain my understanding of this based on constructivism and existentialism. HvF believed that we construct our stable experiential reality based on our historical interactions with our environment in an autonomous manner. Our ongoing interactions lend stability to our experiences that we can identify as “tokens” for objects. This gives us the ability to recall an object in the external world.

From a social realm standpoint, this goes further in that we identify the “self” and the “others” based on this. We differentiate ourselves from the…

View original post 1,519 more words

Maturana’s Aesthetic Seduction:

Harish's Notebook - My notes... Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science.

In today’s post, I am looking at the great cybernetician Humberto Maturana’s idea of “aesthetic seduction”. Maturana was an important biologist who was one of the creators of autopoiesis. I have written about it previously. He challenged the prevalent notion at that time that our nervous system takes in information from the environment. He proposed that our nervous system is closed. This means that there is no input of information coming in from the environment. Instead, the nervous system is reading itself. When the nervous system is perturbed by the environment, it goes through a structural change based on its current state, and this transformation is what is read by the nervous system. The perception or experience of the red color is a result of our closed nervous framework, rather than the result of the rose’s petals. The information is generated within itself. We are not information processing machines…

View original post 684 more words

Representations of Reality in Constructivism:

; but the structure accounts for its usefulness.

Harish's Notebook - My notes... Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science.

In today’s post, I am looking at the fascinating world of second order cybernetics. If first order cybernetics is the study of observed systems, then second order cybernetics (SOC) is the study of observing systems. If first order cybernetics is a hard view of modeling systems, then second order cybernetics is a soft view of modeling the modeling. From my viewpoint, one of the basic notions of second order cybernetics is that we are informationally closed. This means that information does not enter us from the outside. Instead, we generate meaning based on the perturbations we encounter from the outside world. One of the pioneers of SOC was Heinz von Foerster. I will be relying on his wisdom a lot for this post.

SOC teaches us that observer must be included as part of the observation. Objective observations are not possible because the observer is part of the observation. We…

View original post 1,364 more words

Cybernetics of Kindness:

Harish's Notebook - My notes... Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science.

In today’s post, I am looking at the Socrates of Cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster’s ethical imperative:

“Always act so as to increase the number of choices.”

I see this as the recursive humanist commandment. This is very much applicable to ethics, and how we should treat each other. Von forester said the following about ethics:

Whenever we speak about something that has to do with ethics, the other is involved. If I live alone in the jungle or in the desert, the problem of ethics does not exist. It only comes to exist through our being together. Only our togetherness, our being together, gives rise to the question, How do I behave toward the other so that we can really always be one?

Von Foerster views align with that of constructivism, the idea that we construct our knowledge about our reality. We construct our knowledge to“re-cognize” a reality through…

View original post 1,143 more words

The world is not a theorem

If not a theorem,…. then what? Well written article on what’s obvious for non-theoreticians.

Complexity Digest

Stuart A. Kauffman, Andrea Roli
The evolution of the biosphere unfolds as a luxuriant generative process of new living forms and functions. Organisms adapt to their environment, and exploit novel opportunities that are created in this continuous blooming dynamics. Affordances play a fundamental role in the evolution of the biosphere, as they represent the opportunities organisms may choose for achieving their goals, thus actualizing what is in potentia. In this paper we maintain that affordances elude a formalization in mathematical terms: we argue that it is not possible to apply set theory to affordances, therefore we cannot devise a mathematical theory of affordances and the evolution of the biosphere.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00284v1

View original post

When is a Model Not a Model?

Harish's Notebook - My notes... Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science.

Ross Ashby, one of the pioneers of Cybernetics, started an essay with the following question:

I would like to start not at: How can we make a model?, but at the even more primitive question: Why make a model at all?

He came up with the following answer:

I would like then to start from the basic fact that every model of a real system is in one sense second-rate. Nothing can exceed, or even equal, the truth and accuracy of the real system itself. Every model is inferior, a distortion, a lie. Why then do we bother with models? Ultimately, I propose. we make models for their convenience.

To go further on this idea, we make models to come up with a way to describe “how things work?” This is done for us to also answer the question – what happens when… If there is no predictive or explanatory…

View original post 1,025 more words

The knot with not

You cannot deny something with both hands. Saying “not” differs from doing “not”: you cannot do the last. This creates a strange knot in communicating. Facilitation has a lot to do about not.

… What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning—and a child’s more important than a joke, I hope. You couldn’t deny that, even if you tried with both hands.”I don’t deny things with my hands,’ Alice objected.’Nobody said you did,’ said the Red Queen. ‘I said you couldn’t if you tried.’

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Every journey needs a pilot

Facilitation means guiding groups and teams to their desired destiny. The first, and often difficult step, is to request the services of a guide, somebody who can shine some light on your path. Here, on these pages, I’ll publish my guide book. Happy traveling.