Releasing Change: Understanding Flux, Pattern, and Constraint Part I
Note from the Editor
The notion of flux-and-constraint is essential to understanding change, including the way in which change is not something we can ever bring about, but something we merely need to release.
Here we take a technical look at the concept of flux and constraint, which we have already touched on more informally in “Realizing Possibilities”, and in “Some Common Myths about Change” Part I and Part II.
Along the way we briefly explore key concepts like pattern, invariance, constraint, persistence, and stability, all essential for understanding change.
—The Editors
Releasing Change: Understanding Flux, Pattern, and Constraint—Part I
All things being equal, at least in this particular universe of ours, we can expect continuous, random flux. The persistence of any particular order or pattern in any region of this universe is relatively low-probability and needs accounting for. If we observe the persistence of pattern—that is, if some of our observation-descriptions continue to hold over time—these states of affairs are said, in the jargon, to ‘exhibit constraint’. A scientific approach will seek to account for the existence of constraint. In a nutshell: flux is to be expected, all things being equal; and so persistence presupposes mechanism.
What do we mean by constraint? Constraint in our sense, a concept derived from the work of the pioneering cybernetician Ross Ashby (1903–1972) in the 1950s, is simply a relationship between sets—the set of possible values of a variable vs. the set of values of that variable actually observed, which would be a subset of the total range of possibilities.
We think of constraints as being constraints on variance. Let us suppose that a given variable, say the temperature of this room, is observed always to stay strictly within certain values for that variable—say between 20 and 22 degrees Celsius. In our scientific jargon, that variable, the temperature of this room, is said to exhibit constraint.
Another way to say exactly the same thing is to say that this variable does indeed vary, but only within certain limits. And so it displays a certain invariance, namely always being between 20 and 22 degrees. The general word we use for invariance, or the ‘exhibiting of constraint’, is pattern. The pattern of anything is whatever is invariant from one occasion or occurrence to the next.
Where we have pattern, that is, where we have some invariance, or where only some subset of the items in a set of possibilities are observed to be realized in fact, we say that the set of possibilities observed exhibits constraint.[1]
Pattern itself is simply the exhibiting of constraint. Pattern, invariance and constraint are essentially three different ways of looking at the selfsame phenomenon (redundancy and information being two further, more-or-less equivalent notions from the same family of cybernetic concepts—but to get into all that will take us too far afield).
But so what? In the remainder of Part I, we shall try and indicate how pivotal all this is for our understanding of change and how we go about creating it.
First of all, how do we account for the fact that, improbably, a particular invariant defined order persists here, instead of random flux? How do we explain, account for, the maintenance of this particular order? What stops things from varying beyond certain descriptive limits? How do we explain the fact that some of our descriptions continue to hold over time? In the case of the temperature of the room only ever being between 20 and 22 degrees, we might discover that there is a thermostat controlling the temperature.
In general, by Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason, the persistence of any description over time demands explanation—specifically, any enduring pattern or regularity therefore presupposes mechanism. Mechanism, in turn, on this view, is thought of in terms of the presence of some further constraint or constraints.
A Note on Persistence
Now we must be careful to note that persistence, not stability, is the obverse of flux. Persistence refers quite generally to the continued existence of any particular defined order or identity—any pattern. The notion of persistence designates this continued existence in neutral fashion. Unlike stability, the concept of persistence doesn’t imply that whatever it is that continues to exist possesses any particular power of doing so.
Stability, on the other hand, a more specialized and sophisticated notion, refers to the maintenance of a particular position, form, or configuration in the face of perturbations tending to displace or disrupt it. Stability refers to a power or potential to resist alteration, the power of maintaining or re-establishing an equilibrium. Stability at one level of description is dependent upon continuous changes at another, lower level. For example, the maintenance of a stable body temperature requires a host of changes in the dilation of blood vessels, in perspiration, shivering, and so on.
