D. J. Stewart and Ternary Cybernetics (was Re: Framing Reality, Explanation and Design (ASC))

CSGnet Archive CSG2018
1

Hi Angus,

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work and the context of his work.

From what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly, he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes” or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3. eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

···

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson angus@angusjenkinson.com wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1, 15.09 BST)

Â

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract for a paper. I have drafted the following (rather long
version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Â

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally
distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand their world and so conceive and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However,
the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed (at least significantly) as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce,
Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither escaped their disciplinary silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of
decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix of scientific orthodoxy that bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and
directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and beyond.

Â

1.     Â
Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their
appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable situation.

2.     Â
For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended
to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models; these devalue qualitative aspects in the formation of “systems� models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

3.     Â
The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and
information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

4.     Â
The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in
its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain of material succession, whether linear or non-linear.

5.     Â
Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing
occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

6.     Â
Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly.Â

7.     Â
Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up
complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent rules, but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

Â

Well supported alternatives
include:

1.     Â
Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela,
Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient, respectful and valued outcomes (Royce).

2.     Â
Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why
all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such behaviours cancel (conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

3.     Â
Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner,
Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller). All ‘situations’ can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations
of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations (Giddens, Luhmann, Varela).

4.     Â
The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations
into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

5.     Â
The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization
and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative concepts of “emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

6.     Â
The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observer�
is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll, von Foerster, Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’
can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and other realities (Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

7.     Â
These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate
domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these paradigms would develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

1.     Â
New understanding and restating of “rational behaviour�, influencing a variety of social sciences.

2.     Â
Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary
complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

3.     Â
New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

4.     Â
The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

5.     Â
Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

6.     Â
Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisis� and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural
phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential for further development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

7.     Â
Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

Â

Thanks for any comments

Angus

Â

Â

2

I search my email and found another mention of Stewart by Angus Jenkinson in a past thread on csgnet that is worth quoting here for reference in the thread.

"Ternary cybernetics is I think an important addition to the understanding of organisation or systems. It is the theory of JD Stewart who is another brilliant but sidelined scientist. What he argues is that in the explanation of the formation, maintenance and behaviours of (at least) organic systems (organisms), the two domains of energy and information are insufficient. A third domain is required. This is what he calls imparity. In brief, an action involves a decision and in that decision information difference is not enough to explain the action. The difference in information between options (where this is any behaviour at any level of system) does not in itself produce the decision; there has to be an imparity between the information for the agent. A lady goes into a shop and sees two curtains one with a red and the other with a blue pattern. Difference in information. So what? She buys the red. He works it out all rather thoroughly and has a useful website that is easily googled. He is, or was, a British academic.

Best wishes"

···

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Angus,

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work and the context of his work.

from what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly, he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes” or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3. eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson angus@angusjenkinson.com wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1, 15.09 BST)

Â

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract for a paper. I have drafted the following (rather long
version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Â

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally
distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand their world and so conceive and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However,
the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed (at least significantly) as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce,
Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither escaped their disciplinary silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of
decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix of scientific orthodoxy that bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and
directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and beyond.

Â

1.     Â
Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their
appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable situation.

2.     Â
For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended
to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models; these devalue qualitative aspects in the formation of “systems� models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

3.     Â
The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and
information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

4.     Â
The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in
its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain of material succession, whether linear or non-linear.

5.     Â
Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing
occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

6.     Â
Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly.Â

7.     Â
Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up
complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent rules, but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

Â

Well supported alternatives
include:

1.     Â
Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela,
Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient, respectful and valued outcomes (Royce).

2.     Â
Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why
all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such behaviours cancel (conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

3.     Â
Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner,
Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller). All ‘situations’ can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations
of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations (Giddens, Luhmann, Varela).

4.     Â
The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations
into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

5.     Â
The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization
and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative concepts of “emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

6.     Â
The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observer�
is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll, von Foerster, Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’
can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and other realities (Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

7.     Â
These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate
domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these paradigms would develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

1.     Â
New understanding and restating of “rational behaviour�, influencing a variety of social sciences.

2.     Â
Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary
complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

3.     Â
New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

4.     Â
The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

5.     Â
Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

6.     Â
Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisis� and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural
phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential for further development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

7.     Â
Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

Â

Thanks for any comments

Angus

Â

Â

3

[Martin Taylor 2018.02.06.10.47]

I have been interested in the question of how best to address

questions of “How the World Works” for most of my life. In other
words, I was something of a scientist as a child some 70 years ago.
One of the first things I learned was of the form “If you see this
happening, then that will happen”, an observational, descriptive
approach. Later, I learned “If you do this, then that happens, but
if you do something else then a different thing happens”, an
experimentalist, also descriptive but beginning to be a mechanistic
approach. Both approaches describe but don’t explain the workings of
the world. Much psychological research is of this class.
The next stage in figuring out “How the World Works” is the finding
of analogies: “If in state A, you do X and Y happens, but if you do
Z then W happens, then in state B it should be true that if you do
P, and Q happens, but if you do R, S should happen.” This is a
theoretical descriptive approach. As someone recently quotes,
“analogies always leak”, and theories based on analogy always have
missing elements in the matching of states A and B, so the “should
happen” actually does happen only if none of those missing elements
actually matter.
A further stage is the theoretical mechanism approach, which does
not involve descriptions of actual world states, but instead
describes states in a simplified model world in which the
simplifications include precise descriptions of how it works. This
approach is the same as the theoretical descriptive approach except
that “state A” and X, Y, Z, and W are all simplifications that
“should” correspond to “state B” and P, Q, R, and S in the
observable and manipulable world. and with suitable well defined
variations to many such "state B"s. When this works for “state B” in
many situations that seem on the surface to be different, the
simplified “Way the Model World Works” is said to be a mechanism for
how the observable world works. Mathematics is probably the deepest
example, as it can be used in figuring out how best to feed a cow so
that it gives the most good quality milk, and in figuring out that a
burst of neutrinos should accompany the light flash from a distant
supernova, or that gravitational waves from merging black holes
should produce a particular frequency chirp in the detector.
Which of these methods of looking at “how the world works” best
suits your needs of the moment is an entirely personal question.
However, wrong statements can be made at any of those levels. At the
first level, it may be your experience that “If I see a flash, then
I will hear a bang”, but soon you will experience a flash with no
following bang. A flash-bang is not a necessary element as opposed
to a happenstance coincidence of a flash and a bang. At the
theoretical mechanistic level, a simplified model of the way the
world works in which the temperature of something depends on how
much phlogiston it contains is a wrong model, because things it says
should be observed in the real world are not observed.
In these terms, how should we see D.J.Stewart’s and Powers’s ways of
examining “How the World Works”? There are two kinds of question we
could ask: “If one is not wrong, must the other be wrong?”, and if
the answer to that is “No, they could both be not wrong”, the next
question is "Do the two approaches illuminate each other in ways
that help us to understand better how the world works?
Since Stewart proposes no underlying mechanism, it is a theoretical
descriptive approach, dividing analyses of the way the world works
into three types or modes: considerations of energy, considerations
of information, and considerations of choice by living organisms
(imparity). Can it be wrong? I think not, but I also think it is
incomplete, in that organisms do more that is not computable from
energy and information than simply choose based on personal
criteria. Incompleteness does not make it wrong. Incompleteness is
almost inevitable in any theoretical approach to the way the world
works, and can be handled using the throwaway line “none of the
above”. Â
Powers is entirely based on underlying mechanism. The mechanism
operates in a “none of the above” realm of Stewart’s world –
control. However, the mechanism of control is itself explained by
theoretical mechanisms based in Stewart’s three domains, energy,
entropy (information or uncertainty), and imparity (acting to get
what you prefer most out of a range of possibilities). I do not see
anything in PCT that invalidates anything in what I understand of
Stewart (limited to what I can glean from ). Nor do I see
anything in Stewart that contradicts anything in PCT. So in my
opinion, they could both be not wrong.
So the following question is whether consideration of both together
is helpful in understanding how the world works. I think the answer
to that question is that it depends on the background knowledge and
present needs of whoever is doing the understanding. That answer is
in Stewart’s “second domain” (information) and “third domain”
(imparity). “Understanding X” is “reduction of uncertainty about X”,
which is in a mathematical technical sense “information about X”.
If understanding Stewart helps you to understand PCT or vice-versa,
that is good (I think that’s a comment in Stewart’s third domain
“imparity”). If understanding both together helps you understand
more about how the world works, that’s better. If it takes a lot of
effort (Stewart’s first domain “energy”) to develop an understanding
(second domain) of either, you should ask yourself whether the
effort is worth making (third domain).
Personally, so far, I think that contemplating Stewart’s ideas has
been slightly useful because it has helped me look a little
differently at the mechanism of choice in PCT. But most of the time
I prefer theoretical-mechanism approaches over theoretical
descriptive, for an Ockham’s Razor reason. The mechanism applies
more widely if it describes the same in areas where they both apply,
and is often simpler than the description of what is observed. You
may have different preferences, but it’s easier to communicate when
we know whether or not we are talking about the same things. Martin

···

On 2018/02/4 7:05 PM, Robert Levy
wrote:

  Robert, welcome to the discussion. For future reference -- I mean

in case people want to refer back to your messages in the future
– it helps a lot if you start your messages with a unique ID
indicator, which conventionally consists of your name and the date
and time of your message, as I have done here.

        I search my email and

found another mention of Stewart by Angus Jenkinson in a
past thread on csgnet that is worth quoting here for
reference in the thread.

        "Ternary cybernetics is I think an important addition to the

understanding of organisation or systems. It is the theory
of JD Stewart who
is another brilliant but sidelined scientist. What he argues
is that in the explanation of the formation, maintenance and
behaviours of (at least) organic systems (organisms), the
two domains of energy and information are insufficient. A
third domain is required. This is what he calls imparity. In
brief, an action involves a decision and in that decision
information difference is not enough to explain the action.
The difference in information between options (where this is
any behaviour at any level of system) does not in itself
produce the decision; there has to be an imparity between
the information for the agent. A lady goes into a shop and
sees two curtains one with a red and the other with a blue
pattern. Difference in information. So what? She buys the
red. He works it out all rather thoroughly and has a useful
website that is easily googled. He is, or was, a British
academic.

Best wishes"

D J
Stewart: Ternality—an introductory summary

      On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Robert

Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com
wrote:

Hi Angus,

            Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart's

work with this post, which I was not previously aware
of. I was curious if you could offer more background on
Stewart’s work and the context of his work.

            From what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the

development of management cybernetics ala Stafford
Beer. And I was able to piece together that one
application of Stewart’s work on terns was the
ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

            Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart's ideas

I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and
there’s a lot more there I need to read.

            One of my major personal interests in recent years has

been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account
of signs that uniquely specify control systems.Â
Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much
in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly, he
reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of,
and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

            For example, Stewart defines a "tern" as any identity

that is recognizably the same identity across the three
“domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which
correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes”
or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and
thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a
tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or
doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves dyadic
entailment or covariant relations), 3. eg. making
aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or
preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level
support toward these ends).

            I'm looking forward to reading more to find out where

Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of
application to making sense of systems and designing
systems.

