Building Blocks – Magrathea TLC

Recognise / suspect a firm

I previously pointed out that a firm is knowable by its behaviour. Stripping it from what is not invariable, what invariably remains is people’s behavior. We recognise it because it is not random, but instead a pattern of behavior that compares to what we know to suspect it is a firm. What is this coherence that we recognise it by?

Depicted in the philosophy of Deleuze (1968) the firm makes and erases differences, or in other words it solves problems and in so doing it creates new problems at once. These kinds of problems are abundant and new ones emerge continually, by mechanisms that Deleuze calls differenciators (sic): creators of new differences.

The perspective of the firm (as a system) can’t really be known by the human observer in a direct sense. What importance it attributes to its interactions and how it exactly goes about solving problems posed to it are particular to it. Such problems and their solutions are represented to people by way of questions and answers respectively.

People observe firms and interact with them by asking them questions in order to get answers. Firms maintain themselves as a self-referencing system, because they continue to solve problems of their population. Solving their problems enables them to fulfil their purpose to stick around. Customers and investors for instance observe that their question is answered under the condition of answering the problems of the employees, the government, and Nature at once.

Solving such a problem introduces others for example office lease, purchase of machines and materials, energy contracts &c. The firm can be known, because it solves multiple often conflicting problems simultaneously and machinically while its single purpose it to last. It is known to an individual by its answering to a particular, conditional question.

We know a firm by its identity, and we know it answers our questions in a machinic way. But our question can be asked without describing what is a firm, because it emerges from their simultaneous answering. This model is falsified with a non-trivial instance of an interaction between a firm and at least one member of a (sub-)population that does not solve a problem for both. Take for example the case where a product is handed out without any kind of payment, an investment without any kind of return, while the firm continues to last.

Testing Epistemology

I hypothesise that the firm in itself (i.e. not as a group of people) is a cognitive and autonomous entity. Though made up of the behavior(s) of individual people, it is a behavioural phenomenon that is distinct from their cognitive capabilities and their autonomous decision making. According to the hypothesis this becomes manifest in the ability of a firm to attribute importance to events that contribute to its maintenance as a self-referencing system. The firm itself seeks interactions that are conducive to prolongation of its existence (cognition), and it has the elbow room to interact accordingly (autonomy).

That said a firm does not have the senses to perceive events, and the sensomotorische systems to act correspondingly. But the cognition of a firm must not be confused to that of an individual member of it population. Situations where an individual chooses differently from a firm, aka where the importance attributed by a firm are different from the individual, are easy to imagine. The population wants higher wages, lower sales prices, better returns, higher employment and improved personal development, for instance. The firm ‘wants’ continuation of its existence, the parentheses indicate that to want is a state of mind that is typical for the organic.

In an anthropocentric view the firm is managed to achieve behavior (performance) preconceived by the population. In the emergent view, the firm self-organises as an exponent of the ideas included its complex through the behavior of the population. The difference is of course that the complex of ideas evolves independently from the individuals of the population.

Applicability of this hypothesis means its fitness for explaining what is required to bring about change in a firm, or to predict where it is going. As the saying goes: if you want to move the mouse move the cheese. This means that even though we don’t know what a mouse thinks and how it will act, we do know that it will go where the cheese is. Similarly, apart from the generic idea that a firm ‘want’ to continue its existence, we don’t know the detail of its resolve.

How can we generate evidence that the firm pursues its own interests, independently from the wishes of its population? It is not enough to show that it happens on some occasion, it must be shown to happen always. That said it not necessary to show that the interests of the firm and those of the populations are always different and that they diverge completely. They may be the same frequently, but the primate of their occurrence is the interest of the firm. The reasons is that the memeplex explains to the members of the population that this is the best way forward. That may on may occasions be parallel to the best way for the population at once. This is not a necessary condition however, lest there were no conduct of the firm possible.

Is a non-trivial event conceivable where the interest of all the members of the population is singular and identical, but the firm acts differently or not at all? Or an event whereby the best interest of the population is no change, and the interest of the firm is to change in some aspect? I believe this is trivial, because the interests of the members of the population will in practical terms be different at nearly every event, if not the parameter then its value (the extent of required change). The firm emerges precisely from their different interests, and integrates them into a new solution to its perceived problems.

I believe that the autonomy of the firm sits in the elbow room it has from the restrictions posed by the interests of the individual sub-populations (stakeholders) as they continue to contribute to the firm’s continuation. Its cognition is a particular capability to compute a solution in the myriads of different solutions required by its population and the expressions (language) required for the population. They are the dimensions of the rhizomatic universe it spans up for itself. A test must generate evidence for this self-referencing capability of the firm removed from the population.

Testing Ontological Notions

Metaphysical notions are assumed without proof. They serve as a starting point for thinking, like axioms do for mathematics. They presuppose nothing: the buck stops there. In my PhD I opted for process ontology instead of object ontology because I am attracted to the idea that a firm is never the same twice. I also avoided getting trapped in traditional foundational views and enabled a fresh look. A Christian theologist for example is unlikely to be capable of a strong critique of Christianity, because she has not acquired sufficient distance to doubt the foundations of her research topic. We are however not accustomed to think in terms of causal processes, because the Platonic view that objects and relations have the primate took the upper hand over processual approaches proposed by Heraclitus and to an extent Anaxagoras. Russell (1961) writes that this course of events has held humanity back dramatically.

Deleuze (1968) rejects the primate of objects and the relations between them. He asserts that the primitive is instead that nothing is identical (to something else). Consider the example that not snowflakes nor grains of sand are identical, or tend to an ideal or to perfection. This is of course unknowable, because we can’t know them all or everything, let alone compare them, and we are not at the end of the universe.

Relativity theory teaches that events are different, because every event has a particular location in space-time: some but not all coordinates can overlap. Each one is in a different location and / or at a different time. These coordinates are knowable relative to (in terms of those of) another one.

We must take the observer into account and add her to the system as per rhizomatic theory. Her cognitive capabilities range from a primitive making sense of up until a sophisticated interacting. It is implausible that observations, simultaneous or sequential, are identical. Difference not sameness is the invariable qualifying it as a metaphysical notion.

Deleuze (1968) continues to say that [differences between [series of differences]] account for change. This is also a primitive, because it is impossible that all these differences finally generate stasis, because difference is the norm, whether between or within systems. When circular the behavior of such a series repeats to make a pattern.

Thus we assume the metaphysical notions of difference and repetition without questioning. We assume that the ontological notions of change and pattern derive from them. We know change as [observations of [differences between [series of differences]]]. Take for instance changes in systems’ behavior observed by us, or another system, or by itself.

