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Hello, and welcome to another edition of new books in Systems and Cybernetics, a podcast channel on the new books network. I'm Tom Schult, and I co-host the channel with Kevin Lindsey. On this episode, I have the great pleasure of finally getting to talk with one of the unsung heroes of Cybernetics, whose work has finally begun to receive the critical attention and is long deserved, and upon which I have leaned quite heavily in my own works since I entered this field. With Cybernetics for the Social Sciences out from Brill in 2021, Bernard Scott has met a long felt need by authoring a book that shows the foundational relevance of Cybernetics for such fields as psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
Scott provides user friendly descriptions of the core concepts of Cybernetics, with examples of how they can be used in the Social Sciences, and explains how Cybernetics functions as a transdiscipline that unifies other disciplines and a meta-discipline that provides insights about how other disciplines function. He provides an account of how Cybernetics emerged as a distinct field following interdisciplinary meetings in the 1940s, convened to explore feedback and circular causality in biological and social systems, and also recounts how encountering Cybernetics transformed his thinking and his understanding of life in general. And so without any further ado, let's turn to my conversation with Bernard Scott. Bernard Scott, welcome to new books in systems and Cybernetics.
It is such a pleasure to, I finally got to meet you online and if you online conferences over the last years or so, but your work has been such so important to my own studies and my own scholarship through previous publications of yours, many gathered in a wonderful book that addition, Echo Rump, put out a number of years ago that I would also turn readers to. But it's so wonderful to have a chance to speak with you for a good period of time today. So welcome to new books and systems and Cybernetics. Thank you, Tom.
This is my pleasure and I thank you for your interest. Absolutely. So we're going to start, although you do cover it in the book to some degree and in some papers as well, because it seems to me that your journey, your discovery of Cybernetics and your journey towards working so intimately with Gordon Pask is absolutely tied into your key passion for the work. But can you give us a little bit of your academic intellectual biography and how it led you to such a deep engagement with Cybernetics?
Yes, I think it's probably important to say the start that I have a, I developed a concept of what it is to be of Cybernetician, which is informal, not just by thinking but my whole approach to life and living. So it was quite a journey. I started out as an undergraduate in psychology, having decided not to go to medical school. I wasn't really interested in cutting up bodies.
I was more interested in human beings as whole persons. And it was one I was an undergraduate. I read a couple of books which mentioned Cybernetics. But we had a lecturer, a new lecturer gave a course on cybernetics.
His name was David Stewart who is still alive, I believe. And he mentioned, ask, he mentioned Nina, McCulloch, Ask, and Ashby and beer. I think he referred to all of them as geniuses, which I found intriguing. Of course I was on hand a mix of internships, places to work going to work a few months and then coming back to the college.
And through his good grace as David Stewart got me a placement for six months working with Gordon Pasc in Richmond, Surrey, England, not far away from the college. Which was one of the main reasons why I went wanted to go there because I didn't wish to travel around England very much. It was very convenient. But I knew little about Pasc until I got there.
But I was actually astonished when I met him. He was the most intelligent or wet person I'd ever met. And his presence was also just to be in the same room as him. He just commanded attention.
And it was awesome. And he was working with him and inspired me to protect some of the things really seriously. Indeed, he gave an entry into understanding psychology, because up to that point, psychology has been quite disappointing. But I read past papers, I read most recent papers at the time and chased up the references in the library.
I became a serious student of psychology and cybernetics, which was wonderful really, because not only did it mean my studies, I came away with the first class on the screen of cybernetics, in psychology. But it has took me on as a research associate when I graduated. And I enrolled as a PhD under his supervision at the University. That's the brief background.
Wonderful, wonderful. And yeah, the spirit of his work, it lives strong in your work and the ways you've developed it and continue to make it just so accessible is a huge service you've done to scholars like myself and to the whole community. So this book, Cybernetics for the Social Sciences. So this is wrapped in with the question of why this book now, what made you decide this was the moment to write this particular book?
And so what is it that the social sciences needs that cybernetics can bring it, I guess, which is a theme, obviously, of the whole book. But maybe those two questions are connected to why this book now, and what is the social sciences in need of that cybernetics can bring? OK, well, thanks to Gordon Pascal on cybernetics and the 10 years I spent with him developing an applying conversation theory, I became, well, interested in not just psychology, but other disciplines. And not least the social sciences, sociology, social psychology, cultural anthropology, not so much economics, but management science and so on.
And I can see that cybernetics was a wonderful tool or conceptual frameworks used to grasp these other disciplines in a holistic way. And along the way, I discovered that the need within the cybernetics community being regularly expressed that there ought to be a good cybernetics 101 introductory course to cybernetics. And I thought, well, that's a good idea. Maybe I could contribute to such a thing as these.