But here we’re interested not in stability but merely in plain old simple persistence as contrasted with flux, and vice versa.
Ten Upshots, for Starters
Suppose we abandon the usual way of looking at things, in which persistence is to be expected everywhere and that any changes must be accounted for as the effect of some cause or causes. And suppose we adopt instead the alternative, photographic-negative view we have been sketching here—a figure-ground reversal—and suppose we from now on were to look at things the following way instead: There would be nothing but ceaseless change everywhere were it not for the specific, identifiable constraints in place producing any observed invariance.
Look what happens.
First, it becomes impossible to ask for the cause of an observed (usually undesirable) change, because the concept has no place in this alternative view.
Second, we can no longer consistently think in terms of how we might, in effect, cause some desired change, as if we were applying some kind of force such as ‘motivation' to shift things, by overcoming the prevailing inertia by some kind of assault on it.
Third, we would have to abandon the idea that there is such a thing as resistance to change, and we would see it as being, at most, the exception rather than the rule. What is called “resistance” to change is simply evidence of a further set of constraints which have not yet been taken into account in the design of the proposed change. We would neither expect resistance, nor look for ways to deal with it. And we would recognize that much change that is resisted darn well ought to be resisted because it is either the wrong change or has not been properly designed, taking enough points of view properly into account.
Fourth, we would be thinking in terms of identifying observable, objectively describable patterns in neutral terms.
Fifth, if we were wanting to achieve a certain change, we would be looking first for the specific, objectively observable constraints in place locally that meant that the observed, undesirable state-of-affairs (pattern, invariance) was the only state-of-affairs currently possible given those constraints.
Sixth, we would be thinking in terms of the corresponding desired state-of-affairs as an alternative pattern, and thinking about what set of constraints, as near as possible to the existing set of constraints, would make the desired state-of-affairs instead now the only state-of-affairs possible once the set of constraints is altered accordingly.
Seventh, the desired change would be seen as something that would occur naturally, under its own steam, once we have altered the prevailing constraints.
Eighth, we could readily see how the change could occur, and ought to be set up to occur all at once, overnight, in one fell swoop.
Ninth, we would see change as something that we release, rather than bring about.
Finally, we would expect that change, if you go about it the right way and true to this revised view, should always be quick and easy, effortless and natural.
But to really understand how obvious it is that things should be this way, there is a lot more to say first about the view we have been putting forward here. To this, and the upshot for how we go about creating change, we shall now turn in Part II.
[1] Ashby (1956) in section 7/8 gives this example: A set of traffic lights (red, amber, green) can be in a number of states, a set of [8] possible combinations to be exact, (excluding “flashing” possibilities, etc.)—the variety (the measure of the number of possible states) is thus 3 bits; but the set in actual operation exhibits constraint: we never normally see all three lights on, or all three off, or red and green simultaneously or (in the UK) amber and red simultaneously. Since the set of 4 realized possibilities (variety=2) is smaller than the set of 8 theoretical possibilities (variety=3), constraint is exhibited.…
The exhibiting of constraint, on the one hand, and pattern, on the other hand are, again, two sides of a single coin, a single phenomenon. In the case of constraint we consider a set of possibilities: we view the relationship between the subset of realized possibilities to the wider set of total possibilities. In the case of pattern, we consider a set of actual observations, and look at what is invariant across all items in the set, the attributes that hold invariantly for all items in the set of observations (i.e. of slices). If we consider the set of possibilities to be the set of possible values, then if the set of possibilities exhibits constraint the values of those variables will invariably each fall within a certain interval and so the same description will hold of all the items in the set of observations and we shall find pattern. Contrariwise, if the same description holds invariably across all the items in a set of observations of a pattern, then the set of actually realized descriptions of any of those items will be smaller than the set of possible descriptions if their character were to fluctuate randomly, and hence will exhibit constraint.
© Copyright 1994, 2022 Dr James Wilk
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