We know a pattern when we recognise coherent behavior because it has happened before, here and just now or elsewhere in the past. It coheres because we noticed that there is a relation between the series. We don’t see a pattern if there is no coherence, or if we are incapable of observing it (e.g. we can’t observe random behavior, or an atom, or a species). As a byline patterns and change are games for three, not two players (cf. Rovelli 2021).

In regards to coherence, I specifically wish to verify its nature. What test establishes whether a firm is a pattern of coherent behavior that emerges from a causal process and remains self-referencing? It appears that the corresponding design conditions of individuation and autopoiesis offer suitable criteria. I believe that data will not be fit as a source for verification of these premises, because they are usually rubricated and recorded with an object perspective. Interviews will prove more suitable, provided that the interviewees can assume the role of the firms’ spokes person.

About testing

Take the hypothesis that today’s weather is the same as tomorrow’s. It is a rule for generating a prediction or an explanation, in this case, a weather phenomenon. The rule works in a mechanical way: it may have stochastic terms, but its execution is unchanging. If todays weather is sunny and dry, this hypothesis predicts that the weather tomorrow is sunny and dry also. In addition it explains that todays weather is rainy and windy, because this is the same as it was yesterday. Predicting and explaining is treated as the same thing, using different data, namely to generate a relation between stages of a phenomenon or between phenomena.

Such a rule reduces the expressed behavior generated by real processes: making use of it we no longer have to wait until tomorrow to know what the weather will be like. We have designed this hypothesis as a shortcut to the behavior of the weather system between days. This is of course advantageous for many including farmers and sunbathers.

If it repeatedly verifies in a test against reality then the hypothesis may be elevated to become a theory, and if it is false at least once it is a falsified theory. In the first case sunbathers and farmers may rely on it for organising their lives, in the last one they have to look for another. Even having generated correct predictions in many tests the hypothesis may turn out to have been false all along and be amended or scrapped. It may be superseded by another theory which generates predictions that are better in some way, or become part of an overarching theory.

A theory that has frequently predicted correctly can strictly speaking not be said to be true or false, because the event that falsifies it may not have presented itself just yet. The explanations or predictions generated by the hypothesis, however, are true or false. The outcomes that the hypothesis generates compare to a sufficient and pre-agreed extent to the behavior of the phenomenon it seeks to predict on previously agreed aspects.

The hypothesis is explicit, because it is not made of the same stuff that the phenomenon that it seeks to predict is made of. The Navier-Stokes theory for example contains equations not water. An hypothesis to generate predictions of the weather is not made of (the constituent components of) weather but words. Those are intended to identify relations between the behavioral patterns of the phenomenon that render it sufficiently recognizable for the human observer to enable comparison with the outcome generated by the hypothesis. Even if represented in a binary system or a software code the objective is to establish a connection between the phenomenon to be predicted and the observer.

This makes at least manifest that words may not be fit to represent the phenomenon and that the hypothesis is man-made and depends on human observation and cognition for assessment of its veritability. An example of the first is that nature does not restrict the number of decimals as it generates behavior of a given natural process, whereas a practical computer may truncate a number simply because the hardware does not accommodate 3 million decimals. Chaos theory teaches that different approaches to computation of the hypothesis and the subject is problematic. Moreover, chaotic effects can take place even in simple deterministic systems – observed and observing. Secondly, the make up of the hypothesis reflects the cognitive domain of the designer of the hypothesis. But that depends on his life experience and world view, not the topic. The designer runs the risk that his world view is tested and not weather phenomena, say. In case the testing involves answering by people then the interpretation of the questions by the interviewee depends on their worldview and thereby not necessarily represent reality. The testing of the hypothesis may result in testing their particular worldviews or the common opinion.

My research topic is the firm. In a previous post I summarised my hypothesis about the nature of the firm as: ‘.. the topic of my thesis is the firm as an emergent phenomenon. I see the firm as an evolutionary developing self-referencing cultural system. It is constituted of a bunch of ideas in the sense of answers that guide people’s thoughts and their behavior. I hypothesise that those ideas constituting it are widespread and do not mention the firm‘. These statements are founded on ontological, epistemological and phenomenological assumptions. Testing it requires a methodology that takes these into account, if not addressing them directly.

Suppose I wish to test this hypothesis in order to progress it to a theory. In my thesis I demonstrate that the hypothesis is internally consistent. This means that the constituent statements are not incoherent according to the definition of Thagard, although they lack the bonus points of evidence. This is provided if it explains a idea range of behavior of the topic than other theories (widening). If the statements of which the hypothesis is made up are explained by other theories or by evidence (deepening).

The hypothesis as such must predict or explain something (in this case the behavior of the firm), as well as but preferably better than others. Evidence that corroborates underlying assumptions make it more coherent as a theory. Going by the above categories of knowledge, first evidence would be welcome for the ontological assumption that the firm is a pattern emerging from a cognitive causal process.

Next the epistemological capability of the hypothesis to ’take the meme’s eye view’ must be tested. The firm is presented as a cognitive entity. This means that it is capable of making its own observations, or in other words to attribute a particular meaning to what it observes independent of the members of its population, people. How does a firm take decisions that the population would not take, albeit that they are taken through people? What interactions does it engage in that individual people would not?

Last, the assumption that a firm is a phenomenon is supported by evidence that the firm is knowable to a human observer because it behaves in a certain way. How can evidence be generated that corroborates that? What kind of observed behavior is specific for a firm and how can it be measured in reality, and what kind of observable behavior does the model predict? The pivot in this question is the nature of the observation and what that means to people.

One source of evidence are past data generated by the business processes of firms on record with them or in public institutions such as the Companies House. Another source is provided by the population of the firm: the people interacting with it, or in fact the ideas they hold in regards to the firm and how it develops. More specific this concerns the way that ideas are selected to become a part of the body of ideas that guides them and thereby generate the firm’s behavior. How is it that particular idea are selected into the memeplex and people feel compelled to adhere to them and others are not and they are eschewed?

The methodology specifies how the hypothesis is verified: what is tested and in what way. It specifies which business data is compared to what input to the hypothesis, to what extent it is quantifiable and where it is limited to qualitative data. The sources of (business) data are identified and selected, and how they are collected and curated for the task in hand. This includes data drawn from databases concerning past decisions and data yielded from interviews. It organises the activities of the testing, starting from collection and treatment of data up until the comparing of the outcomes with the predictions generated with the hypothesis, their interpretation, and an assessment of the viability of the hypothesis and its constituent parts. Standards are set for the categorisation of the generated data as verifying or falsifying (and probably in between). It indicates how the hypothesis is tested and not the world-view of the designer of the hypothesis or the interviewees, or the designers of the structures of the selected data.

