wallpaper dinding

Winograd and Flores's "Understanding Computers and Cognition" has been a major influence on our thinking in the Institute for Educational Cybernetics. It introduced the principal themes of our work: the philosophy of technology and phenomenology of technological experience; the dynamics of communication and speech acts; and the cybernetics of biological self-organisation. Winograd and Flores's thesis (really, I think its Flores more than Winograd) is that computers are about communication. That hardly surprises us now, but the book was written in the early 1980s when the dominant paradigm for thinking about computers was Artificial Intelligence. There was no internet. So it was prescient.

Their deeper argument is that computers allow us to track the commitments we make to each other. That's very important, and I think, demonstrably true. You only have to look at your email management software to see this. But I think there is something more. It is something which has struck me as I have examined my blogging practice. It is not commitment I make to others that I track; it is the different levels of my own thinking: computers allow us to track our metacognitive reflexive states.

The account of "reflexive modernisation" presented by Giddens and Beck is being borne out by social changes that are underway. At the heart of these changes is the increased atomisation that reorganises the relations between individual experience and collective being. I think the 'collective' is increasing under attack - probably because it is the most dangerous politically - and in its place, 'networks' which are effectively controlled by the elite are substituted: these produce isolation which is the breeding ground for susceptibility to the risks produced by the elite. Computers, of course, are at the heart of this network.

Whilst risk requires isolation, with isolation comes more risk. However, isolation itself needs to be understood. It is, I would say, a meta-strategic problem. It is obvious to say isolation results from lack of 'other people', but it isn't the absence of others that creates isolation, it is the problem of being deprived of the means to make choices. 'Other people' and the shared experience, conviviality, etc provided by them is the means by which choices  can be made. Those are the conditions within which shared absence can be determined, and shared political action undertaken.

But although we are atomised into networks, human experience is much deeper than the expression the networks afford. Moreover, the networks provide the means by which individual experience can be inspected more fully. My thinking is in my blog yesterday and today, from last year, from the year before. I can trace my thinking (like a diary), but (unlike a diary) I can see how others have responded. I can see what they are interested in; what they are searching for. Personal analytics are important. Individuals can track their own meta-strategies and meta-cognition. Go deep enough down and the absences around the network start to reveal themselves. It is the absence around the network which is the deep shared absence; here there is authenticity once more; that may be where we can refind togetherness. As usual, technology is a double-edged sword.

Pierre Bourdieu produces this fascinating diagram in his "Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture":

"This diagram is intended to suggest the logic by which the system of determinations attached to class membership (circle A) acts throughout an educational career, restructuring itself as a function of the varying weight of any given factor (e.g. cultural capital or income) within the structure of factors at the different stages of the passage through education. broadly distinguished here as primary, secondary (A1), higher (A2) and post-graduation (A3). It must be borne in mind that within this system of factors constantly restructured by its own action, the relative weight of the determinations due to Transformed form of initial class membership steadily declines to the advantage of the academic determinations which retranslate them. The lines indicate correlations between variables and the arrows indicate genetic processes. The dotted arrows are used to suggest the determinations which operate through the internalization of objective probabilities in the form of subjective expectations. In other words, the diagram seeks to represent some of the mechanisms through which the structure of class relations tends to reproduce itself by reproducing those habitus which reproduce it."

The factors which relate to the ways in which individuals find themselves at different social strata as a result of the reproductive education system are:

"(1) Distance from centre(s) of cultural values (concentration(s) of intelligentsia) and from educational and cultural facilities; structure of academic and cultural opportunities of groups belonged to (neighbourhood, peer group). (2) Other demographic characteristics (sibling order. family size. etc.) specified by class membership (differential selection) and social definition. (3) Security of Cultural and employment; income and income prospects; environment and working Class social conditions; leisure, etc. (4) Dispositions towards school and culture (i.e. vis-a-vis learning, authority, school values, etc.); subjective expectations (of access to school, of success, of advancement by means of school); relation to language and culture (manners). (5) linguistic capital; previous knowledge; capital of social connections and prestige (testimonials); information on educational system, etc. (6) Average income; average income at beginning and end of career; speed of promotion; position in economic and social structures, particularly in the various fields of legitimacy and in power structure. (7) Relation to class origin and education, depending on academic record and eventual class membership. (8) Diploma; old boy network."

This diagram has fascinated me for a long time. It is fundamentally cybernetic - Bourdieu was heavily influenced by the systems sociology of Parsons. It's interesting to think what he might have done with Luhmann had he looked carefully. But maybe that's something for me to do...

