“An evolving outlook is pieced together, like a patchwork quilt that has no prior design” (TBYT 2009: 272). Beer wrote the sentence in the unfinished title essay of Think Before You Think (2009), and the collection itself is built the same way. It is not a treatise. It brings together lectures, prefaces, papers and that autobiography, written over several decades, and its subtitle, Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing, was chosen by the editor, David Whittaker. The dates of first publication are in sources.md. Read for their epistemology, these texts show that the questions raised in Decision and Control (see chapters 24 and 25) stayed with Beer for the rest of his life: what a model is, who recognizes a system, how complexity is measured. In the later texts they are extended to identity, to self-reference and to the way a person comes to hold an outlook at all.
26.1 Against reductionism
In 1980 Beer wrote a preface for Maturana and Varela’s Autopoiesis and Cognition, and it holds his clearest critique of a science that breaks things down and loses relations. It begins with an inheritance: “We are the inheritors of categorized knowledge; therefore we inherit also a world-view that consists of parts strung together, rather than wholes regarded through different sets of filters” (TBYT 2009, “Preface to Autopoiesis”: 64). Beer traces this through the history of philosophy, from the scholastics through the rationalists and empiricists to Kant, and through the history of science as classification, from Galen to Linnaeus. He then describes the dominant world-view as one “in which real systems are annihilated in trying to understand them, in which relations are lost because they are not categorized, in which synthesis is relegated to poetry and mysticism, in which identity is a political inference” (TBYT 2009, “Preface to Autopoiesis”: 65). The same passage makes a point about universities that Beer had already made about management in DC. Interdisciplinary work does not solve the problem, because it keeps the categories: “Thus it is that an ‘interdisciplinary study’ often consists of a group of disciplinarians holding hands in a ring for mutual comfort. The ostensible topic has slipped down the hole in the middle” (TBYT 2009: 65). What Beer praises in Maturana and Varela is the opposite: their book “does not inter-relate disciplines: it transcends them” (TBYT 2009: 66). The answer to the disciplinary deadlock “has got to be metasystemic, not merely interdisciplinary” (ibid.). Beer’s description of cybernetics as a “transdisciplinary science” (chapter 1.5) belongs here. Nine years later, in “The Identity of Organizations” (prologue to Jorge Etkin and Leonardo Schvarstein, Identidad de las organizaciones, invariancia y cambio, Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1989), Beer aims the critique at management literature. He opens with Bertrand Russell’s reply to a reporter: “I define the practical man as the man who has no idea what to do in practice” (TBYT 2009: 186). He notes: “The evidence is that as the problems become worse and more complicated, the approach to management becomes more and more reductionist and simplistic” (TBYT 2009: 186). His argument against this “pop management” is cybernetic. He cites the Conant–Ashby theorem, which “states that a regulator is only as good as the model it contains of whatever it is that has to be regulated” (TBYT 2009: 187). A business managed through its balance sheet is managed through an inadequate model: “It does not have requisite variety” (ibid.). DC had made the same point about the “unidimensional monetary scale” (see chapter 24.4). Reductionist science and “bottom line” management fail in the same way, and of the former Beer writes that it “has understood the parts of man and of matter, in intricate detail, but has lost the holistic vision of both” (TBYT 2009: 190).
