The Science of Change—Part II
Introduction
In today’s post, we continue our synoptic survey of metamorphology, the science of change, drawing out some of the further threads which distinguish it from other ways of looking at reality and of understanding and studying change: our view of the ubiquitousness of flux or impermanence, the persistence of pattern rather than change as what requires explanation, our focus on states-of-affairs, our photographic-negative view of nature, the nature of change itself and its relativity to point of view, our deployment of only negative explanation, the notion of exhibiting constraint, the search for specific constraints, the concepts of free fall and intervention, the revival of the mediaeval philosophical distinction between agent and patient, the nature of behavior and its role in interaction, the abandonment of the usual map-territory dichotomy, the primacy of context, the radical reconceptualization of scientific objectivity, and much more, all jam-packed into as few words as possible (only around 1800 words in fact).
This is almost certainly our most technical post to date, but it is the shortest, simplest and most accessible account I have ever managed to write regarding the key concepts at the heart of the science of change which has been my life’s work, the science which forms the theoretical basis of all our practical work in Minimalist Intervention in the world of affairs.
So not a long read, but do be prepared for a slow one. This post today is packed with challenging and unfamiliar concepts, important ones though, so while it is not for the fainthearted, take it slooowwww enough, and, if the topic interests you, and you take some time over it over the course of the next two weeks, it might even turn out to be fun! For this stuff may be deep, but, fear not, we’re just going to stroll slowly across the surface, but please, do fasten your snowshoes!
—The Editors
The Science of Change—Part II
From Events to States–of–Affairs; Continuity, Pattern, and Flux
Last time, we followed in some detail one of the important threads running through the fabric of metamorphology, the new science of change.
Now in metamorphology we avoid the understandable but muddling tendency in science to reify “events”1—a tendency many have long critiqued—by turning our attention from events to states–of–affairs described in terms of pattern or invariance.
We seek, in our scientific work, to account for states–of–affairs obtaining at certain points in time, and accordingly eschew all talk of events. Conceptually, this is closely related to a second further thread I must tease out for you. Namely, in metamorphology it is persistence and not flux which is the focus of our inquiry.
This may sound odd for an engagement concerned with the study of change! But first of all, we distinguish flux sharply from change. To oversimplify rather drastically our own account of the matter, flux refers merely to variance—variance in the temporal differentiae in nature which make the attribution of change possible at all.
Flux may be random, chaotic, or it may be simply (or not-so-simply) patterned, and it is characterized as much by continuity as by change. Whereas change refers to an attribution of a descriptive difference in some defined invariance.
So, for example, tides—here is an example of patterned flux—may fluctuate continuously, but as the tide tables show, they can hardly be said, in this strict sense, to change. A ‘sudden’ solar eclipse from our (layman’s, frightened stone-age ancestors’) point of view is only continuity, persistence, from an astronomer’s point of view. If a solar eclipse just failed to occur when expected by the astronomers, or by ancient or contemporary astrologers for that matter—well now, that would be a change, and one that would make front-page news!
As to the question of where change comes into our investigations, I shall return to this in a few moments. For now, let us note that we seek in this field of work to account for pattern, that is, the persistence of descriptive invariance in states of affairs.
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A “Photographic Negative” View of Nature
Moreover, we adopt, if you will, a “photographic negative” view of nature. On this figure–ground reversal of the Official view of the universe, we hold that, all things being equal, we are entitled to expect continuous, random flux everywhere; the persistence of any particular order or pattern in any region of this universe is thus viewed as highly improbable, and needs accounting for.
From this perspective, persistence presupposes mechanism; and it is our job, as scientists, to elucidate the mechanism that accounts for the persistence of any descriptive invariance—pattern.
If there were ceaseless, unconstrained, random flux, there would be, in any assembly we might be observing, an infinity of possibilities that might now be realized just here. But only a small subset of the logical possibilities are actual. The behavior of the assembly is thus said to exhibit constraint.
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The Search for Constraints
Our scientific inquiry is aimed at revealing the nature of these constraints. These constraints will include certain universal, empirically established invariances we normally refer to as “laws of nature” or of physics (e.g. that light cannot travel faster than C).