            Thanks,

            Rob


                On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15

AM, Angus Jenkinson angus@angusjenkinson.com
wrote:

                            Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1,

15.09 BST)

Â

                            There

is a conference coming up of the
Cybernetics and Systems Association and
I have been thinking about an abstract
for a paper. I have drafted the
following (rather long version) and
thought it might be interesting to some
of you and that you might have useful
and interesting comments for me. Here it
is

Â

** Framing
Reality, Explanation and Design:
towards a new concept for resolving
world crises**

                            Humanity

is part of a shared world with limited
resources. Considerable power is not
only available to humans but unequally
distributed amongst them. It matters
how the powerful understand their world
and so conceive and design their ongoing
research, technologies and actions,
including intended remedial
interventions. Therefore, scientists are
one of the powerful groups. However,
the several apparent crises of the 21st
century developed (at least
significantly) as an outcome of ‘frames’
that remain common in scientific
paradigms and principles. Despite some
two centuries of criticism (Coleridge,
Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce, Bateson)
several important interconnected newer
paradigms have neither escaped their
disciplinary silo nor even been broadly
recognized within it. Other paradigms
(hence frames) remain hangovers, even in
scientific communities, of education and
culture of decades or centuries
earlier. Together, there is a
dysfunctional matrix of scientific
orthodoxy that bleeds into management
and political practices and policies.Â
This paper argues that each of the
following frames or paradigms is in fact
questionable and directly prejudicial to
responding to the major crises of the
century and beyond.

Â

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         Reality

is ultimately inaccessible and best
understood by specialist models that
represent aspects of their appearances
or effects. Complexity in particular
always represents an ultimately
unknowable unpredictable situation.

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         For

both epistemological reliability and
practical purposes contemporary
scientific paradigms have tended to
emphasize models that use positivist
(mathematical) distinctions, including
particularly stochastic models; these
devalue qualitative aspects in the
formation of “systems� models,
descriptions, and designs. (One goal is
to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         The

paradigm that explanation of the
organization of entities may be achieved
by the domains of energy and
information, the former representing
resource and the latter form. No other
domains are required.

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         The

assumption that all causality is not
merely physically apparent in its
effects but materially prior in its
action (anteactus); that is there is a
prior material event that effects the
new event by direct chain of material
succession, whether linear or
non-linear.

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         Moreover,

all causal explanations can be reduced
to interactions of their physically
smallest materializing occurrences
(which may depend on interacting
probability fields).

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         Entropy

is the ultimate fact and the appearance
of its negation occurs randomly.Â

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         Emergence

is the (one and only) process by which
higher order entities appear and is a
concept of bottom-up complex interaction
processes. These may have simple
principles that can be formulated post
hoc as intelligent rules, but their
development was a result of random
variation combined with causal
fitness-survival mechanisms.

Â

** Well
supported alternatives**
include:

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         Ternary

cybernetics implies the role of
qualitative dimensions via imparity
(Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela,
Miller, Barfield). This leads to
evaluations, goals, and designs that
maintain or produce more resilient,
respectful and valued outcomes (Royce).

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         Aspects

of perceptual control theory (PCT,
Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and
empirically, how and why all organisms,
including social superorganisms, exhibit
autonomous goal-directed behaviour
control. Such behaviours cancel
(conventionally accounted) external
causal influence, so far as physically
possible.

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         Meta-level

cybernetic loops imply higher-order
organization, not just ‘emergence’
(Miller, Bateson, Steiner, Varela).
Frames are themselves part of this.
Ideas emerge as virtual organizing
factors (Bortoft, Miller). All
‘situations’ can be treated as nested
virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive
spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social
structures are instantiations of
ordering dynamics that materialize only
in the dynamics of process, as
temporally self-maintaining
instantiations (Giddens, Luhmann,
Varela).

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         The

assumption of inaccessible realities is
a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic
reading translates limitations into a
matter of faculty not reality (Weigel,
Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller,
Steiner).

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         The

appearance of autopoietic whole
organization dynamics provides a window
into nested and variational organization
and organisations, akin to musical
themes and variations; this offers a
paradigm for alternative concepts of
“emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as
Goethe envisaged two centuries ago
(Bortoft).

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         The

cybernetics of ‘organization’,
autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural
ecosystems show that the “observer� is a
crucial interwoven aspect of reality at
all levels of description and event
influence (von Uexküll, von Foerster,
Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an
actor in a double hermeneutic loop
(Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The
functioning of each and every ‘observer’
can be understood in terms of ternary,
second-order, autonomously and
qualitatively purposeful, and other
realities (Maturana, Royce, Deleuze,
Morin).

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         These

are interwoven not separate paradigms
(Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys,
Steiner) of interwoven not separate
domains. They are nested aspects or
details of a metalevel monist whole
(Steiner). Each of these paradigms would
develop further in a more conducive
transdisciplinary framework.

** Some
practical consequences**

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         New

understanding and restating of “rational
behaviour�, influencing a variety of
social sciences.

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         Root

cause analysis is transferred into new
and more effective forms of problem
solving and organizational design. Other
results of contemporary complexity
science are reinterpreted and
remodelled.

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         New

concepts of organization identity that
support realization of potential.

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         The

ability to design relatively simple
effective interventions even in complex
scenarios.

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         Tools

to address the political complexity of
(say) tax evasion or migrants.

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         Recognition

that the ecological crisis is not a
“global warming crisis� and that the
attempt to solve that goal as an
isolated natural phenomenon will be
self-defeating on other grounds. The
possibility, and potential for further
development, of more effective ecosystem
tools of enquiry and resolution.

  1.                              Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                         Understanding

and resolving such phenomena as the
banking crisis of 2008.

Â

                          Thanks

for any comments

Angus

Â

Â

4

[Rick Marken 2018-02-05_09:42:50]

···

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 4:05 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

RPL: I search my email and found another mention of Stewart by Angus Jenkinson in a past thread on csgnet that is worth quoting here for reference in the thread.

"Ternary cybernetics is I think an important addition to the understanding of organisation or systems. It is the theory of JD Stewart who is another brilliant but sidelined scientist. What he argues is that in the explanation of the formation, maintenance and behaviours of (at least) organic systems (organisms), the two domains of energy and information are insufficient. A third domain is required. This is what he calls imparity. In brief, an action involves a decision and in that decision information difference is not enough to explain the action. The difference in information between options (where this is any behaviour at any level of system) does not in itself produce the decision; there has to be an imparity between the information for the agent. A lady goes into a shop and sees two curtains one with a red and the other with a blue pattern. Difference in information. So what? She buys the red. He works it out all rather thoroughly and has a useful website that is easily googled. He is, or was, a British academic.

Best wishes"

Hi Robert:Â

I wonder if you and/or Angus could explain why you are interested in PCT. I ask this because this quote about how "ternary cybernetics" explains actions and decisions seems to have little to do with PCT. In PCT, decisions are a reflection of a conflict between two control systems that have different references for the same perceptual variable – in the example, for the color pattern of the curtains. How the decision is made depends on the relative gains of the control systems. If the decision is to buy (control for) the red pattern then at the time the decision is made the system controlling for “red” was controlling with higher gain than the system controlling for “blue”. But things are not over once the decision is made; the system that is controlling for “blue” is still there and if it is of sufficiently high gain then there will be considerable error in that system after the purchase of red and the customer will suffer “buyer’s remorse” and possibly do things (forced by the error) to undo the earlier “red” decision. The point is that all of what is said above is handled (and studied) in PCT in terms of what happens then control systems come into conflict with each other (see, for example, my “Cost of Conflict” demo at http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/Conflict.html). Does “ternary cybernetics” add anything to this or provide a testable alternative?

Best

Rick

Â

–

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Angus,

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work and the context of his work.

From what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly, he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes” or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3. eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson angus@angusjenkinson.com wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1, 15.09 BST)

Â

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract for a paper. I have drafted the following (rather long
version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Â

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally
distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand their world and so conceive and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However,
the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed (at least significantly) as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce,
Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither escaped their disciplinary silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of
decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix of scientific orthodoxy that bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and
directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and beyond.

Â

1.     Â
Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their
appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable situation.

2.     Â
For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended
to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models; these devalue qualitative aspects in the formation of “systems� models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

3.     Â
The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and
information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

4.     Â
The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in
its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain of material succession, whether linear or non-linear.

5.     Â
Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing
occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

6.     Â
Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly.Â

7.     Â
Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up
complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent rules, but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

Â

Well supported alternatives
include:

1.     Â
Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela,
Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient, respectful and valued outcomes (Royce).

2.     Â
Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why
all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such behaviours cancel (conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

3.     Â
Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner,
Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller). All ‘situations’ can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations
of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations (Giddens, Luhmann, Varela).

4.     Â
The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations
into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

5.     Â
The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization
and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative concepts of “emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

6.     Â
The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observer�
is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll, von Foerster, Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’
can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and other realities (Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

7.     Â
These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate
domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these paradigms would develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

1.     Â
New understanding and restating of “rational behaviour�, influencing a variety of social sciences.

2.     Â
Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary
complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

3.     Â
New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

4.     Â
The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

5.     Â
Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

6.     Â
Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisis� and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural
phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential for further development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

7.     Â
Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

Â

Thanks for any comments

Angus

Â

Â

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

5

[@rplevy 2018-02-05 11:49 AM PST]

Hi Rick,

I am peripherally interested in PCT-- my interest in it is subordinate to an interest in cybernetic approaches to solving problems of agent-centered pragmatic meaning and sense-meaning. I’m interested in this from the perspective of building tools that augments human agents’ capacities to be aware of what matters to them constituting environments, individually and collaboratively. Because I find externalist approaches (Gibson and Varela are some points of reference) to make more sense and more progress on these problems, PCT takes a back burner for me, but because PCT occupies a very similar territory in terms of approaches, it yields a lot of insightful ideas, and I think it is wise to keep track of for interesting activity happening under that heading.

I’m not sure if we would gain something from a serious and involved comparison of where ternary cybernetics and PCT differ and share commonality, but my personal interest in it is where it stands in the history of externally specifiable agent-centered control systems, and what contributions might have come from this. PCT as I see it does not directly offer something in that area because it makes the error of internalizing perception in the head of an agent.

Rob

···

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 9:45 AM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-02-05_09:42:50]

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 4:05 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

RPL: I search my email and found another mention of Stewart by Angus Jenkinson in a past thread on csgnet that is worth quoting here for reference in the thread.

"Ternary cybernetics is I think an important addition to the understanding of organisation or systems. It is the theory of JD Stewart who is another brilliant but sidelined scientist. What he argues is that in the explanation of the formation, maintenance and behaviours of (at least) organic systems (organisms), the two domains of energy and information are insufficient. A third domain is required. This is what he calls imparity. In brief, an action involves a decision and in that decision information difference is not enough to explain the action. The difference in information between options (where this is any behaviour at any level of system) does not in itself produce the decision; there has to be an imparity between the information for the agent. A lady goes into a shop and sees two curtains one with a red and the other with a blue pattern. Difference in information. So what? She buys the red. He works it out all rather thoroughly and has a useful website that is easily googled. He is, or was, a British academic.

Best wishes"

Hi Robert:Â

I wonder if you and/or Angus could explain why you are interested in PCT. I ask this because this quote about how "ternary cybernetics" explains actions and decisions seems to have little to do with PCT. In PCT, decisions are a reflection of a conflict between two control systems that have different references for the same perceptual variable – in the example, for the color pattern of the curtains. How the decision is made depends on the relative gains of the control systems. If the decision is to buy (control for) the red pattern then at the time the decision is made the system controlling for “red” was controlling with higher gain than the system controlling for “blue”. But things are not over once the decision is made; the system that is controlling for “blue” is still there and if it is of sufficiently high gain then there will be considerable error in that system after the purchase of red and the customer will suffer “buyer’s remorse” and possibly do things (forced by the error) to undo the earlier “red” decision. The point is that all of what is said above is handled (and studied) in PCT in terms of what happens then control systems come into conflict with each other (see, for example, my “Cost of Conflict” demo at http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/Conflict.html). Does “ternary cybernetics” add anything to this or provide a testable alternative?