It was something that I had nothing materialized, but I started forming it in my own mind, what I would like to communicate. And because of my interest in the social sciences, as a psychologist, I found a home for me amongst the social cybernetics community. I asked the 51 research committee, 51, and social cybernetics as the International Sociological Association. I found a home where I could express my ideas and learn from other people who were working in sociology and other social sciences.
And I saw there was a need, well, we had a name in the group. So this is the, in the RC 51 group. And to spread the good news about cybernetics and systems thinking into sociology at large, which is a rather old name given that there are probably, I don't know, a few hundred thousand socialities around the world in a couple of hundred social cybernetions. We've seen the word the game.
And I mentioned sociologists and we're which was the brief references to systems thinking or cybernetics, but nothing particularly accurate or deep. So I thought it was a good idea to write for that particular audience. And three years ago, my friend Chaimay Machuello offered to work with Brill, publishing to the editor-in-chief for a series of monographs to do with social cybernetics. And I volunteered to write at least one of those.
And eventually I had a discussion we came up with the title of cybernetics for the social sciences. So my aim is to communicate to social scientists at large what cybernetics offers and on the way say something about systems thinking. And I deliberately made it as non-mathematical as I could. And I tried to make it very user friendly in terms of how I wrote about things, described things and so on.
Excuse me, I just had to cancel a Skype call from someone. Yeah. It's just the way. So that was the aim for the book.
And basically I took ideas from a number of papers that I'd already written and then edited them together. Yeah, they're going to try again. They always do at least once. But I think it can't possibly have refused me and then they must have dropped the call.
I just want to make the same visit. I understand what that means. Great. Oh, yes, that's the aim of the book.
And also it's going to be very useful also in the tradition to cybernetics for other people, including those who like yourself already interested in cybernetics. And so it's a contribution to the cybernetics community as well as to the social cybernet, the social sciences at large. Yeah, and it's absolutely done that. I'm well familiar with the lament of wishing there was a suitable introduction to cybernetics, even though there have been books most famously Ross Ashby's book called An Introduction to Cybernetics.
But again, it gets the mathematics start pretty early in their intense. And so yeah, we've been and even weiners a book. You know, it's, so I'm not a social scientist per se. I teach theater and I teach in department theater and film, but cybernetics is very much a huge part of the way I teach acting and directing.
And so I introduce concepts of cybernetics to my students and they end up asking that inevitable question, well, you know, where's a good book to start? You know, and it's always been so hard to do so. And now I've got exactly the text. It's yours for sure.
So if you would summarize just as a sort of, you know, I hate the term elevator pitch, but we'll use it. What the offer is, right? So a social scientist says, I've got, you know, five minutes. What is it specifically?
You say it's a framework through which I can understand or conceptualize or see new things in across the body of social sciences that I can't see without cybernetics. What is it that it provides that is the main offer? Okay, well, from almost from the beginning, I say that cybernetics plays the role of a trans discipline, which looks at some edges and differences across disciplines. And it's also a meta discipline in the comments on how other disciplines work and structures.
The other side, goal set of concepts, which can bring unity to how we look at the social sciences. So it is as a trans discipline, it's enormously useful. If you want a broad comprehensive view of social science, indeed of how the world works in total, because I would certainly not make a student biology from that, no one knows what I excluded the other, the other sciences. So, cybernetics is really using the, I think the term is first coined by or used by Warren Cola, but sometimes it's a trans discipline.
That's what I would offer. Wonderful. And I don't have to say, of course, this main theme is control and communication. Yeah.
Complex systems. Yeah. And that control, looking at all of these other disciplines or all of these various phenomena through the lens of control and communication via circular feedback mechanisms, provides a kind of unifying way to look at them. Is it my?
That's correct. I was just going to elaborate a few things. I was going to say, that the, as you know, the basic conferences held in the 40s and 50s brought together, the thinkers from many different disciplines who are interested in what became cybernetics. And the title of their conferences was feedback and circular causality in biological and social systems.
So it's about the, it was the inside, major insight, it was found in the 40s in a number of places, not the web of precursors, but in the 40 people became aware of the ubiquity of the control by negative feedback, in particular systems that anticipate systems that pursue goals and so on. And this could be applied across the board to biological and social systems in principle. And that work has continued. Hopefully, thankfully in various ways.
Mm-hmm. So you give it, you provide a snapshot of your life in cybernetics, which is wonderful. And then the story of cybernetics, including a sort of sense of decline and then renewal. What do you think is leading to a renewal in cybernetics?
I'm not quite sure at the moment, Tom, that this way encouraging. As you know, the decline was largely because of the really, the subdisciplined of artists intelligence, which I've always seen as being part of cybernetics before and got major funding in the 70s onwards, because of its possible applications in defense. And the more softer aspects of cybernetics were screened out. I mean, they got very little.
