A Metarevolutionary Manifesto: Serialized (Part 13 of 50)

[This is Part 13 of a series of posts which serialize my book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto. Read Part 12 here.]

We can now turn to discussing how all of the preceding units interact, what those patterns of interactions imply about our metacrisis, and how we may use these features/behaviors to our advantage as metarevolutionaries.

Stated otherwise, we have just taken the viewpoint of the “extremely simple”. We were, as Leibniz said, seeking the “elements of the elements” in order to understand how systems of vast complexity come to be what they are. What follows will be complementary to that view, providing a perspective on the “other end” of complexity. As we continue through this book, and, indeed, through life, this persistent oscillation between the reductive and holistic views will be required. We must not forget that all change is, in the deepest sense, the shifting of relationships within a plenum of monads which imperfectly embody, reflect, and desire the Good. And we also must not forget that complex systems of monads have features and behaviors which are not present at the individual (unit) level. Although we can’t give an exhaustive account of the features and behaviors of complex systems, the following at least begins to shift our view from crisis to metacrisis, and revolution to metarevolution.

 a. Feedback

Feedback - in general

Now that we have discussed some of the common units of complex systems, we may dive deeper into the informational/communicational/symbolic relationships (interactions) which make complexity what it is. Many features of complexity, like feedback loops, were first expounded by the forerunner of complex systems science: cybernetics. The field got its name from the Greek word “kubernétés”, meaning “steersman” (as in, one who steers a ship). Note its resemblance to words like “government”.

Mathew E. Gladden: “The field of cybernetics was founded in the 1940s to provide a…vocabulary and theoretical framework for use by researchers studying processes of communication, feedback, and control within particular systems.”

Eric Schwarz: “[It shows that there] are common, transdisciplinary general laws governing complex and highly interactive systems, whether physico-chemical, biological, ecological, economic, social, cognitive, natural, artificial or hybrid. These laws are essentially relational or cybernetic. That is, they are less related to the material constituting the systems than to the network of their internal and external interactions.”

Mathew E. Gladden: “From the perspective of cybernetics, attempting to design a better prosthetic limb and attempting to design a better government can be seen as two different manifestations of a more general problem: that of attempting to build a better information system that utilizes more effective and advantageous processes of communication and control.”

Anil K. Seth: “Importantly, cybernetics adopted as its central focus the prediction and control of behavior in so-called teleological or purposeful machines. More precisely, cybernetic theorists were (are) interested in systems that appear to have goals (i.e., teleological) and that participate in circular causal chains (i.e., involving feedback) coupling goal-directed sensation and action.”

Today we are more likely to hear about complexity theory instead of cybernetics. Regardless, we are concerned with the principles of complex systems, and their implications for any metacrisis or metarevolution. And goal-directed feedback loops are among the central elements of both. The interactions of a complex system are characterized as feedback loops because they are composed of action-centers; the actions of these agents are outputs which become inputs, and these determine the future state of all action-centers; thus action always feeds back into itself. And it can be regarded as goal-directed insofar as Action has an unwavering connection with Value. The Good is the first principle of Action: Value informs Action. Feedback is the linking principle in a perception-prediction-action process which moves complex systems in the direction of value and meaning.

Further, we can distinguish two types of feedback loops which are like complementary adjustments to the “steering” of these systems—these are “positive” and “negative” (also called “amplifying” and “dampening”) feedbacks.

The individual step in the process of a positive feedback loop is any action which produces more of itself after each cycle. So a positive feedback loop is not necessarily positive in the sense of “good”, but rather in the sense of amplification or reinforcement. Conversely, the individual step of a negative feedback process is any action which produces less of itself upon receipt of its own output-to-input cycle.

Joseph Dodds: “Increasingly in science today there is an emphasis on the study of nonlinearities driven by positive feedback where an increase in a variable feeds back recursively producing catastrophic runaway increases if not reined in eventually by negative feedback.”

John Briggs & F. David Peat: “[These] two basic kinds of feedback are everywhere: at all levels of living systems, in the evolution of the ecology, in the moment by moment psychology of our social interaction, and in the mathematical terms of the nonlinear equations.”

In general, feedback is a simple yet formal way to understand the relatedness of everything. It connects us to ourselves and to each other: Nothing is truly disconnected in our universe; everything shares bonds of causality and analogy. That all instantiations of Action feed back on themselves is a basic feature of our interconnectedness. Recognition of these facts in the context of crises is what leads us to believe we must learn to view our whole metacrisis at once. With that bird’s-eye-view, we can discover patterns of feedback which wouldn’t be apparent from ground-level.

Feedback - in a metacrisis

Similarly, it is not obvious where one crisis stops and another begins. This is another reason we must shift our attention from individual crises to our unified metacrisis. In any complex system, outputs turn into inputs which turn into outputs—feedback loops which, in our present context, amplify destruction and despair in the milieu of a metacrisis.

The symbolic presence of zombies, for example, acts as a positive feedback loop which reinforces meaninglessness through mimetic desire. And, on that note, optimism produces a negative feedback loop which dampens (lessens the presence of) nihilism. The movement towards ontological first principles is correlative with the movement from shallow to deep crises within a metacrisis (though it is not the only variable which can lead in that direction). In other words, a crisis of meaning, which deals with the Good and value-in-action, is a deep crisis because its basis is the destruction of that which is at the core of everything. 

From the perspective of feedback loops, the measure of a crisis’s “depth” within a metacrisis becomes a more exact science. The deeper the crisis, the greater its effect on all other crises. One can see this relationship clearly by considering the formation of a string of letters as algebraic variables of states in a system with a Markov-switching process. For simplicity, states A, B, C, and so on each have a 50% chance of producing itself as the next state, and a 50% of producing a new state (as in A could produce B). If a change occurs where the “D” produces an “E” in “ABCDE”, the first four states have remained unchanged. The conditional probability of ABCDE, given ABCD, is 50%. But if one begins with A, the conditional probability of ABCDE is only about 3%. If we examine E as a crisis within a metacrisis, it is clear why a change to A can have a more profound effect than direct action on E itself. 

Feedback - in a metarevolution

Viewed in isolation, a meaning crisis is bad enough. When seen in the context of a metacrisis, in which it is one of many states in a state-space, it gets (to understate it) scary. Its depth within our metacrisis means its effects (outputs) cause more significant changes in the other crises (states) which are connected to it (by receiving input). A more shallow crisis does not cause such a storm in the sphere of a metacrisis—nor does its revolutionary resolution. This is what justified the choice to attend to our meaning crisis as a point of focus throughout this book; and, by the same reasoning, it exemplifies why metarevolutionaries always pay attention to the whole complex system of crises, and the deepest crisis within it.

Mark C. Taylor: “Changes in religion, art, and philosophy influence political, economic, and technological developments, which, in turn, condition cultural evolution. In this way, nature, society, culture, and technology are joined in mutually conditioning and reciprocally transformative feedback loops.”

Because all of these domains co-evolve, and because we wish to achieve the greatest-possible changes with the least-possible energy, a metarevolutionary approach to confronting a metacrisis will involve both understanding and actively harnessing positive and negative feedback mechanisms.