Best

Rick

Â

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Angus,

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work and the context of his work.

From what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly, he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes” or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3. eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson angus@angusjenkinson.com wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1, 15.09 BST)

Â

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract for a paper. I have drafted the following (rather long
version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Â

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally
distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand their world and so conceive and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However,
the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed (at least significantly) as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce,
Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither escaped their disciplinary silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of
decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix of scientific orthodoxy that bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and
directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and beyond.

Â

1.     Â
Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their
appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable situation.

2.     Â
For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended
to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models; these devalue qualitative aspects in the formation of “systems� models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

3.     Â
The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and
information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

4.     Â
The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in
its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain of material succession, whether linear or non-linear.

5.     Â
Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing
occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

6.     Â
Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly.Â

7.     Â
Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up
complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent rules, but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

Â

Well supported alternatives
include:

1.     Â
Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela,
Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient, respectful and valued outcomes (Royce).

2.     Â
Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why
all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such behaviours cancel (conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

3.     Â
Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner,
Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller). All ‘situations’ can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations
of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations (Giddens, Luhmann, Varela).

4.     Â
The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations
into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

5.     Â
The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization
and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative concepts of “emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

6.     Â
The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observer�
is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll, von Foerster, Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’
can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and other realities (Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

7.     Â
These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate
domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these paradigms would develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

1.     Â
New understanding and restating of “rational behaviour�, influencing a variety of social sciences.

2.     Â
Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary
complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

3.     Â
New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

4.     Â
The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

5.     Â
Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

6.     Â
Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisis� and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural
phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential for further development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

7.     Â
Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

Â

Thanks for any comments

Angus

Â

Â

6

From Fred Nickols (2018.02.05.1503 ET)

Okay, Rob, I’ll bite. Where are perceptions to be found if not in the heads of those doing the perceiving?

Fred Nickols

···

On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:49 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

[@rplevy 2018-02-05 11:49 AM PST]

Hi Rick,

I am peripherally interested in PCT-- my interest in it is subordinate to an interest in cybernetic approaches to solving problems of agent-centered pragmatic meaning and sense-meaning. I’m interested in this from the perspective of building tools that augments human agents’ capacities to be aware of what matters to them constituting environments, individually and collaboratively. Because I find externalist approaches (Gibson and Varela are some points of reference) to make more sense and more progress on these problems, PCT takes a back burner for me, but because PCT occupies a very similar territory in terms of approaches, it yields a lot of insightful ideas, and I think it is wise to keep track of for interesting activity happening under that heading.

I’m not sure if we would gain something from a serious and involved comparison of where ternary cybernetics and PCT differ and share commonality, but my personal interest in it is where it stands in the history of externally specifiable agent-centered control systems, and what contributions might have come from this. PCT as I see it does not directly offer something in that area because it makes the error of internalizing perception in the head of an agent.

Rob

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 9:45 AM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-02-05_09:42:50]

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 4:05 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

RPL: I search my email and found another mention of Stewart by Angus Jenkinson in a past thread on csgnet that is worth quoting here for reference in the thread.

"Ternary cybernetics is I think an important addition to the understanding of organisation or systems. It is the theory of JD Stewart who is another brilliant but sidelined scientist. What he argues is that in the explanation of the formation, maintenance and behaviours of (at least) organic systems (organisms), the two domains of energy and information are insufficient. A third domain is required. This is what he calls imparity. In brief, an action involves a decision and in that decision information difference is not enough to explain the action. The difference in information between options (where this is any behaviour at any level of system) does not in itself produce the decision; there has to be an imparity between the information for the agent. A lady goes into a shop and sees two curtains one with a red and the other with a blue pattern. Difference in information. So what? She buys the red. He works it out all rather thoroughly and has a useful website that is easily googled. He is, or was, a British academic.

Best wishes"

Hi Robert:

I wonder if you and/or Angus could explain why you are interested in PCT. I ask this because this quote about how “ternary cybernetics” explains actions and decisions seems to have little to do with PCT. In PCT, decisions are a reflection of a conflict between two control systems that have different references for the same perceptual variable – in the example, for the color pattern of the curtains. How the decision is made depends on the relative gains of the control systems. If the decision is to buy (control for) the red pattern then at the time the decision is made the system controlling for “red” was controlling with higher gain than the system controlling for “blue”. But things are not over once the decision is made; the system that is controlling for “blue” is still there and if it is of sufficiently high gain then there will be considerable error in that system after the purchase of red and the customer will suffer “buyer’s remorse” and possibly do things (forced by the error) to undo the earlier “red” decision. The point is that all of what is said above is handled (and studied) in PCT in terms of what happens then control systems come into conflict with each other (see, for example, my “Cost of Conflict” demo at http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/Conflict.html). Does “ternary cybernetics” add anything to this or provide a testable alternative?

Best

Rick

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Angus,

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work and the context of his work.

From what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly, he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes” or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3. eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson angus@angusjenkinson.com wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1, 15.09 BST)

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract for a paper. I have drafted the following (rather long
version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally
distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand their world and so conceive and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However,
the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed (at least significantly) as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce,
Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither escaped their disciplinary silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of
decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix of scientific orthodoxy that bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and
directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and beyond.

Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their
appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable situation.

For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended
to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models; these devalue qualitative aspects in the formation of “systems� models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and
information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in
its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain of material succession, whether linear or non-linear.

Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing
occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly.

Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up
complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent rules, but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

Well supported alternatives
include:

Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela,
Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient, respectful and valued outcomes (Royce).

Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why
all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such behaviours cancel (conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner,
Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller). All ‘situations’ can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations
of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations (Giddens, Luhmann, Varela).

The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations
into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization
and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative concepts of “emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observer�
is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll, von Foerster, Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’
can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and other realities (Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate
domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these paradigms would develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

New understanding and restating of “rational behaviour�, influencing a variety of social sciences.

Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary
complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisis� and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural
phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential for further development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

Thanks for any comments

Angus

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

7

[Martin Taylor 2018.02.06.15.10]

[@rplevy 2018-02-05 11:49 AM PST]

    Hi Rick,

      I am peripherally interested in PCT-- my interest in it is

subordinate to an interest in cybernetic approaches to solving
problems of agent-centered pragmatic meaning and
sense-meaning.

Have you come across my various papers and book chapters on "Layered

Protocol Theory"? They are on this topic area. I stopped writing
about the theory as such when I discovered that it was really a
special case of PCT. After 2000, we used it and PCT more generally
as background material in a series of NATO Research Study Groups
that were mainly on visualizing massive data sets, which turned out
to be mostly about relationship networks, physical and conceptual.

      I'm interested in this from the perspective of building

tools that augments human agents’ capacities to be aware of
what matters to them constituting environments, individually
and collaboratively.

Now you are talking about an area in which computer-human

interaction is a special case. That problem was the genesis of LPT,
at least when you think of the computer as an interacting entity,
even if it isn’t human.

Because I find externalist approaches (Gibson
and Varela are some points of reference)Â to make more
sense and more progress on these problems,

In what way? How would you describe (not exemplify) an "externalist

approach?

I can understand "make more sense", because what makes sense depends

entirely on one’s intellectual history. There isn’t an absolute
measure of what “makes more sense”, in general. If you can use it
productively to achieve your purposes, then go for it, by all means.
If learning something new might help you make a breakthrough, then
you might try that as well. The best carpenters have least need of
fancy tools, but also the best carpenters make the best use of a
wide range of tools, some of which they can use but a novice could
not. If you want a theoretical background for what you are doing,
and you have competing possibilities, if they predict different
likelihoods of your success, it might be useful to test both, but if
they are complementary, then it is likely to be a good idea to
understand each in light of the other.

      PCT takes a back burner for me, but because PCT occupies a

very similar territory in terms of approaches, it yields a lot
of insightful ideas, and I think it is wise to keep track of
for interesting activity happening under that heading.

      I'm not sure if we would gain something from a serious and

involved comparison of where ternary cybernetics and PCT
differ and share commonality, but my personal interest in it
is where it stands in the history of externally specifiable
agent-centered control systems, and what contributions might
have come from this. PCT as I see it does not directly offer
something in that area because it makes the error of
internalizing perception in the head of an agent.

The word "error" is rather absolute, is it not?

Presumably you use it because the conceptual background from which

you work puts perceptions somewhere outside the heads of
individuals. Could you explain where?

How do you get to Stewart's third level (imparity) without

considering perceptions inside the heads of the people making the
choices?

PCT does allow for what are called "virtual perceptions" that can be

collectively controlled by what has been called a “Giant Virtual
Controller” (mainly in conversations between Kent McClelland and
me). Those virtual perceptions do not reside anywhere physical. The
perception OF a virtual perception does reside in the head
of a theoretician. It resides there because when you do a PCT “Test
for the Controlled Variable”, the test indicates that some
particular perception is being controlled to some particular
reference level, but when we know the mechanism rather than relying
on “The Test” we know that nobody is perceiving it, and nobody has a
reference value for it. Both are “virtual”. Is that the kind of
perception you are thinking of when you say that it is an error for
a perception to be considered to be in the head of an agent?

I hope you get a little more familiar with PCT before deciding it

will not help you in your purposes. There is a lot more depth and
possibility to it than might appear from a cursory overview.

Martin
···

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 9:45 AM, Richard
Marken rsmarken@gmail.com
wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-02-05_09:42:50]

              On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 4:05 PM,

Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com
wrote:

                      RPL: I

search my email and found another mention of
Stewart by Angus Jenkinson in a past thread on
csgnet that is worth quoting here for
reference in the thread.

                        "Ternary cybernetics is I think an important

addition to the understanding of
organisation or systems. It is the theory of
JD Stewart who
is another brilliant but sidelined
scientist. What he argues is that in the
explanation of the formation, maintenance
and behaviours of (at least) organic systems
(organisms), the two domains of energy and
information are insufficient. A third domain
is required. This is what he calls imparity.
In brief, an action involves a decision and
in that decision information difference is
not enough to explain the action. The
difference in information between options
(where this is any behaviour at any level of
system) does not in itself produce the
decision; there has to be an imparity
between the information for the agent. A
lady goes into a shop and sees two curtains
one with a red and the other with a blue
pattern. Difference in information. So what?
She buys the red. He works it out all rather
thoroughly and has a useful website that is
easily googled. He is, or was, a British
academic.

Best wishes"

Hi Robert:Â

                I wonder if you and/or Angus could explain why

you are interested in PCT. I ask this because this
quote about how "ternary cybernetics"Â explains
actions and decisions seems to have little to do
with PCT. In PCT, decisions are a reflection of a
conflict between two control systems that have
different references for the same perceptual
variable – in the example, for the color pattern of
the curtains. How the decision is made depends on
the relative gains of the control systems. If the
decision is to buy (control for) the red pattern
then at the time the decision is made the system
controlling for “red” was controlling with higher
gain than the system controlling for “blue”. But
things are not over once the decision is made; the
system that is controlling for “blue” is still there
and if it is of sufficiently high gain then there
will be considerable error in that system after the
purchase of red and the customer will suffer
“buyer’s remorse” and possibly do things (forced by
the error) to undo the earlier “red” decision. The
point is that all of what is said above is handledÂ
(and studied) in PCT in terms of what happens then
control systems come into conflict with each other
(see, for example, my “Cost of Conflict” demo at http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/Conflict.html) .
Does “ternary cybernetics” add anything to this or
provide a testable alternative?