I mean, past, you know, I worked with, I had quite major funding from the United States, military in various ways, because of their interesting, in training and human learning. But when this new emphasis on research having to be relevant for defense, they clearly, they're funding dried up. Right. This is the famous Mansfield Amendment.
Yeah. So the major, yes, that's correct. Yeah. So, there was a turning away from cybernetics.
There's already been a growing lack of interest in that the major disciplines like biology and engineering and so on, not social sciences, but the other side is what they found interesting in cybernetics and just resolved it into their own disciplines. They were already quite well established with areas of methods and cybernetics just added to them. And they didn't take on board the broader term, transdisciplinary aspects. What we saw then was in the 70s, beginning with the past paper you already referred to about extending the meaning of goal, in which it starts to discuss the difference between what it calls taciturn systems and language oriented systems, which begins at a major emphasis on the social team of beings, with language oriented systems, and it articulates a lot of the challenges for weak humans to be studying humans.
That was quickly followed by Hans von Furze and his distinction between first and second order cybernetics where first order cybernetics is a study of observed systems, which is a standard science basically, study of objects, study of systems. And the study of observing systems, which includes the observing himself, human beings, and which necessarily logically is reflexive, self-referential and carries with it clear ethical implications. And alongside those two, we also have a better matter on it. And his wonderful work on the biology of cognition, in which he too clearly places the human observer centrally as a constructor of the theory, is that he's articulating whilst at the same time imperative presents a theory of the biological and sets out the implications.
Well, that means if you are a biological system, a human being doing science. This is a wonderful story that I encourage everyone to try to get to grips with. So those were the main threads that kept cybernetics going and pass up so interest in the field of architecture and design. So I've gone first, there was instrumental in spreading ideas about cybernetics into education and others of the soft disciplines.
And there's a kind of a period of their survival. There's a paper from past from the 80s, where cybernetics can be found, network and institution in the UK. And he mentions the BCL, I don't think he's a city anymore. He mentions two or three, four places in North America.
And that's about it. So he was very afraid for a while. But there was simply a renewal. I'm not quite sure how and when, but in the late 80s, early 90s, a new generation came along of many of them social scientists who began to take a real interest in what about systems thinking and cybernetics have to offer.
And since then, there has been a variety of the gradual renaissance as many of your generation are in your generation across the world who are interested in cybernetics. And I'm very thankful about that. So my actual book is hopefully going to power that to that renaissance a bit more. Absolutely.
I certainly am determined to get it into the hands of folks who I think might be open to its messages and as a way to continue to do that. And yeah, the absence of cybernetics departments, of course, you did your PhD at Brunel, which was one of the places that actually offered a PhD in cybernetics and those places have vanished, except now there is a new graduate school of cybernetics in Australia. So it's actually gotten to the point where not only is there still interest in it, but an official accreditation in cybernetics is now finding its way back to academia. So I can't know the details when across the world we've got a number of institutions or we have centers to research which incorporate cybernetics into their titles.
That's all to the good. The fourth part of the book is key concepts in cybernetics, which we won't go through at the moment, although some of those concepts of course, will come up throughout our conversation. But if ever there was a glossary that we needed, this is it in terms of really accessible definitions of the key concepts of cybernetics. It's a wonderful chapter.
And so I'm gonna recommend this whole book to lots of folks, but at the very least, my students will be getting, will be being asked to read this chapter because it really does go through the main, really key concepts in such an accessible fashion. But it's time for us to talk a little more specifically, I think about Gordon Pask. You are great mentor and someone who's of course, his name has come up many, many times on this podcast and who had such an impact on those who studied with the Randolph-Glandville, Paul Pangaro yourself. Can you say, begin to sketch in a little bit about conversation theory for us?
And its particular contribution to cybernetics and the social sciences writ large. Okay, I mean, I wish to appreciate conversation. We're talking about Gordon Pask's conversation theory. And there are other people who write about conversation study and study conversation and so on, you know, social constructionists, whatever.
But you can trace past interests right to the very beginning of his work when he, as an inventor, he was building machinery, we're talking about going back to the 50s now, which would adapt to or interact with human beings. Amongst those were famously adaptive teaching machines and Pask liked and liked interaction between the human learner and the adaptive system as conversationally informed. And in fact, there was a way to develop a kind of logical structure for what a conversation looks like between a learner and a teacher. But at the same time, he was alive to the fact that in some sense, at least both systems are self-organizing systems which together as they converse form a kind of a larger whole, which is self-organizing.
And he was those insights to write about some of the fundamental concepts of cybernetics in 1960 after 459, there's a paper called Natural History of Networks and he says he talks about the challenges of interacting or learning about self-organizing systems in general. And he says it's like being a natural historian when you go into the forests or onto Savannah and you want to study animals and their behavior, you end up with essentially having a conversation with them as a social interaction and a crisis. So that's kind of the roots of conversation theory from the scientific approach and also from the natural world. So again, generalizing from that, we can say that the roots of conversation arise in the interaction amongst any organisms that are part of a community.
