Chapter 1 Introduction to Fuzziology
Chapter 2 Bridging the Study of Complexity with
Social Fuzziology
Chapter
3 Understanding Fuzziness of Ourselves
Chapter4
Understanding Fuzziness of Sociaty
Chapter1 Introduction to Social
Fuzziology
I do not
insist that my argument is right in all other respects, but
I would contend at all costs both in word and deed as far as I could
that
we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that
one must search for the things
that one does not know, rather than if we believe
that it is not possible
to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it.
Socrates
1.1 The Basic Postulate of Fuzziology
In a broad sense, fuzziness is the opposite of precision. Everything
that cannot be defined precisely (that is, according to some broadly
accepted criteria or norms of precision) and everything that has no
clearly described boundaries in space or time is considered a bearer of
fuzziness. In a narrow sense, fuzziness relates to the definition of
fuzzy sets as proposed by Zadeh (Zadeh, 1965): sets, the belongingness
to which is measured by a membership function whose values are between
1 (full belongingness) and 0 (non-belongingness).
Mathematics has developed powerful tools for studying and dealing with
fuzziness - uncertainty, imprecision, vagueness - that researchers
encounter when accumulating facts in different fields of their inquiry.
Advanced methods of probability theory and mathematical statistics,
probabilistic reasoning and Bayesian networks, rough sets and fuzzy
logic help researchers not only describe and explain fuzziness, but
also reduce it and, if possible, eliminate from their experimental
findings, theoretical statements and practical solutions. Science
always strives for precise, valid and reliable results; so does any
purposeful action, any reason-based activity.
Fuzziology is not another mathematical study of fuzziness, and social
fuzziology is not another field of application of fuzzy logic.
In the focus of fuzziology is fuzziness inherent in what we know about
ourselves, about the sources and nature of our experience, of our
thoughts and feelings, drives for understanding and urges to create and
realise our potential. This kind of fuzziness is at the core of our
existence, at the essence of our humanness; therefore, it affects any
field of human activity, be it mathematical study of fuzzy equations
and fuzzy integrals or engineering design and implementation of fuzzy
logic-based methodologies, fuzzy control systems and fuzzy robots.
Fuzziness studied by fuzziology is not 'over there', not in an outer
world separated from us, but in the inner world of our own experience,
in the 'swarm' of our thoughts and ideas, emotions and feelings,
beliefs and dreams. We see and understand as much from the outer world
- the world in which we live - as we have already developed inside us
while learning how to enrich our experience, hone our awareness, expand
our consciousness and strengthen our capacity to sense, think, create
and know.
The basic postulate of fuzziology is simple: Our understanding and
knowing grow from within us and cannot be implanted or imposed from
without. Human understanding and knowing are self-organising processes;
and any self-organising process in nature works from inside out. The
universe expands due to forces that emerge from inside of its whirling
dynamics. Every single seed grows from inside when the outer conditions
do not impede but stimulate this growth; so does our understanding. It
expands and grows from inside following the inner urge to know when
there are conditions in the external world nourishing this urge and
facilitating its realization. So, there is a role for human society to
play - not to impede our inner drive for wisdom, but to encourage its
outward fulfilment.
Our perceptions of reality, our experience of the events of life, our
thinking and feeling, understanding and knowing are deeply rooted in
the life of society and its development; we are simultaneously creators
and products of society. The processes of our understanding and knowing
are social in their origin and nature. So is the fuzziness imbedded in
them. Therefore we refer to fuzziology as social fuzziology.
1.2 The Approach of Fuzziology
1.2.1 Dynamic Character of Fuzziness
Fuzziness is inherent in our perception of reality and in every kind of
activity based on this perception, such as experiencing and making
sense of the events of life, feeling and responding emotionally (while
involved in communication with one another, with nature and with
ourselves), thinking and speaking, learning and understanding, knowing,
acting and creating.
When developing its approach to study fuzziness, fuzziology
acknowledges its dynamic character and makes an emphasis on the
following four points:
* Fuzziness has its sources and supporters, causes and effects,
activators that increase it and make it denser and thicker, inhibitors
that decrease it and make it rarer and thinner, exposers that make it
easily recognisable and obscurer that make it hidden and hard to be
disclosed.
* Fuzziness has its own dynamics - forces and energies that make it
move, change, evolve and transform, and its own carriers that are
either immaterial like thoughts, ideas, feelings, emotions, longings,
beliefs, dreams, aspirations, energy fields and spaces, or embodied in
concrete human actions, in specific non-animated and animated forms, in
discernible experiential events, in various kinds of signs and omens,
phenomena and processes, human-created products and machines.
* Fuzziness is able to self-organise into dynamic patterns with
boundaries that can become rigid and hard-to-surpass or soft and
easy-to-permeate, to form attractors or repellers in the experiential
or mental space of the individuals, to structure into layers (levels)
of fuzziness going deeper into one's thoughts and feelings, or into
whirlpools (vortices) of mental, emotional or spiritual energy
producing creative forces - powerful individual urges and drives - that
enable fuzziness to transcend the boundaries of its dynamic patterns,
to move from one level to another, from one attractor to another, from
an individual to another.
* Fuzziness can never be fully eliminated from the human perception of
reality and experience of life - from our thinking and feeling, from
our understanding and knowing.
The fuzziness and uncertainty are identical in their meaning, if the
uncertainty is considered as embedded in human perception of reality.
If the uncertainty is seen as something outside human ability to
perceive, to experience, to understand and know, as something that
exists ëover-thereí, in the 'objectiveí world that
surrounds us, then uncertainty has another connotation than fuzziness.
Fuzziness is a human characteristic, and not a characteristic intrinsic
to an external object. Our knowledge about an external object can be
fuzzy (vague, uncertain, ambiguous, obscure), but the object by itself
has nothing fuzzy in its existence. The object is what the natural or
human-created dynamics - forces, energies, substances and forms, which
act upon it and express through its current appearance - have made it.
At the moment when we consciously direct our attention towards an
external object, the object 'enters' into the realm of our fuzziness -
the fuzziness of our perception: experiencing, feeling, thinking,
understanding, knowing, acting. We call this operation of including an
external object into our fuzziness interiorisation, in analogy with
Bakhtin's operation under the same name, proposed to define the process
of appropriation a story by people who together create it when involved
in a common dialogue (Morson and Emerson, 1989). After the
interiorisation, the subject (the perceiver, the 'experiencer', the
thinker, the knower, the actor) and the object (of perception,
experience, understanding, knowing, acting) stop to be separated; they
are linked at-one by the dynamics of the subject's fuzziness.
1.2.2 The Bootstrapping Algorithm
The approach of fuzziology is entirely centred in the self-referential
nature of the process of human understanding.
For us to understand an object (a phenomenon, a process, an
experiential event, ourselves, society) means to go beyond the limits
of our own fuzziness related to what we understand and know about this
object. But in order to move beyond the fuzziness of our understanding,
the only tool we can use is again our own understanding with the same
fuzziness that is embedded in it. So the process of understanding is a
kind of realisation of a bootstrapping algorithm in the human mind,
that is, seeding or facilitating emergence of conditions which helps
one's own fuzziness to pull itself by its own bootstraps and moves to
another level. The realisation of such a bootstrapping algorithm
becomes possible because the fuzziness is dynamic - it moves: shrinks
and expands, accelerates and slows, hardens or softens, transforms and
transcends its own dynamic patterns.
By studying our own fuzziness - its dynamic nature, sources, causes and
factors which effect its motion, we are able to succeed in the
activating of bootstrapping algorithms and help fuzziness transcend
itself and move to another level.
The levels of fuzziness correspond to the levels of our capacity for
understanding, to the levels of our consciousness. To say that the
fuzziness has moved to another level means that the process of our
understanding has moved to another level also, and what was fuzzy and
incomprehensible for the mind at the level, from where the fuzziness
has pulled itself, has become clear and comprehensible. Of course, this
does not mean that there is no more fuzziness in our understanding,
that we have won the battle with the fuzziness and succeeded to
extinguish it once and for all. Not at all!
