Reply to Social Information -2

From: by way of [email protected] <[email protected]>
Date: Mon 28 Sep 1998 - 11:04:32 CEST

reply to Gottfried Stockinger's reply

(from Bob Artiagiani)
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It is a pleasure to make your electronic acquaintance. I appreciate your
taking time to respond and think we are very close, although the points on
which we disagree are important and the disagreements there are large.
Rather than walk down your text responding to you point by point, perhaps I
can try*and it will be hard*to produce a summary response.

The difference between us on whether information is generated internally by
fluctuations in social systems, which fluctuations are creative individual
acts, is only one of emphasis. I of course agree that people create
alternative behaviors and that societies are conservative organizations
acting purposefully to replicate proven patterns of behavior. I think we
are both recognizing that when a fluctuation within a society alters its
internal relations it also alters the society*s relations with the external
world. Both alterations will affect social roles played by individuals,
which will threaten and confuse some and lead many to resist. This is
indeed entropy.

So I am not denying there are internal sources of evolutionary change but
merely stating what I think is now a platitude--that there is an entropy
price to pay for it. That platitude can turn out to be profoundly
important, however, if you accept the argument that at least some of what
we consider our human identity emerges in the context social evolution
creates. If you will accept that, then we can bring back the Idea of
Progress, give meaning to history, and support an Enlightenment
ideal*without being blind to costs (entropy) or naive about expectations
(no guarantees variations will produce more humane realities). But one
intellectual obligation inherent in the argument is that we not assume a
fully developed human self, consciousness, mind, etc is just plain given.
This human being is, as Vico said in 1724, what we need to explain. I,
like him, try to do it by relating the human to the social context*the
world human actions make.

Now I do think that social systems must be embedded in a context. Even if
the system, to be a system, is partly decoupled from its environment, it
cannot long survive isolated from it. So when a fluctuation generates
information that is a way of saying that a transformed society is
environmentally selected. (We have here the clue to why the fit survive
and the survivors are fit, by the way.) So information is about something,
in this case the context in which a society is embedded.

But I do not imagine that information is sitting *out there* in some
Platonic world waiting to be discovered. If the world is truly dynamic and
evolving, then information is created. I tried to express this idea by
saying that social systems interact with or observe their worlds*by, for
instance, the altered effects they have on the world because of either
self-organization or fluctuations in their structures. Since observation
has effects*makes a difference*I would suppose that difference is the
information created. It is still a measure of reduced uncertainty,
however. But the world about which the social observer is uncertain is
new*it is the different world that evolved when interactions between what
previously existed and the fluctuated social system occurred. I know this
prose is tortured, but I think something like this must be involved and the
trick is to express it more straightforwardly. Any help will be much
appreciated.

But this is partly why I argued social roles store or record information
rather than saying they are made of it. And it is important to me that if
the information is social what is stored in a role is not just what an
individual knows but what the society in which the individual acts knows.
That is why philosophers and soldiers do not invent themselves. But it is
equally important to recognize that the particular characteristics of the
first individuals to play roles will have enduring effects, for they become
models for succeeding generations of erstwhile philosophers, soldiers, etc.
Again, the circular causality involved above has effects here, for the
person and the role *emerge* simultaneously. Newton, for example, is as
much the social creation of his age as of his own intellect, for what the
world credited him with accomplishing is not what he intended.

I am getting tired and my thread is slipping. But Gottfried and I seem to
be led to different conclusions about what the *stuff* of societies is.
That is most unfortunate, because it is very hard for people to even see
the need for thinking about such a question, and I would very much like to
have a friend on this point. Anyway, I think this is a matter of
perspective, which means getting your mind bent around an issue in some
peculiar way. I bent mine by saying to myself if societies are real they
must be made of something; if they are made from human beings the something
of which societies are made must be their interactions; if interactions
make a difference and create information then relations between humans
affect what they do; if behavior matters in this circumstance it must be
because what individual humans do is correlated*people act as if they know
what one another are doing. These actions must be a reduced set of the
total number of possible actions, which mean!
s they measure reduced uncertainty. But, again, it is reduced uncertainty
about a world changed by interactions*if my behavior is different because
of what other people do, their behavior is different because of what I do
and all of our behavior is different because*in the highly unlikely case*we
are all doing something that makes each of us more likely to do something
similar again. Why would we do that? Because by our collective actions we
created*not discovered*a new world, a world in which selection acts on the
whole rather than directly on the parts. Thus, I think it is these
interactions and their combined effects which release environmental matter
and energy flows processed by correlated behaviors that constitute
societies.

It is not easy to see behavior as stuff, for our Western minds have been
habituated to more materialistic perceptions. But if there is a new
scientific paradigm here we need to bend our minds to see things
differently. So rather than making information stuff and calling it
energy, I have chosen to say that societies being different kinds of
realities have a new kind of *material**not the biological human beings
from which they come but regularized human actions, which are the
propensities encouraged by the way relationships load the dice in favor of
one rather than another act. Individuals, however, need tools for
anticipating how to choose between behavioral options. One tool is the
slave-driver*s lash. But another with more long-term benefits for everyone
is Values, Ethics, and Morals (VEMs). For me, they map the roles and
relations constituting societies, as, I think, DNA maps the roles and
relations constituting organisms. As I tried to say, I also think there is
a !
correlation between VEM symbols, behaviors, and social rewards/punishments.
If so, we can turn to other sources for the material and motive forces
activating societies*I am really tired now and may have to eat this later:
Sorry if it is stupid. I am offering an analogy*if organism could not be
made without DNA, DNA is not what organisms are made of. Fluctuations in
behavior which destabilize societies, therefore, will either be repressed
or ignored, unless their environmental effects lead to a restabilization.
If the latter occurs, the VEMs orchestrating societies need to be revised.

The cultural wars fought over revising VEMs Gottfried mentions are another
mark of the entropy associated with social change. But if environmental
selection favors societies whose VEMs permit them to flourish in altered,
often expanded worlds, then progress has been made. I think the VEMs we
have now*compared to those of 2-3000 years ago*represent changes tracking
social evolution which can be considered *progress.* And I think we can
define progress as VEMs mapping roles and relations stimulating individuals
to reflect upon themselves, empowering them to choose, and equipping them
with responsibilities.

I apologize for being so long-winded.

Bob Artigiani
Received on Mon Sep 28 09:18:13 1998

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