So those are the roots that he developed, well, I was with him, he developed a formal theory, a pretty cool conversation theory. The name came out, I think, 72 or 69, something like that. And he set out an agenda of all these conversations that he had with cover and he brought together all his previous thinking and a lot more with Pascal. I worked on mainly on educational projects, building what an hour for learning environments which would in quotes converse with the student to help the student to get to grips with the body of subject matter.
It was a very formal theory in terms of analyzing the structure of the subject matter and studying different styles of learning and conceptualization which was passed for basically for the cognition that learners have was out learning. Now, as always, Pascal's assibulation was generalizing from what from our particular research activities is. So there are a number of places where you can see his ideas broadening. And I should say that it wasn't really until I wrote the book and went into writing the book, but I realized just how important the broadest sense of conversation theory is a way of studying the social from taking from past forms of threads through the book.
It really just plays a central role in the various chapters or conversation theory does. So it's first major book on the conversation with the conversation cognition and learning. So that focuses very much on the research we did together. But it's a theory of cognition, it's a theory of learning and teaching.
It's a theory of knowledge structuring and it's a general theory of social activity, human social activity conversation. And it's got again that ethical implicit ethics into it as well in terms of the autonomy of the conversational partners and the ways they literally turn together, conversary as a root of conversation is turning together. And I remember in one of past paper his drawing a distinction between communication, which he thought of as a one way transmission. I am telling you this versus conversation, which can become the mutual construction of a shared understanding.
Starting from maybe an asynchronicity, a place where we don't understand each other and then coming to a place of synchronicity where we do understand each other and there becomes room for agreement, but which of course can still include the agreement to disagree. And so it seems that it actually sits inside even theories like Freirees, Paulo Freirees, pedagogy of the oppressed in that the learner and the teacher are turning together and understanding each other's conceptual schemas, et cetera, in a way that's much less top down, much less unidirectional and has a kind of ethical dimension to it. Is that, would you agree with my assessment in a way? That's fair enough.
The distinction of past makes is between, as you say, in terms of interaction between humans, which is basically just a signaling operation, an imperative to command or request someone to do something just as you know, just speak to a call center operator over the phone. There's no real sharing of concepts, there's no real learning about the other going on. So he doesn't say that that ran off, so that's not a very simple, none of the non-falsets are very similar. So yes, we're back to the idea of two self-organizing systems to human beings in this case coming together and not synchronicity, the word is synchrony.
Maybe you become synchronized with another human as soon as you use the terminology of sociology and you have the double contingency of expectations of expectations at work that each is expecting the other to participate in a conversation. And then you start to show your concepts and you have, by being synchronized, you are sharing a reality, you begin to construct a reality together, in which literally you are sharing the same space time kind of world. Whereas up to that point, who knows where you are, or where you've been, or what you were doing. So you and I at the moment synchronize to some extent.
Our brains, our brain body systems are synchronized. I'm computing you, you're computing me, and I'm computing what you are computing about being a vice versa as best we can. And when our conversation is finished, we'll go our own ways and I will disappear into another realm as will you, but we'll carry the conversation with us. And next time, shall we encounter each other, the conversation will be picked up and continue.
We will synchronize again and continue the conversation. In the meantime, we will have been conversing me so that in imagination, I will carry Tom Scholte with me. As I already had to, in some extent, I'm learning about you all much more now and vice versa. So you'll become part of who I am.
And I will, some extent, already continue to be or become even more of what you are. Yeah, absolutely. This is where we come into past terminology, which confuses many people. And he talks about psychological individuals.
Great, this is where I wanted to go next. This is great, wonderful. The thing to appreciate is that as understands that as individuals, human beings, as persons, we are thinking it's conversational in form. We are conversing with ourselves, and we're having imaginary conversations with our social world that we have internalized.
So I can still think about past, can have conversations with them. I learned things from him, but if I think about him and what happened, and my aunt, aunt, my friends, my family, they're all the population that is me. I don't know if I'm popped in on the stage, but we always have an opening song. Yes.
I am multitude. I can say multitude, absolutely. I understand it's a quotation from a habit. I'm a bit of a scholar, you know.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think Whitman used the phrase as well. Oh, well, in that case, it's probably possible you're all waiting on it. Yeah.
I've got for the phrase, the audience is nothing. Yes, that's right. Wow, this is great. So now my P-individual of Bernard Scott is now including Bob Dylan, which you and I can do a whole other hour on Bob Dylan, it turns out.
So anyway, that's fantastic. Anytime, Tom. Beautiful. Oh, wonderful.
Okay. I was kind of playing here a problem that I saw in 1965 concert at the Albert Hall in the UK. Oh my goodness. Does that mean you're in the audience in Peinebaker's film, Don't Look Back?
