Hello Folks,
Since returning from the ISSS conference (for which my
gratitude goes to John Kineman, who invited, persuaded, arranged for me
to attend), several aspects of my father's work seem to be coming into
sharper focus for me. In some cases, it's a better grasp (on my part)
of what people are having the most trouble with, in terms of navigating
the idiosyncrasies of my father's modes of _expression_. But there were
some discoveries that I made from within the work itself, which are
surprising to me-- particularly at this late date. Many of them have to
do with integrating so many different perspectives, to which I was
exposed in the space of five days... (being an empath is a blessing and
a curse!)
For example, analyzing the "Relonics" technology created
by Dr. Vadim Kvitash, called "Balascopy", which takes 12 common blood
chemistry readings and analyzes not the readings themselves, but the
readings' relationships. By doing so, he has been able to isolate
consistent patterns created by subclinical (!!!) disease processes--
something I find astonishing, and he gives my father and Rashevsky the
credit for influencing his thinking into relational aspects of human
physiology and how they impact on health. Other people I met have been
using my father's work in studying or developing applications for
economics, or ecology, or social systems sciences, or educational
systems analysis, or artificial intelligence research... It was
instructive to listen to what the problems these people are trying to
solve are, and mine my understanding of my father's work to suggest
avenues of entry for them, where they are most likely to find
information and applications that are of highest value in terms of what
they need.
Many of the problems these thinkers are trying to solve
fall into categories of modeling, prediction, or better control. As my
father's work suggests, complex systems require the use of complex
controls, and it was Anticipatory Systems Theory that I most often had
to reference. The discussions on modeling complex systems, in the book
on Anticipatory Systems, constitute a revolution in scientific
perspective-- one that nearly everyone I spoke to in was actively
seeking-- and yet it remains so little known what my father was talking
about in that book!
One of the areas I rediscovered on this subject were my
father's cautions abou knowing your modeling mode's limitations and
behaviors and making that knowledge part of the decision process when
choosing a mode (or using a mode) for modeling any given system. He
spoke of the fact that certain modes, by their very nature, add
"artifacts" to the information one collects using them. If we don't
realize this from the outset and compensate for it in our analysis,
these artifacts are mistaken for part of the causal structure we're
trying to study. I see this happen all the time, from the latest
"opinion polls" on the presidential campaigns to the way blood
chemistry readings are currently handled. For example, I researched
what the "anion gap" is. This is a question the nurse at my Doctor's
office couldn't answer. The short version of the story is that the
anion gap is an artifact of the mathematical measurement process. There
is no actual gap (between positive and negative ions in the blood)
unless the anion gap reading goes outside the ranges set for it.
However, there are at least two modes of calculating this anion gap and
the ranges are different for each mode; a fact which is not always
specified on labwork results. You can see the problem.
This issue of perspective comes back again and again.
The way we are looking at something determines a great deal. My
father's abilities to look at things differently are responsible for
much of what he accomplished and are often the thing most praised in
his work by people who are benefiting from that peculiar kind of
vision. I bought a video for my littlest daughter called "The Invisible
World", a National Geographic special that was first aired in 1979. I'm
pretty sure I saw it when it first aired or in one of its rerun cycles.
But there were aspects to it that have an entirely new impact on my
thinking now. This video examines the limitations of human sensory
abilities and the ways that technology is allowing us to "see" things
we otherwise could never see. There are examples of how ultraviolet
light reveals aspects of flower petal design that bees can see but that
we never knew were there; the equivalent of a landing strip for the
bees on flowers that most offerred what bees need and in turn most
benefit from the service bees perform. This is an aspect of
co-evolution that I don't recall hearing about before and it's proof of
something that I've always known intuitively. In this video there are
technological modes that slow time down or speed time up, such that we
see common events in entirely new ways. There were technologies that
showed the constant activity inside a living cell and the constant
activity of the atmosphere. There were technologies which made the
intergalactic universe smaller and other technologies which made the
super microscopic universe enormous...
I've seen most of these technologies before, but it's
the perspective angle that is blowing my mind here. Somewhere in my
father's work, he says that Rene DesCartes was looking at some
newfangled "machine" and marveled at how life-like it was. Rene turned
it around and said that life was machine-like. What ended up happening,
between him and Newton, et al, is that science was defined by the
limitations of the perspectives of certain individuals and of the era
in which those individuals did their work. The models chosen, namely
machines, were wrong for the job. They are too limited, having
been created by humans, to ever be a model for science, particularly
when science needs to learn about the reality of systems far broader in
"entailment" as my father would say. It's the anion gap.
Judith