1

Med 7 - Fall 2004Digital Culture

Coevolutionary Paradigms

2

What is a paradigm?

A general conception, model, or "worldview" that may be influential in shaping the development of a discipline or subdiscipline.

"A shared set of assumptions. The paradigm is the way we perceive the world; water to the fish. The paradigm explains the world to us and helps us to predict its behavior. When we are in the middle of the paradigm, it is hard to imagine any other paradigm".

Epistemology?

"A paradigm is a framework of thought ... a scheme for understanding and explaining certain aspects of reality" (Marilyn Ferguson).

From the Greek Paradeigma model, pattern, example.

3

Paradigm

More technically a theoretical, methodological, or heuristic framework.

Sometimes "paradigm" is used synonymously with "methodology," but often it has a broader connotation, more like "world-view."

Paradigms are social constructions, historically and culturally embedded discourse practices, and therefore neither inviolate nor unchanging Paradigm Shift

4

Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions the concept of paradigm is linked to a "coherent tradition of scientific research” a common way of seeing the world and of practicing science.

Examples Newtonian mechanics, Copernican astronomy.

General agreement within a single culture not only scientific.

5

Scientific Paradigms

Kuhn science is not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, science is "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions" [Nicholas Wade, writing for Science] after such revolutions, "one conceptual world view is replaced by another”.

Contrary to popular conception typical scientists are not objective and independent thinkers they are conservative individuals who accept what they have been taught and apply their knowledge to solving the problems that their theories dictate.

6

What is the paradigm of Modernity?

Modernity from ~1450 to ?

Scientific Rationalism

Mechanicism 1600

Materialism 1700

Positivism 1800

7

Cartesian mechanicism

The first product of rationalism in the scientific field Cartesian mechanicism

Mechanicism the ancient atomistic conceptions of Democritus and Epicurus? forerunners of materialism?

Democritus the principles of all things are the atoms and the vacuum.

8

Democritus

The necessary movement of atoms gives rise to visible bodies through aggregations and disgregations.

Even our knowledge is constituted through material pathways, when the “fluxes” of atoms coming from existing bodies strike our sense organs.

The vacuum not being a possibility of manifestation could not have a place in the manifested world, leading the atomists to a paradox not admitting by definition any other positive existence than that of the atoms and their combinations, the atomists are directly led to suppose that between the atoms there exists a vacuum in which the atoms can move.

9

The mechanicist thesis

The mechanicist thesis everything is explainable based solely on the principles of matter and local movement.

Any concept lacks explicative value if such concept cannot be analysed in terms of the dynamical possibilities inherent to the material structures, by reason of the configurations and movements of the component particles.

10

The way to materialism

Decartes did not feel like proposing his “animal-machine” theory at the human level dualism mind and matter Decartes considered one term and consciously neglect the other as opposed to his successors who negate the existence of one of the parts altogether considering only the part that was amenable to the mechanicist conception in order to reduce the entire reality in a way that was naturally going to lead to materialism.

Materialism a later product became explicit with the revival of mechanicism in the XVII and XVIII centuries.

11

The net result

Positivism each increment in knowledge produces a correspondent withdrawal of ignorance the idea of a knowledge that grows as an asymptotic approximation towards an infinite point of view that represents complete knowledge.

Reductionism the principle of analysing complex things into simpler more basic constituents the view that things and living processes can be explained (only) in terms of the material composition and physicochemical activities of their components.

12

Asymptotic knowledge grow

Total Knowledge

13

The limits to reductionism

The reductionist ideal in relation to the highest hierarchical levels of emergence the human “mental process” the most promising strategy?

“New neuroanatomical components that one had no idea about are being described simply by looking at where specific proteins are distributed in the brain. My guess is [M. Raffs’] that the reductionist approach, even where it is just a fishing expedition, will lead to real understanding in unpredictable ways, and that the molecular and cellular basis of memory, learning and other higher brain function could well emerge bit by bit, until the mystery gradually disappears, just as has been happening in developmental biology”

(M. Raff, in the discussion of a symposium paper by W. G. Quinn, 1998: 124).

14

Paradigms of complexity

In the 1900’s alternatives to the reductionist-positivistic epistemologies.

Technological evolution produces a perception of increasing complexity and interactive synergies.

