[A-List] The Cybernetics of Black Knights

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (July 28 2010)


Serendipity's a funny thing. When I started planning out this post a
couple of days ago, I knew that I was going to have to pull my battered
copy of Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature (1979) off the bookshelf
where I keep basic texts on systems philosophy, since it's almost
impossible to talk about information in any useful way without banking
off Bateson's ideas. I didn't have any similar intention when I checked
out science reporter Charles Seife's Sun in a Bottle: The Strange
History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking (2008) from the
local library, much less when I took a break from writing the other
evening to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) for the first
time since my teens.

Still, I'm not at all sure I could have chosen better, for both of
these latter turned out to have plenty of relevance to the theme of
this week's post. Fifty years of failed research and a minor
masterpiece of giddy British absurdity may not seem to have much to do
with each other, much less with information, Gregory Bateson, or a
"green wizardry" fitted to the hard limits and pressing needs of the
end of the industrial age. Yet the connections are there, and the
process of tracing them out will help more than a little to make sense
of how information works - and also how it fails to work.

Let's start with a few basics. Information is the third element of the
triad of fundamental principles that flow through whole systems of
every kind, and thus need to be understood to build viable appropriate
tech systems. We have at least one huge advantage in understanding
information that people a century ago didn't have: a science of
information flow in whole systems, variously called cybernetics and
systems theory, that was one of the great intellectual adventures of
the twentieth century and deserves much more attention than most people
give it these days.

Unfortunately we also have at least one huge disadvantage in
understanding information that people a century ago didn't have,
either. The practical achievements of cybernetics, especially but not
only in the field of computer science, have given rise to attitudes
toward information in popular culture that impose bizarre distortions
on the way most people nowadays approach the subject. You can see these
attitudes in an extreme form in the notion, common in some avant-garde
circles, that since the amount of information available to industrial
civilization is supposedly increasing at an exponential rate, and
exponential curves approach infinity asymptotically in a finite time,
then at some point not too far in the future, industrial humanity will
know everything and achieve something like omnipotence.

I've pointed out several times in these essays that this faith in the
so-called "singularity" is a rehash of Christian apocalyptic myth in
the language of cheap science fiction, complete with a techno-Rapture
into a heaven lightly redecorated to make it look like outer space. It
might also make a good exhibit A in a discussion of the way that any
exponential curve taken far enough results in absurdity. Still, there's
still another point here, which is that the entire notion of the
singularity is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of what
information is and what it does.

Bateson's work is a good place to start clearing up the mess. He
defines information as "a difference that makes a difference". This is
a subtle definition, and it implies much more than it states. Notice in
particular that whether a difference "makes a difference" is not an
objective quality; it depends on an observer, to whom the difference
makes a difference. To make the same point in the language of
philosophy, information can't be separated from intentionality.

What is intentionality? The easiest way to understand this concept is
to turn toward the nearestd window. Notice that you can look through
the window and see what's beyond it, or you can look at the window and
see the window itself. If you want to know what's happening in the
street outside, you look through the window; if you want to know how
dirty the window glass is, you look at the window. The window presents
you with the same collection of photons in either case; what turns that
collection into information of one kind or another, and makes the
difference between seeing the street and seeing the glass, is your
intentionality.

The torrent of raw difference that deluges every human being during
every waking second, in other words, is not information. That torrent
is data - a Latin word that means "that which is given". Only when we
approach data with intentionality, looking for differences that make a
difference, does data become information - another Latin word that
means "that which puts form into something". Data that isn't relevant
to a given intentionality, such as the dirt on a window when you're
trying to see what's outside, has a different name, one that doesn't
come from Latin: noise.

Thus the mass production of data in which believers in the singularity
place their hope of salvation can very easily have the opposite of the
effect they claim for it. Information only comes into being when data
is approached from within a given intentionality, so it's nonsense to
speak of it as increasing exponentially in some objective sense. Data
can increase exponentially, to be sure, but this simply increases the
amount of noise that has to be filtered before information can be made
from it. This is particularly true in that a very large fraction of the
data that's exponentially increasing these days consists of such
important material as, say, gossip about Kate Hudson's breast implants.

The need to keep data within bounds to make getting information from it
easier explains why the sense organs of living things have been shaped
by evolution to restrict, often very sharply, the data they accept.
Every species of animal has different information needs, and thus
limits its intake of data in a different way. You're descended from
mammals that spent a long time living in trees, for example, which is
why your visual system is very good at depth perception and seeing the
colors that differentiate ripe from unripe fruit, and very poor at a
lot of other things.

