towards a global systems steering vision that is simple enough, but not too simple: symviability

■ Research Paper

Towards a Global Systems Steering Visionthat is Simple Enough, But Not TooSimple: Symviability

Gary Boyd1,2,3† and Vladimir Zeman1,2,3*1Department of Education, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada2Department of Philosophy, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada3Centre for System Research and Knowledge Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

The question addressed is as follows: How can we have pleasant long-term humane humansurvival on Earth, given our very potent globally impacting technologies, our huge popula-tion and our terrible propensity for solidarity to propagate our own ‘pure’ quasi-tribal gen-etic and cultural identities through ruthlessly devastating competition with and suppressionof others’ genes and cultures? What has been tried and why it is not good enough: We havetried religious visions of peace, love, caritas and asceticism. These have indeed appealed tovast numbers of people but have left them almost defenceless against those whose religiousbeliefs demand the conversion or extermination of unbelievers.We have also tried bread andcircuses—economic growth with fair shares for all—but the ‘trickle down’ of benefits doesnot happen automatically. The human race’s guiding visions have been workable for smallpopulations with primitive technics, but these visions are proving to be much too simpleto enable us to collaboratively steer the complex webs of coupled systems that constitute lifeon Earth today. Yet there is hope thanks to our continually developing knowledge-basedempathy for one another. We propose a vision that is simple enough to evoke a worldwideconcertation of efforts yet complex enough to ensure a requisite variety of ventures, strat-egies, tactics and tools. We propose a transformative educative value vision based on prag-matic philosophy and the systems sciences. We propose that this be implemented withdiscursive legitimation representing all stakeholders, carried out through a global com-muni-control technology. The vision is as follows: Both ecological–cultural symbioses andintercultural symbioses, where each cultural actor appreciates the need to allow and supportother cultural actors to live and flourish, providing that they control themselves to do like-wise. Such ecolo-co-cultural worldwide symbiosis can be named SYMVIABILITY. Copy-right © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

*Correspondence to: Vladimir Zeman, Department of Philosophy,Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.E-mail: [email protected]†Deceased. Sadly, we note that Gary Boyd died during the periodthis paper was in production.

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Systems Research and Behavioral ScienceSyst. Res. 28, 491–496 (2011)Published online in Wiley Online Library(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/sres.1107

INTRODUCTION

Why this venture? Where to start?We need hope and consolation. We need to de-

sire in order to go on surviving. And oh yes, weneed to survive today, with some wonder and de-light and zest for life despite everything! AntonioGramsci (1987) advocated ‘Pessimism of the in-tellect combined with optimism of the will’. Fromwhence does such optimism of the will arise? Webelieve it comes from a guiding vision and commit-ted well-organized collaborators. Movements suc-ceed when they have a clear cosmopolitanvision and good organization and get massmedia publicity (Eyerman and Jamison, 1991).The movement needed now is a peaceful one to-wards global fair shares and conservation ofresources for future generations. The purpose ofthis paper is to put forward a draft of a sys-tems-science-based guiding vision to lead to-wards concertation of many existing globalmovements that will act together for long-termviability of humane human life on Earth. Today,our main anthropocidal threats seem to comefrom our huge population coupled with our tooconsumptively successful technological and com-mercial growth, which together are burning offnon-renewable resources and contributing to dev-astating climate change. Our hyper-consumptivegrowth is of such over-coupled complexity that itsuffers major cyclic instabilities, which causemuch misery.

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE AND WHY IT HASNOT BEEN GOOD ENOUGH

Historically, what has seemed to be our best solu-tion at the global economic level has been todevelop science-based technologies, includingfinancial and commercial ones, which haveincreased our productivity and global distribu-tion capabilities so that nearly everyone can havemore. However, these have not created moreequality and not more liberty; the rising tide ofbread and circuses, toys, tranquilizer drugs anddiverting games, has worked for about one-fifthof the world population, but at the expense ofmaking things worse not only for others

elsewhere but also for all of us everywhere, withcontinually increasing destruction of our habitatsby pollution and climate change.

