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23.08.2011, 12:20
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This post has been edited 2 time(s), it was last edited by carexfish: 23.08.2011 12:21.
True, False and Everywhere in Between
Let ’ s get one thing clear: clients of divination are not necessarily gullible
and/or superstitious as perceived by outsiders. Those clients are operating
within the acceptable norms of their society. They are individuals who are at
a loss as how to behave in the face of what today we would label uncertainty.
In the past they had to act in response to illness, drought, death, evil or loss:
when they found themselves in intransigent situations. Nowadays, clients
from business face failure from shrinking markets, rampant competition,
personal insecurity, a credit famine, technology out of control: what is
popularly labelled risk . And they too feel a similar intransigence.
Thus this book starts out with the recognition that all theory is a social
act of divination; that all theory has a utility that has nothing to do with it
being true or false. Indeed, its utility can be simultaneously both true and
false, and neither, all depending on both the observer, who is employing
the operations of that theory, and the situation where he fi nds himself.
Such operations should not be taken out of context; they are tied to the
preceding observations that were unavoidably utilized for the process
of theory construction. Theory therefore operates within the acceptable
norms of society, and as divination, it suggests a course of action that can be
taken with confi dence. Theory then is all to do with uncertainty. However,
be clear, uncertainty has little to do with randomness or chaos. Most of
Chaos disappears into the background as white noise, and we pass right
through it unnoticed. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is all to do with some
ordered elements that have been sampled from the Chaos , but which appear
in an unwelcome order, a strangeness that arises from an unexpected and
surprising conspiracy of events.
Chaos is not disorder, not even un-order; it is pre-order. It is the multiplicity
of complexities that characterizes any system prior to any distinction made
by human thought. Thus any notion of a Theory of Chaos is an oxymoron,
because theory already implies an order. That is why this book rejects the
popular misinterpretation of chaos as disorder, and why in the text the
word is italicized whenever its meaning as pre-order is intended. Chaos ,
therefore, is unapproachable by thought. Even these previous sentences, and
particularly the use of the word ‘ because ’ , are vague attempts at imposing
order, and so are inevitably misunderstandings. All understanding of Chaos
is necessarily misunderstanding; human thought is such absurdity piled
recursively upon itself. For that recursion must miss the non-linearity in
the situation: recursion is linear and thus artifi cial, unnatural, because it
simply fl ip-fl ops between subject and object, with the two states naturally
remaining distinct residuals at each step.
The human ‘ understands ’ a ‘ piece of the world ’ as a particular categorical
‘ thing ’ . Then he recursively focuses on understanding the rest, the residual
category, until by combining together the separate and separated fragments,
everything deemed relevant is ‘ understood ’ . According to Bertrand Russell
‘ every advance in a science takes us further away from the crude uniformities
which are fi rst observed into a greater differentiation of antecedent and
consequent, and into a continually wider circle of antecedents recognized
as relevant ’ (Russell, 1954). What is this but a description of tunnel vision?
However, by changing focus from the thing, onto other things (within its
residual category), the original thing goes out of focus. Hence the concept of
a ‘ thing ’ , and thus everything else, is a fallacy. Even the ‘ concept of a concept ’
is a paradox, but one that allows cognition to function undisturbed by the
peculiarities.
In thinking about thought, both the ‘ thinking ’ and the ‘ thought ’ are
simultaneously and refl exively subject and object of the process: a nonlinearity.
However, any rational theory is linear and requires a separation
between subject and object. Causality requires both a subject: the thing
affecting, and an object: the thing affected. The trick is to cut through this
Gordian knot of uncertainty and paradox, and just get on with living by
making the most of Chaos ’ s bounty.
In the academic literature, uncertainty is often related to risk and the
management of risk, implying an elusive underlying assumption that
uncertainty can be planned for. Apparently risk consists of a series of isolated
singularities. Hence individual events, for which tactics and strategies can
be developed, and thus risk, can be managed. Typical examples in the
fi nancial services industry include calculations of ‘ value at risk ’ that attempt
to simulate both the amount of money put at risk for a particular course of
action and its exposure. But calculations like these are just another layer of
divination, masked by the delusional effi ciency of mathematical techniques.
The crisis of 2008 was the outcome of what this unquantifi able exposure
to risk came to imply for fi nancial markets worldwide. In a system of such
complexity, control of the behaviour of the system itself becomes extremely
diffi cult, if not impossible (Mandelbrot, 2005). This confusion is often
responsible for the confounding of uncertainty and risk with ‘ true ’ Chaos .
Even the very act of articulating a risk implies an imposition on the Chaos ,
which actually ceases to be Chaos when it is sampled.
The world inhabited by humanity is intrinsically strange, fantastical,
magical. We are deluding ourselves if we think that we can always make sense
of that strangeness. Managing Uncertainty is just another futile attempt
at controlling the conspiracy of strangeness. There is order in uncertainty,
which is unwelcome because it approaches us out of the void. It doesn ’ t sit
nicely in the authoritarian glare of some universal theory. However, there
can be no ignoring that strangeness in the human condition, as it inevitably
returns to bite us.
By collecting all these strange events together under the label of uncertainty,
and by organizing ourselves as individuals or in groups, we hope that the
surprising events will either go away or become benign/advantageous. We
humans create structures that transform uncertainty into risk: a heady mix
of hazard and opportunity. Thus we swap hopelessness for the optimism in a
plan of action. In other words we submit to theory in order to gain a tenuous
handle on uncertainty.
However, different ages have different perceptions of uncertainty; and
so there are different approaches to theory construction and application,
delivering different risk assessments and prompting different decisions.
Note this book stresses decisions not solutions, because from its position
there are no solutions, only contingent decisions. And each decision is itself
a start of a new journey, not the end of an old one.
Indeed, there is no grander delusion than the production of a solution,
with its linear insistence on cause and effect. A decision about a particular
problem domain or a decision to act upon a situation can only trigger
changes with undetermined consequences, and these in their own turn may
become the basis for requiring even more decisions, and so on. ‘ Solutions ’
always ‘ multiply, proliferate, disperse, circulate, diversify, diffuse the
original problem ’ (Rossbach, 1993). Cause and effect merely implies a focal
point, choosing a single linear path through this multiplicity, which can only
exist within the scope of either: (1) an individual observer who prescribes a
solitary function for a system – a prescription that becomes self-fulfi lling,
and as a consequence the coupling between cause and effect appears even
tighter, or (2) many observers who operate single-mindedly, with that singlemindedness
predetermined by a shared belief in cause and effect.
Science First
Mistake
Delusions in Pursuit of Theory
by
IAN O. ANGELL
and
DIONYSIOS S. DEMETIS
B L O O M S B U R Y A C A D E M I C