WHAT PEOPLE THINK THEY KNOW, THEY DON'T, WHAT PEOPLE THINK THEY DON'T KNOW, THEY DO!

WHAT PEOPLE THINK THEY KNOW, THEY DON’T, WHAT PEOPLE THINK THEY DON’T KNOW, THEY DO!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 16, 2010

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REFERENCE:

Author William L. Livingston IV of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010) sent me an interesting missive that he had created independent of the maturations of my own thoughts, as I was about to walk. Remodeling his domain resulted in cutting him off from his tool kit, but not from his mind.

The mind is an interesting playground that bubbles up new and sometimes tantalizing thoughts when frustrated, blocked from access to our comfort zone, or failure to make meaningful connection. That is my problem not necessary my author friend’s.

Since I am not inside his head, nor privy to his mind, my only clue is what he shares with me in spontaneous moments where the mind as playground doesn’t attempt to create meaningful algorithms, but finds a way for the bubbles to escape their cultural prison only to burst quickly as bubbles do. Consequently, we’re always thinking in remnants. It is good for the soul to recognize and accept this limitation of mind because it allows the mind to go somewhere from nowhere and happily forward in contradiction. The Holy Grail is zero entropy, which requires a climb out of our limitations whatever they may be.

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AUTHOR LIVINGSTON WRITES:

Revisiting my old haunts with the new cognitive framework has been quite a jolt. Stuff I didn't question at the time now jumps out at me as either profound or logically defective. It shows me how close one can be to "enlightenment" and remain stuck in miserable mode. Almost there is nowhere.

An example of benchmarking with the DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (D4P), below, has taken several items usually handled as separate attributes and fused them together. What's interesting is that when I feed back my redo to the original sources, the response is silence. The killer, I believe, is Turing's thesis about intelligence. When it comes to "meanings" about such things, I am far worse than random chance. Outsource to Fisher (He is referring to me and my natural inclination to be random).

The original, by a noted philosopher, was about self-organizing systems. The parts that fit were very good. The parts that missed, missed by light-years.

Self-organization is exhibited in some recursion processes where effective goal-seeking activity occurs without planning or a central authority. Self-organization derives from local interaction of the elements comprising the system and it is always spontaneous. Interaction of elements is both parallel and distributed, depending on the disturbance. For some events, all elements act at the same time. For others, they don’t. With no element a coordinator/manager, each element is autonomous.

Since institutions cannot be self-organizing, operational command and control for organizing to purpose comes at extra cost. Organization imposed cannot solve problems that require intelligence building. Impressing the institutional ideology (infallible) on the troops to support command and control is intolerant of the autonomy intrinsic to effective goal seeking. Recursion and repetition comprise a joint restriction writ large.

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

William,

I was preparing for my daily walk, and I was thinking of many things, then Clarence Darrow slipped into my consciousness. Maybe you and I are telepathic. We humans have been essentially the same for thousands of years. Could we be evolving? I say this not because of instinct or motivation, but necessity. The writing is on the wall, and I sense Darrow got a glimpse of it.

In any case, I tend to think in letterhead themes such as this: "What we think we know, we don't, and what we don't know, we do." Immediately, I thought of writing a piece about it with a lead in with Darrow. But BB would not be happy, as I must ready my novel for publication.

My readers are an eclectic group, wise, energetic, knowledgeable, successful, and creatures of the system, victims of institutions, smothered in paradigms and puzzles of complexity that you present and attempt to unravel in D4P to lower our entropy.

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WHO REMEMBERS A BOOK TITLED “THE WORKER, ALONE” (1995)?

There are many ways to postpone the inevitable, to slow down the rush to oblivion, to bring some sense into the nonsense of the prevailing narrative, to take a stand even if it is on a collapsing cardboard box. I guess that would describe my effort and me.

My latest career has been in organizational development (OD), which is all about self-organizing. I failed to get readers attention with “The Worker, Alone,” although, I think you will agree, these prescient quotations have not withered in provocative freshness. I share them with you as caveat to your quest for getting somewhere in nowhere land:

(1) “Most workers drift into their occupations, many others feel pushed into unwanted careers. Few consider what the job means to them. To derive satisfaction from a job, the worker must be interested in the work. Too many treat work as a prison and find comfort in the victim complex, as if to say, I have no control over my destiny. These workers become bitter, perhaps even hostile in their relationships in the workplace, as they feel trapped. But who is to blame?”

(2) “Workers see economic parity as their birthright. It has never happened before, and it is unlikely to happen in the future. The proportionate distribution of wealth has not changed dramatically since the seventeenth century.”

(3) “Workers insist in the belief that they live in a classless society. Workers cannot accept that the boom is over. Meanwhile, politicians exploit this ambivalence. Both political parties assure workers that the boom is not over. Both sound the same; the rhetoric is the same, the assumptions identical. The common good, upon which the Republic was founded, now a radical idea, is missing, replaced in both parties by majority interest. Polling controls the mind of the time.”

(4) “Democracy loves mediocrity, but abhors, in equal measure, brilliance, idiosyncrasy, genius, or curmudgeons of any kind. Film action heroes, athletes and murderers compete for this worker’s limited attention span. The media give these superstars more exposure in twenty four hours than an iconoclastic Richard Feynman or cerebral Isaiah Berlin receive in a lifetime.”

(5) “For the past quarter century, we have had a bombardment of ideas on how to manage change. Actually, change in the workplace is on only secondary importance. Change will come about naturally, over time, once workers and managers bring about change in themselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change in attitude. Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way workers and managers minds view the world. Order requires the individual going against the grain.”

That was 1995, thirteen years before the economic meltdown in 2008. Clearly, what we think we know, we don’t.

