A Hall of Mirrors

We live in hall of mirrors, a world of augmented memories constantly recreating not only the past, but also the memories of past futures never realized. Those futures were also built on memories reconstituted according to the beliefs of their times (as our ours) with the memory technologies of their times, in turn incorporating earlier futures past, in infinite regress. Past and future are continuously revisited, re-imagined, and reconstructed as we feel it should have been, sometimes taken as fact, sometimes as fiction, but always fictitious.

Most of the time we are no more aware of this than we are that all of our memories are re-imagined each time we recall them. Memory, both personal and collective, is an act of imagination that rewrites each memory even as it is remembered. Like Heraclitus' river, it is an ever-changing stream into which we can never step twice.

This is what neuroscience tells us about memory, but we do not act upon these findings, instead continuing to behave as if memory, and thus reality, were fixed entities. Just as the ancient Greeks and most philosophers in the West have rejected Heraclitus' notions of flux and constant change as the bases for reality, in favor of eternal verities and archetypes, we will most likely reject the science that tells us that our minds are in a constant state of flux and change, forever failing to understand or acknowledge the consequences.

Curiously, we know these things to be true, as we speak often of how unreliable our memories are, and legally accept the possibilities of false memories. Is it so much easier to ignore this and go on living in a world of a fixed and concrete sort? This is an issue long recognized by historians, though only a few books, such Thomas Desjardin's, These Honored Dead, about the construction and reconstruction of the Battle of Gettysburg, or Jill Lepore's, The Name of War, (about King Phillip's War) deal with it at length.

These are no mere academic arguments; as a people that argues political and cultural positions from history on a daily basis in the national media, these are vital issues. If we are going to make cases based on the ideas of the Founding Fathers (though which ones and at what point in their lives is always a sticky point), beliefs found in the Bible (where again we are dealing with the problem of which one and even more with what point in time), the Enlightenment (with a diversity of opinion ranging from Hume to Rousseau, generally I prefer Montesquieu), Lincoln (whose ideas evolved rapidly), FDR (the idealistic pragmatist), then we need to understand how they re-imagined events themselves, and how we have re-imagined them as well. If we can't be bothered to do this, then we are simply surrendering our minds to manipulation by extremists, propagandists, and advertisers.

This is not the worst; the way it contributes to an inflexible mindset is the greater danger. If you think you can fit the past into a little, unchanging box, you are more likely to treat the present in the same way. In an era of rapid change and rolling crises, that is a recipe for disaster, if not extinction. Neuroscience is undoubtedly getting a lot wrong that will have to be corrected latter, and a number of unsupportable claims are being based on it's findings, but our own experiences of memory and perception show that it is fundamentally right about remembering being a form of re-imagining. We need to learn to act on that insight and stop ignoring it.

"The problem is to change the rules...."

Last weekend, I reread a favorite essay, Gregory Bateson's, "From Versailles to Cybernetics." He delivered it as a speech in 1966 and published it a few years later in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. In places it reads as a jeremiad, but the overall point, and the overall tone are something else entirely. Speaking just a few weeks shy of his sixty-fourth birthday, he considered the two most important events of his lifetime the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and the emergence of cybernetics in the half-decade after the Second World War. The first he saw as a great tragedy, the second a great sign of hope, though one too easily misused and abused.

The Versailles Treaty seems as pivotal today, though for somewhat different reasons, as it did forty-five years ago. To us, it's importance results from its boundary drawing in western and central Asia; to Bateson it represented a series of attitudinal changes, including important ones about how international relations should be conducted.

He saw cybernetics as having a similar impact, that is, as having changed attitudes about how the world should be run. But he also warned that the use of cybernetic theories (specifically game theories) to determine the parameters of international relations, was quite dangerous. He might have added that using those theories in that way to determine any patterns of behavior is hazardous.

We tend to see cybernetics in a very limited and narrow way. It isn't just about computers, or games, or even thermostats, but about complex relationships, which is what computers and games, and thermostats analyze. Your immune system is just as much a cybernetic system as any supercomputer. Cybernetics is really the philosophy and study of systems that adapt to their environment.

One reason it represented such attitudinal change, was that it broke with older ideas of causation. (If you think concepts of causation are unimportant or incidental, I would direct your attention to the debates over evolution and creationism, to the arguments concerning the causes and remedies of the present economic and ecological crises, to most of the developments in cancer research over the past few decades, to the causes of almost any war you care to mention, or simply to how a flower grows.) As long as we saw cause as rather direct and acting in one direction, even if it might have multiple effects (so-called billiard-ball causality, as the arguments resembled a cue ball striking and transmitting motion to one or more other balls) we could have only the most limited understanding of complex systems. We were stuck with either trying to reduce everything to simple logic, physical systems, or throwing up our hands and shouting "Deus vult!" ("God wills it!")

Cybernetics added information to the equation, it developed the idea of feedback (and feedback loops) and made possible the understanding of complex interactions within cells that become cancerous, and between them and the immune system, itself dependent on a variety of feedback mechanisms. It permitted us to look more closely at the events that led to both World Wars, the arms races, the diplomatic miscalculations, and the societal and psychological states that produced them.

Unfortunately, Bateson saw in his own time, that instead of being used to interpret the detailed complexity of political, economic, or social systems, cybernetics was employed in a deterministic way to give advice about what to do. Too few variables were allowed into play. The games and simulations were based on reductionist assumptions about human behavior. The results could have led to nuclear war. Used this way, cybernetics simply reinforced the existing rules of the game. It could not lead to a way out because it did not allow for new rules. In his words, "The problem is to change the rules...." Cybernetics could be (can be) used to lead to greater flexibility or greater rigidity. (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972, p. 477.)

We remain in much the same situation today. Limited variables, limited rules, and limited choices are considered viable and acceptable. That should be unacceptable and, unless it leads to a chaotic series of events through feedback, kicking the social, political, and economic systems into new states, the results are likely dire.