Posts
“The purpose of looking at the future is to disturb the present.” – Gaston Berger
This blog continues the exploration of the digital
environment as a change in the conditions of change – which also means the
emergence of new constraints that form identity. Constraints on the
construction of identity are part of the necessary foundation that enable the
work of generating and sustaining social fabric. This particular post is an
adaptation of my response to a question I (among many others) was asked to
answer. The question was, “What is Enaction to You?”
One of the constraints that I see emerging from trajectory
of the digital environment (a change in the conditions of change) is a profound
transformation in our narrative of the individual self. The shift is from the ubiquitous
narrative of individuals as atomistic,
isolated and selfish – toward a narrative that illuminates the individual
as a ‘Social Self’ – as a deeply interdependent being.
First how is enaction defined? The Wikipedia article
originally concerned with enaction and now titled Enactive Interfaces, offers
these ideas:
Enactive interfaces are
interactive systems that allow organization and transmission of knowledge
obtained through action.
Enactive knowledge is information gained through perception–action interaction in the
environment. In many aspects the enactive knowledge is more natural than the
other forms both in terms of the learning process and in the way it is applied
in the world. Such knowledge is inherently multimodal because it requires the
co-ordination of the various senses. Two key characteristics of enactive
knowledge are that it is experiential: it relates to doing and depends on the user's
experience, and it is cultural: the way of doing is itself dependent upon social
aspects, attitudes, values, practices, and legacy.
Probably my first pre-understandings that helped me grasp the
concept of enaction begins with Gregory Bateson’s observation that the ‘unit of
survival’ is not the individual, rather it is species. Even more, that the unit
of survival is in fact – the species-in-environment.
As an
example Bateson suggests that as horses eat grass, grass & environment is
pressured to change and thus evolves – which in turn shapes the horse’s eating
practice – which in turn shapes-changes the grass-environment, and on and on.
This is the way nature and evolution work (let’s not talk about horizontal gene
transfer now - even though it is a vital and pervasive medium of evolution).
In this way we can see that in evolving living systems – the
process of living creates conditions of dynamic change in themselves in-their-environment. Thus, humans-as-nature are the
products and producers of their environment. We are co-creators as a
species-in-environment-mutualism.
The next lineage of thinking began with my encounter with
the theory of Autopoiesis. As the theory of ‘Autopoiesis’ suggests, (e.g. see Varela,
Thompson and Rosch 1992, Thompson 2010, among other works) cognition is not a
representation of a pre-given world – rather it is a co-organization of
experience/practice of embodied-beings-in-environment.
Essentially this means that living systems organize a world.
But there’s more to this. At least the way I’ve come to
understand the implications of our deeply social (co-created/interdependent) nature
(not just a human sociality – but that too). We seem to be ensnared in many
epistemological pathologies (Bateson’s term) – one of which is that
‘technology’ is something outside of life – rather than the deep embodiment of
life itself (also see Kevin Kelly’s ‘What
Technology Wants’). For example – birds build nests, ants farm aphids to
harvest the mold that grows on them, evolution embodies selection ‘mechanisms’,
etc.
If we accept that technology is implicated in our enaction
of the world – then we can understand that the invention of the technologies of
culture and language are also the creation of externalizable systems of memory
that enable new forms of learnings. These new forms of learning no longer
require that they be encoded in DNA and experienced as ‘instinct’ – instead learnings
are enabled to be encoded in Memes that can be exchanged, discarded, improved
many time within a single lifetime.
Thus, with the invention the technologies
of language and culture, humans became even more deeply social as well as
self-programmable – by encoding learnings in meme as well as genes the
diversity and adaptability of learning accelerated exponentially – a trajectory
we are still on. The advantage of meme for the human was that memes enabled groups
of humans to adapt more rapidly to an environment also undergoing rapid and tremendous
climate change (e.g. ice ages). It could be argued that the pressures of early climate
change are also implicated in the change in the conditions of change, shaping the
evolution of homo sapiens. In this way it can be further argued that the change
in conditions of change enabled the emergence of a new form of social-technological-enaction-of-human-in-environment.
Another concept that continues to provide me with insight is
the concept of ‘formal cause’. Not only is it an interesting addition to
understanding causality but I believe it also enables us to appreciate the more
profound implications of enaction. Manuel Delanda gives a nice metaphor for
understanding ‘formal cause’ when he describes what an ‘attractor’ is, by using
the metaphor of blowing soap bubbles. No matter what the shape of the bubble
wand is, or when a bubble is blown, it always seeks to become a perfect orb.
However,
neither the trajectory to nor the final perfect orb can be found in the shape
of the bubble wand, or in the breath used to blow the bubble, or in the soap
solution or even in the soap film (although surface tension is important). The
perfect orb that seems to be the goal of the soap bubble is, in retrospect, an
attractor of a computation by soap bubble to find the shape with the minimum
surface tension possible. The ultimate nature of an attractor is not possible
to see before it is manifest –as Marshall McLuhan (2011 – Media and Formal
Cause) points out – we first see the
effects before we see the (formal) cause. By understanding the concept of attractor
– I finally was able to get a grasp on the nature of formal cause. As Hegel
noted – the truth is in the whole.