Basically? Yes. Oh my goodness. All right.
Okay. Well, you and I will have to have another couple hours on that. Yeah, we've got the idea that we are multitudes, each multitude of perspectives and conversations, whatever. That's called psychological individual.
His next major insight is to recognize that as we become synchronized, we form a classical, if you like, high order or a large or complex P-individual psychological individual. So our conversation is also the we of us is conversation in form. And then you have this kind of fractal structure of the individuals upon Peinebaker and to the upon Peinebaker. So you and I are at Peinebaker together.
Some of the listeners to this tape becomes being deviguated with us. Or a larger conversation as they think about what we're saying. And then we go back and I talk to my friends about Tom Cholte and our conversation, talk to my family. And the individual, the conversations, on conversations just proliferate.
And in no time at all, you have the possibility of the whole culture being, as it were, infected by or influenced by the conversation that we're having. It may be the book over it, it may be a paper you write, maybe some sort. This is how ideas spread. It's a computational activity.
This is basic interaction, social interaction, which as humans, we capture in various ways through our text, our recordings, and our remembering our own personal ways of understanding and interpreting what's happened between us. So we may take a particular topic, write Bob Dylan, and develop our shared understandings up here and then find out perhaps some differences. So I say, well, you don't like or enjoy or understand his gospel work. And I say, now I find it that really significant important and profound.
It was agreements and disagreements. And we can agree to disagree over certain things. But we walk away with understandings about each other, understand each other, always thinking each other understands on these topics. And that's conversation in its healthiest forms.
You know, humans learning about each other, humans learning about, well, animals in general, living systems in general, learning about each other in relatively harmonious ways. And so this important distinction between P individuals and M individuals. So P individuals as the psychological individual and M individual as the mechanical individual and the P individual being this self reproducing, well, literally like a mesh, right? And talk about past entailment meshes, interconnected set of entailed, mutually entailed concepts that is reproduced every time you think of it, right?
So every time I think of Bob Dylan, that that's reproduced, yeah? And that is a P individual, yeah? Yes, we're going forward a bit. We haven't mentioned past concept of the mechanical individual.
OK, I'll ask you to take a second there. It's just a, you know, past is a, you know, a civilization he wants to understand the social and he finds it convenient. Right from the beginning, his work on cognition, he makes a distinction between the cognitive system, all that thinking and the process as it were, and the process or which is embodying that thinking. So essentially, this is roughly, people have been forming, talking about mind and body.
So when he develops conversation theory, his notion of cognitive system, the thinking part, becomes the individual. We've talked about the psychological individual, which is embodied in a mechanical individual. This is general term for basically a brain body system, such as we have. And it's, I like to call it an analytic distinction because we're not saying that humans are less than whole persons.
And we're just saying that the distinctions we make between the mind stuff and the body stuff are distinctions we make. And we use them for certain purposes. And in this case, we want to develop better understandings of what is to be human. So we make the distinction between the psychological individual as a whole system, which renews itself moment by moment, day by day, and the mechanical individual, the biological brain body system, which renews itself biologically, or to basically day by day.
And the two systems are obviously inseparable in reality. You can have a pin to do which is not embodied. And you can have a conscious human being who's not an embodied pin to be individual. You know, you might have a dead body or an unconscious body.
But if a body is unconscious, you can't converse with the person. This is where the word conscious really comes from. It's when doctors interrogate a body that's lying there and say, are you awake? Can you speak to me?
Wake up. Are they flashlights in the body's eyes, this object? And then the object's eyes wake up and he says, where am I? At that point, there's consciousness.
And then the two persons, the doctor and the patients, are knowing something with each other. They are kumskyo, they're knowing with each other. And consciousness is knowing with, is central to passing thinking as well. Within those aspects of the individuals are knowing with, either within the individual person or within the conversation between persons.
But all the time you have, you know, the dynamics, the biological dynamics of the brain body system, which accounts for the basic awareness, which all living systems possess to some degree. We're all aware to some degree that when we're asleep, or dead, basically. And it's a dynamic which has a drive to it. It means that we are certainly amongst the higher mammals and many other species.
We have a, I've got some psychos who prefer to as a curiosity drive or pass refers to as a need to learn. We're always, we explore our worlds, our environments. We have to our knowledge of the world we are in. We're experiencing it, exploration.
And if it's something that can become across, we don't understand. We resolve the uncertainty as best we can. And once we resolve some uncertainty, we start looking for more. In these aspect research, we are doing systems that eaters of variety.
We look at society. If you think about a small infant, crawls around the room, playing with things, looking at things, tasting things, handling things. This is a wonderful example of what it means to be an eating variety. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, and I think one of the things that maybe people might struggle with to initially grasp, but to me is one of the great advantages of a past system, a past system of thought, if I can call it that. And we'll compare it to another one that you compare it to in a moment.