The outcome of this procedure answers the question how we can come to be sure of the viability of the hypothesis, or in other words: does it hold water? It might, or it might not, but most likely the outcome is unclear in some respect and additional research is required. I believe that a major task in this project would be for the participants to keep seeing beyond the preconceptions of the current version of liberal capitalism that seems to occupy the minds of many.

Applicability and Jobs

Physically speaking there is no absolute time nor place, and an event is determined by its relative location in space and time. The universe is relative. It is also subjective, because it exists by its observer. She determines the importance of the event to her, by the frame of reference she has built up in her life time. The subjectivity originates from the uniqueness of her experiences and their order, and causes unique observations. We need a frame of thought to caters for this this subjective perspective by way of a multi-centric view, and non-anthropocentric at that.

I make use of the philosophical notion of assemblages and rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari (2004) to capture the nature of the firm. They are behavioral phenomena put in motion by an immanent guiding principle, for instance of a physical, chemical, biological, and in this case a social nature. They do (behave) as they have to do in a particular circumstance, attracted or repelled to others by aspects of their behavior. What connection attracts has a chance of becoming stable and last, and what repels is more likely to be unstable and disappear.

Assemblages form a rhizome as they get taken up into an organization. One assemblage can be attracted to another because it is pink, while another is attracted to it because it produces an interesting sound or smell. This can occur in many different combinations of pairs. Intermittently and temporarily stable complexes of nested assemblages showing behavioural combinations and juxtapositions constitute new ones with new behavior. A rhizome is the organization of such a tangle of assemblages plus all the (linguistic) instruments required to mutually translate and interpret their individual behavioral expressions and perceptions. Everything is external to the organisation.

A fairly simple instance of a rhizome is a murmuration. Each sparrow picks one direction and speed form many possible ones it is capable of, all the while observing (groups of) neighbouring ones. Together their behavior makes an assemblage, but as a whole the assemblages including their expressions (behavioral aspects) make up the entire murmuration, as a rhizome.

An individual is identified by carving her out from the rhizome: she (the sub-population of the murmuration or the firm she belongs to) is n-1. From all the sparrows emerges (or self-organises) the murmuration, its behavior irreducible from the individuals’. The rhizome is a unity: 1. It has no central coordination, but instead its coordination develops from individuals’ behaviors. It develops from the recursive (not continuous) myriads of individual observations. This model caters for the multi-entered approach.

Firms are havens that cater for a whole range of different interests of the members of the population of the firm (roughly synonymous with its stakeholders). Many different people have different interest that are guided by the different ideas they hold. They put them in motion to do as they do, and they meet the other members of the population in the firm. In order to explain the nature of the firm in this fashion it is not required that these guiding ideas mention the firm. It emerges from them, in fact from the behavior they induce in people.

The first meaning of ’to apply’ is (Merriam-Webster Dictionary): to put to use (especially for some practical purpose). I previously wrote that the purpose of the firm (if there is such a thing) is different for different members of its sub-populations, and for itself which is to maintain its identity. This means that there are many different applications of the model, because it has many different (practical) uses and interpretations. The particular use of a firm for a shareholder is somewhat different from that for a customer, by the dimension of n-1 generally speaking.

He applies pressure to get what he wants.

: to bring into action

apply the brakes

: to put into operation or effect

apply a law

The interests of the sub-population are fulfilled by the firm (1), not by one or more of its parts. The interests of the individual constituents are irrelevant to determine the behavior of the firm, because they are irreducible to one another. You cannot predict a person’s behavior from that of her cells from which she emerged (or her atoms). This is impossible, but their second-order observations of the firm, of the others, and of themselves are relevant. From this we may induce the repertoire of behavior of the firm in an inductive process.

So what do my partners in the discussions with business schools and businesses mean when they say they prefer an applied model (to the extent of not hiring me): for whom is it of practical use? The answer is of course that each sub-population needs to make up their mind for another round of commitment to this firm by assessing the contribution to all the others, of the firm as a whole (its repertoire) and of itself in order to anticipate the future behavior of the firm.

To my interlocutors an increase of applicability means that the firms they represent or study are better able to anticipate their futures. I can contribute to that by deriving an approach to strategy for the firm as a multi-centered system in a nomad environment.

Theory and Jobs

An important requirement for successfully completing a PhD study is that the topic is new to the world in some respect. The aspiring scientist seeks to turn a belief or a suspicion into knowledge.

He selects an hypothesis – a bunch of cohering statements – to explain a phenomenon he fancies and then tests it to generate explanations or predictions. What is the same but using different data. This is different from application, which is intentionally, utile and not necessarily true regarding the nature of the topic. The generated explanations are then compared to what is observed in reality and their closeness is assessed. If repeatedly proven to be close then the hypothesis is promoted to a theory.

The scientist-to-be shows how what was not known to be true or untrue before can be known with some certainty, namely approximately and temporarily. What was uncharted territory to the human observer is now charted, minding the caveats.

If there is no such testable hypothesis to predict the phenomenon of his liking he may decide to develop it himself. He observes any number of seemingly related phenomena for which there seems to be no acceptable explanation. He asserts coherent statements, together a hypothesis, that explain the phenomena and their relations. Utilising induction (focus on structure in data) or abduction (focus on explanation), the scientist generates arguments such that the statements he makes are internally consistent (between them), and that their relation to what is already known (theories) is explained.

According to Bertrand Russell philosophy is defined as what is between science and theology. Science is the part that is known beyond suspicion, but how do we attribute meaning to the remaining unknown. He suggests to use the patterns of thought proposed by religion, or developing other patterns making use of philosophy. Philosophy means to speculate in a formal way about unknown phenomena and patterns of thought. Philosophers too aim to chart territory and to add structure where there was none.

My wish was (and is) to inquire into the nature of the firm. That means to investigate what is invariable in the phenomenon. Peeling off everything that is not invariably present in a firm only people, or in fact their behavior, remain. Even individuals come and go, so in fact not they determine the nature of the firm, but really the behavior of people in general. And assuming that that is guided by ideas, then they are the primitive, people acting on their behalf.

Starting from that premises, the topic of my thesis is the firm as an emergent phenomenon. I see the firm as an evolutionary developing self-referencing cultural system. It is constituted of a bunch of ideas in the sense of answers that guide people’s thoughts and their behavior. I hypothesise that those ideas constituting it are widespread and do not mention the firm.