26.2 Autopoiesis and identity
Beer takes Maturana’s concept and gives it a cybernetic formulation, most fully in “Laws of Anarchy”. A homeostat, Beer explains there, “is a regulatory mechanism, that holds some critical variable within physiological limits” (TBYT 2009, “Laws of Anarchy”: 32). Within this class there is a sub-class: “An autopoietic system is a homeostat for which the critical variable held within physiological limits is its own organization. Thus an autopoietic system produces itself” (TBYT 2009, “Laws of Anarchy”: 32). Beer stresses a detail: “Maturana is explicitly NOT saying that it re-produces itself: he considers that a side issue”; the word is “simply the Greek for self-making” (ibid.). In the lecture he turns the idea into a polemic: “The proposal is that the main business of the government is to produce itself” (ibid.). For Beer the concept “solves the problem of identity which 2,000 years of philosophy have succeeded only in further confounding. There is no need to postulate a mystical something, which ensures the preservation of identity despite appearances” (TBYT 2009, “Preface to Autopoiesis”: 67). The preface explains why. Every philosophical school searched for the “it” that remains the same through change, and each ended with something unreal. Maturana and Varela’s “it” is “notified precisely by its survival in a real world”; analysis cannot find it, “because its categories may all have changed since you last looked” (ibid.). Beer sums up: “The very continuation is ‘it’” (ibid.). Against Berkeley he adds that autopoiesis “says that something that exists may turn out to be unrecognizable when you next observe it” (ibid.). The preface also records a change of mind. Maturana and Varela held that coding and information are notions of the observer and not phenomena of the physical domain. Beer first found this “plainly wrong”, then accepted it: “Nature is not about codes: we observers invent the codes in order to codify what nature is about” (TBYT 2009, “Preface to Autopoiesis”: 69). The observer argument of DC (see chapter 25.1) is here applied to information itself. Beer then extends the concept to social institutions, further than the authors themselves were agreed to go: “if a social institution is autopoietic […] then, on the author’s own showing, it is necessarily alive. […] what does matter is that the social institution has identity in the biological sense” (TBYT 2009: 71). He notes that the two authors “do not fully agree between themselves” on this question (TBYT 2009: 70). He himself is not in doubt: “For I am quite sure of the answer: yes, human societies are biological systems” (TBYT 2009: 70). His examples include “firms and industries, schools and universities, clinics and hospitals, professional bodies, departments of state, and whole countries” (ibid.). In practice such an institution “is not just the random assemblage of interested parties that it is thought to be” (TBYT 2009: 71). Reform therefore does not simply change it; legislation or even revolution “proposes a new challenge to their autopoietic adaptation” (ibid.). Beer adds a warning in the language of recursion (see chapters 3.3 and 6.1). The architects of change treat the system at their own level as autopoietic, “but they insist on treating the systems their system contains, and those within which their system is contained, as allopoietic” (TBYT 2009: 72). In “The Identity of Organizations” the same argument runs through self-reference. Living systems “define themselves as they go along. They iterate their own identity” (TBYT 2009: 188). Beer acknowledges that many disagree about social organizations, and states his position: “Organizations do iterate their own identity: they are self-referential and self-organizing” (TBYT 2009: 188). Why do organizations survive poor management? “The answer says that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that the system is primarily self-organizing” (TBYT 2009: 189). Beer refers back to his own earlier distinction, in Cybernetics and Management, between processes whose regulation can be circumvented and those “regulated by the very act of going out of control”, the “intrinsic controller” (ibid.). He then gives a small formalization. If meaning is a function of structure and structure a function of meaning, substitution gives a structure that is “a self-referential recursion of itself, and the now isolated concept of meaning has altogether disappeared!” (TBYT 2009: 191). The prologue ends with a summary sentence of which the draft quotes the final clause: the organizational identity “is complex in itself because it feeds upon complexity, and […] is self-organizing because it computes itself instead of reacting to external stimuli” (TBYT 2009: 192). The link to self-reference and consciousness in BD is covered in chapter 23.2.
26.3 Paradigms and change
In the Concordia address “About Flat Earths” (1988) Beer asks for change at the level of paradigms. He first speaks of “models of Unreality” that graduates are responsible for updating, and then says that updating models is not enough: “It is a question of paradigm. I define a paradigm as a model that exhibits a closed logic. It means that our attempts to break out of a fixed pattern of thinking are constantly defeated—by running headlong into our own premises” (TBYT 2009, “About Flat Earths”: 183). From working in eighteen countries he names the most common such paradigm: “We cannot do as you propose because—you don’t understand—that’s not how we do it”; “It is the Noah’s Ark Syndrome” (TBYT 2009: 184). The demand follows: “IF YOU WANT TO CREATE CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them” (TBYT 2009, “About Flat Earths”: 184). The definition fits the theory of models in DC. There, progress in science is “the overthrow of a model […] that has exhausted its usefulness” (DC 1966: 122; see chapter 24.5). A paradigm, in the 1988 sense, is a model whose logic prevents its own overthrow. Beer’s BOTF glossary defines paradigm as “an exemplar or pattern; a basic way of doing something recognizable beneath many superficial variations” (BOTF 1981: 403). The two definitions do not contradict each other, but they stress different things: BOTF the recognizable pattern, the Concordia address its closure against change.
