Editor’s Introduction

Welcome to Volume 16, Number 2 of the Joumal of Social md Evolutionary Systems, in which we address such issues as the emergence of world community, the relationship of cognitive structure and literature, and the philosophic import of thinking assisted by personal computers.

Harlan Cleveland, former US Ambassador to NATO, offers commentary on the political and social challenges of the new post-Cold War family of societies in a “Coalition of the Willing.” Family is a good word to describe our new world, because, as Cleveland explains, decisions will best be made in this new system not by simple democratic- mathematic procedures in which majorities win and minorities lose, but by a more organic process of consensus, in which all parties have a voice.

William Benzon’s “The Evolution of Narrative and the Self” provides the latest install- ment of the “rank” theory of cognition, technology, and human activity-a major contribu- tion to our understanding of the human species presented in the pages of our Journal in the past few years in a series of articles written jointly and individually by Benzon and David G. Hays. In this piece, Benzon surveys the history of narrative from pm-literate Native American myths through Homer through Shakespeare through Victorian literature to the 2Othcentury non-linear novel, and relates each of these forms to one or more of four successive cognitive “ranks” characterixed by speech, writing, algorithmic treatment, and computers. Lie all far-reaching analyses, Benxon’s uncovers some unexpected connections; one which especially struck me is that Shakespeare’s fmal works-his “tragicomedies” or romances-were not just declines from the height of his art attained in the tragedies (as is often taught in literature classes), but were rather harbingers of the in-many-respects more advanced and subtle form that came to fruition in the 19th century novel.

Peter Skagestad’s “Thinking with Machines: Intelligence Augmentation, Evolutionary Epistemology, and Semiotic” turns to an area relevant both to the actual preparation of this JoumaZ and to the online courses offered by our organization, Connected Education. Aptly noting that almost all the philosophic attention accorded to computers has thus far been to the possibilities of autonomous artificially intelligent entities, Skagestad picks up a thread first developed by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s and Douglas Engelbart and J. C. R. Licklider in the 1960s to the effect that the more significant impact, especially in the short and medium run, arises from computers as tools to enhance or augment human cognitive processes. Skagestad shows how, rather than being an alternative to human intelligence, computer capacity is woven by humans into a system that is far more powerful

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than computers alone and indeed than unassisted humans. Thls is, of course, precisely what the word-processing, telecommunication, data-management, and graphics revolutions since the 1970s have accomplished, fulfiig with surprising specificity the expectations of Englebart and his colleagues. Skagestad concludes by placement of these developments in a philosophic context offered by Peirce and Popper-highly appropriate, in as much as the evolutionary fallibilism developed by these two thinkers is the most important epistemology since Kant, even if our world had no computers.

From Vienna, Markus Peschl looks at another aspect of computers--computer simulation-as a template for understanding philosophy of science and cognition in general, in “Knowledge Representation in Cognitive Systems and Science.” Although Peschl’s “neurocomputational” perspective goes too far towards relativism in my view- the world we find ourselves in is not quite as much the product of human production as the world on the computer screen-his analysis nonetheless provides some promising leads. (I present my points of disagreement with Peschl in a series of Editor’s Notes interspersed through the text-thus rendering this piece something of a dialogue.).

Finally, Kenyon B. De Greene’s “Evolutionary Structure in the Informational Environmental Field of Large-Scale Human Systems” relates the lessons of information theory to the problems of global community with which this Issue began. The new world community can be usefully comprehended as an “information field,” in which such aspects as attractors, expansion and contraction of phase space, and self-replication of micro-units play major roles. Appreciation of such dynamics, De Greene argues, will make us better prepared for the inevitable ups and downs of such fields.

Our Issue concludes with a handful of book reviews on pertinent topics.

* * *

My father, Morris Levinson, died at the age of 78 while this Issue was in preparation. He was a lawyer with a zest for many of the ideas discussed in the Journal, but the significance of his death in terms of topics wete considered here lies elsewhere. He was killed by a brain tumor, which gave him a little more than four months of life from the time of its diagnosis. Here we have an example, once again, of the greatest dangers to human existence coming not from technology but from the natural world, and the only remedy residing not in less but in more., much more, technology. As I observed the best that the medical profession could offer standing helplessly by as my father died, I could only hope that someday our intelligence will attain a better understanding of the biological system gone wrong that is the tumor, and will therein be able to do something better about it. Perhaps a reader of this Journal will help make such a contribution.

-PL