Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2003 14:54:57 +0000 (UTC)
From: anonymous <tlewis-AT-sdf.lonestar.org>
Subject: Re: complex systems, cybernetics


Steve/Eric/All

Steve wrote:

>
> Anon ended a missive with an implication that "cybernetics,
> communications theory and cognitive neuroscience..." in some sense
> represents a given and inevitable fact, a truth. It seems appropriate to
> given that this is nominally at least a discussion list around the
> texts/works of Lyotard to place the statement in the context of
> Lyotard's insistence that we should resist this approach which he placed
> under the umbrella phrase "development".

I never suggested that cybernetics represents a fact or a truth, merely
that the implications of cybernetics/communications theory/cognitive
neuroscience cast doubt on the relevance of the texts/works of Lyotard and
others.

I would suggest Lyotard had no real understanding of cybernetics or
communications theory. But he realized enough to feel threatened
threatened by it (just as Heidegger felt threatened by science and
technology) and that the implications of this new science threatened
to render his own texts/works obsolete.

Unfortunately there's no short and simple way of responding to this, so I
have no choice but to try and give a better explanation of what
cybernetics and communications theory involve. As tiresome as this might
be, and for me as well, I'd rather let you continue your discussion of
Eliot, nevertheless, I'll make an effort to explain some of these ideas
none of which are mine. (And I included Eric above, because this also has
implications for the discussion of free will vs. determinism that I was
too tired to deal with the other day.

And a lot of what follows is just repeating what anonymous already posted
on the Deleuze/Guattari list, but here I'm attempting to explain the
terms, whereas in that post no attempt at an explanation or clarification
was even attempted.

And again, bear in mind that the following statements are not my opinions
and not one idea below is original. These ideas are out there. Pick up Norbert
Wiener's basic book entitled "Cybernetics" for an ABC starting point.
But speaking strictly within cybernetic/communications theory
terminology.... Consciousness does not exist and indeed, there is
no reason to believe that it ever did exist. Not conscious, not unconscious.
If consciousness does not exist, there can hardly be a state of
unconsciousness.

Withing cybernetic theory, Man is an abstraction. Human abstractions are
based on the past, on behavior, not on operant considerations of what is
happening. Considerations of the present? Patterns. Transaction. Activity.
Doing. Considerations of the past? Behavior. Environment. Man.

According to communications theory, (once again this is not some eccentric
personal opinion and not one of these ideas are "mine") the abstractions of man
characterize phenomena without regard to the operant activities of the
phenomena. It is a limited system of classification.

Cybernetic/communications theory asks how to deal with what is happening?
It tries to search for rhythms and patterns. Assuming Man is dead, then
the analysis moves from the study of fixed entities that are capable of
ownership to the transaction of the species with environmental forces.
Look to the transaction.

Cognitive neuroscience (borrowing from cybernetic/communications theory)
suggests that that the world about us is accessible only through a nervous
system, and our information concerning it is confined to what limited
information the nervous system can *transmit.* The brain receives
information and acts on it by telling the effectors what to do. The loop
is completed as the performance of the effectors provides new information
for the brain. It is a new feedback loop, a nonlinear relationship between
output and input. Again, in cyber/comm/neuroscience terminology.

Man always dealt with what had already happened, believing that it
occurred in the present instant. However,within cybernetic theory, what he
thought was happening coincides approximately between steps two and three
of the cybernetic feedback loop. (Does Lyotard address this anywhere in
his work?) Man was aware only of the past, and never aware of the
activities of his brain, where there are order and arrangement, but there is no
experience of the creation of that order. Experience gives us no clue as
to the means by which it is organized.

To understand these notions, it is necessary to explore the
cybernetic/communications theory concept of the interval. The interval
refers to the moment of the creation of the order of the brain's
activity. The activity of which man was never aware, the inaccessible
present, the direct experience of the brain. The rest of time
emerges only in signals relayed to us at this instant by innumerable
stages and unexpected bearers. The nature of a signal is that its message
is neither here nor now, but there and then. If it is a signal, it is a
past action, no longer embraced by the 'now' of present being. The
perception of a signal happens 'now,' but its impulse happened then. In
any event, the present instant is the plane upon which the signals of all
being are projected.

This instant, the interval, constitutes all that is directly experienced.
It was for man the abstraction the critical point. In cybernetic theory,
a stage beyond space and time, the interval is closed forever, and man
ceases to exist.

Man always ordered his experience in terms of psychological considerations
of the nonexistent mind. But according to communications theory, the
ordering of experience is always on the here-and-now level. The
interpretation of the ordering is always at the there-and-then level.
Cognitive neuroscientists are aware that the brain's operation is a
continuing activity of ordering in the here-and-now. There was always
ordering in the here-and-now while man deluded himself with considerations
there-and-then, considerations of a world that didn't exist. A world that
never had existed. The world of the past. A fractional instant, and yet the
past. Because of that interval man (with all of his delusions and
abstractions) was able to exist. But according to
cybernetic/communications theory man is a relic of the
instantaneous past. Man, an instant too old to exist. Things not existent
should be of no interest to us. All those things rendered unto man are
based on a system that deals with illusion. The interpretation of the
ordering of the brain takes place while new ordering is continually
happening. It is almost as though there were two parallel planes.