Nothing new at first sight: ideas in this regard have been developed from different scientific disciplines. But all sorts of additional questions arise, e.g. how do ideas that do not have senses cohere into complexes, how is the complex of ideas of, say a multinational firm that is too big to fit into one mind consistently distributed over many people, how are parts of the complex coherently recorded on people’s minds, and how can a firm as such be self-referencing if the argument is not accepted that it is cognitive and autonomous.

The statements in the previous sections are non-anthropocentric, subjective, processual, and they admit the laws of physics, because they are not restricted to the organic. But they are not sufficiently coherent to explain the nature of the firm. I need additional statements from the literature for that, and where unavailable I must develop them. This implies that the nature of this study is in part scientific and in part philosophical. It is also hypothetical, because the desired outcome is an internally consistent framework of new, invented and reinterpreted concepts with well-explained relations to what there is. In other words this is a hypothesis, not a theory. The project serves to develop and compile coherent statements, not to test them to reality.

After some (I thought) well-deserved relaxation I thought it a great idea to develop this hypothesis to a theory by testing it, and then to make use of it professionally. I presented it to business schools and a couple of strategy departments in firms. They thought it too theoretical to include in their curriculum and to their practices. What I believe they meant was that it is formulated in abstract terms. From the start my purpose was for it to keep it general (applicable to every conceivable firm) and not enter an empirical rabbit hole of small n. This is however the more common practice and my approach does not help me to find a job.

Another comment was that it is not sufficiently applicable. This is not the same as to say it is not a tested theory: if it works it works. They argued it does not enable business managers to make practical predictions about their particular businesses and they have a point there. It was never intended to be applicable in that sense. It is made up of statements about the nature of the firm, not a management tool catering for generating a change of behavior of the firm (aka increase its performance). That is a derivative model of this one.

From the beginning I wish to share these ideas with an audience wider than the scientific community, it is in fact how the whole adventure started. That implies that people including customers, shareholders, and management will want to know what to do to anticipate their (professional) futures. In order to be useful in this sense the hypothesis needs to be tested against business reality, and then tools for thought must be derived from it that guide people to think about firms and how to deal with them.

Magrathea

Magrathea, in de URL van deze site, is een fictieve planeet uit Douglas Adams’ trilogie ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. Het is een mega-grote werkplaats waar andere planeten worden gebouwd.

Je kunt uit een catalogus bestellen, bijvoorbeeld een massief gouden planeet of volledig bekleed met bont van een kleur van je voorkeur. Of met een maximale lengte van de kustlijn en een overal permanent sub-tropisch klimaat inclusief altijd ondergaande zon. Maar een klant met visie bestelt haar planeet op maat. Ook de aarde is op bestelling geproduceerd op Magrathea, om te functioneren als een supercomputer met de opdracht om te berekenen wat de betekenis is van ‘Life, The Universe and Everything’.

Het implementeren van zo’n planeet gaat als volgt: de planeet is gebouwd (Design Award voor de Noorse fjorden!), alle levensvormen zijn erop gezet met de opdracht het langer vol te houden dan iemand voor mogelijk zou hebben kunnen houden (vrij naar Erwin Schrodinger). De aarde met alle organismen erop co-evolueert zichzelf in zijn omgeving en levert ‘en passant’ de antwoorden op die vraag. De aarde is in het verhaal de computer!

Chemical Organization Theory and Autopoiesis

E-mail communication of Francis Heylighen on 29 May 2018:

Inspired by the notion of autopoiesis (“self-production”) that Maturana and Varela developed as a definition of life, I wanted to generalize the underlying idea of cyclic processes to other ill-understood phenomena, such as mind, consciousness, social systems and ecosystems. The difference between these phenomena and the living organisms analysed by Maturana and Varela is that the former don’t have a clear boundary or closure that gives them a stable identity. Yet, they still exhibit this mechanism of “self-production” in which the components of the system are transformed into other components in such a way that the main components are eventually reconstituted.

This mechanism is neatly formalized in COT’s notion of “self-maintenance” of a network of reactions. I am not going to repeat this here but refer to my paper cited below. Instead, I’ll give a very simple example of such a circular, self-reproducing process:

A -> B,

B -> C,

C -> A

The components A, B, C are here continuously broken down but then reconstituted, so that the system rebuilds itself, and thus maintains an invariant identity within a flux of endless change.

A slightly more complex example:

A + X -> B + U

B + Y -> C + V

C + Z -> A + W

Here A, B, and C need the resources (inputs, or “food”) X, Y and Z to be reconstituted, while producing the waste products U, V, and W. This is more typical of an actual organism that needs inputs and outputs while still being “operationally” closed in its network of processes.

In more complex processes, several components are being simultaneously consumed and produced, but so that the overall mixture of components remains relatively invariant. In this case, the concentration of the components can vary the one relative to the other, so that the system never really returns to the same state, only to a state that is qualitatively equivalent (having the same components but in different amounts).

One more generalization is to allow the state of the system to also vary qualitatively: some components may (temporarily) disappear, while others are newly added. In this case, we no longer have strict autopoiesis or [closure + self-maintenance], i.e. the criterion for being an “organization” in COT. However, we still have a form of continuity of the organization based on the circulation or recycling of the components.

An illustration would be the circulation of traffic in a city. Most vehicles move to different destinations within the city, but eventually come back to destinations they have visited before. However, occasionally vehicles leave the city that may or may not come back, while new vehicles enter the city that may or may not stay within. Thus, the distribution of individual vehicles in the city changes quantitatively and qualitatively while remaining relatively continuous, as most vehicle-position pairs are “recycled” or reconstituted eventually. This is what I call circulation.

Most generally, what circulates are not physical things but what I have earlier called challenges. Challenges are phenomena or situations that incite some action. This action transforms the situation into a different situation. Alternative names for such phenomena could be stimuli (phenomena that stimulate an action or process), activations (phenomena that are are active, i.e. ready to incite action) or selections (phenomena singled out as being important, valuable or meaningful enough to deserve further processing). The term “selections” is the one used by Luhmann in his autopoietic model of social systems as circulating communications.

I have previously analysed distributed intelligence (and more generally any process of self-organization or evolution) as the propagation of challenges: one challenge produces one or more other challenges, which in turn produce further challenges, and so on. Circulation is a special form of propagation in which the initial challenges are recurrently reactivated, i.e. where the propagation path is circular, coming back to its origins.

This to me seems a better model of society than Luhmann’s autopoietic social systems. The reason is that proper autopoiesis does not really allow the system to evolve, as it needs to exactly rebuild all its components, without producing any new ones. With circulating challenges, the main structure of society is continuously rebuilt, thus ensuring the continuity of its organization, however while allowing gradual changes in which old challenges (distinctions, norms, values…) dissipate and new ones are introduced.