26.4 Learning an outlook
The title essay, “Think Before You Think: Learning an Outlook” (previously unpublished), is autobiographical. The editor describes it as “An experiment in autobiography, far from finished at the time of Beer’s death” (TBYT 2009: 271). It is written with digressions and an interlocutor called Polycarp, who interrupts the author. Here the quilt appears in full. An outlook grows: “An evolving outlook is pieced together, like a patchwork quilt that has no prior design” (TBYT 2009: 272). The quilt-maker “works with whatever materials are available for much of the time” and sets patches aside until they are recognized as belonging (ibid.). Beer decided early “never to regard the process of learning an outlook as completed, but actively to pursue that activity to my dying day” (TBYT 2009: 296). Most people, in his view, stop: they “seem to give up the process sooner or later, often as early as puberty, and that is a tragedy” (ibid.). He separates learning an outlook from learning in general: “learning an outlook means incorporating experience as it happens, formulating and refining it continuously” (ibid.). The next sentence ties it to the theory of models: “It means adjusting the model of life itself while it is being lived” (ibid.). Beer applies to his own biography the “prognosis continuously corrected by feedback” of DC (DC 1966: 100; see chapter 24.1). He sees his life’s theme in a single distinction: “How could anyone have imagined that I would spend so much of my life trying to understand and to delineate the distinction autonomy/independence—whether in babies, or in communities, or in corporations, or in provinces, or in countries—all of which turn out to have formal identity” (TBYT 2009: 308). The occasion is his own birth: “I was now an autonomous unit, but by no means independent” (ibid.). He adds: “The issue is central to organizations of every kind, and of every political system, to this day. Also to this day, people do not understand it” (ibid.). On my reading, the distinction corresponds to the relation between System One autonomy and the cohesion of the whole in the VSM; Beer does not draw that link in this passage. The essay also ties epistemology to the body. Discussing the senses, Beer notes that “Many self-organizing systems are similarly difficult to discuss, because they are subject to a form of what logicians call undecideability” (TBYT 2009: 300). His physical example is the smell of nitrous oxide, which cannot be investigated as such, because exposure to air changes the substance. And: “The fact is that the fiendish puzzles of epistemology, which sophisticated people imagine are founded in language, have profoundly physiological bases” (TBYT 2009: 300).
26.5 Holism through communication and control
The same essay names what science is missing. Reflecting on the complexity packed into a single fertilized cell, Beer writes that modern biochemistry has highlighted “the quantifiable complexity that has to be handled as a problem of communication and control” (TBYT 2009: 281–282). He then generalizes. Science, philosophy and logic have been reductive: “So anything that is said about wholes is at once analyzed into parts by the traditional tools of science or philosophy or logic, and loses whatever is important about its wholeness” (TBYT 2009: 282). Mathematics has nevertheless left “a trail of valuable clues”; in particular, “The field of set theory treats of wholes in preference to isolated parts” (ibid.). It is the same set theory in which the homomorphic brain models of DC were worked out (DC 1966: 137; see chapter 24.4). Then comes the sentence: “The time will eventually come when the dimension of communication-and-control is recognized as the missing clue to holistic thinking” (TBYT 2009: 282). Beer gives a working definition of “dimension” in the same passage: “A working definition of a dimension is a condition of existence” (ibid.). The sentence returns to the definition at the beginning of this text: cybernetics as the science of control and communication (chapter 1.1), and as a “transdisciplinary science” (chapter 1.5). The epistemological strand of Think Before You Think also closes the arc of Part V. In DC Beer argued that systems and models are acts of recognition by an observer (chapters 24 and 25). In the later texts he applied that argument to identity, to institutions and finally to himself, the quilt-maker whose outlook is a model continuously adjusted “while it is being lived”.