But our inquiry need not stop there, that is, we need not confine ourselves to citing only such universal invariances as happen to apply.
For in specifying more fully the set of constraints–on–variance that preclude all states of affairs other than the one we are seeking to account for, the theoretical edifice of metamorphology provides us with a rich set of methods for additionally specifying, with the highest degree of scientific rigour, those far more numerous sources of constraint which are not universal at all but quite concrete, local, and idiosyncratic to the situation.
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Negative Explanation
Our scientific explanation is not complete until we can satisfy a questioner’s quite specific “why this rather than that.” To do so we shall find it essential to specify constraints which may be idiosyncratic to this assembly, in this context.
And so, in metamorphological explanation, the concept of flux–and–constraint replaces the much more epistemically permissive concept of cause–and–effect.
A state–of–affairs is now only to be regarded as having been explained scientifically once it can be demonstrated to be the only state–of–affairs not currently precluded.2 And as you can begin to see, our explanations in metamorphology are always explanations in terms of unities.
The concepts with which we are able to operate rigorously in metamorphology include purpose, intention, and design, which again, as we discussed last time, can be defined in terms of imparity (unequal weighting) and can be rigorously derived theoretically3 from some pretty basic logical and physical concepts on which all of empirical science depends, once we allow description an explicit and legitimate place in our armoury of fundamentals. And as we saw, this is something we cannot logically avoid doing in science.
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The Nature of Change
Change is a difference over time—a descriptive difference. And so change is always change–from–a–point–of–view.
In metamorphology, we analyze situations in terms of an agent assembly (that which does) and a patient assembly (that to which something is done).
We look at an agent’s observation/attribution of change in the context of the agent’s intervention into the “free fall” of the patient assembly (see below), as seen from the agent’s point of view, i.e. with respect to a set of aspects heeded.
The agent’s intervention to create a pre–defined change in a state–of–affairs—from one description of the patient to another—is viewed as a design problem.
The agent’s behavior at any point in time is seen as the only behavior currently possible given the design constraints within which the agent is operating. The patient assembly, whether it is basically inert or whether it can also be analyzed in agent terms, similarly is viewed as being in the only state not currently precluded.
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Free Fall and Intervention
We can define a “descriptive space” as a set of (mutually orthogonal) descriptive dimensions. A set of dimensions is mutually orthogonal if for any given particular, its value on any of these dimensions cannot be deduced from its value on any or all of the others (for example, you cannot normally deduce the width of something from knowledge of its height).
The description of a particular along all of the dimensions constituting the descriptive space can be given by a vector (an n–tuple, e.g. [x,y,z]) specifying the coordinates of the particular’s “representative point”4 within the space.
For shorthand, rather than speaking of ‘the location of a particular’s representative point’ within the space, we shall refer to ‘the particular’s location’ in the space. As a particular’s description along these dimensions changes over time, the particular will come to occupy different locations within the space, and we can track the trajectory of the particular through the descriptive space over time.
For some agent assembly to intervene in the free fall of some patient assembly is for the agent to act upon it such that the patient’s trajectory through a defined descriptive space will be different to the trajectory it would have followed had the agent not so acted.
But it is only meaningful to consider the “free fall” of an assembly with respect to the possibility of some agent’s intervention. Free fall is thus defined as an assembly’s trajectory through some descriptive space over time—the description of some assembly as it would unfold over time—if the agent did not intervene at all.
Free fall is thus always relative to a point of view of—a set of descriptive aspects heeded by—an agent. The agent intervenes in order that the patient will be descriptively different over time—from the agent’s point of view—to what it would have been in the absence of his intervention.
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The Nature of Behavior
Some descriptive pattern, some invariance is to be replaced by another which is preferred by the agent.
In metamorphology, whether in the human realm or in the wider biological realm, the agent’s purposes and point of view are paramount, and any valid scientific explanation must take account of them, not seek (per impossibile) to explain them away. Behavior is intervention, the purposeful achieving of a selected descriptive state–of–affairs in preference to the alternatives.5
But what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The patient’s response to the agent’s intervention will itself be an intervention on the patient’s part. The patient must be construed as an agent. And it is always with reference to the first agent’s knowledge of the nature of the–patient–assembly–as–agent that the intervention is ideally to be designed, and properly understood.