A honeybee has different needs for information, and so its senses
select different data. It sees colors well up into the ultraviolet,
which you can't, because many flowers use reflectivity in the
ultraviolet to signal where the nectar is, and it also sees the
polarization angle of light, which you don't, since this helps it
navigate to and from the hive. You don't "see" heat with a special
organ on your face, the way a rattlesnake does, or sense electrical
currents the way many fish do; around you at every moment is a world of
data that you will never perceive, because your ancestors over millions
of generations survived better by excluding that data, so they could
extract information from the remainder, than they would have done by
including it.

Human social evolution parallels biological evolution, and so it's not
surprising that much of the data processing in human societies consists
of excluding most data so that useful information can emerge from the
little that's left over. This is necessary but it's also problematic,
for a set of filters that limit data to what's useful in one historical
or ecological context can screen out exactly the data that might be
most useful in a different context, and the filters don't necessarily
change as fast as the context.

The history of fusion power research provides a superb example. For
more than half a century now, leading scientists in the world's
industrial nations have insisted repeatedly, and inaccurately, that
they were on the brink of opening the door to commercially viable
fusion power. Trillions of dollars have gone down what might best be
described as a collection of high-tech ratholes as the same handful of
devices get rebuilt in bigger and fancier models, and result in bigger
and costlier flops. They're still at it; the money the US government
alone is paying to fund the two fusion megaprojects du jour, the
National Ignition Facility and the ITER, would very likely buy a solar
hot water system for every residence in the United States and thus cut
the country's household energy use by around ten percent at a single
stroke. Instead, it's being spent on projects that even their most
enthusiastic proponents admit will only be one more inconclusive step
toward fusion power.

The information that is being missed here is that fusion power isn't a
viable option. Even if sustained fusion can be done at all outside the
heart of a star, and the odds of that don't look good just now, it's
been shown beyond a doubt that the cost of building enough fusion power
plants to make a difference will be so high that no nation on Earth can
afford them. There are plenty of reasons why that information is being
missed, but an important one is that industrial society learned a long
time ago to filter out data that suggested that any given technology
wasn't going to be viable. During the last three centuries, as fossil
fuel extraction sent energy per capita soaring to unparalleled heights,
that was an adaptive choice; the inevitable failures - and there have
been wowsers - were more than outweighed by the long shots that came
off, and the steady expansion of economic wealth powered by fossil
fuels made covering the costs of failures and long shots alike a minor
matter.

We don't live in that kind of world any longer. With the peak of world
conventional petroleum production receding in the rear view mirror,
energy per capita is contracting, not expanding. At the same time, most
of the low hanging fruit in science and engineering has long since been
harvested, and most of what's left - fusion power here again is a good
example - demands investment on a gargantuan scale with no certainty of
payback. The assumption that innovation always pays off, and that data
contradicting that belief is to be excluded, has become hopelessly
maladaptive, but it remains welded in place; consider the number of
people who insist that the proper response to peak oil is some massive
program that would gamble the future on some technology that hasn't yet
left the drawing boards.

It's at this point that the sound of clattering coconut hulls can be
heard in the distance, for the attempt to create information out of
data that won't fit it is the essence of the absurd, and absurdity was
the stock in trade of the crew of British comics who performed under
the banner of Monty Python. What makes "Monty Python and the Holy
Grail" so funny is the head-on collisions between intentionalities and
data deliberately chosen to conflict with them; any given collision may
involve the intentionality the audience has been lured into accepting,
or the intentionality one of the characters is pursuing, or both at
once, but in every scene, cybernetically speaking, that's what's
happening.

Consider King Arthur's encounter with the Black Knight. The audience
and Arthur both approach the scene with an intentionality borrowed from
chivalric romance, in which knightly combat extracts the information of
who wins and who loses out of the background data of combat. The Black
Knight, by contrast, approaches the fight with an intentionality that
excludes any data that would signal his defeat. No matter how many of
the Black Knight's limbs get chopped off - and by the end of the scene,
he's got four bloody stumps - he insists on his invincibility and
accuses Arthur of cowardice for refusing to continue the fight. There's
some resemblance here to the community of fusion researchers, whose
unchanging response to half a century of utter failure is to keep
repeating that fusion power is just twenty (more) years in the future.