The idea that a P individual can be made up or can be instantiated rather across a number of M individuals. So for instance, the idea of people sitting in a church together, there's a gathering of M individuals. But if we are sharing a concept, a set of concepts that is whatever faith, I guess I've said church, so I'm guess I'm talking Christianity. In this instance, we share a set of concepts that we are being mobilized in this activity.
We're doing that. And we're knowing with each other. You've got a gathering of M individuals, but in a sense, a shared P individuals being instantiated by us together. Is that an accurate?
Just as with you and I, we have our bodies, our brain body systems, which are temporarily synchronized as we converse, and we are creating a common burner P individual, our conversation. If you have a group of people engaged in social activity together, then there may be any number of brain body systems involved, but together, certainly from the perspective of an external observing, say, oh, look, they are conversing together. They are one social system. But the key factor here is that the individuals are self-referential.
They're in an awareness of what they are doing and saying. And what makes a gathering of human beings, the individual, a psychotubergent, individual, a conversation, a social system, in my terms, is that they construe themselves as such. When they're sitting in church, they are saying, we are members of the organization. You go to work with your colleagues.
You all talk to each other. Everybody knows in the sense that they are conceptualizing themselves as members of the organization. That's what brings them together. That's what makes the organization fundamentally a social system.
And this is a very different concept from, for example, that of Nicholas Loom and all. Which is where I was going next. You're always one step ahead of me. That was where I was going to go next.
Well, there are many, many, many, many, some additional systems thinkers who just talk about human systems as if it's just an all just another system. Well, there's a system of the people to make up the organization. Then you've got the production system and the socio-technical systems, that kind of language. It's around, but it's not as clear-cut.
And as I think conceptually satisfying as past distinction between the individuals and them individuals. So we can go to the whole level of a society or a culture where what makes it a society or culture is that the participants in one way or another regard themselves, construe themselves as the members of that system. Now, this is where I disagree with you. I don't buy into Looman's concept of social systems as systems of communications.
It's just separate from the conscious beings, the psychic systems. I'm a fan of Looman as well as Paskin. I had a brief interaction with you just in the chat function during an online conference where I'm trying to reconcile the two. And I know that your feeling is that they are ontologically incompatible.
But that's another conversation we can have that's maybe a little more sort of inside baseball as they say then for this particular podcast. Just a brief couple of thoughts here. Yeah, please. I mean, Looman is taking his main theoretical structure from Talcott Parsons.
And Parsons is an interest in macro-sociology. He wants to develop a theory of society, which is exactly what Looman wants to do too. He borrows all that from Parsons. And Parsons looks at societies, certainly Western societies, as a set of functional subsystems which work together to keep society going, the system of the law, the politics, the military, whatever, all these systems which function together to keep society going.
So it's a kind of a macro-sociative macro-systems. And it's got place for the human in there somewhere. It's fairly peripheral. But Looman takes all that.
And just instead of where Parsons emphasizes what he calls action systems where things get done, Looman emphasizes what he calls communication systems where something is communicated. And in both cases, for Parsons, obviously, at the end of the day, seem to be initiating the actions. And in Looman's cases, the environment for the communications, they are passing them on or interpreting and so on. So at the level of wanting to have a macro-sociative society with functional...
Which accounts for how functional subsystems emerge and how they... What's the word for it? Interact together or... Looman has another word for it.
Interpenetrate, penetrate. Yes. Well, if that's what you're doing with a macro-sociologist, fine. But the other stuff about psychic systems and interaction systems is fairly peripheral.
I just been reading it out of the name now. S-SP-CTO. L-SP-CTO is one of the students. I just wrote an interview with her.
She gives a beautiful, clear account of how she uses the theory of functional subsystems and media and so on in Looman's theory. And I'm looking at it, well, it really still has a morphic to Parsons. The other concepts, the psychic systems, are still conceptually riddled. It's just taken from a bit of Freud.
There's no serious development of the concept of social organizations, like business organizations or other social institutions. It's useful at the level of macro-sociology. And there's music at that level. Yeah.
This is great. This is really helpful because I think that perhaps what I'm attempting to do is replace the Freudian notion of... It always disappoints me when Freud shows up in Looman because I like so much of Looman. If I went Freud shows up, I get a little disconcerted.
That try to replace the Freudian notion. So if the psychic system is the environment for the social system that Looman believes is constituted of these recursive communications, I guess maybe my hope is that the notion of the P-individual could replace a Freudian notion of a description of the psychic system that enables Looman's communication system. So the environment are that we share a bunch of distinctions and then they get instantiated in conversation so that the P-individual might be a new way to conceptualize the psychic system in Looman's thinking. Well, the psychic system is taken from Freud, which is Looman takes it from Parsons, Parsons takes it from Freudian.