Frontier disciplines cognitive sciences, evolutive sciences, systemic thinking, philosophy of science, experimental epistemology, cybernetics, semiotics.

15

The cybernetic conferences (1946-1953)

Cybernetics

Cognitive sciences

Information Theory

Systems Theory

The common denominator the notion of ”complexity”

The first conference ”The Feedback Mechanism and

Circular Causal Systems in Biology and the Social Sciences”

16

CyberneticsCybernetics from the Greek word kybernetes steersman

"the art of steering"

Norbert Wierner mathematician and founder of cybernetics the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine and in individual human beings and social systems.

Claude Shannon information theory designed to optimize the transmission of information through communication channels.

 

Cybernetics proposes a revolution with respect to the linear, mechanistic models of traditional Newtonian science.

 

In classical science every process is determined solely by its cause a factor residing in the past however, the behavior of living organisms is typically teleonomic oriented towards a future state which does not exist as yet.

17

” … a branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness, and information.”

Cybernetics

18

The new conceptsThe simplest example of such a circular mechanism is feedback engineering control systems.

The simplest application of negative feedback for self-maintenance is homeostasis Walter Cannon (1932) American physiologist homeostasis from two Greek words meaning to remain the same resistance to change.

A homeostatic system an open system that maintains its structure and functions by means of a multiplicity of dynamic equilibriums rigorously controlled by interdependent regulation mechanisms.

The non-linear interaction between the homeostatic or goal-directed system and its environment results in a relation of control of the system over the perturbations coming from the environment.

19

Analogical and digital codes I

The distinction depends on the hierarchical nature of contexts.

Bateson (1979)

“A signal is digital if there is discontinuity between it and alternative signals from which it must be distinguished. Yes and no are examples of digital signals.

In contrast, when a magnitude or quantity in the signal is used to represent a continuously variable quantity in the referent, the signal is said to be analogic”.

20

Analogical and digital codes II

In digital systems response is a matter of “on-off thresholds”.

In analogic systems response is graded (i.e.: varies continuously) according to some variable in the trigger event.

In digital communication a number of purely conventional signs combine according to rules that can be said to be similar to algorithms. The signs themselves have no simple connection (e.g., correspondence of magnitude) with what they stand for.

In analogic communication real magnitudes are used, and they correspond to real magnitudes in the subject of discourse

(Bateson, 1972: 373).

21

“In the natural world, communication is rarely either purely digital or purely analogic. Often discrete digital pips are combined together to make analogic pictures ... and sometimes ... there is a continuous gradation from the ostensive through the iconic to the purely digital.”

(Bateson, 1972: 291).

The hierarchical nature of contexts

22

Towards the mental sphere

New concepts useful not only in biology and engineering but also for a transdisciplinary synthesis in human sciences.

Cognitivism ideas from cybernetics, computarized models of cognitive processes, information theory a challenge to academic psychology.

Kenneth Craik (1944) what kind of machine is the human being situated between an information output and a gun? an analogy between human mind and servomechanism.

Welford (1947) the first model of mental function in terms of information flux cognitivism.

23

Cognitivism

Behaviorism the observable behavior of organisms (humans, animals) resulting from exposure to different stimuli.

Cognitivism mental processes the primary object of study model the mental processes.

Knowledge symbolic, mental constructions in the minds of individuals.

The development of computers with a strict "input - processing - output architechture" from the 1960s and up till today certainly have inspired these "information-processing" views of mental processes "information-processing ideas".

24

Coevolutionary paradigms

Coevolution of Cybernetics, Information Theory, Cognitive Sciences and Systems Theory multiple research programs:

Game Theory Artificial Intelligence Communication Sciences Neurosciences Complex Systems Artifitial Life Caos theory etc, etc, etc…

Applications in mechanical, electronical, biological and social systems.

25

The second industrial revolution

A good deal of the exponential growth in technological developments and the mass production of devices and systems communication and computation was directly influenced by the Macy’s Cybernetic Conferences.

Norbert Wiener (1940’s) predicted a second industrial revolution centered on communication, control, computation, information and organization.

The future more interest in concepts than in hardware Second Order Cybernetics

26

Med 7 - Fall 2004Digital Culture

Coevolutionary Paradigms