The fuzziness is 'alive' - full of vigour and potential to become
denser and to expand wider, but its dynamics are 'whirling' at another
level. One can call the new level 'higher' or 'deeper', it does not
matter; what matters is that one's understanding has become deeper,
that one's consciousness has been expanded to a higher level, that the
limitations, which fuzziness used to impose on one's thinking at the
previous level, have been transcended. The inquiring mind will soon
encounter the limitations that the fuzziness will bring with at the new
level of its evolving dynamics, so that to challenge the mind to
explore it further and make it move again.
1.2.3 Paradox of Fuzziology
What is important in applying the approach of fuzziology is that we do
not need to fight with the fuzziness of our understanding in order to
eliminate it. To eliminate fuzziness would be equivalent to stop
developing our ability to perceive, experience, think, feel,
understand, know and act, as the fuzziness is inseparable from each and
all of these vital processes.
The same motivation and urges, which support the self-organisation of
the human consciousness, support the self-organisation of the fuzziness
- its ability to expand, shrink or 'pull itself by its own bootstraps'.
The dynamics of the fuzziness inherent in one's understanding are, at
the same time, dynamics of this very process of understanding, as
understanding means nothing but overcoming (going beyond, transcending)
the limitations of fuzziness that is embedded in this understanding, in
its motion, changes and evolution.
How easy it would be, if it were possible to separate the fuzziness
from the process of understanding, to isolate it and then either to
eliminate or keep it in captivity, while victoriously moving outside
its boundaries. Unfortunately, this is impossible! The fuzziness
permeates the whole process of one's understanding and not only it, it
permeates one's whole life, experience and consciousness.
The more we try to push fuzziness in one only region in our mental
space - the space of our thoughts and ideas, or in our experiential
space - the space where the trajectories of our lives unfold, the wider
and denser its unexpected emergence in other regions.
When we create (seed, facilitate) conditions to energise and strengthen
- broaden and deepen - the process of one's understanding, we
simultaneously create conditions to energise the fuzziness dissolved in
this process. Here lays the greatest paradox of fuzziology, no matter
whether it is focused on studying the fuzziness of a single individual
or the fuzziness of the society as a whole.
The higher the impetus to grow and evolve in consciousness, the more
vigorous the expression of the fuzziness inherent in this growth and
evolvement.
This paradox propels the development and application of the approach of
fuzziology ? an approach of:
* exploring the sources, nature, dynamics, causes and effects of the
human fuzziness;
* not fighting with the fuzziness, but trying to grasp its
self-organising (bootstrapping) dynamics and to 'nudge gently' from
within, in an almost unnoticeable manner. Such kind of 'gentleness' and
'secrecy' is necessary in order not to provoke the emergence of
undesirable psychological reactions of resistance to changes in the
human mind, which are inevitable if there are well-established dynamic
patterns of fuzziness in one's understanding and knowing
(unfortunately, such patterns are always present in the human minds).
* activating the realisation of bootstrapping algorithms in human
understanding by stimulating emergence of conditions that helps
fuzziness 'pull itself by its own bootstraps', withdraw its limitations
from a certain level of development of oneís capacity to think,
feel and experience, and then move to another level.
The above-formulated paradox puts emphasis on the significance of the
practical realisation of the approach of fuzziology; each step in
expanding its field of realisation has a greater value, as it deals
with fuzziness of more potent nature.
At the same time, the paradox acts in favour of increasing the
applicative power of the approach of fuzziology: the more 'virile' the
fuzziness, the greater its capacity to transcend itself. This is of
primal importance for the evolution of the human thinking - for
deepening of our understanding and expanding of our consciousness.
The paradox of fuzziology requires a high level of alertness at every
stage of development of our consciousness to avoid absolutizing of what
is considered known. According to the paradox of fuzziology, one can
expect that the higher the level of consciousness (that is, the wiser
the individual), the easier the fuzziness can pull itself from that
level, and yet it is clear that efforts need to be applied and
conscious actions to be undertaken for this to happen. Otherwise the
fuzziness cannot be made move, no matter how high is its
self-organising potential.
1.2.4 Example
Let us apply the approach of fuzziology to explore the nature and
sources of the fuzziness around the motives for the US to initiate a
war against Afghanistan in November 2001. Officially, the war was
characterised as a 'war against terrorism', with an immediate aim to
capture Osama bin Laden and destroy his terrorist organisation al
Qaida.
At the first level of the fuzziness around the motives for this war, we
were prepared to almost immediately justify the war as an act of
revenge (in the spirit of the rule: 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for
a tooth') against the terrorist attacks that killed more than three
thousands people in New York and Washington.
Now, when the war is over and more facts and evidences are accumulated
to strengthen the capacity of our understanding, we ask ourselves: what
this war really was aiming at? As any, the war caused the death of many
people, not only soldiers but innocent people also, in Afghanistan -
one of the world's poorest country, where more than 8 millions people
have been forced from their homes by draught and civil war. The war put
an end of the Taliban regime and a new interim government was formed.
Osama bin Laden was not captured and the world terrorism was not
destroyed, as the war had absolutely nothing to do with the removal of
the deep social and economic roots and sources of the terrorism,
nourished by today's monstrous power differential. The huge economic
contrasts in society, the unsurpassable gaps of the ever-growing social
inequalities and the inability of the poor countries and the
marginalised social and ethnic minorities to resist the devastating
effects of the global capitalist establishment on their economies and
culture, on their urges for self-expression and independence are among
the strongest catalysts of the terrorism all around the world - in the
South and North America, in the Western Europe and Russia, in the
Middle-East and Africa.
It was a 'war on terror' at an entirely superficial level only - war
concerned with the effects and not with the causes of the terrorism.
The overthrow of the Taliban government did not contribute much for
weakening of the global terrorist network or making the world order
more democratic. There are many countries with political rulers even
worse than the Talibans. The social policy of the government of Saudi
Arabia - a country considered a friend of the US - does not differ much
from the policy of the Taliban leaders, and yet the US has no intention
to overthrow the regime in the Saudi Arabia. The oil of that country
has a much greater significance for the US than the suppression of the
human rights there, particularly, the rights of the women.
When the fuzziness of our understanding moves and self-organises, based
on more real-life material and contemplation, we may recall that in
Afghanistan during the 1970s, with the support of Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan - countries that could hardly be called democratic -
Washington encouraged the creation of Islamic detachments recruited in
the Arab-Islamic world and made up of what was called 'freedom
fighters' at that time. As it is well known now, that was the
environment in which the CIA enlisted and trained Osama Bin Laden, so
the latter was prepared as terrorist entirely by the US (Ramonet,
2001).
At the next level of the evolving dynamics of the fuzziness in our
understanding of the war in Afghanistan, we may bring into
consideration the previous attacks of the US on the Muslim world, such
like Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext - bombing
that destroyed half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killed
tens of thousands of people (no one knows, because any inquiry at the
UN into that event was blocked by the US), attacks on Iraq and Libya,
which caused the death of innocent people, just to 'give lessons' to
the governments of these countries (as they were officially
explained). The US is the key military supporter to the Israeli
occupation of the Palestinian territory and to the suppression of the
Palestinian people's endeavour for freedom and independence. The US
embargo against Iraq continues, causing the deaths of thousands of
innocent civilians while preserving the regime in power. Before 1989,
in the years of the could war, the US was actively involved in a
crusade against communism in the Islamic world. Sometimes that resulted
in mass extermination: thousands of communists killed in Iran; almost
1m communists killed in Indonesia. So there are certainly reasons for
the people of the Islamic world to hold hostile feelings towards the US
politics.