Another application of circulating challenges are ecosystems. Different species and their products (such as CO2, water, organic material, minerals, etc.) are constantly recycled, as the one is consumed in order to produce the other, but most are eventually reconstituted. Yet, not everything is reproduced: some species may become extinct, while new species invade the ecosystem. Thus the ecosystem undergoes constant evolution, while being relatively stable and resilient against perturbations.

Perhaps the most interesting application of this concept of circulation is consciousness. The “hard problem” of consciousness asks why information processing in the brain does not just function automatically or unconsciously, the way we automatically pull back our hand from a hot surface, before we even have become conscious of the pain of burning. The “global workspace” theory of consciousness says that various subconscious stimuli enter the global workspace in the brain (a crossroad of neural connections in the prefrontal cortext), but that only a few are sufficiently amplified to win the competition for workspace domination. The winners are characterized by much stronger activation and their ability to be “broadcasted” to all brain modules (instead of remaining restricted to specialized modules functioning subconsciously). These brain modules can then each add their own specific interpretation to the “conscious” thought.

In my interpretation, reaching the level of activation necessary to “flood” the global workspace means that activation does not just propagate from neuron to neuron, but starts to circulate so that a large array of neurons in the workspace are constantly reactivated. This circulation keeps the signal alive long enough for the different specialized brain modules to process it, and add their own inferences to it. Normally, activation cannot stay in place, because of neuronal fatigue: an excited neuron must pass on its “action potential” to connected neurons, it cannot maintain activation. To maintain an activation pattern (representing a challenge) long enough so that it can be examined and processed by disparate modules that pattern must be stabilized by circulation.

But circulation, as noted, does not imply invariance or permanence, merely a relative stability or continuity that undergoes transformations by incoming stimuli or on-going processing. This seems to be the essence of consciousness: on the one hand, the content of our consciousness is constantly changing (the “stream of consciousness”), on the other hand that content must endure sufficiently long for specialized brain processes to consider and process it, putting part of it in episodic memory, evaluating part of it in terms of its importance, deciding to turn part of it into action, or dismissing or vetoing part of it as inappropriate.

This relative stability enables reflection, i.e. considering different options implied by the conscious content, and deciding which ones to follow up, and which ones to ignore. This ability to choose is the essence of “free will“. Subconscious processes, on the other hand, just flow automatically and linearly from beginning to end, so that there is no occasion to interrupt the flow and decide to go somewhere else. It is because the flow circulates and returns that the occasion is created to interrupt it after some aspects of that flow have been processed and found to be misdirected.

To make this idea of repetition with changes more concrete, I wish to present a kind of “delayed echo” technique used in music. One of the best implementation is Frippertronics, invented by avant-garde rock guitarist Robert Fripp (of King Crimson): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frippertronics

The basic implementation consist of an analogue magnetic tape on which the sounds produced by a musician are recorded. However, after having passed the recording head of the tape recorder, the tape continues moving until it is read by another head that reads and plays the recorded sound. Thus, the sound recorded at time t is played back at time t + T, where the interval T depends on the distance between the recording and playback heads. But while the recorded sound in played back, the recording head continues recording all the sound, played by either the musician(s) or the playback head, on the same tape. Thus, the sound propagates from musician to recording head, from where is is transported by tape to the playback head, from where it is propagated in the form of a sound wave back to the recording head, thus forming a feedback loop.

If T is short, the effect is like an echo, where the initial sound is repeated a number of times until it fades away (under the assumption that the playback is slightly less loud than the original sound). For a longer T, the repeated sound may not be immediately recognized as a copy of what was recorded before given that many other sounds have been produced in the meantime. What makes the technique interesting is that while the recorded sounds are repeated, the musician each time adds another layer of sound to the layers already on the recording. This allows the musician to build up a complex, multilayered, “symphonic” sound, where s/he is being accompanied by her/his previous performance. The resulting music is repetitive, but not strictly so, since each newly added sound creates a new element, and these elements accumulate so that they can steer the composition in a wholly different direction.

This “tape loop” can be seen as a simplified (linear or one-dimensional) version of what I called circulation, where the looping or recycling maintains a continuity, while the gradual fading of earlier recordings and the addition of new sounds creates an endlessly evolving “stream” of sound. My hypothesis is that consciousness corresponds to a similar circulation of neural activation, with the different brain modules playing the role of the musicians that add new input to the circulating signal. A differences is probably that the removal of outdated input does not just happen by slow “fading” but by active inhibition, given that the workspace can only sustain a certain amount of circulating activation, so that strong new input tends to suppress weaker existing signals. This and the complexity of circulating in several directions of a network may explain why conscious content appears much more dynamic than repetitive music.

How Social System Program Human Behavior

Heylighen, F., Lenartowicz, M., Kingsbury, K., Beigi, S., Harmsen, T. . Social Systems Programming I: neural and behavioral control mechanisms

Abstract

‘Social systems can be defined as autopoietic networks of distinctions and rules that specify which actions should be performed under which conditions. Social systems have an enormous power over human individuals, as they can “program” them, ..’ [draft p 1]. DPB: I like the summary ‘distinctions and rules’, but I’m not sure why (maybe it is the definitiveness of this very small list). I also like the phrase ‘which actions .. under which conditions’: this is interesting because social systems are ‘made of’ communication, which in turn is ‘made of’ signals, which in turns are built up from selections of utterances &c., understandings and information. The meaning is that information depends on its frame, namely its environment. And so this phrase above makes the link between the communication, rule-based systems and the assigning of meaning by (in) a system. Lastly these social mechanisms hold a strong influence over humans, even up to the point of damaging themselves. This paper is about the basic neural and behavioral mechanisms used for programming in social systems. This should be important for my landscape of the mind, and familiarization.

