Tao cannot be mocked - IV

At the beginning ... I said that the focus would be upon validating the existence of very large systems. This goal may now be made more specific by asking what features of human religions, ancient and modern, become intelligible in the light of cybernetic theory and similar advances in epistemology. It is time to reverse the trend which since Copernicus has been in the direction of debunking mythology, to begin to pick up the many epistemological components of religion that have been brushed aside. In doing so, we may come upon important notions partly displaced by trash (particularly the kind of trash produced by religious people pretending to scientific authority, which is not their business) or partly lost by the failure to understand what religion was about, that has characterized most of the scientific debunking. The battle over the Book of Genesis is a piece of history of which neither the evolutionists nor the fundamentalists should be proud. But I have discussed that matter elsewhere and intend here to pick up what can be picked up after the battles are over – would that they were!

Religion does not consist in recognizing little bits of miracles (miracula, “little marvels”), such as every religious leader tries to avoid providing but which his followers will always insist upon, but vast aggregates of organization having immanent mental characteristics. I suggest that the Greeks were close to religion in concepts such as anangke, nemesis, hubris, and diverged from religion when their oracles claimed supernatural authority, or when their mythologists embroidered the tales of the various gods in the pantheon.

Can we on our part recognize among the scientific findings enough of the basic principles of traditional religion to give a base for some rapprochement? In the thinking that has led to my present position, I‘ve used a combination of approaches – logical, epistemological, and traditional – going from one to another as the circumstances of my life provided the opportunity and as the form of the argument suggested. I am trying to investigate the communicational regularities in the biosphere, assuming that in doing so, I shall also be investigating interwoven regularities in a system so pervasive and determinant that we may even apply the word “god” to it. The regularities we discover – including regularities and necessities of communication and logic – for a unity in which we make our home. They might be seen as the peculiarities of the god whom we might call Eco.

There is a parable which says that when the ecological god looks down and sees the human species sinning against its ecology – by greed or by taking shortcuts or taking steps in the wrong order – he sighs and involuntarily sends the pollution and the radioactive fallout. It is of no avail to tell him that the offense was only a small one, that you are sorry and that you will not do it again. It is no use to make sacrifices and offer bribes. The ecological God is incorruptible and therefore is not mocked.

If we look among the necessities of communication and logic to find what might appropriately be recognized as sacred, we must note that these matters have been investigated long and ponderously by a very great many people, most of whom do not alt all think of themselves as students of natural history. One class of those people call themselves logicians. They do not draw distinctions between the phenomena of communication and those of physics and chemistry; they do not assert, as I do, that different rules of logic apply in the explanation of living, recursive systems. But they have laid down a large number of rules about what steps shall be acceptable in joining together the propositions to make the theorems of tautology. Furthermore, the have classified the various kinds of steps and kinds of sequences of steps an have given names to the different species of sequences, such as the different types of syllogism discussed... [Their taxonomies are not unlike the taxonomies constructed of insect or butterfly species, and indeed these different species of syllogism live in different niches and have different needs for their survival.] We might well adopt this classification as a first step towards a natural history of the world of communication. The steps that the logicians have identified would then be candidates for the role of examples in our search for eternal verities that characterize that world, more abstract than the propositions of Augustine.

But, alas, logic is blemished, particularly when it attempts to deal with circular causal systems, in which the analogs of logical relations are causal sequences that proceed in a circle, like the paradox of Epimenides the Cretan, who declared, “All Cretans are liars.” This paradox the logician dismisses as trivial, but the observer of “things” – even things that can hardly claim to be alive – knows that Epimenides argument is a paradigm for the relations in any self-correcting circuit, such as that of the simple buzzer or house doorbell.

I have taken the presence of such circuits to be one of the criteria by which I define a mind, along with coding, hierarchical organization, and collateral energy supply. Such circuits can be found in many mechanical and electrical forms, such as the house thermostat … or the device that controls the water level in the tank of a toilet, but more significantly they arise in the physiology of organisms that must correct for variations in temperature, blood sugar, etc., and in ecosystems where different populations (say snowshoe rabbits and lynxes) vary in interconnected ways keeping the whole in balance. Logic tends to be lineal, moving from A to B or from a premise to a conclusion; logic frowns on arguments that move in circles. [Similarly, formal logic rejects as invalid the metaphorical connections that are so pervasive in the natural world.]

I am therefore unwilling in the description of life to trust to logic or logicians as a source of verities. It is, however, interesting to consider the properties of the self-corrective circuit itself as an example of profound abstract verity, and this is the subject matter of cybernetics and the first step in using cybernetics in moving towards new ways of thinking about nature. Perhaps we may be driven later to some still more profound and abstract set of descriptions of relations – but the relations of circuits will do for a starter, always remembering the verity that there are inevitable limitations on any act of description, which we have yet to spell out in detail.

Tao cannot be mocked - III