The bootstrapping algorithm of the fuzziness in our understanding of
the war in Afghanistan is significantly facilitated when one becomes
aware of the gigantic appetite of the Texas petrol companies - the most
powerful supporters of the President G. W. Bush administration - for
the resources of oil located in the Caspian region. The huge oil
treasure of that region its extremely high qualities irresistibly keeps
attracting the economic interests of the petrol magnates in the US for
a long time. The US government cannot but act as an armed militia for
the richest corporations in this country, otherwise the US Presidents
would have no chance to be 'freely' elected or to make their decisions
work (the 2001 election campaign of the president Bush cost 200
millions dollars!). The thirst of the US petrol giants for an
ever-greater economic power might have had the ultimate word in the
declaration of the first war conflict in the new millennium. Everything
else - all that meaningless fuzzy charisma of the official speeches
about saving the world from terrorism, bringing the terrorists to
justice, defending freedom and democracy, helping the people in the US
and the poor countries in the world - was nothing but a brainwash to
'fuzzify' and delude people's understanding.
The war in Afghanistan had almost zero effects on preventing the
emergence of new acts of terrorism and new Osmana-Bin-Ladens in the
world, but it has perfectly served the insatiable thirst for military
and economic power of the producers of advanced military tools for
killing and for the petrol giants in the US.
It needs to be noted that the application of the approach of fuzziology
for understanding a particular event, phenomenon or process has never
an absolute ending; it is ready to take into account consideration of
new facts and developments as they appear and unfold.
1.3 The Project of Social Fuzziology
Social fuzziology explores fuzziness in our understanding of society
and ourselves as its creators and products at the same time.
ëSocietyí is not simply an object out there, to be
understood well or badly through theories and categories. Society is a
co-constructed object, a collective but not necessarily consensual set
of meanings, expectations, roles and duties constraining the actions of
self and others, as agents and affected participants, on-goingly
created by interactions over time that are mediated through kinds of
communication, which always appears to some extent fuzzy to the human
mind. ëSocietyí in this sense exists as a network of fuzzy
images, sustained by human thought and action. Society itself does not
exist outside these processes. A group of human bodies is not a
society, and without reference to these processes we cannot understand
what any society does, as an entity or as an effect on actions and
behaviours of individuals who compose it.
1.3.1 Science and Art of Social Fuzziology
The constant interplay of human dynamics at the three major scales of
their manifestation: individual (intrapersonal dynamics), social
(interpersonal dynamics) and existential (universal dynamics), results
in emergence of spinning webs and whirlpools of social interactions,
which constantly reproduce forces and energies to strengthen or weaken
the self-propelling capacity of these dynamics. There are so many
intricately interwoven factors and conditions engaged in the
realisation of this capacity, that it is nonsensical to look for or to
apply precise descriptions and definitions when explaining or dealing
with their infinite, in number and diversity, embodiments.
Fuzziness has a crucial presence in our knowledge about ourselves and
society. It is present or denied to different degrees in different
theories of society (sociology, politics, history etc.) so the
recognition of the role of fuzziness in any theory becomes a part of
the evaluation of its adequacy. It is also present in the minds of
social agents - politicians, prophets, advertisers, heads of media
organisations, managers of companies and corporations, heads of
academic departments, and also in members of the public, concerned
citizens and activists, parents, children, lovers, friends. Everyone
develops and internalises one or more theories of politics and society
to live by. Everyone is a practical social theorist, and the theories
they act on are always, to a greater or less extent, devices to deal
with the fuzziness of human knowing as it constitutes society and
social processes.
ëSocial fuzziologyí is a science concerned with social
phenomena, so it can be classified as one of the social sciences. In
theory as in practice, this could be a damagingly limited way of
treating it, if it means that scientists and engineers come to think
that it does not concern their core expertise. Engineering and
scientific decisions are always taken in the light of assumptions and
understandings, explicit and implicit, well-grounded or not, about the
social, natural and constructed world which cannot be isolated from
science or engineering problems, and the consequences of particular
solutions.
Social fuzziology is also a form of art - the art of coping with
fuzziness inherent in human knowing, the art of searching for meaning
while stuck to apparently irrational life trajectories - trajectories
that inevitably approach death and physical disintegration.
1.3.2 Awareness of Life as It Unfolds
The fuzziness in our understanding of society has roots in the
self-referential nature of our awareness of human dynamics. It is an
awareness of what happens inside and outside us as a living movement in
which we are also included, without fixing it or standing apart from
it. It is an awareness of life as it unfolds through each of us,
through our society and through the universe, a profound awareness of
human dynamics working within us.
Such kind of awareness is something fundamentally different from mere
observing, fixing and comprehending social processes as if they are
'over there', that is, outside of the observers' mind. In becoming
aware about the social processes, our experience and understanding of
them remain inseparably connected with the innermost nature of each of
us, and gradually (or suddenly) transform one's individuality while
taking hold of it.
Therefore, to grasp the fuzziness of our social experience, of what we
know and understand about society, meansto grasp the fuzziness of one's
unique individual experience, of one's own knowledge about oneself.
This kind of fuzziness changes - moves, evolves, transforms - together
with the changes - movement, evolution and transformation of each of
us.
When fuzziness moves, transforms and evolves, we have a greater chance
to see more of its limitless embodiments and thus to sharpen our
awareness about:
* the dynamics of our inner nature
* the webs and whirlpools of our social interactions
* he evolving dynamics of the natural environment and our vital
inseparability from them
* the ways in which the life-supporting rhythm manifests through us and
the environment
* the creative power of our inspiration and intuition
* the enigma of the spiritual continuity of existence.
Social fuzziology digs into fuzziness of our understanding of all these
phenomena as they cross our inner being while responding to the
turbulent dynamics of social life in which no individual, no group or
nation or species is ever autonomous, ever able to understand one's own
destiny in isolation.
1.4 Socrates' Wisdom at the Origin of Fuzziology
I know that I know not
Socrates
1.4.1 Meno's Paradox
In Platoís Meno Socrates explores what has been called Meno's
paradox of learning:
If we don't know what X is, how can we recognize it?
If we can't recognize X, how can we learn what X is?
Socratesí discussion developed Meno's paradox into a more
general paradox of human inquiry:
We know what X is. (Then we are not motivated to inquire into what X
is.)
We don't know what X is. (Then we are motivated to inquire, but are
frustrated by the paradox, since we cannot recognize instances of X, or
what X is in general, to find out what X is.)
Discussions of Menoís paradox typically turn it into a
proposition issued by a master (Plato or Socrates). In fact
Platoís text describes an incident which dramatises processes of
inquiry and proof. This social context is not mere decoration. It
provides information for a social form of the paradox, which is crucial
for social fuzziology.
The chief character debating with Socrates in the dialogue is Anytus, a
historical character of great importance in Socratesí life. He
was a leader of the ëdemocraticí party in the Athenian
assembly which overthrew ëthe Thirtyí, a tyrannical
oligarchy who ruled Athens briefly in the chaotic years at the end of
Athensí disastrous war with Sparta which was the death-knell of
Athens as an independent state. He was also the leading force in the
Assembly who moved and successfully argued against Socrates on the
grounds of ëimpietyí, as a result of which Socrates was
condemned to death. The context implies:
Menoís paradox is not simply an academic argument, it was seen
as a threat to the state. Socratesís ëproofí of his
proposition took the form of an interrogation of a slave boy about
geometry, in which Socratesí careful questions brought out
mathematical knowledge from the boy he did not know he knew, ëout
of himselfí.
Anytus, democrat and politician, did not like this argument, which was
too democratic (Athenian democracy did not extend to slaves). He
successfully accused Socrates of ëcorrupting the youngí by
teaching them ënoveltiesí. In this case the
ëyoungí was a slave, and the novelty he was taught was that
mathematics is comprehensible to someone without formal education.
1.4.2 Socrates' Approach
Socrates' approach to Meno's paradox of learning included four steps:
(1) generating hypotheses; (2) testing the hypotheses against examples;
(3) philosophic examination of the hypotheses; (4) drawing out
implications for learning and inquiring further.