But how is enaction
and formal-cause-as-attractor related?
Before I answer this, there is another important and related
concept that can help us to grasp the inherent mutualism of living systems, as
a type of ground of/for sociality. Terrance Deacon in his book “Incomplete
Nature” coined the term ‘Entention’. This concept/term is meant to recall the
term intention – but with a much broader scope of ‘enaction’. As an adjective
‘ententional’ applies to any object or phenomena that is essentially explicitly
about something that is not physically present.
For example books are ententional
because a book is explicitly referential to both readers and literacy that
aren’t actually present in a book by itself. DNA is also ententional in that
DNA strands refer to ‘living systems and ecologies’ that aren’t themselves
physically present in the DNA strand(s). Tools are ententional in referring to
tool makers/users and purposes not explicitly present.
Stuart Kaufman indirectly points to the idea of
ententionality, when he makes the distinction that there is no ‘purpose’ in objects
obeying the laws of physics but that purpose or function emerges only in living
systems. For example there is no function or purpose in a ball rolling down an
incline as it responds to gravitational forces. But there is a purpose-function
to the beating of a heart (Deacon elaborate the emergence of purpose in much
greater detail in his book).
So enaction points to a part-whole co-structuring,
co-constructuring, co-evolving mutualisms. This is where the concept of Formal
Cause shifts our framing of causality with a perspective that tries to grasp
the whole. Rather than only relying on the sort of cascading dominoes
represented by ‘efficient causation’ we are enabled to look at the conditions
of change and therefore a change in the conditions of change – that implicate
the whole-and-its-parts simultaneously.
But enaction also entails a more profound realization of how
we know and are. That the meanings and learnings of our experience can only
arise as we comprehend our ententionality (purposes not present but imbued in
the whole). Ententionality is a profound dimension of the context of our
enactive living experience as individual-in-species-environments.
However, as humans our environments include new technological emergences of
language and culture.
We live as languaging beingsLanguage occurs as a flow of living together in recursive coordination’s of behaviors, that is, recursive coordination’s of feelings, emotions, and doings.
…as languaging beings we live in networks of conversations. We speak of conversations when we attend to the inner feelings and emotions that guide our recursive coordination’s of behaviors.
Humberto Maturana
It could very well be that at least some of what we
experience as emergence is a first glimpsing of an enactive affordance. We grasp
such emergences as the effects of the formal causes that constitute the co-shaping
of the ententions inherent in our evolutionary holisms of species-ecologies-environments in a more than finite world. A world
that is more than finite because it is also open to a continual influx of
energy. The influx of energy is at once the condition for life and simultaneously
the affordances that life has learned (and continues learning) to transform
into ever greater variety of matter-energy-mind
enactive instantiations. Enaction is the effect of formal cause arising from
the whole-of-system-in-environment.
Given this line of reasoning and this formulation of human
arising – the idea that humans are outside of nature or that individuals can ‘enact’
an isolated, atomistic way of being is both impossible and ludicrous.
The most interesting paradox that arises from a narrative of
an enacted, ententional social self – is that individuality as an ever blossoming
process of individuation can only arise in a context of an ever growing network
of encounters. These encounters include people we don’t know (moments where it
is possible to explore new behavior – and have our mirror-neurons respond to
new people) or new types of interaction with people we already know, or
engaging in liminal situations. Thus the more connected one becomes – the more
possibilities to individuate there are. The social self is the self that
evolves – unlike the isolated, atomistic and permanent self-identity. This
paradox of individuation through social interaction is also scary – it means
being ready to face many uncertainties including engaging in liminal situations
and the encounters these situation involve.
The next post will build on this and previous posts to
explore a bit more deeply how debt is social fabric. Debt as favors,
obligations, responsibilities, form the fundamental nature of the social fabric
through which we enact ourselves-through-others.
Understanding the nature of debt-as-social-fabric
provides an interesting ground to imagine the possible constraints that the
digital environment enables and demands. Constraints that are necessary to harness
human efforts to do the work of sustaining social fabric by revealing our
ubiquitous and eternal debts, our enactions of value, our creative efforts, and
our moments of trust and risk. Constraints that enable the revealing of value
where ever it is created will also shape new constructions of social identity
and social self.
References
Gregory Bateson. 1979. Mind
and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Hampton Press
Francisco J. Varela, Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson. 1992. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and
Human Experience. MIT Press.
Evan Thompson. 2010. Mind
in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Belknap Press.
Manuel Delanda. 2011. Video at European Graduate School. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/manuel-de-landa/videos/
Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan. 2011. Media and Formal Cause. NeoPoiesis Press
Deacon, Terrance, W. 2011. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. WW Norton.
Stuart Kauffman. 2013. Beyond
Reductionism Twice: No Laws Entail Biosphere Evolution, Formal Cause Laws
Beyond Efficient Cause Laws. http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.5684
Humberto Maturana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twne4EqYl5w
