The Science of Change—Part IV
Introduction
In this final instalment of our four-part Cook’s tour of metamorphology, the new science of change, we begin by considering the reality of everyday life.
From there we consider the nature of mind and its pivotal role in the actual mechanics of the universe.
And then we will explore the way in which metamorphology provides the scientific foundations for the very practical business of swiftly creating sweeping, major transformations overnight in the world of affairs with absolute precision, by means of tiny, typically inconspicuous, rigorously pinpointed communications.
—The Editors
The Science of Change—Part IV
The Ordinary Universe: Rediscovering the Reality of Everyday Life
As we have seen, metamorphology permits us to deal rigorously with the rich, concrete, idiosyncratic details of real life, to treat diversity seriously as an essential feature of the universe, and to accord fundamental explanatory significance to those very features of everyday life which the man or woman in the street knows to be of importance.
From this point of view, the rules of bridge or cricket, and the kinds of information contained in Hoyle or Wisden, may turn out to be every bit as fundamental as the laws of physics in accounting scientifically for what transpires at a given juncture in spacetime, if what transpires there happens to be, say, a card game or a cricket match.
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The Nature of Mind
Which leads us to something I have not yet called by name, and without which my short introduction to metamorphology would be like a synopsis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet omitting to mention the Prince of Denmark. I am referring here, of course, to mind.
Mind in human life, as some of my own work1 has argued, appears from this point of view as an abstraction referring to the realm of finding our way about in the world according to our designs, the realm of intervening in contexts according to our understanding of those contexts. It is the realm of intervention in contexts-as-understood.
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Mind and Body
What then, on this view, is the relationship of mind and body? Quite simply, on this view, there is no relationship between mind and body.
The alleged mind-body ‘relationship’ is like the relationship between the separation of powers in the American Constitution, on the one hand, and the arrangement of partition walls in the architecture of the White House, on the other hand. One has nothing to do with the other.
‘The mind’ and ‘the body’ are both, equally, abstractions, but they are abstractions—abridgements, ‘arrests in description’2—along very different lines.
To the extent that we are only concerned with the handful of aspects of some assembly corresponding to the tiny handful of aspects studied by physics (aspects concerned with, or derivable from, the descriptive dimensions of distance, time, mass, etc.), to that extent we abstract the physical aspects.
To the extent that we are concerned to understand the mechanisms of behavior by placing the behavior in the realm of conduct (“the complex background in which it is enacted”3) to make it intelligible, to that extent we abstract the mental.
There is an important sense in which ‘the mind’ is no more closely related to the brain than it is to any other organ of the body.4 And for my own part I can confidently assert, after more than five decades of investigation as a neurophysiologist, cybernetician, cognitive scientist and philosopher of mind, that the study of the brain has so far thrown no light (but much darkness) on our understanding of the mind, nor is it ever likely to do so. The whole business, on my reading of things, involves a philosophical error of the first water.5
Now ‘traditionally’, cognitive science has started from the false premiss that we have nature (equated spuriously with the so-called ‘physical world’) pretty well understood, at least in broad outline. The anomaly remaining to be accommodated within the physical scheme, so the story goes, is mind, and cognitive science seeks accordingly to understand the nature of mind and its place within nature as thus, Officially, understood.
The approach adopted by my colleagues and myself, however, has been to start from the other end and proceed in the opposite direction. We aim, as D. J. Stewart has aptly remarked6, not to reduce psychology to physics but to bring physics up to the level of psychology.
And so, in stark contrast to the prevailing view in cognitive science, we have taken the view that we have not yet even begun to understand the mechanics of nature—blinded, as we have been, by the physicists whom we have permitted, in E. A. Burtt’s phrase7, to make a metaphysic out of a method. But if we understand nature aright, along the incomparably richer lines of metamorphology, mind is no longer an anomaly at all.
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The Mind of Nature
For mind, more generally, from this point of view, can be seen to refer to those aspects of phenomena in the universe which inherently involve description, significance and point of view, where a defined pattern has its source in imparity, and so is the result of a design, and no less so even where, as in Darwinian evolutionary theory, there is no designer.8
Design or purpose—what Cudworth called “plastic natures”9—can be shown, in metamorphology, to be as essential to understanding the mechanics of the majority of observable phenomena in the universe as are the concepts of mass/energy, length, and time.