Socratesí approach was a double-edged weapon. While examining
what people (important men like Anytus) consider as known, Socrates
draws out implications and asks questions that may lead them to
contradiction (incoherence), circularity (presupposing what is at
issue), infinite regress or other violations of epistemic norms. The
same process addressed to the supposedly ignorant, like the slave boy,
shows the opposite - that they may implicitly understand far more than
they are credited with.
The trial of Socrates was full of paradoxes. Socrates, one of the most
virtuous men who has ever lived, was convicted of ëimpietyí
and corrupting the young. His accuser was a 'sincere democrat' who
found Socratesí freedom of thought and speech intolerable.
Socrates contributed to the death penalty by refusing to ask for mercy
or mitigation, claiming instead he should be rewarded by being given
the freedom of the city, which was true but so angered his potential
supporters that they swung to the other side. Nothing happened as it
ought to have, according to common logic, but exactly the opposite.
The chaotic situation produced two paradoxes: one of the most unjust
legal decisions in recorded history, one of the greatest insights into
the paradoxes of human knowing.
The approach used by Socrates made him aware of the following famous
paradox: The less we know, the more certain and precise we are in our
explanations; the more we know, the more we realise the limitations of
being certain and precise.
Although Socratesí wisdom was incomparably deeper and broader
than the transitory knowledge of his contemporaries, he used to say
with a proverbial humility: "I know that I know not." The awareness
that "I know not" made Socrates capable of revealing the gaps in the
ëpreciseí and ëcertainí knowledge of his
opponents. When the Athenians went to the famous Delphic Oracle to ask
who was the wisest man in Athens, the answer of the Oracle was
"Socrates". "But how can he be the wisest if he permanently tells us
that he knows not," responded the crowd. "That is why he is the wisest
among you," was the answer of the Oracle.
The acknowledgment of the fuzziness in human knowledge serves a
stimulus for a lifelong inquiry and search for truth and wisdom; and it
is this search that makes human life meaningful.
Meno's paradox and the paradox of Socrates are at the conceptual basis
of fuzziology.
1.4.3 Maieutic Inquiry
Maieutic inquiry (from the Greek word maieutikos, which means
'midwifery') is a method developed by Socrates; Socrates used to call
himself a midwife who would bring about the birth of new ideas in
people. The method implies asking people questions so that to draw
knowledge out of them - a knowledge that, according to Socrates, they
already have (Taylor, 2001).
Maieutic inquiry is based on the famous Socratic axioms that
* unexamined life is not worth living, and
* human knowing is limitless.
The practical realisation of maieutic inquiry is through a dialogue
between two sides - one asking questions (the inquirer), and the other
(the respondent) trying to answer them based on available pieces of
knowledge. Both sides are interested in the process of inquiry: the
respondent - to confirm the significance of the available knowledge,
the inquirer - to reveal its limits and thus to facilitate emergence of
new insights. If such an emergence occurs, the inquirer and the
respondent move together beyond the limits of what was considered known
by them before initiating the process of inquiry.
Socrates was convinced that one can always generate questions which
push the boundaries of what is assumed to be known; so these boundaries
are never fixed. Every time when the known is locked into patterns with
rigid (non-fuzzy, crisp) boundaries, it tends to become a dogma, and
the dogma is not knowledge any more. The fuzziness of the boundaries of
any domain of human knowing is a vital condition for its evolution and
transformation. This was revealed by the wisdom of Socrates more than
2400 years ago. And not only this.
For Socrates the known appeared as a symbiosis - the Greek word for
"co-existing" - of many qualities, the process of understanding of
which could be deepened without limits. Such qualities always escape
precise definitions, and therefore appear fuzzy to human mind. In
maieutic inquiry these are 'individual' and 'social', 'subjective' and
'objective', 'internal' and 'external', 'concrete' and 'abstract',
'rational' and 'intuitive', 'partial' and 'holistic', 'local' and
'global', etc.
It was clear for Socrates, as it was for Pythagoras 150 years before
him, that human beings must strive, at any cost, to understand the
enigma of spiritual continuity of existence. What does this mean?
First of all, the great thinkers of the Ancient Greece believed that
human life does not finish with death. People can be fully aware of
real-life events, the experience of which proves that there are
qualities in human nature that survive body's disintegration. If one
cannot succeed in reaching such a degree of awareness, life appears
entirely meaningless - we come to life in order to die after a while,
or create offspring destined to die also.
"Life which moves towards death, how can it be called life?" asked the
ancient thinkers and answered: "Life that implies death is a hidden
death, not life." It must have been hard for Socrates's wisdom to
accept that nature could approve such a meaningless life for humans
endowed with a gigantic capacity to explore and understand both
themselves and the universe. He must have been convinced that humans
are exponents of a much greater Life extended beyond its physical
manifestation only. But it must have been clear for him also that human
awareness of spiritual continuity of life does not come automatically.
Its awakening needs efforts - genuine and persistent efforts on behalf
of the whole triad of one's body, mind and soul supported by devotion
and determination to reveal the immortal essence of Life before the
moment of death of the physical body.
Fuzzy as it might appear from the standpoint of our science today, the
exploration of spiritual continuity of life was at the core of
Socrates' self-inquiry into this greatest enigma of human existence,
and his famous: "I know that I know not" reflects the soundless mystery
of this enigma. Maybe it was Socrates' understanding of spiritual
continuity of life that made him categorically reject the suggestion to
ask for mercy when unjustly accused by the society in Athens - a
society full of envy, hatred, stupidity and ignorance. How far was (and
continues to be) any society from understanding individuals whose
thinking is miles ahead the average 'they-say' fuzziness of thinking of
the colourless majority in society and its senseless rulers or leaders!
Being a method for exploring fuzziness of human knowledge and thus
facilitating, trough the skill of maieuticos, the 'birth' of new
insights, the maieutic inquiry of Socrates is used in the research
practice of Social Fuzziology.
1.4.3.1 Conditions Enhancing Maieutic Inquiry
Maieutic inquiry depends essentially on the active interaction of the
inquirer and respondent. This kind of inquiry does not represent a
problem-solving process; the both sides do not search how to eliminate
fuzziness from what they label as 'known' and 'unknown' about the
issue(s) of their concern. Fuzziness is an intrinsic characteristic of
human knowing and cannot be eliminated from any stage of its evolving.
It is rather a kind of dialogue which helps the sides dissolve the
impediments on the way to their understanding of the discussed issue(s)
and thus loosening the knots into which they might have entangled
themselves consciously or unconsciously by their prejudices, fix ideas,
borrowed solutions and delusions.
The interactions of sides involved in maieutic inquiry aim at
liberating their creative potential from the pull of forces born out of
human egocentricity and egotism, blind attachments and addictions,
social brainwash or power-based manipulations - forces able to convert
fuzziness of knowing into hard-to-surpass ignorance.
The dialogue of maieutic inquiry unites rather than separates the
dialoguing sides, and makes them act at-one when dealing with the
limits of known.
Among the conditions that facilitate emergence of creative insights in
an open maieutic dialogue are:
* thirst for understanding and knowing;
* authenticity, that is, dropping from the mind any bias,
prejudice, false pretentiousness, dogmas and ultimate 'truths';
* holistic questioning, that is, asking questions that allow the
process of knowing to go deeper and broader.
The first condition - thirst for understanding and knowing - relates to
the proverbial ability of Socrates to inflame his students, to fire
them with such a great passion to know that nothing seemed more
important for them than the search for truth, a lifelong search
undertaken together with their Master.
The second condition - authenticity - relates to Socrates' humble
expression that 'the only thing he knows is that he knows not', and
points again to the organic connection of maieutic inquiry with social
fuzziology. Socrates' expression is not only an indicator of his
humility and modesty. In the ability to prevent mind from formation of
rigid patterns of knowledge, and thus to keep the process of knowing in
a receptive and open state of changing its fuzziness, lies the secret
of a wise person. Wisdom is authentic and the words of wisdom are never
precise. But what they express does not appear fuzzy for those who can
understand it. On the contrary, its message is illuminating; it can
'move' minds, hearts and souls of different people, evoke meaning in
different situations and stimulate people's urge to know more about
themselves and reality.