Almost. We might even assume there was a choice between living in one
plane or another. Actually, there is no choice. There is no choice. There
is only the ordering and arrangement, the here-and-now. Some of us, most
of us, cannot recognize this level and continue by blindness, by inertia,
by pretension, the delusion that we are men. It's a mistake. Man is dead.
Man never existed at all. Our awareness as experience is past experience.
Dreaming.

It's a world of information. Information in this context refers to
regulation and control and has nothing to do with meaning, ideas, or data.
Any system is said to be able to receive information if when a change
occurs the system is capable of reactions in such a way as to maintain its
own stability. Information is nothing but an abstraction. As an
abstraction it will allow for new observations and associations, for
discernment of patterns and organization. Note that the reference is to a
reaction to change. The concern here is only with the reaction, the
effect. Information is a measure of the effect. This refers to how the
control center of the organism, the brain, reacts to change in order to
maintain continuity.

In cybernetics and cognitive neuroscience, we are dealing with activity
integrated on the neural, the brain level, i.e., the present. Thus, when
discussing information, we are talking about the brain's response in terms of
present, direct experience. This response is *always* effected without
consent or awareness. There is no choice. (Which raises the issue of free
will again.) According the communications theory, there is no information
unless there is a change. Information does not exist as information until
it is within the higher levels of abstraction of each of the minds and
computed as such. Up to the point at which it becomes perceived as
information, it is signals. These signals travel through the external
reality between the two bodies, and travel as signals within the
brain substances themselves. Till the complex patterns of traveling
neuronal impulses in the brain are computed as information within the
cerebral cortex, they are not yet information. Information is the result
of a long series of computations based on data signal inputs, data signal
transmissions to the brain substance, and recomputations of these data.
Information is an abstraction to be used for measuring the communication
of pattern, order, and neural inhibition.

Cybernectics is concerned only with the changes in the operations of the
receiver, the brain, in terms of the transactional present. Do not confuse
information with signals or the source of signals. The mind of the
observer-participant is where the information is constructed, by and
through his own programs, his own rules of perception, his own cognitive
and logical processes, his own metaprogram of priorities among programs.
His own vast internal computer constructs information from signals and
stored bits of signals.* Information is a process. There are no sources of
information; there are no linear movements of information to the brain.

Information is an abstraction. Information is a measure of effect.
Information is a concept that allows for relationships not previously
possible. Effect deals with the construction of information from both
incoming signals and bits of signals stored in the operant circuits of the
brain. The incoming signals are transmitted by both internal and external
receptors. Effect involves the total situation and not a single level of
information movement. There are no single levels of information movement.
The total situation is the neural situation, the process of the nervous
system. This system is operational. All that's traceably happening is a
shimmering array of pattern shifting occurring in a centerless, edgeless
network.

Communications theory is the study of messages. In this system, the
message is nonlinear. The communication, the message, is pattern, order,
neural inhibition. The message is the change in neural activity. It can be
considered as a program, and a program is nothing else but a set of
commands: "do this; do that . . ." which in other words means: "don't do
this; don't do that . . ." We are dealing with the transmission of neural
pattern from a brain and its outputs, through a specifiable set of
processes to the external world, through a portion of that world with
specifiable modes, media and artificial means to another body, another
brain. We are dealing with a set of relationships which allows us to
conceptualize the communication of neural experience. The difference
between human experience and neural experience is the difference between
illusion and reality, between choice and no choice.


Man is dead. Credit his death to an invention. The invention was the
grasping of a conceptual whole, brought about by research in
cybernetics, communications theory and cognitive neuroscience, a set of
relationships which had not been previously recognized. The invention was
man-made. (It has nothing to do with my personal opinion. Not one of these
ideas is mine.) It was the recognition that reality was communicable. The
process was the transmission of neural pattern. Such patterns are electrical
no mental. The system of communication and control functioned without
individual awareness or consent.The message in the system was not words,
ideas, images, etc. The message was nonlinear: operant neural pattern. It
becomes clear that these new concepts of communication and control involve a
new interpretation of man, of man's knowledge of the universe, and of society.
In my opinion, and this is the only part of this message where I allow
myself to express a personal opinion these concepts these concepts
threaten Lyotards work/texts, as well as that of many other writers
and traditional literary intellectuals.

But this part (the sentence above) is simply my humble opinion.

