Re: Social Information

From: Prof. Dr. Rafael Capurro <[email protected]>
Date: Mon 28 Sep 1998 - 18:00:32 CEST

Dear Bob,

just a footnote to VEM (values, ethics, moral). There is a classic
distinction (also common in the English philosophic tradition) between
_ethics_ and _moral_. Moral (or morality, from Latin: _mos_ = customs,
traditions) concerns the living (!) traditions of a group or society. Every
society has its _moral_. _Ethics_ is a term reserved for the _reflection_ on
moral. It can be, for instance, a _descriptive_ reflection, or a
_critical_one or a _metareflection_ (in the case when we talk about the
_language_ of moral = _metaethics_).
As far as the term _value_ is concerned, it was introduced in Philosophy
particulary in the 19th century with regard to economic theories. A _value_
is something to be set by someone who is interested in _quantifiyng_ a
particular thing. In a metaphoric (!) sense we use this term when we talk
about _ethical values_ although this _values_ (for instance, love or
solidarity, or life, or friendship etc.) by no means can be _e-valuated_ in
an economic sense (or, in case we do it, they loose their specificity...).
In ancient philosophy there was, for instance, the term _agathos_ (Greek:
good) (or, _arete_ which means the quality of something to perform
efficiently an activity, and which was used particularly by Aristotle to
design the _human_ arete, consisting in living according good _thinking_).
_Agathos_ and _bonum_ are terms used in pre-modern philosophy for
designating the quality of something in itself (non-dependent of a _subject_
that _evaluates_ this according to his/her particular interest). So VEM is a
very tricky formulation for designing very different things.
kind regards
rafael

-----Urspr|ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Bob Artigiani (by way of) <artigian@novell.nadn.navy.mil>
An: Multiple recipients of list <fis@listas.unizar.es>
Datum: Donnerstag, 24. September 1998 12:40
Betreff: Re: Social Information

