Soon to be published as an e-book on Kindle
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
©
March 19, 2020, First Day of Spring
Reaction to the pandemic is simply a reminder that what you learn about a system in happy equilibrium tells you nothing about system behavior in disturbance. To obtain system control, as per Ashby's law of requisite variety, you require the system characteristic equation. In industry such is obtained by disturbing the system in several different ways in tests. In social systems, we do not yet have this equation. That's why our progress is set by applying disturbances in a systematic manner - the story of your life as well.
William L. Livingston, IV, author of The New Plague: Organizations in Complexity, 1985
W. Ross Ashby was a British cybernetician interested in the phenomenon of homeostasis or the way complex systems operate in changing environments to maintain a relatively stable equilibrium within tightly defined limits (e.g., internal body temperature at 98.6).
Ashby came up with the concept of variety as a measurement of the number of possible states of a system. His "Law" of Requisite Variety posits the idea that for a system to be stable, the number of states that its control mechanism is capable of attaining (its variety) must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.
Ashby’s Law was framed in the context of self-regulating biological systems, but it rapidly became relevant to a number of other systems. In colloquial terms, Ashby’s Law has come to be understood as a simple proposition: if a system is to be able to deal successfully with the diversity of challenges that its environment produces, then it needs to have a repertoire of responses equal to or exceeding the problems thrown at the environment. So a viable system is one that can handle the variability of its environment. Or, as Ashby put it, only variety can absorb variety.
Organizations traditionally cope with environmental challenges by reducing the variety in which they have had to cope. Mass production was meant to reduce the variety of its environment by limiting the range of choices available to consumers (Vance Packard’s “The Waste Makers,” 1960 wrote about how “planned obsolescence” impacted productivity and the national character). Product standardization was essentially an extrapolation of Henry Ford’s slogan that customers could have the Model T in any color so long as it was black.
But the rise of the Internet has made variety-reduction increasingly difficult if not impossible. By any metric the pace of change in our information ecosystem is of an order of magnitude beyond comprehension and therefore seemingly impossible to resolve. We have a greater knack for creating than comprehending.
In Ashby’s terms, variety has increased in proportion to its complexity. Given that variety reduction seems unfeasible in this new situation, the implication is that many of our organizations and social systems—ones that had evolved to cope with variety—are no longer viable. For them, the path back to viability requires that they have to find ways of increasing their variety. And that is the big question: how do they do that? That is the conundrum, or is it?
Livingston says, “In social systems, we do not as yet have this equation.” I wonder.
With THE FISHER PARADIGM, I look at the situation from an entirely different perspective. When I was at university, I was not fascinated with the laboratory in chemistry, but with biochemistry. Why so?
It started with an experiment in which I was involved regarding osmosis. The experiment related to the osmotic hydraulic equilibrium that the human body attempts to maintain between the body’s lymphatic system and its blood supply by passing through a semi-permeable membrane. What was fascinating is that the human body’s autonomous system manages systemically to practice Ashby’s Law despite human biological complexity or essentially without our involvement in the process.
We are currently consumed with nightmarish fear of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Another thing I learned in biochemistry is that our bodies contain the pathogens that could lead to such things as cancer, yet many go through life and avoid this unsettling state. Likewise, human existence is vulnerable to invisible microbial pathogens that are either dormant within us or festering in the animal and insect kingdoms.
Now, about THE FISHER PARADIGM, remembering fondly the homeostasis maintenance of a constant internal environment to such factors as body temperature, blood pH, and a multitude of other chemical reactions constantly occurring, I confess to practicing a kind of homeostasis in my external environment, a practice that I have gradually come to realize is part of my nature as a Homo sapiens.
It has to do with instinct, intuition and integration, and the idea of fight, flight, and survival. It is a social system predicated on our primordial brain, often referred to as the “reptilian brain.”
Everyone has this brain but society, indeed, civilization prefers to ignore our primordial nature which is bombarding our mind with how a situation reads in terms of instinct, intuition and integration translating sight into insight and action. THE FISHER PARADIGM is a modest attempt to bridge this void.
Only last night, I was telling Beautiful Betty that THE FISHER PARADIGM has a lot in common with the current pandemic of the coronavirus. “How so,” she asked. Then I reduced it to the equation that is representative of a dozen scenarios in the book:
Cognitive confidence has waned in the Coronavirus Pandemic
Intuition
· Personality – mankind is under siege
· Geographic – an invisible microbial pathogen is on the rampage
· Demographic – draconian focus on the crisis has reached the point of insanity
Fear and panic has stolen the mind of humanity
Maximum connection we find leads invariably to maximum separation. It happened with the Bubonic Plague, and is now happening with the Coronavirus Pandemic. Why has no learning taken place?
LIFE WITHOUT A CAUSE
Maximum connection invariably leads to maximum separation as we are now experiencing, and it is clear people don’t know how to handle it. They are angry because they can no longer be on automatic robotic pilot and are confronted with the prospects of being alone as persons, people who have never learned to be alone or separated from the noise and commotion of others.
The inconvenience finds scientists looking desperately, first for a vaccine for the coronavirus, and then for the cause. The cause, as it was with the Bubonic Plague, is likely to be found in one of nature’s creatures that was the innocent carrier of the pathogen.
Perhaps this would be a good time to realize that life has no cause as much as we wish to give it such a noble role.
But our lives, all of our lives, have a symmetry that could be missed. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer points out that when we reach a certain age, and look back over our lifetime, it can be seen to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little consequence turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed this plot?
Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an unconscious aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed of the will within you. This has led me to THE FISHER PARADIGM and to sharing this missive with you.
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