Algedonic signal

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Algedonic signal

A special algedonic (pain and pleasure) signal divides the ascent from System One and uses its own filter “to decide whether or not TO ALERT SYSTEM FIVE” (DTS 1985: 133). Alone of enterprise signals, algedonics are “organized to break through recursivity” (HOE 1979: 407).

What Beer says

The metasystem might hear “the whole organism droning on, and simply ‘fall asleep’” (DTS 1985: 133). Alarms “do not belong to the family of management information systems at all” (HOE 1979: 406). “The algedonic signal screams: ‘ouch; it hurts!’” Unhandled lower-recursion signals “cause mayhem at the senior management level”; unanswered, “the viable system would lose its cohesiveness” (HOE 1979: 407). System Three: “arousal filter which models the reticular formation of the brain stem” (BOTF 1981: 178). Chile meter: eudemony (BOTF 1981: 283).

Where it sits in the model

Six vertical channels absorb System One horizontal variety (First Axiom, HOE 1979: 217). Algedonics are orthogonal to that calming MIS (HOE 1979: 406) — mechanism of the Law of Cohesion (HOE 1979: 407); inter-recursive failure is the “ultimate pathology” (Pathologies of viable systems; HOE 1979: 408). Crossings need capacity and transducers (HOE 1979: 99, 101; DTS 1985: 47).

Textual notes

HOE six loops (1979: 142–143): happenstance — environments, operations, System One managers as a team; designed — command, System Two, audit. DTS (1985: 81–82): Corporate Intervention, Resource Bargain, operational linkages, environmental intersects, System Two, audits. DTS splits command; drops managers-as-team (Pure VSM — Appendix). BOTF adds a second arousal filter in System Four (BOTF 1981: 183). Algedonic “dates from 1894”; Beer had thought he invented it (BOTF 1981: 401).

Punch and Judy

Punch and Judy argues that Beer stated how an algedonic signal qualifies — a statistical filter watching chosen points of stability, its criteria set by the metasystem — but never who chooses those points, who may contest the filter, or who audits it, so the channel has no owner the regulated could name (Ch 4); the manuscript reads the reserved but apparently never installed algedonic meter of Project Cybersyn as consistent with this, while marking that reading as its own inference from Beer’s sentence (Ch 8). It adds that the algedonic channel inherits the transducer problem — a right to raise an alarm through a three-level form is a right to raise one of three alarms (Ch 25) — and the coda reads the channel with System Five as nearly a witness function for which the model supplies no theory of standing (Coda). These are the manuscript’s arguments, several provisional, not findings against the model.

Open points

MS 1967: 47–48 unscanned in ch. 12. Equating HOE ch. 14 alarm (HOE 1979: 386) with HOE 1979: 406 is the manuscript’s reading. Draft not canon (Pure VSM — Overview).

Part II — The Viable System Model · Viable System Model · System Five · Cybersyn · Stafford Beer · Punch and Judy — Overview