I think that whilst Bourdieu's focus is on reproduction, and indeed reproduction is very important, my concern (as I said yesterday) is regulation. Bourdieu's worry, deep down, was that an education system which reproduced social inequality would eventually produce an unviable society. He was right. But I think now more than ever, rather than describing the mechanisms of reproduction (which have only really fed the careers of sociologists), we need to think about what a viable society looks like. Education is a reproductive force - but in its function it is regulatory. As our thinking about education is now being transformed by post-industrialisation, marketisation, technology, personalisation, etc, I think we need to re-examine the reproductive function of education as a regulatory system and to see it in the context of broader regulatory systems within society.

Here there is the need to think about the relation between the regulatory functions of education and the regulatory functions of technology. As I argued yesterday (amidst my angst at the prospect of being without work - although my University has done that to practically everyone now...) people are the regulators of society. Bourdieu's worry is that the system for making the regulators (education) makes them from a mould which reproduces unviable patterns of class structures. This, he would argue, is because education is controlled by the elite who wish to preserve their position. I'm sure that was true in Bourdieu's France of the 1960s and 70s, and probably elsewhere too. Is it the case now?

I think it's more complex. Technology complicates the picture. It affords learning without state regulation. It asserts its own hegemony - the power of the global technology companies is wielded for the maximising of profit, not for the good of society. Corporate expediency replaces principle and individuals are atomised, which in the process compromises the deep social solidarity that is necessary for politics and (ultimately) emancipation.

But then education itself is in a process of industrialisation and marketisation. Governments are pulling-back from regulation and state support as education is increasingly seen as a commodity, and a factor in global competitiveness. In the post-industrial world, education simultaneously promises conviviality and solidarity on the campus, whilst participating in the atomisation of individual accreditation and certification. And within this setting, education is still doing the reproductive work that Bourdieu highlights.

But people are the regulators of society. The biological and psychological effect of injustice and entrapment is fury. Any society must worry if it produces too many angry people. The function of government is to prevent that happening (Ibn Khaldun's remarkable 14th century definition of the function of government still stands: "to prevent injustice other than that which it creates itself"). The job of preventing injustice is going to get harder. The priority of government must be to understand how to do it in complex times.

I've been arguing for a long time now that the domain within which I worked, Educational Technology, was moribund, and that many of the individuals who we regularly interacted with professionally (from project colleagues to project funders) would themselves be out of work quite soon.

But the challenge I wish to concentrate on is not the death of educational technology. It is the peril that education itself is in. The work which has changed my life over the last 10 years has focused on an immensely complex issue of how technology has affected the organisation of education. The means by which we, in our Institute for Educational Cybernetics, have addressed the problem have allowed us to cut through the morass of category-bound confusion and false divisions that dominate the education discourse. In short, a cybernetic approach matters.

But of all the issues we have dealt with, it is the relationship between education, technology and economy which is the most important. The regulators of society are people. Education equips them to perform their regulatory function. States regulate (or have regulated) education for this purpose. Increasingly, technologies afford the means of providing education, and what technology does need not be regulated in this way. Increasingly, the marketisation of education similarly leads it towards some kind of deregulation. Government wants to loosen the ties of regulation of education to the level of coordinating the management and allocation of resources between students and institutions (and enforcing a hike in tax rates on students in the future). Increasingly, education finds itself sitting awkwardly within a strangely regulated internal market, which at the same time attempts to open itself to the outside world, but with increasing restrictions relating to immigration and social regulation. It's all a bit crazy - so many conflicting levels. Seeing things clearly must be a priority. How do the regulators work? What are humans that they can regulate a society? What is a society that it is regulated by humans? What is education that it produces in humans this capacity? What is knowledge in its function as an organising principle for education? What is the relationship between education and civilisation?

Educational Cybernetics can help us to do this. But if the resource-base for Educational Cybernetics (Educational Technology) has dried-up, where else does it go? This is my personal challenge. But I passionately believe it is also the challenge for the sector and our society.

I've been puzzling over how to represent recursive sets of metagames, which is following the work I'm doing around Nigel Howard's Paradoxes of Rationality. I know that what I am articulating is very fractal-like. What makes it so is not just the recursiveness of the metagame idea, but the fact that the metagame tree has boundaries marked out by the 'blind spots' of individual thinking - where deep recursion breaks down. More importantly, the depth of the recursion of a particular path is the fundamental determiner of an equilibrium point for making a decision. This led me to think that Mandelbrot style visualisations might be useful, since the different colours reflect the different levels of recursion at particular points.
But I'm not interested in this for the pretty pictures! With regard to Metarationality, the distinction between light and dark is a distinction between deep metarationality and shallow metarationality. The dark stuff is an indication of where the equilibrium points are. But can we do better?

Then I started looking for a different kind of coordinate system. Parallel coordinates are very interesting because they highlight visual patterns which are not obvious using Cartesian coordinates. Using parallel coordinates, points become lines. After a presentation by Alfred Inselberg in Vienna (who has pioneered the use of Parallel coordinates), I asked him what fractals look in his parallel system. Not terribly interesting was his reply (I guess a lot of different coloured lines for all the different points). But I'm now thinking about a different approach.