Best

Rick

Â

                                        Richard S.

MarkenÂ

                                            "Perfection

is achieved not when you
have nothing more to
add, but when you
have
nothing left to take
away.�
Â
           Â
   --Antoine de
Saint-Exupery

–

                            On Sun, Feb 4,

2018 at 12:50 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com
wrote:

Hi Angus,

                                  Thank you for drawing attention

to D. J. Stewart’s work with this
post, which I was not previously
aware of. I was curious if you
could offer more background on
Stewart’s work and the context of
his work.

                                  From what I could gather, Stewart

contributed to the development of
management cybernetics ala
Stafford Beer. And I was able to
piece together that one
application of Stewart’s work on
terns was the ecological design
pattern of “micronudges”.

                                  Almost all of the interesting

content on Stewart’s ideas I could
find comes from the horse’s mouth,
at http://www.hfr.org.uk/
and there’s a lot more there I
need to read.

                                  One of my major personal interests

in recent years has been applying
Peirce’s triadic framework as an
account of signs that uniquely
specify control systems.Â
Stewart’s work seems to me an
approach that is very much in line
with that way of thinking.Â
Interestingly, he reinvents the
ideas in a way that seems
independent of, and perhaps
unaware of Peirce.

                                  For example, Stewart defines a

“tern” as any identity that is
recognizably the same identity
across the three “domains”–
energy, information, and imparity,
which correspond closely to what
Peirce called the “modes”
or “predicaments” of firstness,
secondness, and thirdness.Â
Stewart gives as an example that
work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling
dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or
doing a crossword puzzle (this
work involves dyadic entailment or
covariant relations), 3. eg.
making aesthetic judgements
(applying some utility or
preference that drives the
selection of dyadic-level support
toward these ends).

                                  I'm looking forward to reading

more to find out where Stewart and
others took these ideas in terms
of application to making sense of
systems and designing systems.

                                  Thanks,

                                  Rob

                                      On Thu,

Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus
Jenkinson angus@angusjenkinson.com
wrote:

                                                  Angus

Jenkinson
(2018-2.1, 15.09
BST)

Â

                                                  There

is a conference
coming up of the
Cybernetics and
Systems
Association and I
have been thinking
about an abstract
for a paper. I
have drafted the
following (rather
long version) and
thought it might
be interesting to
some of you and
that you might
have useful and
interesting
comments for me.
Here it is

Â

** Framing Reality, Explanation and
Design: towards
a new concept
for resolving
world crises**

                                                  Humanity is part of a shared world

with limited
resources.
Considerable power
is not only
available to
humans but
unequally
distributed
amongst them. It
matters how the
powerful
understand their
world and so
conceive and
design their
ongoing research,
technologies and
actions, including
intended remedial
interventions.
Therefore,
scientists are one
of the powerful
groups. However,
the several
apparent crises of
the 21st
century developed
(at least
significantly) as
an outcome of
‘frames’ that
remain common in
scientific
paradigms and
principles.Â
Despite some two
centuries of
criticism
(Coleridge,
Goethe, Whitehead,
Peirce, Bateson)
several important
interconnected
newer paradigms
have neither
escaped their
disciplinary silo
nor even been
broadly recognized
within it. Other
paradigms (hence
frames) remain
hangovers, even in
scientific
communities, of
education and
culture of decades
or centuries
earlier.Â
Together, there is
a dysfunctional
matrix of
scientific
orthodoxy that
bleeds into
management and
political
practices and
policies. This
paper argues that
each of the
following frames
or paradigms is in
fact questionable
and directly
prejudicial to
responding to the
major crises of
the century and
beyond.

Â

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               Reality

is ultimately
inaccessible and
best understood by
specialist models
that represent
aspects of their
appearances or
effects.
Complexity in
particular always
represents an
ultimately
unknowable
unpredictable
situation.

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               For

both
epistemological
reliability and
practical purposes
contemporary
scientific
paradigms have
tended to
emphasize models
that use
positivist
(mathematical)
distinctions,
including
particularly
stochastic models;
these devalue
qualitative
aspects in the
formation of
“systems� models,
descriptions, and
designs. (One goal
is to eliminate
the bias of the
observer.)

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               The

paradigm that
explanation of the
organization of
entities may be
achieved by the
domains of energy
and information,
the former
representing
resource and the
latter form. No
other domains are
required.

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               The

assumption that
all causality is
not merely
physically
apparent in its
effects but
materially prior
in its action
(anteactus); that
is there is a
prior material
event that effects
the new event by
direct chain of
material
succession,
whether linear or
non-linear.

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               Moreover,

all causal
explanations can
be reduced to
interactions of
their physically
smallest
materializing
occurrences (which
may depend on
interacting
probability
fields).

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               Entropy

is the ultimate
fact and the
appearance of its
negation occurs
randomly.Â

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               Emergence

is the (one and
only) process by
which higher order
entities appear
and is a concept
of bottom-up
complex
interaction
processes. These
may have simple
principles that
can be formulated
post hoc as
intelligent rules,
but their
development was a
result of random
variation combined
with causal
fitness-survival
mechanisms.

Â

Well supported alternatives include:

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               Ternary

cybernetics
implies the role
of qualitative
dimensions via
imparity (Stewart,
Whitehead, Weber,
Varela, Miller,
Barfield). This
leads to
evaluations,
goals, and designs
that maintain or
produce more
resilient,
respectful and
valued outcomes
(Royce).

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               Aspects

of perceptual
control theory
(PCT, Powers)
demonstrate,
theoretically and
empirically, how
and why all
organisms,
including social
superorganisms,
exhibit autonomous
goal-directed
behaviour control.
Such behaviours
cancel
(conventionally
accounted)
external causal
influence, so far
as physically
possible.

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               Meta-level

cybernetic loops
imply higher-order
organization, not
just ‘emergence’
(Miller, Bateson,
Steiner, Varela).
Frames are
themselves part of
this. Ideas emerge
as virtual
organizing factors
(Bortoft, Miller).
All ‘situations’
can be treated as
nested virtual
multi-dimensional
‘descriptive
spaces’ (Barfield
and others).
Social structures
are instantiations
of ordering
dynamics that
materialize only
in the dynamics of
process, as
temporally
self-maintaining
instantiations
(Giddens, Luhmann,
Varela).

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               The

assumption of
inaccessible
realities is a
frame not a fact.
A hermeneutic
reading translates
limitations into a
matter of faculty
not reality
(Weigel, Barfield,
Bateson, Bortoft,
Miller, Steiner).

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               The

appearance of
autopoietic whole
organization
dynamics provides
a window into
nested and
variational
organization and
organisations,
akin to musical
themes and
variations; this
offers a paradigm
for alternative
concepts of
“emergent� or
whole-order
behaviour, as
Goethe envisaged
two centuries ago
(Bortoft).

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               The

cybernetics of
‘organization’,
autopoiesis, and
‘social’ and
natural ecosystems
show that the
“observer� is a
crucial interwoven
aspect of reality
at all levels of
description and
event influence
(von Uexküll, von
Foerster, Brier,
Bachelard,
Miller). She is an
actor in a double
hermeneutic loop
(Giddens, Miller,
Peirce). The
functioning of
each and every
‘observer’ can be
understood in
terms of ternary,
second-order,
autonomously and
qualitatively
purposeful, and
other realities
(Maturana, Royce,
Deleuze, Morin).

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               These

are interwoven not
separate paradigms
(Ovid, Deleuze,
Coleridge, Beuys,
Steiner) of
interwoven not
separate domains.
They are nested
aspects or details
of a metalevel
monist whole
(Steiner). Each of
these paradigms
would develop
further in a more
conducive
transdisciplinary
framework.

Some practical consequences

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               New

understanding and
restating of
“rational
behaviour�,
influencing a
variety of social
sciences.

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               Root

cause analysis is
transferred into
new and more
effective forms of
problem solving
and organizational
design. Other
results of
contemporary
complexity science
are reinterpreted
and remodelled.

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               New

concepts of
organization
identity that
support
realization of
potential.

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               The

ability to design
relatively simple
effective
interventions even
in complex
scenarios.

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               Tools

to address the
political
complexity of
(say) tax evasion
or migrants.

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               Recognition

that the
ecological crisis
is not a “global
warming crisis�
and that the
attempt to solve
that goal as an
isolated natural
phenomenon will be
self-defeating on
other grounds. The
possibility, and
potential for
further
development, of
more effective
ecosystem tools of
enquiry and
resolution.

  1.                                                    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
                                               Understanding

and resolving such
phenomena as the
banking crisis of
2008.

Â

                                                Thanks

for any comments

Angus

Â

Â

8

[Eetu Pikkarainen 2018-02-06_10:35:40 UTC]

Hi Robert,

You wrote: â€? PCT as I see it — makes the error of internalizing perception in the head of an agent.â€? That is very interesting question about which I have planned
to write a lengthy message but have not got time yet. (Fred already asked about your view, so I write shortly mine.) The canonical diagram of control system situates the label “perception� inside the organism. But however a quite commonly repeated dispute
in this list has been about this because for example Rick (at least in a way) situates the thing which is controlled outside the organism. So if the organism is controlling its perception, then what is that perception and where it resides?

My view is that perception
takes place in the border zone between the organism and the environment – not outside or inside, not externnal nor internal. What is inside the organism is the perceptual signal which is a trace of happened perception. (As a semiotician I would like to
say that the perceptual signal is a sign of perception.) So perception is a process or an event of interaction between the subject and its environment.

I have not yet read Steward but look forward what answer to Fred’s and Martin’s questions.

Eetu

Please, regard all my statements as questions,

no matter how they are formulated.

···

[@rplevy 2018-02-05 11:49 AM PST]

Hi Rick,

I am peripherally interested in PCT-- my interest in it is subordinate to an interest in cybernetic approaches to solving problems of agent-centered pragmatic meaning and sense-meaning. I’m interested in this from the perspective of building
tools that augments human agents’ capacities to be aware of what matters to them constituting environments, individually and collaboratively. Because I find externalist approaches

(Gibson and Varela are some points of reference) to make more sense and more progress on these problems, PCT takes a back burner for me, but because PCT occupies a very similar territory in terms of approaches, it yields a lot of insightful ideas, and
I think it is wise to keep track of for interesting activity happening under that heading.

I’m not sure if we would gain something from a serious and involved comparison of where ternary cybernetics and PCT differ and share commonality, but my personal interest in it is where it stands in the history of externally specifiable
agent-centered control systems, and what contributions might have come from this. PCT as I see it does not directly offer something in that area because it makes the error of internalizing perception in the head of an agent.

Rob

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 9:45 AM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-02-05_09:42:50]

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 4:05 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

RPL: I search my email and found another mention of Stewart by Angus Jenkinson in a past thread on csgnet that is worth quoting here for reference in the thread.