At the trans-national corporate higher manage-ment levels, persons have been and are beingpromoted to positions beyond their competence,leading to the collapse of huge corporations(e.g. in the US and EU financial institutions circa2006–2008). Corporate boards have tried to makepromotions carefully by thoroughly investigatingperformance at lower corporate levels. This strat-egy has often failed partly because of the falla-cious assumption that the knowledge and skillsand values that effective and efficient middlemanagers have been using to deal with moder-ately complex systems equip them for steeringthe new vast complex emergent global systems.Such CEO and CFO promotions theoreticallybased on merit actually take many persons farbeyond their knowledge of emergent complex‘edge-of-chaos’ cybernetic systems (Peter, 1968).Furthermore, when persons believe they arereally entitled to great power, they often behavecorruptly ‘because they feel at some intuitivelevel that they are entitled to take what theywant’ (De La Carda and Cerda, 2010). At theinterpersonal socio-technical and personal levels,bad habits, cognitive fixities and psychologicaladdictions handicap millions of poorly inte-grated persons. Conventional educational andpsychotherapeutic services do some good butare slow and expensive and unavailable in thequantities and places where they are required—or are flatly rejected by ideological ‘true believers’.In summary, there is clearly a lack of complexsystems science understanding and frequentlyalso weak ethical and moral commitment amongthose who fight their way to the top of largeorganizations.

WHAT WE PROPOSE INSTEAD:SYMVIABILITY—AWELL-WARRANTEDGUIDING VISION FOR GOOD ‘NOWS’ ANDGOOD ‘FOREVERS’

It is fairly easy to create superficially attractiveutopian visions and even easier to demolishthem. Usually, they are seriously lacking in

RESEARCH PAPER Syst. Res.

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Syst. Res. 28, 491–496 (2011)DOI: 10.1002/sres

492 Gary Boyd and Vladimir Zeman

requisite variety (diversity) and are excessivelyconcerned with un-democratically imposing sup-posedly virtuous uniformities of behavior. Hereis our attempt to do better by promoting an idealvision of great potential universal appeal.‘Symviability’ is defined most simply as an

ecolo-co-cultural symbiosis—as a long-term com-mitment to living together considerately with alllife. More precisely, it is a commitment to symbi-oses between all major human cultures and theflora and fauna of Earth and a long-term commit-ment to symbioses among all of the major humancultures (linguigions, national ideologies, etc.).The main thing that this implies is that whereverthere is an appreciable power or intelligence dif-ferential between living/identity systems, thestronger shall modify itself to attenuate its repro-ductive activity somewhat so as to maintainviability of the weaker (at the very least, to pre-vent extinctions). Clearly, trans-national third-party educative interventions will continue tobe required to influence powerful political actor-systems to modify any unbounded crimepetitivereproductive imperatives that they may tend toexhibit.

CYBERSYSTEMICALLY WARRANTINGSYMVIABILITY

Our Visionary Aim Is Warranted by FulfillingSystemic Requirements for Viability with theAddition of Human Reflective Care

The objective systemic requirements for viabilityof any autopoietic system include requisite stan-dardized interface couplings and requisite avail-able energy, fulfilment of the cybernetic laws ofrequisite variety and requisite heterarchy andadaptation to ‘edge-of-chaos’ considerations.If we conceive of a civilized human being as a

historically evolved message being carried andpropagated by humanimals and machines, thenour central concern has to be the signal-to-noiseratio of the ongoing message of a human being.One of the most important developments incybernetic science is Ashby’s ‘law of requisitevariety’, which can be derived from ClaudeShannon’s 10th theorem concerning the

maintenance of adequate signal-to-noise ratio orfrom a game theory concerning what is neededto draw or win a game. Ashby’s law states thatfor control (in the engineering, not the psycho-so-cial sense) the controllers must have at their dis-posal a greater, or equal, resource of appropriatetypes of ‘control variety’ (or control diversity)than the variety of disturbances that are to beencountered (CV>DV). Ross Ashby, when quer-ied, agreed with Gary Boyd (1969) that this in-deed provides a good argument for liberty inany society that wants to survive indefinitely.Only liberty can enable the populace to generateenough of a variety of solutions to counteractall the myriad challenges to survival that comeup over time. Liberty requires not just enoughtrust and freedom from censorship to entertainwith one another any possible strategies thatcan be imagined but also the availability ofenough quiet leisure time to do so. So clearlynow, symviability requires requisite variety andtherefore requires appreciable personal andorganizational liberty to generate such a var-iety-conserving variety.