We can only understand the ‘interaction’ between two assemblies by understanding what each is “trying to do.” There need be nothing ‘anthropomorphic’ about this notion, but of course man, we should argue, is best understood anthropomorphically anyway.6 Behavior7 is thus understood in metamorphology, as in cybernetics, as the behaving entity’s varying of all kinds of things which do not matter to it, in order to maintain or secure the things (descriptive states–of–affairs) which do matter to it.
What is more, our analytical methodology here ensures that we can never forget that the patient assembly into whose free fall an agent assembly intervenes is never part of some common universal system of nature—not part of the territory, as it were—but is part of the–territory–as–mapped–by–the–agent. An agent intervenes in a context–as–understood.
Our universe is thus seen not as a grand unitary system but as a collection of Leibnizian windowless monads, each mirroring the activity of the other monads from its own unique, subjective point of view.
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Scientific Objectivity
This perspective thus brings with it a distinct view of what objectivity must needs involve in the scientific engagement.
The subjectivity of the object of study is the asymptote of objective understanding.
The sine qua non of the scientific engagement, in our view, is the elucidation of mechanism. In science we aim to achieve greater and greater fit between the distinctions in terms of which we seek to understand the mechanism of the assembly, on the one hand, and the distinctions from which the assembly is itself actually operating on the other hand.
Metamorphology, by the way (but not incidentally!), is rooted firmly in a philosophy of science which is uncompromisingly foundationalist, essentialist, and realist, and is committed unreservedly to a correspondence theory of truth, and in all of these respects it thus finds itself directly at odds with the whole ‘postmodern’ and ‘post-structuralist’ tradition.
I know this is a lot to grapple with for one fortnightly post, but I hope this all makes sense, or will by next time, when, in Part III, we will consider the radical difference all of this makes to our whole conception of the nature of reality and the mechanics of the universe, an essential prerequisite for understanding the equally radical implications for creating major desired transformations in the world of affairs by means of very small, precisely pinpointed, inconspicuous interventions (which will be spelled out in the fourth and final part of this article, the time after next).
© Copyright 1995, 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Despite the difference in terminology (at least in English translation), our view here, on which metamorphology has been based for nearly half a century, is essentially equivalent to the view highlighted later in the important work of the physicist Carlo Rovelli and his colleagues in relational quantum physics—the ubiquitousness of impermanence or flux, with the persistence of what we are calling states-of-affairs as requiring special explanation—though Prof. Rovelli uses the term “events” rather differently from most scientists who use the term, and he, for one, is careful never to reify events. See his The Order of Time, London: Penguin Books, 2018. Also see our earlier post on the epistemological relationship between metamorphology and quantum mechanics, A Science of the Singular: The Interactional View Comes of Age
Cf. G. Bateson (1967) “Cybernetic Explanation,” in American Behavioral Scientist, X, no. 8, April 1967, pp. 29–32, reprinted in G. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, London: Paladin, 1973.
J. Wilk, Principia Metamorphologica: Novum Organum; London: Brunel University (PhD dissertation), 1995
W. R. Ashby (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics, London: Methuen & Co
Cf. Powers on behaviour as the control of perception: W. T. Powers (1974) Behaviour: The Control of Perception, London: Wildwood House; W. T. Powers (1989) Living Control Systems I, Gravel Switch, Kentucky: The Control Systems Group; W. T. Powers (1992) Living Control Systems II, Gravel Switch, Kentucky: The Control Systems Group
R. Taylor (1966) Action and Purpose, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice–Hall
W. T. Powers (1974) Behaviour: The Control of Perception, London: Wildwood House; W. T. Powers (1989) Living Control Systems I, Gravel Switch, Kentucky: The Control Systems Group; W. T. Powers (1992) Living Control Systems II, Gravel Switch, Kentucky: The Control Systems Group