"Ternary cybernetics is I think an important addition to the understanding of organisation or systems. It is the theory of JD Stewart who is another brilliant but sidelined scientist.
What he argues is that in the explanation of the formation, maintenance and behaviours of (at least) organic systems (organisms), the two domains of energy and information are insufficient. A third domain is required. This is what he calls imparity. In brief,
an action involves a decision and in that decision information difference is not enough to explain the action. The difference in information between options (where this is any behaviour at any level of system) does not in itself produce the decision; there
has to be an imparity between the information for the agent. A lady goes into a shop and sees two curtains one with a red and the other with a blue pattern. Difference in information. So what? She buys the red. He works it out all rather thoroughly and has
a useful website that is easily googled. He is, or was, a British academic.

Best wishes"

Hi Robert:

I wonder if you and/or Angus could explain why you are interested in PCT. I ask this because this quote about how “ternary cybernetics” explains actions and decisions seems to have little to do with PCT. In PCT, decisions are a reflection
of a conflict between two control systems that have different references for the same perceptual variable – in the example, for the color pattern of the curtains. How the decision is made depends on the relative gains of the control systems. If the decision
is to buy (control for) the red pattern then at the time the decision is made the system controlling for “red” was controlling with higher gain than the system controlling for “blue”. But things are not over once the decision is made; the system that is controlling
for “blue” is still there and if it is of sufficiently high gain then there will be considerable error in that system after the purchase of red and the customer will suffer “buyer’s remorse” and possibly do things (forced by the error) to undo the earlier
“red” decision. The point is that all of what is said above is handled (and studied) in PCT in terms of what happens then control systems come into conflict with each other (see, for example, my “Cost of Conflict” demo at http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/Conflict.html ).
Does “ternary cybernetics” add anything to this or provide a testable alternative?

Best

Rick

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Angus,

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work and the context of his work.

from what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at

http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly,
he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes”
or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3.
eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson angus@angusjenkinson.com wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1, 15.09 BST)

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract for a paper. I have drafted the following
(rather long version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand their world and so conceive
and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However, the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed (at least significantly)
as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce, Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither escaped their disciplinary
silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix of scientific orthodoxy that
bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and beyond.

Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable
situation.

For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models;
these devalue qualitative aspects in the formation of “systems� models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain
of material succession, whether linear or non-linear.

Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly.

Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent
rules, but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

Well supported alternatives include:

Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela, Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient,
respectful and valued outcomes (Royce).

Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such
behaviours cancel (conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner, Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller).
All ‘situations’ can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations
(Giddens, Luhmann, Varela).

The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative
concepts of “emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observer� is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll,
von Foerster, Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’ can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and
other realities (Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these
paradigms would develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

New understanding and restating of “rational behaviour�, influencing a variety of social sciences.

Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisis� and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential
for further development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

Thanks for any comments

Angus

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you

have nothing left to take away.�

                            --Antoine de Saint-Exupery
9

[From Fred Nickols (2018.02.06.1229 ET)]

To clarify my question:Â How do you define perception, Robert?

Fred Nickols

···

From: Fred Nickols [mailto:fred@nickols.us]
Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 3:06 PM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: D. J. Stewart and Ternary Cybernetics (was Re: Framing Reality, Explanation and Design (ASC))

From Fred Nickols (2018.02.05.1503 ET)

Okay, Rob, I’ll bite. Where are perceptions to be found if not in the heads of those doing the perceiving?

Fred Nickols

Sent from my iPad

On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:49 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

[@rplevy 2018-02-05 11:49 AM PST]

Hi Rick,

I am peripherally interested in PCT-- my interest in it is subordinate to an interest in cybernetic approaches to solving problems of agent-centered pragmatic meaning and sense-meaning. I’m interested in this from the perspective of building tools that augments human agents’ capacities to be aware of what matters to them constituting environments, individually and collaboratively. Because I find externalist approaches (Gibson and Varela are some points of reference) to make more sense and more progress on these problems, PCT takes a back burner for me, but because PCT occupies a very similar territory in terms of approaches, it yields a lot of insightful ideas, and I think it is wise to keep track of for interesting activity happening under that heading.

I’m not sure if we would gain something from a serious and involved comparison of where ternary cybernetics and PCT differ and share commonality, but my personal interest in it is where it stands in the history of externally specifiable agent-centered control systems, and what contributions might have come from this. PCT as I see it does not directly offer something in that area because it makes the error of internalizing perception in the head of an agent.

Rob

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 9:45 AM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-02-05_09:42:50]

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 4:05 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

RPL: I search my email and found another mention of Stewart by Angus Jenkinson in a past thread on csgnet that is worth quoting here for reference in the thread.

"Ternary cybernetics is I think an important addition to the understanding of organisation or systems. It is the theory of JD Stewart who is another brilliant but sidelined scientist. What he argues is that in the explanation of the formation, maintenance and behaviours of (at least) organic systems (organisms), the two domains of energy and information are insufficient. A third domain is required. This is what he calls imparity. In brief, an action involves a decision and in that decision information difference is not enough to explain the action. The difference in information between options (where this is any behaviour at any level of system) does not in itself produce the decision; there has to be an imparity between the information for the agent. A lady goes into a shop and sees two curtains one with a red and the other with a blue pattern. Difference in information. So what? She buys the red. He works it out all rather thoroughly and has a useful website that is easily googled. He is, or was, a British academic.

Best wishes"

Hi Robert:

I wonder if you and/or Angus could explain why you are interested in PCT. I ask this because this quote about how “ternary cybernetics” explains actions and decisions seems to have little to do with PCT. In PCT, decisions are a reflection of a conflict between two control systems that have different references for the same perceptual variable – in the example, for the color pattern of the curtains. How the decision is made depends on the relative gains of the control systems. If the decision is to buy (control for) the red pattern then at the time the decision is made the system controlling for “red” was controlling with higher gain than the system controlling for “blue”. But things are not over once the decision is made; the system that is controlling for “blue” is still there and if it is of sufficiently high gain then there will be considerable error in that system after the purchase of red and the customer will suffer “buyer’s remorse” and possibly do things (forced by the error) to undo the earlier “red” decision. The point is that all of what is said above is handled (and studied) in PCT in terms of what happens then control systems come into conflict with each other (see, for example, my “Cost of Conflict” demo at http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/Conflict.html). Does “ternary cybernetics” add anything to this or provide a testable alternative?

Best

Rick

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Angus,

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work and the context of his work.

From what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly, he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes” or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3. eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson angus@angusjenkinson.com wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1, 15.09 BST)

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract for a paper. I have drafted the following (rather long version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand their world and so conceive and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However, the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed (at least significantly) as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce, Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither escaped their disciplinary silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix of scientific orthodoxy that bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and beyond.

  1.   Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable situation.

  1.   For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models; these devalue qualitative aspects in the formation of “systems� models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

  1.   The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

  1.   The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain of material succession, whether linear or non-linear.

  1.   Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

  1.   Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly. 

  1.   Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent rules, but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

Well supported alternatives include:

  1.   Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela, Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient, respectful and valued outcomes (Royce).

  1.   Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such behaviours cancel (conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

  1.   Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner, Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller). All ‘situations’ can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations (Giddens, Luhmann, Varela).

  1.   The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

  1.   The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative concepts of “emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

  1.   The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observer� is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll, von Foerster, Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’ can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and other realities (Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

  1.   These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these paradigms would develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

  1.   New understanding and restating of “rational behaviour�, influencing a variety of social sciences.

  1.   Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

  1.   New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

  1.   The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

  1.   Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

  1.   Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisis� and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential for further development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

  1.   Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

Thanks for any comments

Angus

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

10

[Rick Marken 2018-02-06_15:52:35]

···

Eetu Pikkarainen (2018-02-06_10:35:40 UTC)–

Â

EP: The canonical diagram of control system situates the label “perceptionâ€? inside the organism. But however a quite commonly repeated dispute
in this list has been about this because for example Rick (at least in a way) situates the thing which is controlled outside the organism. So if the organism is controlling its perception, then what is that perception and where it resides?

RM:Â A control system controls a perception, defined as a neural perceptual signal inside the system (organism, in this case) that is an analog of a state of affairs outside the system. In so doing the “state of affairs” outside of the system (which is also called an “aspect of the system’s external environment”) is also being controlled. This is easily derived from the PCT definition of perception that was posted by Fred:

WTP: “Perception: A perceptual signal (inside a system) that is a continuous analog of a state of affairs outside the system.â€?

RM: So the PCT model of behavior places perception squarely inside and the aspect of the environment of which this perception is an analog outside of the organism. This seems to me to be the least controversial aspect of Powers’ application of control theory and the one that is most comfortably compatible with conventional psychology and neurophysiology.Â

EP: My view is that perception
takes place in the border zone between the organism and the environment – not outside or inside, not external nor internal.

RM: Here you seem to be talking about the process of perceiving rather than the nature of the perception itself, which in PCT is the output of that process. In PCT the process of perceiving also takes place inside the organism; it is carried out by perceptual functions, which are presumed to be neural networks inside the organism. The result of this processing is a perceptual signal, variations in the magnitude of which are presumed to be an analog of variations in the aspect of the environment that is “constructed” by the perceptual function.

RM: When implemented in the form of a working model, those assumptions result in behavior that matches actual behavior with a far greater degree of accuracy than is dreamt of in your philosophy.Â

Best

Rick

Â

What is inside the organism is the perceptual signal which is a trace of happened perception. (As a semiotician I would like to
say that the perceptual signal is a sign of perception.) So perception is a process or an event of interaction between the subject and its environment.

I have not yet read Steward but look forward what answer to Fred’s and Martin’s questions.

Â

Eetu

Â

 Please, regard all my statements as questions,

 no matter how they are formulated.

Â

Â

From: Robert Levy [mailto:r.p.levy@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 9:50 PM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: D. J. Stewart and Ternary Cybernetics (was Re: Framing Reality, Explanation and Design (ASC))

Â

[@rplevy 2018-02-05 11:49 AM PST]

Hi Rick,

Â

I am peripherally interested in PCT-- my interest in it is subordinate to an interest in cybernetic approaches to solving problems of agent-centered pragmatic meaning and sense-meaning. I’m interested in this from the perspective of building
tools that augments human agents’ capacities to be aware of what matters to them constituting environments, individually and collaboratively. Because I find externalist approaches

(Gibson and Varela are some points of reference)Â to make more sense and more progress on these problems, PCT takes a back burner for me, but because PCT occupies a very similar territory in terms of approaches, it yields a lot of insightful ideas, and
I think it is wise to keep track of for interesting activity happening under that heading.

Â

I’m not sure if we would gain something from a serious and involved comparison of where ternary cybernetics and PCT differ and share commonality, but my personal interest in it is where it stands in the history of externally specifiable
agent-centered control systems, and what contributions might have come from this. PCT as I see it does not directly offer something in that area because it makes the error of internalizing perception in the head of an agent.

Â

Rob

Â

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 9:45 AM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-02-05_09:42:50]

Â

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 4:05 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

RPL: I search my email and found another mention of Stewart by Angus Jenkinson in a past thread on csgnet that is worth quoting here for reference in the thread.

"Ternary cybernetics is I think an important addition to the understanding of organisation or systems. It is the theory of JD Stewart  who is another brilliant but sidelined scientist.
What he argues is that in the explanation of the formation, maintenance and behaviours of (at least) organic systems (organisms), the two domains of energy and information are insufficient. A third domain is required. This is what he calls imparity. In brief,
an action involves a decision and in that decision information difference is not enough to explain the action. The difference in information between options (where this is any behaviour at any level of system) does not in itself produce the decision; there
has to be an imparity between the information for the agent. A lady goes into a shop and sees two curtains one with a red and the other with a blue pattern. Difference in information. So what? She buys the red. He works it out all rather thoroughly and has
a useful website that is easily googled. He is, or was, a British academic.