Other important cybersystemic insights haveto do with feedback processes. Namely positive(deviation-amplifying) feedback loop processespromote both systemic emergence (e.g. capital re-investment) and system collapse (e.g. populationovershoot leading to starvation). Therefore,symviability implies the use of negative (balan-cing) feedback controls to stabilize pathologicalgrowth and collapse processes.

For symviability, cybersystemic modelling andco-control of the most important emergent levelsof the underlying generative processes, whichgive rise to humanly constructed and experi-enced reality, must be heterarchical in order totake into account the needs for explanation andprediction and the multiple probabilistic alterna-tive mechanisms that already exist.

Heterarchy is a name for a hydra-headed stateof affairs, where there is redundancy of potentialcontrol. The conceptualization of an appropriatefunctional heterarchy usually requires an am-bivalent way of thinking, that is, a willingnessto ambulate freely between diverse perspectives.At times, we need to increase our uncertainty inorder to generate valuable new options (Boyd

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and Zeman, 1995). Heterarchical structure is im-portant for achieving robustness and evolvabilityin a wide variety of types of biological systemsincluding human motivational systems.

Normally, ‘heterarchy’ is a state wherein anypair of items is likely to be related in two or morediffering ways. Whereas hierarchies sort groupsinto progressively smaller categories and subcat-egories, heterarchies divide and unite groupsvariously, according to multiple concerns thatemerge or recede from view according to chan-ging perspectives. Crucially, no one way of divid-ing a heterarchical system can ever validly claimto be a totalizing or all-encompassing view of thesystem (paraphrased from ‘heterarchy’ entry inWikipedia, 2010).

The highest emergent level involves at leasttwo leading systems. Lower emergent levels in-volve multiple active systems. This complexityleads us, as perceivers, to a feeling of contradic-tion that invites new ways of envisioning andredeveloping the processes (Dockens, 2010). But,of course, these new ways are also just partialand temporary. There is only a provisional work-ing model, which, if informed by a guiding vi-sion, can be good enough for simulating optionsfor action and thus managing current affairs.But of course, nothing can ever yield one singlefinal true objective macro system model, let aloneone acceptable to all people’s self-understanding.

Self-Understanding and Caring for Self AreCrucial to the Realization of Organizationaland Cultural Symviability

Also warranted by the self-observing system(second-order cybernetics) are subjective moodand caring requirements for symviability to serveas a universally inspiring and uniting symbolicvision (De La Cerda and Cerda, 2010).

THE HIGHER-ORDER CYBERSYSTEMSREQUIRED BY SYMVIABILITY

We use Boyd’s (2000) theory of the evolutionarilyemergent levels of those cybersystems that con-stitute human becoming, as a refinement of

Kenneth Boulding’s (1956) system level schemefurther guided by Mario Bunge’s theoretical def-inition of emergent levels of systems. More pre-cisely, Boyd’s model of emergent cybersystemlevels is derived from considerations of distinctlevels of operationally measurable kinds of un-certainty reduction such as Shannon’s receiver-uncertainty-reduction objective information (Klirand Weierman, 1999), Weltner’s subjective infor-mation and various kinds of higher-level inform-ative value needed for survival.

The evolution of our cybersystemic levels canbe portrayed in a ‘just-so story’ similar to Wolff-Michael Roth’s (2003). Obviously, the most elem-entary living systems to survive were formed inways that reduced the likelihood of extinction intheir environments. Primitive animals evolvednervous systems, which reflected their environ-mental niches in ways that allowed them to dealwith uncertain choices of what not to eat andwhether to fight or flee. In a sense, their nervoussystems modelled their worlds. Those were whatwe call ‘substantial cybersystems’, that is, in-stinctual systems that were selectively formedinto emulative learning systems through trial-and-error correction learning. Such approacheswere good enough for the survival of the myriadspecies that have evolved and persisted.