It was the best kind of holistic psychology. It was the one that you knew about. The thing for the psychic system is what's happening psychologically that's embodied with all those drives and repressions and all that kind of motivational personality stuff. Once you've got the passing and concept of a psychological individual, you've got something much more powerful and it's embodied, of course, in the biological system, the brain body system.
The source of emotions, feelings and so on, all the stuff that you can find in Freud is going to be found in the concept of an embodied P-individual. The natural, which already discussed it very straightforward, kind of recursive, fractal architecture of the individuals, being subsets of other P-individuals or super sets and so on. The whole of society is one great P-individual and it says that members of society come through themselves as being part of society and we're all part of that conversation if we choose to see ourselves that way. I find all we need is the psychosocial unity, which is the P-individual in past terms and the biomechanical unity, which is the M-individual in past terms.
As we sit in at the individual, it's all the material aspects, the brain body system and all the biological stuff that goes on in there, including the brain functions and all that wonderful stuff about the neurophysiology and the central motor system that you get from the motor on and first to all about it. I'm also coupled to my environment in a sense, I've got extensions and we're in spectacles. I've got a computer in front of me, which is affording the conversation with you. I am a biomechanical unity as a material system and all that's around me.
When I go to my motor car, my motor car becomes an extension of me as the psychological individual embodied, not just my body, but also in the car. These are very powerful ideas to bring a simplicity and unity to how we understand the human condition and we only need the biological or the biomechanical and the psychosocial, which captures the psychological individual in the past. We don't need the tripartite distinction that Lumen makes between communication systems and social systems and the psychosystems and biological systems. It has a tripartite distinction.
It's past we only need two. And as I say, Lumen goes on to distinguish between interaction systems, which are what we would call face-to-face conversations and organizations, which are the same institutions, business organizations, families, things like that. And the functional subsystems, the main interest is in the functional subsystems and the codes on media, in which they communicate, on the basis of which they communicate, it's all very abstract far away from the psychological or social psychological come to that. And he's a serious structure.
He doesn't really develop his concepts of interaction systems. His ideas are just fairly compared to what you find in richness of social psychology and his ideas about organizations that are not developed. At one point, he says, the education system educates, you know, as I say, communication, only communication communicates. And it's a kind of, to me, it's just a kind of pseudo-afferism.
It's an affection of wisdom and insight, which really doesn't vary to the examination. Right. So, if you wanted to macro-subsiology, functional subsystems, how law and politics interact, I mean, fine. But there's only about 5% of places on the planet where you can actually see their subsystems function differentiated everywhere else, its dictatorships, corruption, greed, you know, there's no real distinction between these functional subsystems, it all gets down to something else.
But it's interesting to think about how these subsystems emerge, if you were sure that this functional analysis of how society works. And this is a macro system, this is Parsons, which is straight from, which is the human takes over. Right. Okay.
So, that's mine. I'm going to keep, I hear you loud and clear. I'm going to keep tinkering with my understanding and see if at some point I can throw something past you that you think, maybe there's something here. You also, we're running low on time, even so generous with your time.
There's also, you sort of put cybernetics up against some other theories in the social world. You look at a comparison between what cybernetics offers alongside connectivism and actor network theory and other things. But because we're running short on time, I want to get to your thoughts about the future. As it seems that this book then sort of moves us towards, you know, your, maybe some of your desires or some of your hopes for the future and what's in the part 10, which is called some socio-cybernetic understanding of possible world futures.
So can you just say a few things about that section as we move to a close and what would your hopes be your desires or you think the possibilities are of what socio-cybernetics could bring to a possible world future? Okay. Chapter 10, part two or chapter two says, second sections is being holistic about global problems. So part of the theme is about being holistic.
First of all, I'm taking the grantees that there are global problems, there are serious problems at every level of society, not just globally but also locally. And I also am, besides this has been a concern of cyberneticians from the off. And we had Margaret Mead and Gregory Bates in the original Mason Conferences, both cultural anthropologists and both seriously concerned about how the world works, how humans behave, killing each and all these other nasty things that go on. And increasingly aware as others on the planet were that we're well understood amongst the most intellectual, biological and social side of setting the cyber-cybernetic community that we humans are destroying the planet as well as continuing to kill and maim and enslave each other.
So the problems have always been apparent and you can find reference to these in various commentaries that have been made by one person, Pask and McCulloch and Bier, certainly Bier, Safa Bier over the world in torment, one of Safa's most famous papers, sketches out of this, the dire situation that we're in. And as I said before, we've only got roughly 10% of the planet which can claim to be democratic. And while we are destroying our biosphere, which is a collective town for all possible ecosystems that can be distinguished. So those are the serious concerns and Safa Bier inspired me at one point where he says, he says, Syvenetia is about being holistic.