Best wishes"

Â

Hi Robert:Â

Â

I wonder if you and/or Angus could explain why you are interested in PCT. I ask this because this quote about how "ternary cybernetics"Â explains actions and decisions seems to have little to do with PCT. In PCT, decisions are a reflection
of a conflict between two control systems that have different references for the same perceptual variable – in the example, for the color pattern of the curtains. How the decision is made depends on the relative gains of the control systems. If the decision
is to buy (control for) the red pattern then at the time the decision is made the system controlling for “red” was controlling with higher gain than the system controlling for “blue”. But things are not over once the decision is made; the system that is controlling
for “blue” is still there and if it is of sufficiently high gain then there will be considerable error in that system after the purchase of red and the customer will suffer “buyer’s remorse” and possibly do things (forced by the error) to undo the earlier
“red” decision. The point is that all of what is said above is handled (and studied) in PCT in terms of what happens then control systems come into conflict with each other (see, for example, my “Cost of Conflict” demo at http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/Conflict.html ).
Does “ternary cybernetics” add anything to this or provide a testable alternative?

Â

Best

Â

Rick

Â

Â

Â

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Angus,

Â

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work and the context of his work.

from what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at

http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly,
he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes”
or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3.
eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson angus@angusjenkinson.com wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1, 15.09 BST)

Â

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract for a paper. I have drafted the following
(rather long version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Â

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand their world and so conceive
and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However, the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed (at least significantly)
as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce, Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither escaped their disciplinary
silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix of scientific orthodoxy that
bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and beyond.

Â

1.     Â
Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable
situation.

2.     Â
For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models;
these devalue qualitative aspects in the formation of “systemsâ€? models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

3.     Â
The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

4.     Â
The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain
of material succession, whether linear or non-linear.

5.     Â
Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

6.     Â
Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly.Â

7.     Â
Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent
rules, but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

Â

Well supported alternatives include:

1.     Â
Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela, Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient,
respectful and valued outcomes (Royce).

2.     Â
Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such
behaviours cancel (conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

3.     Â
Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner, Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller).
All ‘situations’ can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations
(Giddens, Luhmann, Varela).

4.     Â
The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

5.     Â
The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative
concepts of “emergentâ€? or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

6.     Â
The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observerâ€? is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll,
von Foerster, Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’ can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and
other realities (Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

7.     Â
These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these
paradigms would develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

1.     Â
New understanding and restating of “rational behaviourâ€?, influencing a variety of social sciences.

2.     Â
Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

3.     Â
New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

4.     Â
The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

5.     Â
Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

6.     Â
Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisisâ€? and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential
for further development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

7.     Â
Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

Â

Thanks for any comments

Angus

Â

Â

Â

Â

Â

–

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you

have nothing left to take away.�

                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

11

[Eetu Pikkarainen 2018-02-07_08:20:58 UTC]

Rick,

Yes that’s true, I was thinking about “perception� as a process or perhaps as an act of perceiving. If you perceive an aspect of environment it requires that there is an interaction
between you and the environment and it is actually the aspect of that interaction that you perceive. Perception as a consequence of that process resides then of course inside the organism. But not necessarily inside the head of the agent? (control of standup
position by reflexes?)

Eetu

···

[Rick Marken 2018-02-06_15:52:35]

Eetu Pikkarainen (2018-02-06_10:35:40 UTC)

EP: The canonical diagram of control system situates the label “perception� inside the organism.
But however a quite commonly repeated dispute in this list has been about this because for example Rick (at least in a way) situates the thing which is controlled outside the organism. So if the organism is controlling its perception, then what is that
perception and where it resides?

RM: A control system controls a perception, defined as a neural perceptual signal inside the system (organism, in this case) that is an analog of a state of affairs outside the system.
In so doing the “state of affairs” outside of the system (which is also called an “aspect of the system’s external environment”) is also being controlled. This is easily derived from the PCT definition of perception that was posted by Fred:

WTP: “Perception: A perceptual signal (inside a system) that is a continuous analog of a state of affairs outside the system.�

RM: So the PCT model of behavior places perception squarely inside and the aspect of the environment of which this perception is an analog outside of the organism. This seems to me to be the least controversial aspect of Powers’ application
of control theory and the one that is most comfortably compatible with conventional psychology and neurophysiology.

EP: My view is that perception
takes place in the border zone between the organism and the environment – not outsidee or inside, not external nor internal.

RM: Here you seem to be talking about the
process of perceiving rather than the nature of the perception itself, which in PCT is the output of that process.
In PCT the process of perceiving also takes place inside the organism; it is carried out by perceptual functions, which are presumed to be neural networks inside the organism. The result of this processing is a perceptual signal, variations in the magnitude
of which are presumed to be an analog of variations in the aspect of the environment that is “constructed” by the perceptual function.

RM: When implemented in the form of a working model, those assumptions result in behavior that matches actual behavior with a far greater degree of accuracy than is dreamt of in your philosophy.

Best

Rick

What is inside the organism is the perceptual signal which is a trace of happened perception. (As a semiotician I would like to say that the perceptual signal
is a sign of perception.) So perception is a process or an event of interaction between the subject and its environment.

I have not yet read Steward but look forward what answer to Fred’s and Martin’s questions.

Eetu

Please, regard all my statements as questions,

no matter how they are formulated.

From: Robert Levy [mailto:r.p.levy@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 9:50 PM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: D. J. Stewart and Ternary Cybernetics (was Re: Framing Reality, Explanation and Design (ASC))

[@rplevy 2018-02-05 11:49 AM PST]

Hi Rick,

I am peripherally interested in PCT-- my interest in it is subordinate to an interest in cybernetic approaches to solving problems of agent-centered pragmatic meaning and sense-meaning.
I’m interested in this from the perspective of building tools that augments human agents’ capacities to be aware of what matters to them constituting environments, individually and collaboratively. Because I find externalist approaches

(Gibson and Varela are some points of reference) to make more sense and more progress on these problems, PCT takes a back burner for me, but because PCT occupies a very similar territory in terms of approaches, it yields a lot of insightful ideas, and
I think it is wise to keep track of for interesting activity happening under that heading.

I’m not sure if we would gain something from a serious and involved comparison of where ternary cybernetics and PCT differ and share commonality, but my personal interest in it
is where it stands in the history of externally specifiable agent-centered control systems, and what contributions might have come from this. PCT as I see it does not directly offer something in that area because it makes the error of internalizing perception
in the head of an agent.

Rob

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 9:45 AM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-02-05_09:42:50]

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 4:05 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

RPL: I search my email and found another mention of Stewart by Angus Jenkinson in a past thread on csgnet that is worth quoting here for reference in the thread.

"Ternary cybernetics is I think an important addition to the understanding of organisation or systems. It is the theory of JD Stewart who
is another brilliant but sidelined scientist. What he argues is that in the explanation of the formation, maintenance and behaviours of (at least) organic systems (organisms), the two domains of energy and information are insufficient. A third domain is required.
This is what he calls imparity. In brief, an action involves a decision and in that decision information difference is not enough to explain the action. The difference in information between options (where this is any behaviour at any level of system) does
not in itself produce the decision; there has to be an imparity between the information for the agent. A lady goes into a shop and sees two curtains one with a red and the other with a blue pattern. Difference in information. So what? She buys the red. He
works it out all rather thoroughly and has a useful website that is easily googled. He is, or was, a British academic.

Best wishes"

Hi Robert:

I wonder if you and/or Angus could explain why you are interested in PCT. I ask this because this quote about how “ternary cybernetics” explains actions and decisions seems to
have little to do with PCT. In PCT, decisions are a reflection of a conflict between two control systems that have different references for the same perceptual variable – in the example, for the color pattern of the curtains. How the decision is made depends
on the relative gains of the control systems. If the decision is to buy (control for) the red pattern then at the time the decision is made the system controlling for “red” was controlling with higher gain than the system controlling for “blue”. But things
are not over once the decision is made; the system that is controlling for “blue” is still there and if it is of sufficiently high gain then there will be considerable error in that system after the purchase of red and the customer will suffer “buyer’s remorse”
and possibly do things (forced by the error) to undo the earlier “red” decision. The point is that all of what is said above is handled (and studied) in PCT in terms of what happens then control systems come into conflict with each other (see, for example,
my “Cost of Conflict” demo at http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/Conflict.html ).
Does “ternary cybernetics” add anything to this or provide a testable alternative?

Best

Rick

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Robert Levy r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Angus,

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work
and the context of his work.

from what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at

http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly,
he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes”
or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3.
eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson angus@angusjenkinson.com wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1, 15.09 BST)

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract for a paper. I have drafted the following
(rather long version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand their world and so conceive
and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However, the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed (at least significantly)
as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce, Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither escaped their disciplinary
silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix of scientific orthodoxy that
bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and beyond.

Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable
situation.

For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models;
these devalue qualitative aspects in the formation of “systems� models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain
of material succession, whether linear or non-linear.

Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly.

Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent
rules, but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

Well supported alternatives include:

Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela, Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient,
respectful and valued outcomes (Royce).

Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such
behaviours cancel (conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner, Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller).
All ‘situations’ can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations
(Giddens, Luhmann, Varela).

The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative
concepts of “emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observer� is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll,
von Foerster, Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’ can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and
other realities (Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these
paradigms would develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

New understanding and restating of “rational behaviour�, influencing a variety of social sciences.

Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisis� and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential
for further development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

Thanks for any comments

Angus

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you

have nothing left to take away.�

                            --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you

have nothing left to take away.�

                            --Antoine de Saint-Exupery
12

Angus Jenkinson, 2018-02-16, 19:07

Hi Robert

Apologies for the delay.

I also came across the work of Stewart in the context of micro-nudges.

The relationship between this and PCT is concerned with understanding how human beings behave and make decisions. Micro nudges is only a term that is
used in certain contexts to try and differentiate from nudge theory but indicate that both of them have something to do with the design of change and that how people behave his very context dependent. Perceptual control theory provides important elements in
understanding how people act in such a way as to cancel out interference. Most attempts at change design have the characteristic of trying to force something through and then generating resistance. What is required is a mode of designing change that produces
no resistance, which to put in another way means that there are no changes being made to the environment that is being controlled for such that people will respond in a way that is different from what is desirable.

Everything I have learnt has been either directly from his website or certain people who have studied under him and tend to preserve discretion. The rest
of course is thinking.

I think that Peirce’s work is consistent, and a field that I am trying to understand better.

by the intellect) and the emotional response to it, which is to say that there is an aesthetic or emotional or ternary aspect to this. Different organisational (organic) systems are embodied for these different processes. But they are tightly interconnected.
The work of Damasio identifying the relationship of emotion in the neurology of decision making was interesting 20+ years ago

···

………………………………â€â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦………………….

Angus Jenkinson

On 04/02/2018, 20:51, “Robert Levy” r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Angus,

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work and the context
of his work.

from what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at
http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly,
he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes”
or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves
dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3. eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson <angus@angusjenkinson.com >
wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1,
15.09 BST)

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract
for a paper. I have drafted the following (rather long version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand
their world and so conceive and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However, the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed
(at least significantly) as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce, Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither
escaped their disciplinary silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix
of scientific orthodoxy that bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and
beyond.

Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable situation.

For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models; these devalue
qualitative aspects in the formation of “systems� models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain of material
succession, whether linear or non-linear.

Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly.

Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent rules,
but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

Well supported alternatives include:

Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela, Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient, respectful
and valued outcomes (Royce).

Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such behaviours cancel
(conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner, Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller). All ‘situations’
can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations (Giddens,
Luhmann, Varela).

The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative concepts of
“emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observer� is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll, von Foerster,
Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’ can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and other realities
(Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these paradigms would
develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

New understanding and restating of “rational behaviour�, influencing a variety of social sciences.

Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisis� and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential for further
development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

Thanks for any comments

Angus

13

Angus Jenkinson, 2018-02-16: 20:07

Rick

Thank you for your question. You ask why I am interested in PCT and go on to give an explanation of how PCT, as you understand it, explains the choice
of curtains. In doing so you are making a general point about decisions and choices.

My reason for being interested in PCT — as well aas ternary cybernetics — is because both of them contribute to an understanding of the two key fields
in which I’m interested, the design of change and, most importantly, the functional organizing identity of organisations. As a person who abhors artificial distinctions between academic disciplines, it is worth pointing out that I regard them as two aspects
of one continuous academic field. Neither of the two fields that I am interested in can be adequately dealt with without both of them.

Having made that assertion, I need to turn to your supplementary remarks in which you attempt to provide an alternative explanation using perceptual control
theory. At this point I find myself in a somewhat schizophrenic position. On the one hand, I would be the 1st to admit that I am far from being the authority on the cultural tradition and accumulated knowledge field of the perceptual control theory
community. On the other hand I take the view that a good deal of what I have read is an unnecessary accumulation and accretion of structures around perceptual control theory that get in the way of its fundamental brilliance.

One of the problems is the way that descriptions of the theory construct model elements and then reify those model elements in such a way as to dismiss
other theories that have not reified their model in the same way. Thus you described the decision as a conflict between two control systems that have different references. That is in one sense consistent with what ternary cybernetic theory says, with this
difference. It claims that there is a difference between the domains themselves, the fundamental domains of science and not merely between two different systems functioning on the same domain. Once that is accepted it becomes the case that the decision becomes
a process of interaction between two different organizing processes, each of which provides elements of a ‘cognitional’ field. At the same time, I would say that the distinction between these two different organising elements (defined as information and imparity
by Stewart) is produced by the functional organisation of the human.

The significance of this theory from the point of view of science is that the general tendency of the last four centuries has been to cut out the emotional
and qualitative aspects as secondary and dubious rather than fundamental properties and characteristics of the world. Thus to quote one author in a different field, we have a biology without wonder. What Stewart argues is that there is an aspect of the world
to be understood that cannot be understood without a domain (dimension) that is equally significant and coterminous with what has been the central subject of the last four centuries of science. Of course, he does not say this: he simply argues in a very cool
way for what he believes must be the case and the implications of that case is what opens the door to a new way of understanding the reality of order and existence.

But then taking the example you give, of buyer’s remorse — or the opposiite — it’s quite impossible to be able to make sense of social organisation would
be able to design change without taking into account how people will respond. Ternary cybernetics provides a helpful approach to this.

On a more critical note, I would argue that the example you give with the controlling for red and blue has not sufficiently thought through the issues.
If you think there is a conflict between two different systems, one of which is controlling for red (bearing in mind that before coming into the shop the customer may have had no idea what colour they were looking for) and the other for blue, how do you actually
see that functioning? Are they to levels in a hierarchy or are they two different preferences (controlled for criteria) at the same level, and how is the decision actually made between them. What is this “gain�? Where does it come from? And how does it function
organically?

···

………………………â¦â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦………………………….

Angus Jenkinson

On 05/02/2018, 17:50, “Richard Marken” rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-02-05_09:42:50]

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 4:05 PM, Robert Levy <r.p.levy@gmail.com >
wrote:

RPL: I search my email and found another mention of Stewart by Angus Jenkinson in a past thread on csgnet that is worth quoting here for reference
in the thread.

"Ternary cybernetics is I think an important addition to the understanding of organisation or systems. It is the theory of JD Stewart who is another brilliant but sidelined scientist. What he argues is
that in the explanation of the formation, maintenance and behaviours of (at least) organic systems (organisms), the two domains of energy and information are insufficient. A third domain is required. This is what he calls imparity. In brief, an action involves
a decision and in that decision information difference is not enough to explain the action. The difference in information between options (where this is any behaviour at any level of system) does not in itself produce the decision; there has to be an imparity
between the information for the agent. A lady goes into a shop and sees two curtains one with a red and the other with a blue pattern. Difference in information. So what? She buys the red. He works it out all rather thoroughly and has a useful website that
is easily googled. He is, or was, a British academic.

Best wishes"

Hi Robert:

I wonder if you and/or Angus could explain why you are interested in PCT. I ask this because this quote about how “ternary cybernetics” explains actions and decisions seems to have little to
do with PCT. In PCT, decisions are a reflection of a conflict between two control systems that have different references for the same perceptual variable – in the example, for the color pattern of the curtains. How the decision is made depends on the relative
gains of the control systems. If the decision is to buy (control for) the red pattern then at the time the decision is made the system controlling for “red” was controlling with higher gain than the system controlling for “blue”. But things are not over once
the decision is made; the system that is controlling for “blue” is still there and if it is of sufficiently high gain then there will be considerable error in that system after the purchase of red and the customer will suffer “buyer’s remorse” and possibly
do things (forced by the error) to undo the earlier “red” decision. The point is that all of what is said above is handled (and studied) in PCT in terms of what happens then control systems come into conflict with each other (see, for example, my “Cost of
Conflict” demo at http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/Conflict.html ).
Does “ternary cybernetics” add anything to this or provide a testable alternative?

Best

Rick

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Robert Levy <r.p.levy@gmail.com >
wrote:

Hi Angus,

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work and the context
of his work.

from what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at
http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there
I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly,
he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes”
or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves
dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3. eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson <angus@angusjenkinson.com >
wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1,
15.09 BST)

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract
for a paper. I have drafted the following (rather long version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand
their world and so conceive and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However, the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed
(at least significantly) as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce, Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither
escaped their disciplinary silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix
of scientific orthodoxy that bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and
beyond.

Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable situation.

For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models; these devalue
qualitative aspects in the formation of “systems� models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain of material
succession, whether linear or non-linear.

Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly.

Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent rules,
but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

Well supported alternatives include:

Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela, Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient, respectful
and valued outcomes (Royce).

Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such behaviours cancel
(conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner, Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller). All ‘situations’
can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations (Giddens,
Luhmann, Varela).

The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative concepts of
“emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observer� is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll, von Foerster,
Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’ can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and other realities
(Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these paradigms would
develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

New understanding and restating of “rational behaviour�, influencing a variety of social sciences.

Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisis� and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential for further
development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

Thanks for any comments

Angus

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you

have nothing left to take away.�

                            --Antoine de Saint-Exupery
14

Angus Jenkinson, 2018-02-16: 20:34

Fred

Perceptions are to be found wherever they are in the world. They cannot be anywhere else.

Now if you are asking about what kind of control, thinking, or emotion responses may be taking place with whatever kind of neurological, biological and
cybernetic organisation may be in function in relationship to those perceptions, that is another question. Nothing can be observed unless I actively observe it, there. That my biological organisation is extremely active in enabling me to do that and that as
a result I may be receiving all manner of different kinds of signals from the world that are being processed by me, and that these are distributed throughout the organisation of my body (for example my fingertips) is perfectly obvious. Anyone who thinks that
the neurological processes terminate with the head, or that the processes of sensing/perception are exclusively confined to neurological processes is I believe missing certain facts.

Now having made these rather bold statements, I will come back to you and say that, it’s probable that some of the confusion of languages to do with specific
technical uses of terms like “perception�. You/one can define perception in any way you like and at the end of that you/one can end up with a definition of perception that cannot take place in anything else other than the brain. But if you do that then you
need to find an alternative word for the whole variety of what is generally called perception because without that you/one won’t be able to understand and develop suitable science.

You offered a “bite� and I’m afraid I have bitten. No doubt you will now reel me in and land me gasping on the shore!

Very warm wishes

···

…â………………………………………………………………………….

Angus Jenkinson

On 05/02/2018, 20:06, “Fred Nickols” fred@nickols.us wrote:

From Fred Nickols (2018.02.05.1503 ET)

Okay, Rob, I’ll bite. Where are perceptions to be found if not in the heads of those doing the perceiving?

Fred Nickols

Sent from my iPad

On Feb 5, 2018, at 2:49 PM, Robert Levy <r.p.levy@gmail.com >
wrote:

[@rplevy 2018-02-05 11:49 AM PST]

Hi Rick,

I am peripherally interested in PCT-- my interest in it is subordinate to an interest in cybernetic approaches to solving problems of agent-centered pragmatic meaning and sense-meaning. I’m
interested in this from the perspective of building tools that augments human agents’ capacities to be aware of what matters to them constituting environments, individually and collaboratively. Because I find externalist approaches
(Gibson and Varela are some points of reference) to make
more sense and more progress on these problems, PCT takes a back burner for me, but because PCT occupies a very similar territory in terms of approaches, it yields a lot of insightful ideas, and I think it is wise to keep track of for interesting activity
happening under that heading.

I’m not sure if we would gain something from a serious and involved comparison of where ternary cybernetics and PCT differ and share commonality, but my personal interest in it is where it stands
in the history of externally specifiable agent-centered control systems, and what contributions might have come from this. PCT as I see it does not directly offer something in that area because it makes the error of internalizing perception in the head of
an agent.

Rob

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 9:45 AM, Richard Marken <rsmarken@gmail.com >
wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-02-05_09:42:50]

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 4:05 PM, Robert Levy <r.p.levy@gmail.com >
wrote:

RPL: I search my email and found another mention of Stewart by Angus Jenkinson in a past thread on csgnet that is worth quoting here for reference
in the thread.

"Ternary cybernetics is I think an important addition to the understanding of organisation or systems. It is the theory of JD Stewart who is another brilliant but sidelined scientist.
What he argues is that in the explanation of the formation, maintenance and behaviours of (at least) organic systems (organisms), the two domains of energy and information are insufficient. A third domain is required. This is what he calls imparity. In brief,
an action involves a decision and in that decision information difference is not enough to explain the action. The difference in information between options (where this is any behaviour at any level of system) does not in itself produce the decision; there
has to be an imparity between the information for the agent. A lady goes into a shop and sees two curtains one with a red and the other with a blue pattern. Difference in information. So what? She buys the red. He works it out all rather thoroughly and has
a useful website that is easily googled. He is, or was, a British academic.

Best wishes"

Hi Robert:

I wonder if you and/or Angus could explain why you are interested in PCT. I ask this because this quote about how “ternary cybernetics” explains actions and decisions seems to have little to
do with PCT. In PCT, decisions are a reflection of a conflict between two control systems that have different references for the same perceptual variable – in the example, for the color pattern of the curtains. How the decision is made depends on the relative
gains of the control systems. If the decision is to buy (control for) the red pattern then at the time the decision is made the system controlling for “red” was controlling with higher gain than the system controlling for “blue”. But things are not over once
the decision is made; the system that is controlling for “blue” is still there and if it is of sufficiently high gain then there will be considerable error in that system after the purchase of red and the customer will suffer “buyer’s remorse” and possibly
do things (forced by the error) to undo the earlier “red” decision. The point is that all of what is said above is handled (and studied) in PCT in terms of what happens then control systems come into conflict with each other (see, for example, my “Cost of
Conflict” demo at http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/Conflict.html ).
Does “ternary cybernetics” add anything to this or provide a testable alternative?