The third condition - holistic questioning helps not only reveal the
fuzziness in what is accepted as 'known for sure', but also make the
process of knowing deeper and further, and not let it crystallise in
frozen patterns in our mind. "Never stop questioning!" is the message
of Socrates. Answers live only for a short time, the questioning goes
forever.
1.4.3.2 Maieutic Way: From Knowledge to Wisdom
Some questions require yes-no answers (ëAre you male?í).
Others are catechistic, questions to which the person asking it already
knows the answer and is testing the other (ëWhat is the name of
the Greek philosopher who taught Plato?'). Such questions, which are
common in most education systems, are a form of training in
Aristotelian logic.
Often we know the answers of the questions we ask and yet continue to
put them; these are questions which imply efforts - physical, mental,
emotional or spiritual - in order to fulfill what their answers
require. By asking such questions ever and ever again, we try either to
hide our lack of will power for realization of what they urge us to do
or to deceive ourselves that we are doing something while thinking
about them.
Holistic questions - the questions asked by Socrates and social
fuzziology - are entirely different. They are open, dynamic and
inextricably linked ultimately to the fuzziness of the whole fabric of
human experience and knowledge. They are questions endowed with power
to transform the fuzziness of knowledge into the illuminating -
enlightening, inspiring and soul-elevating - 'preciseness' of wisdom.
Maieutic inquiry of social fuzziology can be seen as an inquiry into
conditions under which knowledge can be transformed into wisdom. There
are crucial differences between knowledge and wisdom.
While wisdom needs the vibrant fuzziness of human thoughts, words and
actions in order to inspire and evoke their creative understanding,
knowledge constantly tries to reduce the fuzziness, substitute it with
precise definitions or simply get rid of it.
Knowledge can be transferred, borrowed from books and experts, imparted
and taught; wisdom is non-transferable, it is a unique individual
treasure accumulated while riding on the tides and ebbs of life.
Knowledge is inevitably partial, it sets boundaries, hangs labels,
separates and tries to generate precision - precision that always turns
out to be meaningless when dealing with spontaneity of one's life
unfolding. Wisdom is holistic; it accepts the unlimited - the timeless
and the infinite - and sees clearly that the precise formulas and
definitions never work in life.
Below are examples of some holistic maieutic questions:
Why do we exist on this planet?
What is the purpose to be born and then die?
Is it possible to escape the death sentence that each of us was born
with? How?
What is the meaning of one's life?
Where do our thoughts and feelings come from, our emotions and
longings, aspirations and dreams?
What propels the life-sustaining rhythm of each person's heart?
What makes the cells and organs in the body not stray away but function
in accordance?
From where come the waves of inspiration?
How do we intuit?
What does enlightenment mean?
The above questions directly zoom into the fathomless depth of our
essence as creatures endowed with potential to comprehend reality.
Attempts to answer a maieutic question may lead to other questions, and
their answers may fire another inquiry. The maieutic way of exploring
fuzziness of human knowledge - its nature, sources and dynamics - never
ends. Nor is there an end to the emergence of new insights about the
truth of existence to those who, like Socrates, see the mission of
their lives in revealing it.
While using the technique of maieutic inquiry, social fuzziology
continues to explore the same process to which Socrates devoted his
life - the process of transforming fuzziness imbedded in human
knowledge into insights that springs out of human wisdom.
1.5 Principles of Fuzziology: A Social Perspective
1.5.1 Principle of Incompatibility
As the complexity of a system increases, human ability to make precise
and relevant (meaningful) statements about its behaviour diminishes
until a threshold is reached beyond which the precision and the
relevance become mutually exclusive characteristics (Zadeh, 1973). It
is then that fuzzy statements are the only bearers of meaning and
relevance.
This principle was used by Zadeh for extending the applicability of his
fuzzy sets theory and fuzzy logic to the analysis of complex systems.
Given the high degree of complexity of all known human societies, this
principle applied to social fuzziology states:
The more precise the language that sustains and describes human
societies, the less socially effective (able to maintain the integrity
of social relations) and the more distorting (unable to describe
adequately the meaning of social forms, processes and actions). The
more complex and dynamic the context of explanation, the more essential
will fuzziness appear to the human understanding which constitutes and
explains it.
1.5.2 Principle of Connectivity-in-Dynamics
No thing and no being can exist in itself or for itself but only in a
dynamic relationship with other things and beings.
This principle relates to the integrity of existence vitally supported
by universal dynamics, whose creative, sustaining or destructive powers
are constantly demonstrated at different scales of the manifested
world. It is through these dynamics that everything that exists, from
an elementary particle to a gigantic galaxy, becomes connected in an
all-embracing web of relationships.
The application of this principle to society in social fuzziology is:
Social meanings, social relations, social identities and social actions
exist irreducibly in open, dynamic networks of relations.
1.5.3 Principle of Fractality
The geometry of nature is fractal and reveals itself as self-similar
structures at different scales of manifestation.
This principle is at the basis of Mandelbrotís theory
(Mandelbrot, 1982) of fractals and demonstrates the way
self-organisation works while unfolding the complex dynamics of nature.
Self-similarity is a kind of fuzzy repetition; each scale has common
features with every other, and yet there are noticeable differences.
Fractals are inherent in the holistic unfolding of individual, social
and existential dynamics: the macrocosm is a projection of the
microcosm, onto which it projects itself; the external world of
individuals is a projection of the inner world of their experience,
which fractally repeats that outer world; each level of development of
consciousness has similarity both with the previous (less developed)
and the next (more advanced) levels and yet has its own distinguishable
characteristics, its own strength and weakness.
The principle of fractality applies directly to social phenomena:
ëSocietyí has equivalent significance and complexity at
every level, from the biota over billions of years to individual
nations, groups, classes, down to ëindividualsí.
From a 'fractal' point of view an ëindividualí therefore is
always a social form, intrinsically connected to social forms and
patterns at higher levels, containing social forms and patterns within.
Ethical decisions at local levels - eg project-based, work-place based
decisions - will be similar to ethical issues at higher levels, up to
the scale of planet, involving humanity and all other species.
1.6 Impossibility Theorems
1.6.1 First Impossibility Theorem
It is impossible to eliminate fuzziness from any explanation that tends
to make sense of
* the wholeness of the existential dynamics
* the infinity of their manifested activities.
* the immensity of their potentiality to create.
The validity of this statement follows from the first two principles of
social fuzziology. According to the Principle of Connectivity, the
wholeness of existence, its manifested activities and its creative
potential are results of an all-embracing connectivity of everything
that exists, that moves, changes and transforms in a gigantic
self-organised Web of Interdependent Dynamics. According to the
Principle of Incompatibility, it is impossible to offer precise and yet
meaningful explanations related to the overwhelming complexity of this
web. Hence, any possible explanation that makes sense of the integrity
of existential dynamics, their unlimited actual or virtual appearance
(as "manifested activities" or "potentiality to create") inevitably
contains fuzziness.
The First Impossibility Theorem prevents fuzziology from looking for
and from designing techniques to eliminate the fuzziness of our
knowledge of social complexity; such techniques are hardly to be found.
The fuzziness of social complexity has its deep roots in the very
essence of existence - an essence whose self-propelled unfolding makes
the universe "incomprehensible" to our "frail and feeble minds" -
expressions used by Einstein when describing his religion.
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable
superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able
to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional
conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is
revealed in the incomprehensible Universe, forms my idea of God"
(quoted in his New York Times obituary of April 19, 1955).
Human "frail and feeble minds" are products of the unfolding of the
mysterious essence of existence. Therefore, its fuzziness is not
something ëover thereí that can be objectified, rationally
defined and then studied and modelled; it is deeply inside each of us
and, therefore, escapes the grasp of our reasoning. It can be felt,
experienced and eventually realised in life. Being out of the realm of
logical formulations (no matter what kind of logic we decide to use, be
it inductive, deductive, abductive, binary, multi-valued or fuzzy), the
journey into the existential mystery needs ëpreparationí,
in which the reasoning power of the human mind plays an important role,
to co-ordinate sense impressions, perceptions, sensations, feelings and
emotions into a meaningful whole.