So we have to try to understand the whole, how can we, because we are the challenges that we are part of the whole, which we're trying to understand, we're trying to understand some kind of philosophical, metaphysical sense, or we're just trying to understand some pragmatic sense of what we're going to do about all these problems. So in recent years, I formulated some Michael, Scott's laws of observation and action to help inform us about the challenges that we face. And they go as follows, there's always a bigger picture. It's a utter conceit, I think, that we know what's going on specifically anywhere locally, or globally, there is always a bigger picture.
Number two, there is always another level of detail. You can always build down further and further and further down into the mysteries of whatever we want to contemplate as the ultimate, because we never reach them. Now here I'm thinking of quantum physics, which is an ever-ending game. I've tried to understand the whole of which we are apart in another way.
There is always another perspective, different ways of looking at what everyone has their own perspective on what's happening. But there's always error, we always make mistakes, we never know as an ultimate ever right. You only find lack of error in eternity, in heaven or something like that. And then the fissile is always the unexpected.
So really I became aware of the global issues of the environment and so on. Pollution, whatever, in the late 60s and 70s, early 70s. I saw an extra from the ecologist Barry Cominer, and that really inspired me. And I've been thinking about it ever since, as of many, many, many other intellectuals, in fact, we know a whole new discipline of ecology sprang up in various forms.
And in the systems where many, many people have worked to work to systemic understanding. So I'm not original here and being concerned about these problems, I'm just saying. I'd say we must look at them holistically, which is in a sense an impossible task. But we have our different perspectives, and we need to convert us together, we need to work together.
So I make it a distinction between the first order of problems and what's happening materially around us. The damage that is being done in various ways. And at the time, when I first wrote this article that preceded this chapter, I didn't know pandemics on my list, which is right on the topic of what's happening at the very first. And then I named what I called second order problems, which is with reference to one first or second order cybernetics, which is the cybernetes observing systems.
We, it is a complex first order world world system, the all the natural systems and so on, which are going on and all the other sort of material activity that happens on our planet. The second order problems are the interactions, social interactions, the individual situation that's going on and the conflict lack of harmony and absolutely that. And it's really inside the complex. We can sort of consider from very macro levels of different competing belief systems and competing political systems, ideologies and so on.
And we can look down to the very micro level of why is it that my neighbor, for some reason, thinks that as I discovered a few years ago, we want someone I would be introduced to her and she thought that lack and white people are different species. But there are a level of ignorance, lack of understanding, different perspectives, certainly lack of understanding at all levels, certainly locally. So there's so much to be done, also much that is wrong. And depends on pound feeding on a day or day where I'm optimistic or pessimistic about the future.
On a good day, I think, well, we're the uncutting natural disasters, which are coming upon as faster and faster. And we're still barely waking up, certainly not at a global level waking up. There are fires and storms and floods everywhere, getting worse, worse, worse. And where will the bit 10 years, 20 years, it was L50 years, no, it'll be five years, 10 years.
We'll all be washed away, not many others. So there's going to be disaster there. And given the lack of harmony and maximum of beings, we don't know what else will go on. People are worried about nuclear war, I'm just worried about the concern about the ongoing conflicts and oppression that goes on.
The slavery ground the world. There's huge gaps between the rich and poor. And for heaven's sake, Richard Branson, a British entrepreneur, made his living initially by selling LPs by posts in the 60s and 70s. And he had long hair just like a hippie, but he's believed in anything but, believe it.
And he just put himself into space. Why? What kind of contribution is that to what's going on? That's part of what we've got kept based on doing the same thing.
That's part of what the nation states continue to do, the Chinese and the Americans and the Russians. We've got the British people wanting to go into space, sending billions and trillions on that sort of activity. Well, we're facing all sorts of catastrophes and issues down here. So that's the big pictures that I'm concerned about Tom.
And I hope cybernetics is only a tool to help with solutions. It already exists inside the concepts of pig backfeed forward and so on deeply embedded in ecology. And increasingly in the understanding of the social welfare, but we also have the real need to educate in the best set, the race awareness. Just as one simple example, annoys me, annoys me, disappoints me, makes me sad.
We always talk about race and racism. Race is not the scientific concept. There's no credibility to it anymore. It's just in local context by some physical anthropologists, I believe.
It doesn't have any scientific meaning. And yet, both racist and anti-racist maintained the use of this trope. Race, race and how do you penetrate into that? How do you try to educate people when they're burdened by this basically ignorant misguided way of thinking about what human beings are?
Would you suggest we use a word like prejudice or discrimination instead? Yeah, we have prejudice, discrimination, ethnicity, ethnicity, as a useful term. But let's retire that word because its continuing existence only actually propagates this false distinction. Great.
Well, thank you so much for the time you've given us, Bernard. The book is a real important contribution. I'll certainly be sharing it with many, many people. And it's been great to have you here on the podcast.
Thanks again. Well, Tom, thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to share some of my thinking. Also, have a very productive conversation with you. Thank you.
It's been my pleasure.