>ON THE NATURE OF SOCIAL INFORMATION
>
>
>If information is the measure of reduced uncertainty an observer has about
>the world, then social information is the measure of a society*s reduced
>uncertainty. I know several of you will be uncomfortable with that because
>you are convinced that only humans can be observers. But I think
>observation is simply interaction, and interaction can take place between
>every kind of element and system, provided there is an energy gradient
>available. There is a record or trace left of an interaction, however,
>only when some structure can be noticeably changed as a result of a flow
>across a frontier. The record of an interaction, which provides a kind of
>*map* of the observed, is the alterations in internal components and
>relationships defining the observing structure. When the structures
>associated with information are living systems, if not exclusively human
>beings, neural networks or similar brain-related tissues are altered.
>These material media store memories about encounters between organisms and
>their worlds.
>
>Societies also store memories, but not always in material media. There are
>material records, of course, in the forms of tools, art works, and
>documents. But societies also store information in rituals and rites,
>social roles and institutions, languages and myths. Recording interactions
>with the world in, e.g., social roles means that it is changed human
>behaviors which store social information. Of course, humans can change
>their behaviors individually, spontaneously, and for their own private
>reasons. But if we imagine spontaneously changing individuals in
>isolation, then it is clear the record of these changes can be stored in
>their separate brains and bodies. However, if these individuals are
>members of societies, then their behavioral variations may affect how*and
>even whether*others live. The records of these actions will then be stored
>in external systems, like symbol systems and organized group behaviors.
>The recording media change because it is information about the groups, not
>the individuals in them, which now to has be stored.
>
>The existence of these records indicates that information about social
>collectives is qualitatively different from the biological information
>stored in genes and tissues. Collectives are not always easy to perceive,
>especially if you are burdened with an Anglo-American sensibility. But it
>takes only a moment to appreciate how societies could self-organize, on the
>one hand, and have effects on the world and their components which
>permanently transform both. If that is so, then the structure of a
>self-organized society is itself the embodiment of social information, for
>the social structure remembers, through replicated rituals and rites, roles
>and institutions, languages and myths, how much the group*s uncertainty
>about a transformed environment was reduced.
>
>Societies self-organize when the number of human interactions pass a
>threshold and, suddenly, become interconnected wholes greater than the sum
>of their parts. This is not mystical, for if synergies between people
>release energy into an environment which has effects disproportional to its
>causes, feedback from the environment *selects* the whole. Although
>generated bottom-up by interacting people, once organized societies have
>top-down effects on their constituents. The whole sustains itself by
>recording what it, the society, knows about the world. That cannot be done
>in the brains and bodies of people, for then we would have lots of
>information about yous and mes but no information about the us shared in
>common. The most obvious example is the invention of agriculture, which
>released energies able to sustain an exploding population that was trapped,
>ever after, in the Iron Cage of its own making. For an expanded population
>could not survive by following its biological injunctions*it survived by
>sustaining the agricultural system.
>
>For agricultural systems to survive it was necessary to communicate
>messages to all of their members describing how they must restrict the
>number of possible behaviors available to them biologically*fight, flight,
>mate, sleep, eat, etc*in favor of a circumscribed set of behaviors. The
>latter is essential because it is only by practicing selected behaviors
>that the social network on which all depend is reconstituted. Only if
>people counted on to dig ditches, say, did so regardless of how tired they
>were or of how little return they got on their labor could those who
>ploughed fields expect to have the water needed to ripen crops, which
>soldiers, scribes, and artisans needed to perform the tasks on which ditch
>diggers depended.
>
>It is important to realize that there is nothing in our biology that
>requires digging ditches, say, and little in the outcomes of early
>civilizations to seduce people into such endless labor. People performed
>these jobs because their societies obliged or forced them to, which is why
>Spencer called early forms of correlated human behaviors *coercive
>cooperation.* Being restricted to a narrow set of externally determined
>behaviors by the whole to which a person belongs is playing a *social
>role.* Social roles record what societies know about collective
>environments.
>
>People learn how to play social roles as members of societies, by
>assimilating the information stored in their structures. Social roles are
>communicated to people, in the first instance, by reenactments of
>successful collective enterprises, typically dances or games, which, over
>time, become rituals and rites. Once the behaviors appropriate to a social
>role become clear, however, they could be institutionalized by blows and
>shouts. Blows and shouts are not subtle means of communicating but they
>can be effective, especially if people could be locked into particular
>behaviors and, thereafter, simply required to repeat them. Simple social
>systems self-organized in stable and benign environments survived by
>confining people to rigidly prescribed behaviors for long periods of time.
>
>
>But if individuals varied their behavior they sometime found more effective
>ways to exploit nature, and the increased flow of resources would have
>required more specialized roles and more intimate relations to process.
>(Environmental changes can have similar effects, of course.) Processing
>increased flows by telling generations upon generations to perform the same
>tasks would no longer be adequate, for there would be new tasks to perform
>and many different ways to perform them. Thus, more, and more complex,
>messages would have to be sent. People might have to be taught to alter
>their social roles or at least to vary some of their outputs as
>circumstances changed. Sending more messages and more complex ones
>required developing new media for communicating. Rather than telling
>people exactly what to do, societies needed to equip them with the ability
>to figure out not only what role to play but which variant of the role
>applied, how intensely to apply it, etc. Then people could guide
>themselves*and still sustain the interacting network on which all depended.
>To communicate information about complex actions, repeating messages was
>not enough. New forms of redundancy were required.
>
>For people to guide themselves they needed to anticipate how the collective
>environment would respond to structural alterations in a society caused by
>varied individual behaviors. Anticipations require the use of mental
>models, which in this case would be views of the social wholes to which
>individuals belonged. Typically, it is an axiom of systems theory that
>while wholes can observe parts, parts cannot observe wholes. So providing
>a god*s-eye view was not easy. But when Values, Ethics, and Morals (VEMs)
>emerged a device was at hand. VEMs symbolically represented morally
>significant end-states and provided rules for arriving at*or avoiding*them.
>Pursuing those states according to the prescribed rules leads individuals
>to judge their own actions and make meaningful choices between options.
>VEMs are symbolic representations of the roles members of societies play,
>which roles themselves are behavioral representations of the worlds
>societies create.
>
>Maps of the behaviors that map the world, VEMs are quintessential social
>information. Because they are not records of personal experiences, which
>can be communicated in terms of sensations of pleasure and pain, VEMs are
>new kinds of information. The knowledge of good and evil, VEMs symbolize
>what actions *mean* and then harness sensations of pleasure and pain in the
>pursuit of socially beneficial behaviors. VEMs only emerge after the phase
>change from nomadic scavengers to sedantic farmers takes place, after a
>context in which individual actions have collective effects self-organizes.
>The context, of course, is the social whole, and actions which tend to
>sustain it are *good* while those tending to destabilize it are *bad.*
>
>VEMs make the evolution of more complex societies possible because they
>contextualize messages. Messages which contextualize information are much
>more dependable, for they give receivers clues on how to decode them and
>thus increase the probabilities that the sender*s intention will be
>achieved. When communication systems improve, social systems can access
>many more states, process different kinds of flows, and make more efficient
>use of resources. But securing messages depends on providing individual
>decision makers with the ability to, imaginatively, rise above their
>station and view the social whole. Thus, VEMs are metaphorical periscopes
>recording the reduced uncertainty societies have about their
>environments*which uncertainty VEMs keep to a minimum by constraining
>human behaviors. This kind of information also helps people reduce their
>uncertainty about each other and themselves.
>
>VEMs demonstrate that social information exists, is a measure of reduced
>uncertainty, and has no agency. Social information should not be reified
>and does not DO anything. But it does record the emergence of new
>observers*social systems rather than biological, chemical, or physical
>ones...
>
>
>Bob Artigiani
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Received on Mon Sep 28 16:07:06 1998

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