Doubtless believers in the singularity will be saying much the same
thing fifty years from now, if there are still any believers in the
singularity around then. The simple logical mistake they're making is
the same one that fusion researchers have been making for half a
century; they've forgotten that the words "this can't be done" also
convey information, and a very important kind of information at that.
Just as it's very likely at this point that fusion research will end up
discovering that fusion power won't work on any scale smaller than a
star, it's entirely plausible that even if we did achieve infinite
knowledge about the nature of the universe, what we would learn from it
is that the science fiction fantasies retailed by believers in the
singularity are permanently out of reach, and we simply have to grit
our teeth and accept the realities of human existence after all.

All these points, even those involving Black Knights, have to be kept
in mind in making sense of the flow of information through whole
systems. Every system has its own intentionality, and every functional
system filters the data given to it so that it can create the
information it needs. Even so simple a system as a thermostat connected
to a furnace has an intentionality - it "looks" at the air temperature
around the thermostat, and "sees" if that temperature is low enough to
justify turning the furnace on, or high enough to justify turning it
off. The better the thermostat, the more completely it ignores any data
that has no bearing on its intentionality; conversely, most of the
faults thermostats can suffer can be understood as ways that other bits
of data (for example, the insulating value of the layer of dust on the
thermostat) insert themselves where they're not wanted.

The function of the thermostat-furnace system in the larger system to
which it belongs - the system of the house that it's supposed to keep
at a more or less stable temperature - is another matter, and requires
a subtly different intentionality. The homeowner, whose job it is to
make information out of the available data, monitors the behavior of
the thermostat-furnace system and, if something goes wrong, has to
figure out where the trouble is and fix it. The thermostat-furnace
system's intentionality is to turn certain ranges of air temperature,
as perceived by the thermostat, into certain actions performed by the
furnace; the homeowner's intentionality is to make sure that this
intentionality produces the effect that it's supposed to produce.

One way or another, this same two-level system plays a role in every
part of the green wizard's work. It's possible to put additional levels
between the system on the spot (in the example, the thermostat-furnace
system) and the human being who manages the system, but in appropriate
tech it's rarely a good option; the Jetsons fantasy of the house that
runs itself is one of the things most worth jettisoning as the age of
cheap energy comes to a close. Your goal in crafting systems is to come
up with stable, reliable systems that will pursue their own
intentionalities without your interference most of the time, while you
monitor the overall output of the system and keep tabs on the very
small range of data that will let you know if something has gone
haywire.

That same two-level system also applies, interestingly enough, to the
process of learning to become a green wizard. The material on
appropriate technology I've asked readers to collect embodies a wealth
of data; what prospective green wizards have to do, in turn, is to
decide on their own intentionality toward the data they have, and begin
turning it into information. This is the exercise for this week.

Here's how it works. Go through the Master Conserver files you
downloaded, and any appropriate tech books you've been able to collect.
On a sheet of paper, or perhaps in a notebook, note down each project
you encounter - for example, weatherstripping your windows, or building
a solar greenhouse. Mark any of the projects you've already done with a
check mark. Then mark each of the projects you haven't done with one of
four numbers and one of four letters:

1 - this is a project that you could do easily with the resources
available to you.

2 - this is a project that you could do, though it would take some
effort to get the resources.

3 - this is a project that you could do if you really had to, but it
would be a serious challenge.

4 - this is a project that, for one reason or another, is out of reach
for you.

A - this is a project that is immediately and obviously useful in your
life and situation right now.

B - this is a project that could be useful to you given certain changes
in your life and situation.

C - this is a project that might be useful if your life and situation
were to change drastically.

D - this is a project that, for one reason for another, is useless or
irrelevant to you.

This exercise will produce a very rough and general intentionality, to
be sure, but you'll find it tolerably easy to refine from there. Once
you decide, let's say, that weatherstripping the leaky windows of your
apartment before winter arrives is a 1-A project - easy as well as
immediately useful - you've set up an intentionality that allows you to
winnow through a great deal of data and find the information you need:
for example, what kinds of weatherstripping are available at the local
hardware store, and which of those can you use without spending a lot
of money or annoying your landlord. Once you decide that building a
brand new ecovillage in the middle of nowhere is a 4-D project,
equally, you can set aside data relevant to that project and pay
attention to things that matter.

Of course you're going to find 1-D and 4-A projects as well - things
that are possible but irrelevant, and things that would be splendidly
useful but are out of your reach. Recognizing these limits is part of
the goal of the exercise; learning to focus your efforts where they
will accomplish the most soonest is another part; recognizing that
you'll be going back over these lists later on, as you learn more, and
potentially changing your mind about some of the rankings, is yet
another. Give it a try, and see where it takes you.

_____

John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids
in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty
books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long
Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society,
2008). He lives in Cumberland, Maryland. 

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/07/cybernetics-of-black-knights.html


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