The framework of metamorphology thus not only provides a philosophical and natural-scientific basis for taking purpose as central to our understanding of human conduct. For more broadly, it provides a theoretically parsimonious basis for including purpose and meaning within nature, yielding a new and readily tractable understanding of the relationship between the mental and the physical.
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A General Theory of Intervention: Transformation Unleashed
What has so far interested some people the most, however, about the field of metamorphology—particularly in government and industry—has been, predictably, the emerging practical applications of this work.
The core of the detailed theoretical structure of metamorphology, which we have hardly even alluded to, is a General Theory of Intervention which provides an account of what it is for anyone or anything to act and what it is for anyone or anything to be acted upon. This theory turns on the concepts of description, point of view, agent, patient, free fall, and intervention.
Practically speaking, this has yielded, in turn, a method of agent/patient analysis for systematically identifying the smallest intervention in a given situation that will be sufficient to trigger an all-or-none transformation or ‘flip’ to some pre-defined, desired state-of-affairs.10
I have sometimes put the matter facetiously by saying that if chaos theory shows us how a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing can alter the weather over New England, this methodology provides a means of identifying which butterfly has to flap its wings for how long, just when, on which street corner in Beijing to guarantee a beautiful Labor Day weekend on Cape Cod.
More seriously put, the method, closely related to the method of negative explanation, permits the apparent complexity of any situation to be filtered to reveal the smallest intervention by an agent assembly that will result in the desired transformation in a patient assembly.
By identifying the set of constraints that make the present behavior of the patient assembly the only behavior currently possible, we can pinpoint which constraints, if lifted, will yield the transformation desired.
This theoretical capacity for “minimalist intervention” has already been applied successfully to creating significant real-world transformations by means of very small sets of precisely pinpointed actions. Some of the practical implications have already been tested by the C-suite of the world’s leading multinational corporations, in some thousands of applications ranging from the resolution of intractable problems to the overnight transformation of corporate culture.
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Transforming How Nature is Said
It is heartening, to say the least, to find that what has seemed to me and my colleagues to be such a rich field of study, such a powerful explanatory framework, and such a profound and fertile epistemological shift, should turn out, so early in the game, to have such profound empirical and pragmatic consequences, and consistently over the past four decades. These consequences, of course, sound startling only from within the narrow stable of the Official View.
If we can include within Nature a cluster of fundamental concepts traditionally excluded, as we have described throughout this four-part article, we can come to adopt an epistemology possessing better fit to the way Nature herself in fact would appear to operate—namely, locally, concretely, and in terms of unities, within a universe in which description and meaning play a critical determining role. To borrow Aristotle’s phrase, this constitutes a major transformation in “the way Nature is said.”
The founder of modern scientific methodology, Francis Bacon, said that “nature can be commanded only by obeying her.” If we can achieve this better fit, this greater obedience of our explanations and interventions to the actual dictates of Nature, then we can expect far greater, and more ecologically robust, command of Nature than the Official universe has so far accommodated.
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(C) Copyright 1995, 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
James Wilk, Principia Metamorphologica: Novum Organum; London: Brunel University (PhD dissertation), 1995
Oakeshott, M. (1933) Experience and Its Modes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Bedford, E. (1957) “Emotion," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, LVII, 1956–57
James Wilk, Principia Metamorphologica: Novum Organum; London: Brunel University (PhD dissertation), 1995
ibid.
D. J. Stewart, “A Ternary Domanial Structure as a Basis for Cybernetics and Its Place in Knowledge,” in Kybernetes, 1988, Gordon & Breach Scientific Publishers
E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science: A Historical and Critical Essay, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1932
D. J. Stewart, “A Ternary Domanial Structure as a Basis for Cybernetics and Its Place in Knowledge,” in Kybernetes, 1988, Gordon & Breach Scientific Publishers; James Wilk, Principia Metamorphologica: Novum Organum; London: Brunel University (PhD dissertation), 1995)
R. Cudworth, R., The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 1628, reprinted 1994 by Thoemmes Press, Bristol, UK
James Wilk, “Culture and Epistemology,” in The International Journal of Systems Research and Information Science, October 1989; James Wilk, “Some Common Myths About Change,” Invited Address, British Academy of Management Annual Conference, Proceedings, December 1991, reprinted here in Change in three parts; James Wilk, “The Metaphysics of the Physical World,” invited address to the Annual Conference of the Cybernetics Society (UK), September 1995; James Wilk, Principia Metamorphologica: Novum Organum; London: Brunel University (PhD dissertation), 1995