Our human nervous systems and communica-tive interaction capabilities have evolved to dosomething more and, moreover, to do it collabora-tively in groups. The range and scope of the uncer-tainties that we have evolved and constructedways of learning to deal with have continuallyincreased stepwise, adding at least four new levelsto the basic ones developed in earlier animals. Weadded negotiative (bargaining for resources) and‘conjugo-propagative’ (bargaining with, and for,soulmates) cybersystems many millennia ago. Inaddition, more recently, two further levels of sys-tems have emerged, namely the ‘liberative’ (re-placing inadequate learning habits, limiting beliefsand neurotic coping mechanisms) and the ‘scienti-sophic’ (co-constructing a coherent well-validatedmodel of all aspects of the universe) cybersystems.

Arguably, the first of these two higher-levelknowledge-building systems to emerge (at leastin ancient Greece) was the ‘liberative’ discoursesocio-cybersystems, which enabled us to free




ourselves from limiting habits of thought and tobegin to free ourselves from indoctrination andmythological–ideological domination. Liberative-level cybersystems are typically educational sub-systems led by teachers who, along with whateversubjects they teach, also teach how to deal with fal-lacious arguments and handicapping self-reinfor-cing habits of thought (cognitive fixities).Liberative socio-cybersystems also include quiteanother class of subsystems, namely group psy-chotherapy systems led by psychologists who dealwith various neurotic coping habits (e.g. phobias,cult indoctrinations and other pathological identityaddictions). Yet other liberative socio-cybersystemsinclude live theatre and multiplayer virtual-realitydramas and games. These can all be considereddeeply ‘educational’ in the broadest sense.Scientisophic systems emerged when we had

to some extent mastered the critical emancipativecollaboration skills of the liberative level. Histor-ically, some of us (e.g. Aristotle in Plato’sAcademy) were free enough to be able to formcollaborations to produce better and better theor-etical and artefactual models of our universe andthus evolve to ‘scientisophic’ socio-cybersystems.Scientisophic-level systems are philosophicallyinfused social systems where people collaborateto do science, that is, to create and validate morereliable explanatory and probabilistically predict-ive models of the underlying (causal) processesthat generate all that we can observe, do or ex-perience. Such scientific ‘knowledge-building’(Scardemalia and Bereiter, 2002) systems are usu-ally led by exceptional scholars and researchers.Why should we aim to support global symvia-

bility capability in terms of modelling how peoplecan learn to participate in the two top-level socio-cybersystems? Why should our educational pro-cesses explicitly include these cybersystems? Weclaim that clearly and systematically defined lib-erative and scientisophic systems enable us toreveal what kinds of uncertainty reductioncapabilities people are acquiring through them.These cybersystems have historically evolved totry to control their and our survival and eude-mony. Furthermore, because we can pretty clearlydetermine as we go along what it takes for thesesystems to be reasonably successful, they are agood basis for our educational designing. Can

educational systems for symviability throughenculturing people to become productive mem-bers of these two higher-order systems actuallybe designed and implemented by co-opting therapidly growing and complexifying global com-munication media? Perhaps yes.

John Casti (2010) argued from a century of his-torical data that far from events driving publicattitudes, the converse is true. At the very least,he made a convincing case that the causal arrowcan and often has run either way. Language isour first step toward salvation. We cannot fightfor what we cannot describe. More than ever be-fore, we need a key to a global ‘mood’ that pro-motes sustainability, and that means we need tochange from ‘sustainability’ to ‘symviability’.

It is up to us.

CONCLUSION?

The notion of sustainability is inherently backwardlooking and thus physically and socio-politicallyimpossible. We need a forward-looking perspec-tive, which is fully compatible with the realunderlying generative processes that naturalsciences and systems sciences have coherentlyexplained.

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towards a global systems steering vision that is simple enough, but not too simple: symviability

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