Introduction

Humans experience a large influence from many different social systems on a daily basis: ‘Our beliefs, thoughts and emotions are to an important extent determined by the norms, culture and morals that we acquired via processes of education, socialization and communication’ [p 1]. DPB: this resonates with me, because of the choice of the words ‘beliefs’ and ‘thoughts’: these must nicely match the same words in my text, where I explain how these mechanisms operate. In addition I like this phrase because of the concept of acquisition, although I doubt that the word ‘communication’ above is used in the sense of Luhmann. This is not easy to critique or even to realize that these processes are ‘social construction’ and difficult to understand them to be so (the one making a distinction cannot talk about it). Also what is reality in this sense: is it what would have been without the behavior based on these socialized rules or the behavior as-is (the latter I guess)? ‘Social systems can be defined as autopoietic networks of distinctions and rules that govern the interactions between individuals’ (I preferred this one from the abstract: which actions should be performed under which conditions, DPB). The distinctions structure reality into a number of socially sanctioned categories of conditions, while ignoring phenomena that fall outside these categories. The rules specify how the individuals should act under the thus specified conditions. Thus, a social system can be modeled as a network of condition-action rules that directs the behavior of individuals agents. These rules have evolved through the repeated reinforcement of certain types of social actions’ [p 2]. DPB: this is a nice summary of how I also believe things work: rule- based systems – distinctions (social categories) – conditions per distinction – behavior as per the condition-action rules – rules evolve through repeated reinforcement of social actions. ‘Such a system of rules tends to self-organize towards a self-perpetuating configuration. This means that the actions or communications abiding by these rules engender other actions that abide by these same general rules. In other words, the network of social actions or communications perpetually reproduces itself. It is closed in the sense that it does not generate actions of a type that are not already part of the system; it is self-maintaining in the sense that all the actions that deifne parts of the system are eventually produced again (Dittrich & Winter, 2008). This autopoiesis turns the social system into an autonomous, organism-like agent, with its own ideintity that separates it from its environment. This identity or “self” is preserved by the processes taking place inside the system, aand therefore actively defended against outside or “non-self” influences that may endanger it’ [p 2]. DPB: this almost literally explains how cultural evolution takes place. This might be a good quote to include and cut a lot of grass in one go! Social systems wield a powerful influence over people, up to the point of acting against their own health. The workings of social systems is likened to parasites such as the rabies virus which ‘motivates’ its host to become aggressive and bite others such as to spread the virus. ‘We examine the simple neural reinforcement mechanism that is the basis for the process of conditioning whilst also ensuring self-organization of social systems’ (emphasis by the author) [p 3]. DPB: very important: this is at the pivot where the human mind is conditioned such that it incites (motivates) it to act in a specific way and where the self-organization of the social system occurs. This is how my bubbles / situations / jobs work! An element of this process is familiarization: the neural reinforcement mechanism.

The Power of Social Systems

In the hunter gatherer period, humans lived in small groups and individuals could come and go as they wanted to join or form a new group [p 3]. DPB: I question whether free choice was involved in those decisions to stay or leave – or whether they were rather kicked out – and if it was a smooth transfer to other bands – or whether they lost standing and had to settle for a lower rank in a new group. ‘These first human groupings were “social” in the sense of forming a cooperative, caring community, but they were not yet consolidated into autopoietic systems governed by formal rules, and defined by clear boundaries’ [p 4]. DPB: I have some doubts because it sounds too idealistic / normal; however, if taken for face value then this is a great argument to illustrate the developing positions of Kev and Gav against. In sharp contrast are the agricultural communities: they set themselves apart from nature and other social systems, everything outside of their domain fair game for exploitation, hierarchically organized, upheld with symbolic order: authorities, divinities paid homage to with offerings, rituals, prescriptions and taboos. In the latter society it is dangerous to not live by the rules: ‘Thus, social systems acquired a physical power over life and death. As they evolved and refined their network of rules, this physical power engendered a more indirect moral or symbolic power that could make people obey the norms with increasingly less need for physical coercion’ [p 4]. DPB: I always miss the concept of ‘autopolicing’ in the ECCO texts. Individuation of a social system: 1. a contour forms from first utterances in a context (mbwa!) 2. these are mutually understood and get repeated 3. when outside the distinction (norm) there will be a remark 4. autopolicing. Our capacity to cognize depend on the words our society offer to describe what we perceive: ‘More fundamentally, what we think and understand is largely dependent on the concepts and categories provided y the social systems, and by the rules that say which category is associated with which other category of expectations or actions’ [p 5]. DPB: this adds to my theory the idea that not only the rules for decision making and for action depend on the belief systems, namely the memeplexes, but also people’s ‘powers of perception’.

How Social Systems Impede Self-actualization

Social rules govern the whole of our worldview, namely our picture of reality and our role within it (emphasis DPB re definition worldview): ‘They tell us which are the major categories of existence (e.g. mind vs. body, duty vs. desire), what properties these categories have (e.g. mind is insubstantial, the body is inert and solid, duty is real and desire is phantasmagoric), and what our attitudes and behaviors towards each of these categories should be (e.g. the body is to be ignored and despised, desire is to be suppressed)’ [p 5]. DPB: I like this because it gives some background to motivations; however, I believe they are more varied than this and that they do not only reflect the major categories but everything one can know (or rather believe). They are just-so in the sense that they can be (seen or perceived as) useful for something like human well-being or limiting for it. They are generally tacit and believed to be universal and so it is difficult to know which of the above they are. ‘.. these rules have self-organized out of distributed social interactions. Therefore, there is no individual or authority that has the power to change them or announce them obsolete. This means that in practice we are enslaved by the autopoietic social system: we are programmed to obey its rules without questioning’ [ p6]. DPB: I agree, there is no other valid option than that from a variety of just-so stories a few are selected that are more fitting with the existing ones. For people it may now appear that these are the more useful ones, but the used arguments serve a mere narrative that explains why people do stuff, lest they appear to do stuff without knowing why. And as a consequence the motivation to do things only if they serve a purpose is itself meme that tells us to act in this way especially vis a vis others, namely to construct a narrative such that this behavior is explained. The rules driving behavior can be interpreted more or less strictly: ‘Moreover, some rules (like covering the feet) tend to be enforced much less strictly than others (like covering the genitals)‘ [p 6]. DPB: hahaa: Fokke & Sukke. Some of the rules that govern a society are allowed some margin of interpretation and so a variety of them exist; others are assumed to be generally valid, and hence they are more strictly interpreted, exhibiting less variety, leaving people unaware that they are in fact obeying a rule at all. As a consequence of a particular rule being part of a much larger system they cannot be easily changed, especially because the behavior of the person herself is – perhaps unknowingly – steered by that rule or system of rules. In this sense it can be said to hinder or impede people’s self-actualization. ‘The obstruction of societal change and self-actualization is not a mere side effect of the rigidity of social systems; it is an essential part of their identity. An autopoietic system aims at self-maintenance. Therefore, it will counteract any processes that threaten to perturb its organization (Maturana& Varela, 1980, Mingers, 1994). In particular, it will suppress anything that would put into question the rules that define it. This includes self-actualization, which is a condition generally characterized by openness to new ideas, autonomy, and enduring exploration (Heylighen, 1992; Maslow, 1970). Therefore, if we wish to promote self-actualization, we will need to better understand how these mechanisms of suppression used by social systems function’ [p 7]. DPB: I fully agree with the mechanism and I honestly wonder if it is at all possible to know one’s state of mind (what one has been familiarized with in one’s life experience so far, framed in the current environment), and hence if it is possible to self-actualize in a different way from what the actual state of mind (known or not) rules.