The supreme abstraction of the brain was indeed the mind. From the
confusion of metaphysics and psychoanalysis, abstractions of abstractions,
the thinking brain has turned to the first possible glimpses of itself.
For years man understood that animals did not act through a consciousness;
now it is evident that man himself, the human animal, did not and does
not act with a conscious sensibility. It's all a question of breaking
through to new systems of abstraction.

Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. But the only conclusion to be
derived from thought is that the brain has direct experience. Cybernetics
is not concerned with the existence of thought but with the activity of the
brain.

There is no conscious self, there is no subconscious, there is no mind.
Indeed, the word mental is an unfortunate word, a word whose function in
our culture is often only to stand in lieu of an intelligent explanation,
and which connotes rather a foggy limbo than a cosmic structural order
characterized by patterning. Cybernetics is concerned only with discerning
operant patterns on the neural level. All experience can be accounted for
in terms of neural operations. Only by renouncing an explanation of life in the
ordinary sense do we gain a possibility of taking into account its
characteristics.

The operation of the brain is a nonlinear process. It is a system of
self-organization where given sets of oscillations pull themselves
together into a particular frequency band.

Instead of "man" and "not man," move the object-subject separation one
step back to objectify a universe of simultaneous operations: the process
of interaction of "man" and "not man," integrated on the level of the
neural activity of "man." In this system there is not only a universe, but
there are also elements capable of observing this universe. The
observation is through a nervous system similar to that of the
observer-participant in the universe under consideration. Reality is no
longer to be found hidden in the subjects and objects of "man" and "not
man."

For discussing integration at the neural level we must look to the
interval. The only way to capture that moment is with the death of man,
the death of the concept of the individual. It has been demonstrated that
the brain responds to change in terms of the information it has already
received. The past experience of the person determines the manner of his
response to a given stimulus. The primary direct effects of stimuli
commonly have little bearing on their ultimate expressions.* The brain
continually functions during the moment man termed the interval, this
functioning being dependent on its physiological construction and stored
information. There is no interval. There is only what the brain is doing.

Not ideas or opinions, but the changes brought about by the experience,
the neural involvement. Information is a nonlinear relationship
established between output and input, the simultaneous universe of
experiential feedback of information. Points of view are beside the point.

Cybernetics is concerned only with activity integrated on the neural
level. It is a process. The only unit of currency in the process is the
neural impulse or permeability wave. In studying the transmission pattern
of these waves we learn that each local area of the cortex interprets the
message according to its local pattern of response. Nothing in the message
itself can indicate its source of origin. On the integrative neural level
there are no visual images, no sounds, no taste, no physical feeling, no odor.
It matters nothing whether these trains of neural impulse arise in the ear,
the eye, or any other sense organ; they are all the same, they have no
more individuality than the elemental dots and dashes of the telegraph
code. There is no more of a sound or sight or pain in a nerve impulse
during transmission than there is love or grief in the underground lines
of the telegraph.

The mechanism whereby a sensory receptor which has important information
to convey can transmit this information to the cortex of the brain, along
a neural axone which is as featureless as a telegraph wire, has
interesting properties of a quantitative nature. Two methods are available
whereby the stark yes or - no, which is all that the nerve can carry, may
be elaborated into the wealth of sensory detail which actually reaches the
brain. One method is to vary the number of nerve fibers engaged in the
work of transmission: twenty fibers will convey a message more efficiently
than ten fibers. The other method is by modulation of the frequency of the
impulses as they follow each other along the single track. It becomes a
question of frequencies, or numbers.

How does the picture get put together? It doesn't. All that is happening
are volleys of neural impulses. What is the point of attempting to
correlate patterns of neural activity to mind, feelings, emotions, etc.?
Cybernetics and communications theory dispenses with these abstractions.
They are from another epoch. They are of little usefulness in dealing
with operant phenomena.

The implications of all this for man are unbelievable, but this message
has already gone on for too long and I suspect no one on this list is
interested in any of these ideas anyway, so I'm probably just wasting my
time and yours.

With that out of the way, please feel free to resume your discussion of
T.S. Eliot, and I'll step aside.

anon






























> " ...However systems theory is not a philosophical system but a
> description of reality, "a so called reality" that has become entirely
> describable in terms of general physics, which stretches from
> astrophysics to particle physics (electronics, information technology,
> and cybernetics are only aspects of this general physics) and of course
> in economic terms. In this description the alive or the human appear as
> particular cases of complex material systems...This means that from this
> perspective, conflict (and ultimately war) does not arise between human
> and nature; rather the struggle is between more developed systems and
> something else that is necessarily less developed and that physicists
> know as entropy, the second principle of thermodynamics. The section of
> humanity that is not developed can be considred as entropic in relation
> to the system (and this is already the way it is thought of,
> particularly by the central banks of the developed countries)..."
> (Quoted from Oikos 1988)
>
> Lyotard's argument and target is remarkably clear.