Fuzziology acknowledges the irreducible fuzziness of human knowledge
about the essence of the existential dynamics. The awareness of this
fuzziness activates the potential of fuzziology in construing reality
where the conscious revelation of our deep, inner experience plays the
paramount role in making sense of existence, not the intellectual
speculations about the outward, ëobjectiveí world as
perceived through our senses. The information from our senses
inevitably passes through mental and emotional filters, consciously or
unconsciously established in the process of socially informed
interactions. Some of these filters can irreversibly distort the
sensory information to such a degree (as the result of bias and
prejudice, brainwashing or propaganda, attachments and delusions) that
it entirely ceases to help people navigate the social complexity of
their lives.
All of these considerations apply equally to the irreducible fuzziness
of human sociality. There is one important consequence for social
fuzziology in its relations to the current set of disciplines which
purport to describe and explain social life:
The disciplines of the social sciences as subdivided from each other
and separated from the totality of the field of human knowing are
inherently incapable of understanding the essence of social life, or
activating creative processes of interaction. The main models, terms
and categories of the social sciences, where they aspire to precision
and crispness, will inevitably provide a distorted and diminished
understanding of social life. They need to be 'fuzzified', that is,
enrich with rooted-in-life approaches aimed not so much to explain
social reality in scientific terms but rather activate creative
insights for understanding and dealing with its paradoxes and enigmas.
1.6.2 Second Impossibility Theorem
It is impossible to understand and deal with fuzziness related to a
higher (more developed, expanded) level of consciousness from the point
of view of a less developed level.
The validity of this statement follows from the Principle of Fractality
when applied to the unfolding of existential dynamics. From their
manifestation at the scale of non-animated nature, described by the
ancient thinkers as being built by fire, light, air, water and earth,
dynamics unfold to express themselves at various scales (levels) of
animated nature, at the scales of plants, animals and humans. The
unfolding of these dynamics runs parallel with a self-propelled
expansion and growth of complexity at each scale of manifestation.
There is a stunning diversity at the level of minerals, and also at the
levels of plants and animals.
The complexity at each level of existential dynamics' unfolding cannot
be reduced to the complexity of the previous level: animalsí
lives are of a higher order of complexity than the life of the plants,
which are themselves much richer and diverse than the 'life' of
minerals. When dynamics enter the human scale, it is human
consciousness (as a holistic experience and awareness and knowing of
our own nature and the nature of reality in which we exist and evolve)
that expands and grows.
The fuzziness of knowing at each level of development of human
consciousness can hardly be grasped from a lower level of
consciousness. What may appear as a ëfuzzy messí for
individuals with a certain level of development of their consciousness
can be seen as saturated with meaning, if they exert effort and succeed
in developing a higher level of awareness and intelligence, or/and in
sharpening their capacity to think, feel and experience holistically,
rather than solely from a more narrowly established point of view
(ëworldviewí).
As the example of Platoís Meno illustrates, a mere
accumulation of knowledge or degrees in education does not mean wisdom
or higher levels of consciousness. The 'well educated' Anytus believed
he was superior to Socrates, and far above the level of the slave boy.
Yet as Socrates demonstrated, the slave boyís eager and open
mind could discover a mathematical proof, when properly led by the
wisdom of Socrates, while Anytusís arrogance meant he was unable
to understand either the slave boy or Socrates.
Far from social elitism being an illustration of this theorem, it
serves to reinforce the distinction between knowledge as an
accumulation of facts, theoretical explanations and practical skill and
wisdom as holistic insights into existence born while living and
experiencing existential dynamics in their all-embracing integrity and
infinity.
What the wisdom of Socrates could grasp was far beyond the
understanding of his contemporaries. And the enigmas of life which
appeared fuzzy to Socrates and kept the passion of his inquiry alive
till the day he was unjustly accused and killed, quite possibly never
bothered most of the Athenians at that time.
The fuzziness inherent in the deepest spiritual wisdom of the ancient
Vedas, considered the oldest written text on our planet (coming to us
in written form between 4000 to 6000 years ago) is almost impossible to
grasp with the level of consciousness of our generations -
consciousness deeply immersed in a constant pursuit of materialistic
acquisitions, selfish accomplishments and anti-human manifestations of
ego-centred power.
One practical message of the Second Impossibility Theorem is that the
life-threatening fuzziness of all the serious ecological, economical
and social problems, which todayís humanity creates, and by
which more and more people are tormented, can hardly be solved using
the present level of consciousness typical for the rulers of the
developed capitalist 'democracies', driven by an insatiable
thirst for money and pleasures, competitive advantages and power.
1.7 Social Nature of Fuzziness
1.7.1 The Double Face of Fuzziness
In writing this book we were strongly drawn to social fuzziology for
ethical motives, by a desire to help the world to be a better place. We
believe the current tendency to separate science and ethics has proven
a dangerous mistake, an experiment which has sufficiently proven that
the planet cannot survive a science and technology, a politics and
economics without an ethical and spiritual dimension. In this context,
recognition and use of fuzziness is an ethical act, an ethical
imperative.
Yet it is also the case that fuzziness is not always good or bad, and
non-fuzziness always bad or good. Ethics is not only a matter of mind,
but involves soul and other strengths of human nature. Qualities of
mind cannot provide the sole criteria for judgements of good and evil.
At the same time, ethical systems themselves are products of human
minds and judgements. They can be more or less fuzzy, more or less
adequate to the complexity of other kinds of understanding of inner and
outer experience. But human values like beauty, justice and love come
from other sources as well. Fuzziness must be judged by ethical values
outside itself, even though we may use our experience of fuzziness in
our continual attempts to refine these values.
There are three principles describing the variable ethical value of
fuzziness:
* there is no absolute fuzziness: it exists only in contexts and
relationships to human experience and knowledge, thinking and speaking,
feeling and acting, etc. at a particular moment;
* fuzziness is always in a dynamic state, and finds value in its
direction and momentum not just in its particular position;
* fuzzily expressed contexts, relations and tendencies have ethical
value that grows out of the totality of life.
Fuzziness is a treasure, and the fuzziness of our thinking is
inseparable from our joy in creativity. Attempts to crush this
fuzziness in individuals or in whole populations are tantamount to
killing life itself, and killing life is surely wrong. Yet it is also
the case that to attempt to understand a situation or problem that is
experienced as too complex, by generating less fuzzy solutions can be
immensely creative. The opposite response, to simply accept an
amorphous fuzzy understanding, can be passive and lacking insight.
We can capture this doubleness in the form of two contrary propositions
* creativity and insight can be powerfully released by trusting
fuzziness of mind;
* creativity and understanding can be unleashed by an energetic journey
of understanding from greater to less fuzziness, especially through
journeys that go forwards, into transcendence of fuzziness, not
backwards, to its denial.
To illustrate the complementarity of these two propositions in relation
to fuzzy logic as developed in engineering contexts: applying
principles of fuzziology to fuzzy logic can restore its creativity and
explanatory potential, while applying fuzzy logic to social complexity
without renouncing that complexity could be stimulating and productive.
1.7.2 Fuzziness and Power
Human social relations are characterised by effects of power - acts of
domination and resistance in complex forms. Social fuzziology needs to
be always alert to effects on ethics and truth of interrelations
between power and fuzziness. In general there is an inverse relation
between power and the value of fuzziness: where social relations are
strongly determined by power, fuzziness becomes delusive fuzziness, and
non-fuzziness becomes dogmatism.
There are many examples of this proposition. For instance in the first
year of his Presidency, George Bush promoted two proposals, one which
seemed to welcome fuzziness too much, the other to respect it too
little. He opposed the Kyoto Protocol to control greenhouse gas
emissions, then close to finalisation, on the grounds that there were
some ëdoubtsí about the exact extent of global warming and
the contribution of human-produced greenhouse gases.