Reinforcement: reward and punishment

Conditioning, or reinforcement learning, is a way to induce a particular behavior. Behavior rewarded with a pleasant stimulus tends to be repeated, while behavior punished by an unpleasant stimulus tends to be suppressed. The more often a combination of the above occurs, the more will the relation be internalized, such that it can take the shape of a condition-action (stimulus-response) rule. This differential or selective reinforcement occurs in a process of socialization; the affirmation need to be a material reward, a simple acknowledgement and confirmation suffices (smile, thumbs up, like!); these signals suffice for the release of dopamine in the brain. ‘Social interaction is a nearly ubiquitous source of such reinforcing stimuli. Therefore, it has a wide-ranging power in shaping our categorizations, associations and behavior. Maintaining this dopamine-releasing and therefore rewarding stimulation requires continuing participation in the social system. That means acting according to the system’s rules. Thus, social systems program individuals in part through the same neural mechanisms that create conditioning and addiction. This ensures not only that these individuals automatically and uncritically follow the rules, but that they would feel unhappy if somehow prevented from participating in this on-going social reinforcement game. Immediate reward and punishment are only the simplest mechanisms of reinforcement and conditioning. Reinforcement can also be achieved through rewards or penalties that are anticipated, but that may never occur in reality’ (emphasis by the author) [ p 8].

The power of narratives

People are capable of symbolic cognition and they can conceive of situations that have never occurred (to them): ‘These imagined situations can function as “virtual” (but therefore not less effective) rewards that reinforce behavior’ [p 8]. Narratives (for instance tales) feature tales where the characters are punished or rewarded for their specific behavior. Social systems exploit people’s capacity of symbolic cognition using narratives, and hence build on the anticipatory powers of people to maintain and spread. ‘Such narratives have the advantage that they are easy to grasp, remember and communicate, because they embed abstract norms, rules and values into sequences of concrete events experienced by concrete individuals with whom the audience can easily empathize (Bruner, 1991; Heylighen, 2009; Oatley, 2002). In this way, virtual rewards that in practice are unreachably remote (like becoming a superstar, president of the USA, or billionaire) become easy to imagine as realities’ (emphasis by the author) [p 9]. Narratives can become more believable when communicated via media, celebrities, scripture deemed holy, &c.

Conformist transmission

Reinforcement is more effective when it is repeated more often. Given that social systems are self-reproducing networks of communications (Luhmann, 1995), the information they contain will be heard time and again. Conformist transmission means that you are more liable to adopt an idea, behavior or a narrative if you are communicated it by more other individuals; once adopted you are more likely to convert others to it and to confirm it when others express it. DPB: I agree and I never thought of this in this way: once familiarized with it, then not only can one become more convinced of an idea, but also can one become more evangelical about it. In that way an idea spreads quicker if it is more familiar to more people who then talk about it simultaneously. Now it can become a common opinion; and at that point it becomes more difficult to retain other ideas, up to the point that direct observation can be overruled. Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet exist!

Cognitive dissonance and institutionalized action

People have a preference for coherence in thought and action: ‘When an individual has mutually inconsistent beliefs, this creates an unpleasant tension, known as cognitive dissonance; this can be remedied by rejecting or ignoring some of these thoughts, so that the remaining ones are consistent. This can be used by the social systems to suppress non-conformist ideas by having a person act in accordance with the rules of the social system but conflicting with the person’s rules: the conformist actions cannot be denied and now the person must cull the non-conformist ideas to release tensions [p 10]. ‘This mechanism becomes more effective when the actions that confirm the social norms are formalized, ritualized or institutionalized, so that they are repeatedly and unambiguously reinforced’ [p 10]. DPB: an illustration is given from [Zizek 2010]: by performing the rituals one becomes religious, because the rituals are the religion. This is an example of a meme: an expression of the core idea; conversely by repeating the expression one repeats the core idea also, and thereby familiarizes oneself with that idea as it becomes reinforced in one’s mind. But that reminds me of the idea of the pencil between the lips making a person happier (left to right) or unhappy (sticking forward). And to top it off: ‘Indeed, the undeniable act of praying to God can only be safeguarded from cognitive dissonance by denying any doubts you may have about the existence of God. This creates a coherence between inner beliefs and socially sanctioned actions, which now come to mutually reinforce each other in an autopoietic closure’ [p 10]. DPB: this is the role of dogma in any belief system: the questions that cannot be asked, the nogo areas, &c.

Individuation of Social Systems

Lenartowicz, A., Weinbaum, D., Braathen, P. . The Individuation of Social Systems: A Cognitive Framework . Procedia Computer Science (Elsevier), vol. 88 (pp 15-20) . Doi: 10.1016/j.procs.2016.07.400 . 2016

Abstract

Starting point is formed by the Theory of Individuation (Simondon 1992), Enactive Theory of Cognition (Paolo e.a. 2010) and the Theory of Social Systems Luhmann 1996). The objective is to identify how AI integrates into human society.

1. Introduction

Social systems influence cognitive activities. It is argued that social systems operate as cognitive systems: ‘.. autonomous, self-organizing loci of agency and cognition, which are distinct from human minds and manifesting behaviors that are irreducible to their aggregations’ [p 15]. DPB: I like this (in bold, to end all others) way to formulate the behavior specific to the whole, as opposed to the behavior specific to the individuals therein. It is argued here that these systems individuate in the same way, and their mode of operation is analogous to, other processes of life. This paper does not follow some others that take a narrow approach to cognition starting at the architecture of the individual human mind; instead it presents a perspective of cognition that originates from a systemic sociological view, leading to a socio-human cognitive architecture; the role of the individual human being in the establishing of networks and their operation thereafer is reduced. The theory if based on the view of Heraklitus that ontologically reality is a sequence of processes instead of objects and with Simondon’s theory of individuation: ‘This results in an understanding of social systems as complex sequences of occurrences of communication (emphasis of the authors), which are capable of becoming consolidated to the degree in which they start to display an emergent adaptive dynamics characteristic to cognitive systems – and to exert influence over their own mind-constituted environment’ [p 16]. DPB: this reminds of my understanding of the landscape of Jobs, where Situations and Interactions take place as sequences of signals uttered and perceived.