Maybe we should consider 'fractal axes' and then see what parallel coordinates might show. I was looking at this http://azimuth.mathforge.org/discussion/652/useful-fractal-coordinate-system/ from Curtis Faith which presents a fractal-based coordinate system which looks like this..

Cybernetics is full of 'spins'. From Watt governors to Heinz von Foerster's Eigenvalues, circular metaphors abound. This makes more sense when we can directly see the machine that makes it. But when the spin metaphor is applied to thinking itself, as with the Eigenforms, then I find that the description of the identification of objects as the emergence of stable patterns of flux in a continually emergent engagement between individuals and their environment difficult, if not downright fanciful. The assertion of those who believe this is that objects aren't 'real', what is seen as an object is a patterning of perception, notwithstanding philosophical arguments about 'real' in the first place.

Gordon Pask puts a similar emphasis on spins when he talks about concepts. He argues that

Concepts are force exerting, persisting, closed, Brunnian in threes at least, braids recursively packed in toroidal processes ("like multicore telephone cable" or ""onion skins") in any medium, solid, liquid, gas, plasma or, indeed, brains. Their spins exert a residual parity within a coherence.

What on earth does that mean? I suspect Pask saw concepts much as Von Foerster saw objects: a dynamic whose patterning forms (the "residual parity within a coherence") the basis of cognition. But it's a jolly abstruse concept!

What do I think of this? It's difficulty is indicative of a bigger problem: it's simply all too circular. Spins are fascinating, but in the end, they just go round and round. I suspect everyone (including Von Foerster) got carried away with topology in the 60s and 70s and got caught up in its spins (everyone was into knots then: R.D. Laing and Lacan are (k)notable exponents!). It fitted the 'cybernetics of cybernetics' idea (although I'm fairly sure they misunderstood Margaret Mead's appeal - she had an eye on the circularity of cybernetic discourse, which Von Foerster's 'cybernetics of cybernetics' may have only made worse). It was as if they'd used mathematical topology for calculation of some hermetic wisdom: the maths became a positive metaphor for articulating what was the case with "thinking" and "perception". Yet topology, like all maths, is interesting where its reasoning breaks down: it articulates the limits of reasoning, albeit very complex reasoning.

For all this spinning, to me experience does not spin - it stretches in a process of tension and release. Music doesn't spin - the most spin-like music (for example, hypnotic trance music or minimalism) seems to me musically deficient. Curiosity is like this too, and for all these spinning accounts of cognition, curiosity precedes cognition. (Pask has an idea about the dynamics of concepts which appears to try to explain cognition, but it's all still spinning around).

There is at least some tension between Luhmann's psychic system and his social system. But the tension here (and indeed, the most sensible aspect of Luhmann's theory) is the fact that really he doesn't attempt to theorise what a psychic system is, only to say that it's what you and I do in our heads. For Luhmann, it's the communications we make which matter, which is a position with quite a Marxist practicality to it. He sensibly side-steps the issue of 'stretch'. The separation between psychic and social systems is what Luhmann gets criticised for by 2nd order cyberneticians. To me, it's a smart move, allowing him to say something practical without getting sucked-in to intractable arguments about thinking.

But characterising a stretch is difficult. Our physical analogues are usually biological in origin: the sinewy stretch of muscles, strings, elastic, and so on. But they could equally be psychological: stretching one's imagination, stretching a dissonance, prolonging moments.

The key difference between spins and stretches is a difference between sequentialism and recursion. That sounds like a strange statement, but I think I can explain it like this. A spin is conceived as a process of motion in time. The equation for a spin, as any circular motion is:
But what, really, is T? Ironically, the T is something which derives from clocks, which in turn depend on the same equation in order to operate, and the principal notion with regard to clocks is sequentialism (one thing follows another).

With a stretch something latent within a thing is revealed: the increased length of the elastic was always in the elastic. Whether the elastic is stretched or not, it is still elastic. The stretched elastic is always within the unstretched elastic as a potential. This is like saying that the infinite division of a line is always within the line (for example, the division in the Sierpinski triangle): the form that emerges is ever-present but unrealised. With the Sierpinski triangle, particularly, this indicates recursion as the operating principle.

But realisation of potential creates tension in elastic. But is the tension is really in us, not the elastic? It is our fingers that feel the force. And in our thinking about the division of the Sierpinksi triangle, as the recursion gets deeper so does the complexity, so does the tension we feel in apprehending what we witness.

But release is then interesting. We can of course release the elastic, which will take us back to where we started. But equally, we could do something with it which creates a new kind of stability. We can create some sort of tensegrity, which itself will have new latent recrusive properties. This, I think, is what concepts do. It may be that Pask is saying something similar. But I do suspect he gets it the wrong way round. Spins may be the product of stretches, not stretches the product of spins.