The Bush administration proposed to wait for further research to
resolve these doubts. In response to this position, a group of science
academyís issued a consensus statement urging the Protocol be
adopted. They noted the existence of uncertainty (ëThere will
always be some uncertainty surrounding the prediction of changes in
such a complex system as the worldís climateí) but after
careful deliberation they accepted a figure of ëat least 90%
certainí that temperatures will rise between a predicted range
(Editorial, 2001).
Bush reacted in the opposite direction to criticism of his proposal for
an anti-ballistic system to replace the previous Arms Treaty. Faced
with criticisms that the technology did not yet exist to make such a
scheme feasible, he responded with faith that it was possible, and that
buckets of money should be devoted to this dream.
In the first case, the relative fuzziness and uncertainty of the
arguments in favour of the Kyoto Protocol became his reason to ignore
them completely, in spite of the consensus of the scientific community
that the fuzziness and uncertainty existed within manageable limits,
known, understood and accepted. In the second case, the fuzziness and
uncertainty of the arguments in favour of his anti-ballistic system
became a reason to back the creativity of his scientists to tackle and
solve the problems.
The Bush administration used more than fuzziness. In July 2001, the
Pentagon publicised a ëtestí of the feasibility of the
available missile technology, in which two out of four missiles struck
their ballistic target. ëThey hit a bullet with a bullet, and it
does work!í proclaimed Republican Senator Trott. But then it was
revealed that the target missiles all carried beacons to allow them to
be tracked from space, prior to the radar system cutting in. Pentagon
officials admitted the beacons were ëa big helpí, and that
enemy missiles would not have come equipped with them. (Riley, 2001).
If this report had been prepared by a scientific institute it would be
declared a fraud. It is no surprise to find such things occur with the
amounts of money and vested interests at stake. The public has grown
cynical about the cynicism of politicians. But the case makes a less
obvious point about fuzziness and its interactions with power. The
technology Bush promoted on relies on precision, and therefore produces
either its opposite - uncertainty, or fraud. Fraud in a double guise -
manipulative fuzziness about what technology might do, concealing the
actual conditions of the test - is a consequence of the interaction of
fuzziness and power. Non-experts do not know the exact details of what
fraud was perpetrated, but the general public know this principle of
social fuzziology, that when power and fuzziness are related, truth is
the first casualty.
1.8 Human-Centred Sources of Fuzziness
1.8.1 Mind as A Source of Fuzziness
The greatest source of fuzziness is our mind. This powerful rational
thinker never ceases to divide the whole of reality into fragments in
order to analyse, classify and label them, and then to toss or scrap
together to piece out a world, which has very little to do with the
unbreakable wholeness of reality, a wholeness we inseparably belong to.
The world we piece together from fragments made out of perceptions -
sensations and thoughts, serves to provide partial and therefore
distorted models of reality. These models represent a world
as-perceived, a human-made world, and not a world whose natural
evolution has brought us to existence and with which we are linked
through an umbilical chord of vital and impossible-to-separate
connections. All our models deal with parts of something that we
perceive as over-there, as surroundings considered to be used for what
our ego-centred minds label as meaningful.
An army of scientists, engineers, economists, politicians and
philosophers are involved in adapting many distorted models for
predicting and exercising power over the unfolding dynamics of reality.
Although we know that complex dynamics of reality are beyond our
ability to predict and control, we 'do our best' to mutilate reality so
that it could be pushed into Procrustean beds of reductionist models.
The applications of this kind of models have made both nature and
society vulnerable; this is clearly demonstrated by today's ecological
disasters and continual worsening of socio-economical conditions for
the largest and ever-increasing part of society.
The rational mind can never move beyond duality. It either selects
something while rejecting its opposite (as in black-and-white thinking
when using binary logic) or accepts both the opposites up to some
degree (as in fuzzy thinking when using fuzzy or probabilistic
reasoning). The dualistic nature of the rational mind is so strong that
it is unable to transcend it alone. The best it can do is to reconcile
the opposites by eliminating one, or blurring them both.
Following the black-and-white approach in thinking ('either A or
not-A'), we can be easily entrapped in routines, stereotypes,
prejudices and habits that become a source of fuzziness which
eventually makes us incapable of authentic experience. All our
'understanding' is constantly filtered through already established
mental patterns.
Following the fuzzy logic-based approach in thinking ('both A and
not-A' up to some degree), we may agree too much to everything the
others say, and this can push us towards compliance and indecisiveness.
When everybody is right, the uncritical acceptance of the fuzziness
accompanying other people's thoughts makes it hard for us to generate
our own creative ideas. It is the polarity of opposites, contradictions
and clashes of opinions, that provides human mind with dynamics (forces
and energies) necessary for transcending the opposites. These dynamics
manifest in mind as an urge to search beyond the plane where the
opposites clash. Without such an urge, the mind can be entrapped into
stasis, stuck in repetition or mesmerised by illusory thoughts and
dreams.
"Do not reject anything! But do not remain with anything either! Go
beyond!" is written in the Vedic scriptures. In our context these words
of wisdom say: "When searching for understanding, be ready to go beyond
logical rules and restrictions, no matter how soft (fuzzy,
probabilistic) or hard (binary, deterministic) they are!"
1.8.2 Ever-Emerging Desires
Another powerful source of fuzziness is rooted in our ever-emerging
desires of various kind - from simple physicaldesires which we share
with other animals to much more complicated desires specific for human
nature. Every desire agitates the mind and distracts the process of
concentration indispensable for an act of understanding to be
productive. The stronger an emergent desire, the higher the degree of
agitation it stirs up, the less the degree of concentration of mind;
the less the degree of concentration, the fuzzier the process of
thinking, the lower the degree of understanding.
Most of the desires self-propel their intensity - the more we try to
satisfy them, the higher become their demands. The way of moderation,
the 'middle way' in terms of the Buddhist thinkers, is hard to follow
when the fire of desires is burning inside us and making our minds
restless, turbulent, obstinate.
The restlessness and turbulence of minds are permanently intensified by
the stress in which we live due to the competitiveness inherent in
today's society and the helplessness of the majority of us to get out
of the social boxes and cages, in which we have been pushed by economic
forces too strong to withstand.
Although the strength of passion with which we pursue truth and
understanding is a powerful stimulator and energizer of thinking,
understanding also needs 'peace of mind', a mind which is calm and
cool, composed and collected.
Paradoxically, while being sources of fuzziness, mind and desires are,
at the same time, key factors for overcoming (transcending) it,
especially if it relates to problems deeply rooted in human experience.
1.8.3 'Golden Rules' of Fuzziology
However concrete and precise human actions might appear, in the context
of social complexity their effects are 'fuzzified' through a multitude
of consequences, both known and unknown, open or hidden, erupting
immediately or after a hard-to-predict interval of time. Therefore,
almost every action within social complexity is fuzzy. We can hardly be
certain about the consequences they lead to.
The way to cope with the fuzziness of understanding consequences of
social actions is to be aware of it, not pretend that it does not exist
or hurry to substitute it with straightforward cause-and-effect
explanations. Our haste to offer such kind of explanations when
justifying the application of any economic, technological or political
decision, is responsible for the most serious maladies of today's
society: environmental destruction, disconnection of economy from
society, extreme inequality in the distribution of wealth, degradation
of work, etc. Awareness of fuzziness when dealing (working, acting)
with social complexity goes hand by hand with our drive to understand
the nature and dynamics of every incarnation of this complexity as it
appears in our lives, both individual and social.
In the context of the inseparability of human understanding and social
complexity, an inseparability which is at the very core of social
fuzziology, one can visualised the subject of social fuzziology through
the wings of the famous butterfly attractor of Lorenz - one of the
creators of chaos theory. From the wing of understanding complexity we
move towards the wing of working with it, and from there again to
understanding, and then again to working, and so on, in a never-ending
attempt to realize the uniqueness and infinity of our potential to
think and act.