2. Individuation of Cognitive Agents

The basis is a shift from an Aristotelian object oriented ontology to an Heraklitian process oriented ontology (or rather an ontogenesis); not individuals but individuation are the center-piece; no individual is assumed to precede these processes; all transformations are secondary to individuation: ‘Individuation is a primary formative activity whereas individuals are regarded as merely intermediate and metastable entities, undergoing a continuous process of change’ [p 16]. In this view the individual is always changing, and ‘always pregnant with with not yet actualized and not yet known potentialities of change’ [p 16]. DPB: His reminds me of the monadic character of systems: they are very near completion, yet never quite finished and always ready to fight the previous war. Local and contingent interactions achieve ever higher levels of coordination between their constitutive elements; the resulting entities become ever more complex and can have agency. Cognition can be seen as a process of sense-making; cognition can facilitate the formation of boundaries (distinctions). This is explained by the theory of enactive cognition that treats sense-making as a primary activity of cognition (Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1992; Stewart, Gapenne &Di Paolo 2010; De Jaegher & Di Paolo 2007). This idea is radicalized in this paper: sense-making is assumed to be bringing forth distinctions, objects and relations; sense-making precedes subjects and objects and it is necessary for their emergence; sense-making precedes the existence of consolidated cognitive agents to whom the activity itself would conventionally be attributed. DPB: this firstly reminds me of the phrase ‘love is in the air, even if there is nobody there yet’; ‘processes of individuation constitute a distributed and progressively more coherent (as boundaries and distinctions are formed) loci of autonomous cognitive activity’ [pp. 16-7]; also the process of individuation precedes the process of autopoiesis: the latter cannot exist as a work in progress, but individuation occurs also without autopoiesis; and so autopoiesis can only be a design condition of a process that has already individuated. In this way individuation is taken from its narrow psychological context and projected to a general systems application: ‘Sense-making entails crossing the boundary between the unknown and the known through the formation of tentative perceptions and actions consolidating them together into more or less stable conceptions (emphasis by the author)’ [p 17]. DPB: this is a useful working definition of sense-making; these processes are relevant not just for psychic and social processes, I believe they have their root (and started in some form once) as chemical and physical processes, for which the above terminology does not seem fully suitable; from that point on, these multitudes of elements ‘grew up’ together and became ever more complex. ‘Individuation as an on-going formative process, manifests in the co-determining interactions taking place within the heterogeneous populations of interacting agents. These populations are the ‘raw materials’ from which new individuals emerge. The sense-making activities are distributed over the population and have no center of regulated activity of synchrony. Coordination – the recurrent mutual regulation of behaviors is achieved via interactions that are initially contingent. These interactions are necessary for the consolidation of any organized entity or system’ [p 17].

3 Social Systems as Cognitive Individuals

By a social system is meant any meta-stable form of social activity. DPB: but what is meant with meta-stable. This is the Luhmann understanding of a social system. This paper demonstrates 1. the individuation of social systems and 2. identify social systems as the metastable individuals. Events that are the building blocks for social reality happen as single occurrences of communication, each consisting of: 1. a selection of information, 2. selection of the utterance, and 3. the selection of the understanding. DPB: this is as per my Logistical Model. If and only if the three selections are combined do they form a unity of a communicative event, ‘a temporary individual’. ‘This means that it distinguishes itself from its environment (i.e. any other processes or events) by the means of three provisional boundaries, which the event sets forth: (a) an ‘information-making boundary’ between the marked and the unmarked side of the distinction being made (Spencer Brown, 1994), i.e. delineating the selected information (marked – M) and the non-selected one (unmarked – Un-M), (b) a ‘semiotic boundary’ (Lotman, 2001) between the thus created signified (SD) and a particular signifier selected to carry the information (SR), and (c) a ‘sense-making’ boundary between thus created sign (SGN) and the context (CX), i.e. delineating the understanding of information within its situation (Lenartowicz, Weinbaum & Braaten, 2016)’ [p 17]. DPB: I am not sure what to do with those three selections; I have not used them and instead I am working with selection of some piece of information, while it is uttered, and while it is also perceived (made sense of). I must figure out whether (and how) to use this. Maybe ask ML to clarify how they connect to my logistical model, and especially the E and the B operators. It is important because it is a chain-link in a chain of events: ‘The three selections and corresponding boundaries of an event make the communication available to interact with or to be referred to by another communicative event constituted by another triple selection’ [p 17]. DPB: all this sounds a bit artificial and procedural and mechanical: how can this process come about in a natural way? Once recorded and remembered these elements become available for endless re-use independent of space, time and context (frame). In closed networks of communication, however, they have a tendency to converge into recurrent self-reinforcing patterns, such that the become established and difficult not to be associated with, even if in a negative form or critique. From the associations of these selected simple forms can arise complex individuated sequences, social systems. Through their interactions these systems gain and maintain coherence; as they recur the probability that the same pattern is repeated is higher than the probability that a completely new pattern is selected. Initially contingent boundaries become self-reinforced and stable. ‘On account of their repetition, a social system can be said to develop perceptions (i.e. reappearing selections of information and understanding), actions (i.e. reappearing selections of utterance) and conceptions (percept – action associations) that dynamically bind them. Each such assemblage thus becomes a locus of identifiable cognitive activity, temporarily stabilized within a flux of communication’ [p 18].

4. The Role of Human Cognition

The (three) selections individuating social systems are performed by other cognitive individuated systems. In a social system that is individuated to a level of stability and coherence, emerging patterns in that system further orient the selections made by people. And reciprocally the the psychic environment of the people facilitates the individuation of the social system by selecting new instances of communication that somehow fit the existing parts. Human beings are indispensable for the continuation of communication and hence for the maintenance of a social system, but they are incapable of influencing the social system in the sense that one seedling is incapable of influencing the amount of water in a lake. Only when a social system is at the early stages of its individuation and taking shape can it be influenced by individual people: a pattern of a large social system is confirmed by many other communications and also one different communication, that does not follow the pattern, doesn’t hold sufficient weight to change its course. ‘Taking into account a variety of powerful factors that guide all the linguistic activities of humans: (a) the relative simplicity, associative coherence, frequent recurrence of the cognitive operations once they become consolidated in a social system, (b) the rarity of context-free (e.g. completely exploratory and poetic) communications that is reinforced by the density and entanglement of all “language games” in which contemporary humans are all immersed in, and (c) the high level of predictability of human selection-making inputs observable from the sociological standpoint; it will be reasonable to set the boundaries of our modeling of he general phenomena of human cognition in such a way, which delineates the dynamics of two different kinds of individuating cognitive agencies operating at different scales: the human individual and the social system. Instead of reducing all cognitive activities to the human individual we can clearly distinguish cognitive agencies operating at different scales’ [p 19]. DPB: I like the three arguments above for the likelihood of patterns to appear in communication and also that human cognition is to some extent built with the(extensive) help of social systems, such that human cognition cannot be fully reduced to the individual itself, but also to the social systems in the environment of the individual.