Best

Rick

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Robert Levy <r.p.levy@gmail.com >
wrote:

Hi Angus,

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work and the context
of his work.

from what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at
http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there
I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly,
he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes”
or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves
dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3. eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson <angus@angusjenkinson.com >
wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1,
15.09 BST)

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract
for a paper. I have drafted the following (rather long version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand
their world and so conceive and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However, the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed
(at least significantly) as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce, Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither
escaped their disciplinary silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix
of scientific orthodoxy that bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and
beyond.

Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable situation.

For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models; these devalue
qualitative aspects in the formation of “systems� models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain of material
succession, whether linear or non-linear.

Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly.

Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent rules,
but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

Well supported alternatives include:

Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela, Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient, respectful
and valued outcomes (Royce).

Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such behaviours cancel
(conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner, Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller). All ‘situations’
can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations (Giddens,
Luhmann, Varela).

The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative concepts of
“emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observer� is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll, von Foerster,
Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’ can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and other realities
(Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these paradigms would
develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

New understanding and restating of “rational behaviour�, influencing a variety of social sciences.

Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisis� and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential for further
development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

Thanks for any comments

Angus

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you

have nothing left to take away.�

                            --Antoine de Saint-Exupery
15

[From: Richard Pfau (2018.02.28 13:00 EST)]

Angus,

A belated thought related to your statement to Robert (Angus Jenkinson, 2018-02-16, 19:07) about emotions and decision-making shown below:

“From my perspective, every single decision of any sort always involves both the more neutral field of differential information (which we can say is processed by the intellect) and the emotional response to it, which is to say that there is an aesthetic or emotional or ternary aspect to this. Different organisational (organic) systems are embodied for these different processes. But they are tightly interconnected. The work of Damasio identifying the relationship of emotion in the neurology of decision making was interesting 20+ years ago”

If you haven’t seen it already, you may be interested in Lawrence B. Mohr’s book The Causes of Human Behavior: Implications for Theory and Method in the Social Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). Mohr developed an “affect-object paradigm” where in the encounter of affects the strongest always wins.  This fully fits with your idea that there is an aesthetic or emotional or ternary aspect to decision making. And if such emotion or affect as Mohr calls it is intimately linked to the PCT idea of “error signals”, Mohr’s views as well as your own about emotional aspects seem compatible with Powers Perceptual Control Theory.

With Regards,

Richard Pfau

···

On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 2:20 PM, Angus Jenkinson angus@angusjenkinson.com wrote:

Angus Jenkinson, 2018-02-16, 19:07

Â

Hi Robert

Apologies for the delay.

I also came across the work of Stewart in the context of micro-nudges.

The relationship between this and PCT is concerned with understanding how human beings behave and make decisions. Micro nudges is only a term that is
used in certain contexts to try and differentiate from nudge theory but indicate that both of them have something to do with the design of change and that how people behave his very context dependent. Perceptual control theory provides important elements in
understanding how people act in such a way as to cancel out interference. Most attempts at change design have the characteristic of trying to force something through and then generating resistance. What is required is a mode of designing change that produces
no resistance, which to put in another way means that there are no changes being made to the environment that is being controlled for such that people will respond in a way that is different from what is desirable.

Everything I have learnt has been either directly from his website or certain people who have studied under him and tend to preserve discretion. The rest
of course is thinking.

Â

I think that Peirce’s work is consistent, and a field that I am trying to understand better.

From my perspective, every single decision of any sort always involves both the more neutral field of differential information (which we can say is processed
by the intellect) and the emotional response to it, which is to say that there is an aesthetic or emotional or ternary aspect to this. Different organisational (organic) systems are embodied for these different processes. But they are tightly interconnected.
The work of Damasio identifying the relationship of emotion in the neurology of decision making was interesting 20+ years ago

Â

…………………………… ¦â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦…………………………………….

Angus Jenkinson

Â

Â

On 04/02/2018, 20:51, “Robert Levy” r.p.levy@gmail.com wrote:

Â

Hi Angus,

Â

Thank you for drawing attention to D. J. Stewart’s work with this post, which I was not previously aware of. I was curious if you could offer more background on Stewart’s work and the context
of his work.

from what I could gather, Stewart contributed to the development of management cybernetics ala Stafford Beer. And I was able to piece together that one application of Stewart’s work on terns was the ecological design pattern of “micronudges”.

Almost all of the interesting content on Stewart’s ideas I could find comes from the horse’s mouth, at
http://www.hfr.org.uk/ and there’s a lot more there I need to read.

One of my major personal interests in recent years has been applying Peirce’s triadic framework as an account of signs that uniquely specify control systems. Stewart’s work seems to me an approach that is very much in line with that way of thinking. Interestingly,
he reinvents the ideas in a way that seems independent of, and perhaps unaware of Peirce.

For example, Stewart defines a “tern” as any identity that is recognizably the same identity across the three “domains”-- energy, information, and imparity, which correspond closely to what Peirce called the “modes”
or “predicaments” of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Stewart gives as an example that work is a tern: 1. eg. shoveling dirt, 2. adding up an invoice or doing a crossword puzzle (this work involves
dyadic entailment or covariant relations), 3. eg. making aesthetic judgements (applying some utility or preference that drives the selection of dyadic-level support toward these ends).

I’m looking forward to reading more to find out where Stewart and others took these ideas in terms of application to making sense of systems and designing systems.

Thanks,

Rob

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Angus Jenkinson <angus@angusjenkinson.com >
wrote:

Angus Jenkinson (2018-2.1,
15.09 BST)

Â

There is a conference coming up of the Cybernetics and Systems Association and I have been thinking about an abstract
for a paper. I have drafted the following (rather long version) and thought it might be interesting to some of you and that you might have useful and interesting comments for me. Here it is

Â

Framing Reality, Explanation and Design: towards a new concept for resolving world crises

Humanity is part of a shared world with limited resources. Considerable power is not only available to humans but unequally distributed amongst them. It matters how the powerful understand
their world and so conceive and design their ongoing research, technologies and actions, including intended remedial interventions. Therefore, scientists are one of the powerful groups. However, the several apparent crises of the 21st century developed
(at least significantly) as an outcome of ‘frames’ that remain common in scientific paradigms and principles. Despite some two centuries of criticism (Coleridge, Goethe, Whitehead, Peirce, Bateson) several important interconnected newer paradigms have neither
escaped their disciplinary silo nor even been broadly recognized within it. Other paradigms (hence frames) remain hangovers, even in scientific communities, of education and culture of decades or centuries earlier. Together, there is a dysfunctional matrix
of scientific orthodoxy that bleeds into management and political practices and policies. This paper argues that each of the following frames or paradigms is in fact questionable and directly prejudicial to responding to the major crises of the century and
beyond.

Â

1.     Â
Reality is ultimately inaccessible and best understood by specialist models that represent aspects of their appearances or effects. Complexity in particular always represents an ultimately unknowable unpredictable situation.

2.     Â
For both epistemological reliability and practical purposes contemporary scientific paradigms have tended to emphasize models that use positivist (mathematical) distinctions, including particularly stochastic models; these devalue
qualitative aspects in the formation of “systems� models, descriptions, and designs. (One goal is to eliminate the bias of the observer.)

3.     Â
The paradigm that explanation of the organization of entities may be achieved by the domains of energy and information, the former representing resource and the latter form. No other domains are required.

4.     Â
The assumption that all causality is not merely physically apparent in its effects but materially prior in its action (anteactus); that is there is a prior material event that effects the new event by direct chain of material
succession, whether linear or non-linear.

5.     Â
Moreover, all causal explanations can be reduced to interactions of their physically smallest materializing occurrences (which may depend on interacting probability fields).

6.     Â
Entropy is the ultimate fact and the appearance of its negation occurs randomly.Â

7.     Â
Emergence is the (one and only) process by which higher order entities appear and is a concept of bottom-up complex interaction processes. These may have simple principles that can be formulated post hoc as intelligent rules,
but their development was a result of random variation combined with causal fitness-survival mechanisms.

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Well supported alternatives include:

1.     Â
Ternary cybernetics implies the role of qualitative dimensions via imparity (Stewart, Whitehead, Weber, Varela, Miller, Barfield). This leads to evaluations, goals, and designs that maintain or produce more resilient, respectful
and valued outcomes (Royce).

2.     Â
Aspects of perceptual control theory (PCT, Powers) demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, how and why all organisms, including social superorganisms, exhibit autonomous goal-directed behaviour control. Such behaviours cancel
(conventionally accounted) external causal influence, so far as physically possible.

3.     Â
Meta-level cybernetic loops imply higher-order organization, not just ‘emergence’ (Miller, Bateson, Steiner, Varela). Frames are themselves part of this. Ideas emerge as virtual organizing factors (Bortoft, Miller). All ‘situations’
can be treated as nested virtual multi-dimensional ‘descriptive spaces’ (Barfield and others). Social structures are instantiations of ordering dynamics that materialize only in the dynamics of process, as temporally self-maintaining instantiations (Giddens,
Luhmann, Varela).

4.     Â
The assumption of inaccessible realities is a frame not a fact. A hermeneutic reading translates limitations into a matter of faculty not reality (Weigel, Barfield, Bateson, Bortoft, Miller, Steiner).

5.     Â
The appearance of autopoietic whole organization dynamics provides a window into nested and variational organization and organisations, akin to musical themes and variations; this offers a paradigm for alternative concepts of
“emergent� or whole-order behaviour, as Goethe envisaged two centuries ago (Bortoft).

6.     Â
The cybernetics of ‘organization’, autopoiesis, and ‘social’ and natural ecosystems show that the “observer� is a crucial interwoven aspect of reality at all levels of description and event influence (von Uexküll, von Foerster,
Brier, Bachelard, Miller). She is an actor in a double hermeneutic loop (Giddens, Miller, Peirce). The functioning of each and every ‘observer’ can be understood in terms of ternary, second-order, autonomously and qualitatively purposeful, and other realities
(Maturana, Royce, Deleuze, Morin).

7.     Â
These are interwoven not separate paradigms (Ovid, Deleuze, Coleridge, Beuys, Steiner) of interwoven not separate domains. They are nested aspects or details of a metalevel monist whole (Steiner). Each of these paradigms would
develop further in a more conducive transdisciplinary framework.

Some practical consequences

1.     Â
New understanding and restating of “rational behaviour�, influencing a variety of social sciences.

2.     Â
Root cause analysis is transferred into new and more effective forms of problem solving and organizational design. Other results of contemporary complexity science are reinterpreted and remodelled.

3.     Â
New concepts of organization identity that support realization of potential.

4.     Â
The ability to design relatively simple effective interventions even in complex scenarios.

5.     Â
Tools to address the political complexity of (say) tax evasion or migrants.

6.     Â
Recognition that the ecological crisis is not a “global warming crisis� and that the attempt to solve that goal as an isolated natural phenomenon will be self-defeating on other grounds. The possibility, and potential for further
development, of more effective ecosystem tools of enquiry and resolution.

7.     Â
Understanding and resolving such phenomena as the banking crisis of 2008.

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Thanks for any comments

Angus

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