My sense is the only way we can change this is to somehow make connection with what we think we don’t know, but do. Meanwhile, entropy is a gaining on us.

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WHAT PEOPLE WANT

People don’t want you to mess with their minds. They want to believe the myths of their religion that have been programmed into them; the myths of their culture and its singular place in the firmament; the myths of their heroes as their being strong, focused, confident and true and not weak, lost, confused and dissembling as they are. The list could go on for pages.

What people want and what they know is what they refuse to think they know, and that is that the myth parade is a charade, a collage of worn out ideas that are stubbornly maintained for how else can they go forward without thinking? .

Civilizations as well as individuals have cognitive biases, and they have evolved over time into truisms, or some kind of ism.

You are taking measure of entropy by fighting reality with D4P, and people – engineers as well as others – are caught up in the chaos of complexity not only of change but in the persistence of these myths that now serve them so poorly.

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Few books have disturbed me (as that is the correct word) as much as D4P. It is a radical document that blasts through the safety net of our cognitive dissonance to leave nowhere land for somewhere land, a place we’ve never been before, and are therefore afraid to go.

No one knows better than you that for an idea to take hold it must have some remnants of that idea already in place. My wonder is if there is enough there to make it so. I certainly want to think it is so.

For that to happen, I believe, and I think you are attempting to do this, readers must discover that what they think they don’t know, they do. Your book will cause pain and discomfort for those who prefer not to think at all but only to believe what they have been programmed to believe, and to think everything will be all right in the end. It won’t.

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I have not read MARK TWAIN's autobiography, but he comes to mind. Twain was a freethinker and had a very dark side to his mind, a side that he didn’t want exposed until he was dead for one hundred years, which happens to be 2010. His reputation is secure but his concerns about religion, institutions, ideologies and human intransigence are closer I suspect to your ideas – if extracts I have read are any example. You, unfortunately, are without a one hundred year cushion.

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CLARENCE DARROW, DARWIN, AND EVOLUTION AS EPILOGUE

William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes "monkey trial" still clung to the belief that the whale swallowed Jonah and regurgitated him, as he believed all the miracles of the Bible.

Darrow asked Bryan if God commanded the sun to stand still so that Joshua and the Israelites could avoid the slaughter, as the Bible says, or did Bryan believe the sun moved around the earth as people believed in biblical times?

Bryan was forced to believe the earth moved around the sun, forcing him to acknowledge much of the bible is written in metaphor reflective of the knowledge of the times.

Darrow then reminded Bryan that God didn’t stop the sun, as the sun didn't move at all. Bryan was forced to concede this point as well. That said he won the trial given the mind of the times. Metaphor and entropy are strange bedfellows as it is difficult to move people off their cherished beliefs.

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Since 1969 when I left Nalco after experiencing apartheid in South Africa, I have been a lay student of religion. BB can attest that I have a sizable library on religion, including that of Freud, whom I put in the same proselytizing category, as he hitched a ride on science and developed a philosophy of the mind as he saw it, and came up with psychotherapy.

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I returned to the university for six years after South Africa, and studied psychology, sociology, and methodology within these curriculums while learning about evolutionary theory mainly through the books and articles (Nature) of Stephen Jay Gould.

If you can imagine, I subjected BB to nine hours of unabridged tapes of "Full House" by Gould one summer as we drove to Minnesota. The narrator was Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Gould's tapes covered Plato to Darwin.

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Science has unraveled laws of nature and we have invented laws of society and culture often inconsistent with nature. We have done so believing it necessary to support our survival in opposition rather in concert with nature. Times change but societal laws persist beyond their usefulness. You address this in D4P. I wish you well.

Media people put "experts" on television, which is the main source of most people's information, that and the Internet. Experts are asked to comment on these social-cultural aberrancy, and what they say is then taken as gospel.

Experts are believed to know when they actually don't, but think they do, and sometimes are quite convincing in their delivery. I’m thinking of “Dr. Phil,” for example.

It is the same in most other fields of expertise, including science, when science wanders off its fulcrum into the arts, philosophy, and behavior. For example, economics is all about behavior. Experts can even win Nobel Prizes for economics and still get it wrong. No discipline uses science more rigorously than economics, and yet economics has driven us to the brink of absolute entropy time and time again.

On the other hand, and there is always an "on the other hand," these are our guides who take us through the forest of shadows into the partial light of day. I say partial light because what we see is not actually there. It is only what our consciousness allows us to think we see.

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Forty years ago, I wrote about this phenomenon rather poetically before I read Antonio Damasio on consciousness. I discovered I knew what I thought I didn’t know. It was captured in a novel never published titled “The Triple Fool.” At the time, I was disillusioned with the anchors society had provided me, including religion, and, yes, the anchors of my upbringing in a culture that lied to me as well as to itself, and got away with it, or did it?

In many ways, I felt that since 1969 I have been sleep walking through life fighting to find consciousness, or enough of it to purchase some meaning. My wonder is if Clarence Darrow felt this as he saw the powerful forces of unreason taking hold and control of the world he was leaving, a world I was about to enter, a world that continues to come apart at the seams.

Here is what Darrow wrote in his 1932 autobiography:

"The number of people on the borderline of insanity in a big country is simply appalling. These people seem especially addicted to believing themselves saviors and prophets. It takes only a slight stimulus to throw them entirely off balance."

So, you see D4P, far removed from the problems of engineers and their litigates, has become a document of knowing without knowing, or venturing into the complexity that we call "society," with all its synthetic constructs, constructs that are no longer serving us, and like Darrow with Bryan, cut off at the pass by believers who are willing to die for metaphors.

Be always well,

Jim