26.6 Models of reality in the shorter pieces
Several shorter pieces in the collection return to the model as the observer’s only access to the world. The occasions below are those given in the editor’s source notes. “Cybernetics of Humankind” (first published in The Journal of Human Potential, January 1976) argues from the physiology of perception. The senses and the brain filter variety from the moment signals arrive, and Beer concludes: “I want to establish that we do not ‘just know’ reality, but have a necessarily low-variety model of reality to work with” (TBYT 2009, “Cybernetics of Humankind”: 39). The filtering supplies a shared classification and with it a way of talking “that gives expression to the model—and to nothing else” (ibid.). What remains is “the human potential to question the models, to doubt the programming” (ibid.). “An Open Letter to Heinz von Foerster” (ASC Forum, January 1976) applies the Conant–Ashby theorem (chapter 2.9) to the regulation of large systems: “Since every regulator must be an effective model of the system regulated, it ought to consist of an isomorphic mapping of the system” (TBYT 2009, “An Open Letter to Heinz von Foerster”: 52). Current approaches fail because “the mappings are contorted homomorphisms and not isomorphic at all”, and “the guaranteed isomorphic mapping is the identity mapping” (ibid.). A large system innervated with an ultrastable network of microprocessors would approach that identity mapping (ibid.). On my reading, this asks more of a regulator’s model than DC asks of a scientific model, which is a homomorphism whose omissions cost utility but not validity (chapter 24.3); Beer does not compare the two. The same letter diagnoses a bureaucracy that preserves its own organization instead of the nation’s as “pathological autopoiesis” (TBYT 2009: 54). “Requisite Ross”, written in the mid-1970s for ASC Forum and previously unpublished, defends Ashby’s Law against a friend who called it “a mere tautology”: “Always suspect the word ‘mere’”, since “the entire corpus of mathematics is either tautologous—or wrong” (TBYT 2009, “Requisite Ross”: 45). In the Second Annual Teilhard Lecture, “I Said, You are Gods” (King’s College, London, 2 December 1980), Beer insists “that these scientific accounts of reality are best called MODELS”, whose “utility (as distinct from their truth or their inclusiveness) is judged by their predictive capacity” (TBYT 2009, “I Said, You are Gods”: 75). This is the criterion of DC (chapter 24.3). From the Conant–Ashby theorem he derives a limit: “we cannot regulate our interaction with any aspect of reality that our model of reality does not include” (TBYT 2009: 77). He adds “that the distinction between what is real and what is unreal is determined not only by the content of the model, but by the kind of distinction that the model has the competence to draw” (TBYT 2009: 77–78). The same lecture cites “the cybernetic theorem of the recursiveness of viable systems” for the claim that the Earth is “an integral viable system” (TBYT 2009: 80). “The Preposterous Inference” (first published in So This Is 1984, 1984) reads political simplification as a loss of variety: “The paring away of detail from multifaceted issues will soon pervert their fundamental nature: it represents a loss of variety” (TBYT 2009, “The Preposterous Inference”: 120). “Recursions of Power”, the keynote address to the 7th European Meeting of Cybernetics and Systems Research (University of Vienna, April 1984), places scientific progress in “the detection of invariants in systems” and proposes that identity “will be an invariant that we shall find at every level of recursion” (TBYT 2009, “Recursions of Power”: 160–161). Beer uses “‘recursion’ in the mathematical sense of one system implying and being included in the next” (TBYT 2009: 161) and runs the Conant–Ashby theorem, “the regulator of a system must contain a model of what is regulated” (TBYT 2009: 163), through four levels: person, institution, nation and planet. For the institution the difficulty is one of recognition: “If your epistemology is such that fundamentally you do not recognize the system you’ve got, what is your hope of defining the regulatory system that will control it?” (TBYT 2009: 167). The address also states the maxim “The purpose of the system is what it does” (TBYT 2009: 169; see chapter 3). “On Suicidal Rabbits: a Relativity of Systems” (a Festschrift contribution for Russell Ackoff, first published in Systems Practice, 1990) puts the observer problem in the same terms: “To observe the observing system requires a new level of logical recursion” (TBYT 2009, “On Suicidal Rabbits”: 212). “The Culpabliss Error” (a “Memorandum marking his 70th birthday”, Liverpool John Moores University, 25 September 1996, in the editor’s note) begins with a story Beer had first published in DC (TBYT 2009, “The Culpabliss Error”: 233). It then returns to his term “surrogate worlds” for the models by which we manage: they are not systemic, “they do not exhibit requisite variety”, and “they are usually out-of-date” (TBYT 2009: 235). “But understanding is a product of modelling” (TBYT 2009: 239). The piece ends by asking for “a cybernetic insight into epistemology, with its emphasis on the role of models” (TBYT 2009: 247).
References
- DC — Beer, Stafford (1966). Decision and Control: The Meaning of Operational Research and Management Cybernetics. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Cited from the Stafford Beer Classic Library reprint, 1994.
- BOTF — Beer, Stafford (1981). Brain of the Firm. 2nd ed. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. (1st ed. London: Allen Lane, 1972.)
- TBYT — Beer, Stafford (2009). Think Before You Think: Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing. Edited by David Whittaker. Charlbury: Wavestone Press.