In order to keep Lorenz butterfly moving, so that each flap of its
wings might be able to bring forth not only a "hurricane" or "tornado"
(metaphors used by Lorenz when describing the butterfly effect in chaos
theory) but also real fruits of human creativity, social fuzziology
offers three 'golden rules', not to follow blindly but to consider
consciously as practical tools for strengthening individual awareness:
* Avoid neglecting the unknown, denying it, turning away from it or
trying to make ourselves and others believe that it is really known and
then to organize, dichotomize and impose rules on it. The unknown
manifests through spontaneity of any novel expression of human
creativity
* Avoid clinging to a need for certainty, definiteness and order or to
ideas and practices that are familiar, commonsensical or accepted as
true by an assumed majority. Remaining attached to what is certain and
familiar suppresses idiosyncrasy of the human potential for
self-realization
* Avoid fighting with the complexity of life dynamics, no matter where
they manifest - in our inner nature or in the world around. The way to
avoid being a slave or a victim of these dynamics is through a constant
pursuit of understanding how they work and how to apply their infinite
energy for growth in intelligence and spirit.
1.8.4 Danger of Dogmatising Fuzziness
Fuzziology warns us against the danger of dogmatising the fuzziness
inherent in human understanding. When making dogmas out of fuzziness,
we can easily kill its capacity to move - to change, evolve and
transform together with the changes, evolution and transformation of
the process of one's knowing; when keeping alive its dynamics, we never
stop strengthening our capacity to learn and know.
There is almost no danger of following strictly a precisely described
instruction - manual, algorithm - that helps one run a dynamic
technological process (or a sophisticated engineering system). Enormous
danger is involved in choosing or being forced to choose to follow
dogmatic interpretations related to somebody else's understanding of
life complexity. The manuals and algorithms helping to run an
engineering system deal with the limited sphere of an artificial
(human-made) reality, the logic of the statements about which can be
tested and verified in an objective way. The fuzzy knowledge how
to deal with complexity of one's every day existence, while living in
this complexity, inevitably covers a much larger space of possible
interactions and interpretations. The truth of any piece of fuzzy
knowledge about the living reality can be tested and verified
subjectively, while experiencing individually and socially the
immediacy of its limitless variety of dynamic manifestations, and not
pushing this variety into precise manuals and algorithm, formulas and
equations, rigid rules and dogmas.
As far as each individual life unfolds in a unique unpredictable way,
any voluntary or externally imposed choice to live following precise
recipes impedes the possible emergence (discovery, creation) of a
multitude of other (different) ways of dealing with the life
complexity. The suppression of human creativity causes misery and
anguish, blocks the natural flows of individual and social energy (be
it physical, emotional, mental, spiritual), takes all the joy and
gladness from human life and eventually destroys it.
It is impossible for an individual to be other than oneself - to live
with one's own fuzziness of understanding and struggle with it every
time when trying to grasp its bottomless sources. One suffers when
fuzziness leads to delusion and pain, and feels happy when it triggers
new insights and inspiration. Who knows, maybe this is the most
efficient way of learning how to understand and cope with the enigmatic
fuzziness inherent in the meaning and mission of one's life.
The proverbial expression of Nietzsche: "Follow not me, but you" has a
deep existential meaning. One cannot be transplanted into the inner
space of another person. If we follow others, instead of being
ourselves, we lose the creative sparkles born out of our own struggles
to understand the fuzziness of ourselves and make the light of our own
unique individuality shine. Without this light, there is no
self-awareness, no wisdom.
It is a grievous mistake to imitate someone else's fuzziness in
experiencing the events of life. This mistake may result in fatal
conflicts between the inner nature and mind of an individual (confusion
in thinking), the inner nature and heart (confusion in feelings), and
the inner nature and soul (confusion in experience and search for
meaning and light in life). When imitating others' ways of living,
thinking and acting, we are losing the most precious gift we have - the
freedom to be ourselves, to express ourselves and realize our
potential.
1.8.5 The 'Drowning-Man' Paradox
Any act of understanding is an act of emergence of meaning(s) out of
the fuzzy thoughts constantly 'swarming' in one's mind. In the moment
when a meaning emerges, we try to use it in making sense of what we
experience - what we see and hear, touch and smell, read and
contemplate, create and discover. Of course, this meaning is fuzzy, as
it has emerged out of the fuzziness of our interactive thoughts. Once
emerged, the fuzzy meaning immediately reflects the way we think. And
as far as thinking is always coloured with feelings, the fuzzy meaning
affects our emotional life too.
By influencing the ways we think and feel, the fuzzy meanings we create
self-propel their growth - they act as magnets attracting more and more
thoughts and emotions, which support them, and thus make them more
definite, more categorical, more stable. For example, after Mandelbrot
presented his idea of fractals, those who work in fields of research
different than mathematics or computer science constructed their fuzzy
meanings of fractals and actively started to generate ideas and
accumulate information confirming these meanings, so the latter
gradually became more definite and stable.
In the overall fuzziness of human understanding of social complexity,
the tendency of any emergent fuzzy meaning towards stability reflects
humans' own gravitation to stability, to something that is considered
familiar, secure, habitual and known. In its extreme, this tendency
leads to a paradox, which we call the drowning-man paradox:
The fuzzier one's understanding, the stronger one's attachment to what
seems non-fuzzy in it.
Social life shows many instances of this paradox. For example, the
denser the fuzziness of understanding dynamic complexity of a social
situation by some governing body (managers, leaders, governors), the
higher its willingness to implement stringent, that is, non-fuzzy
methods of control. Unfortunately, the use of these methods only
aggravates the existing problems and makes their fuzziness
incomprehensible.
If the increase of economic and social turbulence in a state is beyond
government's ability to understand its nature and sources, the
government sticks to bureaucratic methods of control. When an
organisation is in a process or restructuring, again the bureaucrats in
it become extremely active: the number of rules, restrictions and
regulations they produce dramatically increases. Although the rules,
regulations and control actions appear crisp - black-and-white,
categorical, rigid - they often lead to vicious circles, blockages on
the innovative ways of thinking and thus result in a further increase
of the overall fuzziness in understanding and coping with the
organizational complexity.
Before the collapse of the soviet model, Andropov's regime desperately
tried to put into practice non-fuzzy (KGB-like) methods of dealing with
socio-economic complexity, and this turned the life of the ordinary
people into a hell.
Routines, prejudices and biases in human thinking also illustrate the
spread of the 'drowning-man' paradox in society. We cling to rigid
patterns of thinking because we lack will and courage to openly explore
the sources emitting fuzziness in our own understanding of life. Every
time when we cling to what others preach and teach, taking blindly the
fuzziness of their understanding as a 'precise' recipe and ignoring our
own lessons in understanding complexity, we are captives of the
'drowning-man' paradox.
To avoid this paradox does not mean to use only unstable, easily
changeable, superficial and open-to-manipulations meanings; this kind
of meanings can hardly trigger any earnest process of contemplation.
In order to 'move' our understanding towards a deeper and broader grasp
of social complexity, the emergent meanings need to be beyond duality
of labelling them 'stable' or 'unstable'; they can be used for
generating hypotheses, concepts and emotional attitudes, without
hardening or transforming these concepts and attitudes into dogmas. In
other words, meanings need to freely emerge and dissolve in response to
the changes occurring in reality of our experience.
1.9 Transcending Duality and Non-duality
When studying fuzziness of human understanding, social fuzziology looks
for ways of transcending both duality and non-duality inherent in
thinking.
With duality the mind constantly asserts
A is true and (therefore) not-A is not true, or
A is not true and (therefore) not-A is true.
Fuzzy logic based non-dualism accepts that
both A and not-A are true (up to some degree).
Spiritually enhanced non-dualism rejects the existence of dualism
itself, maintaining that reality is an illusion (samsara in Buddhist
terminology):
neither A nor not-A are true
Both duality and non-duality keeps the mind entrapped in logical
speculations, and may lead to confrontation, one-sidedness and error
(in the case of dualistic thinking) or to compliance, confusion and
passivity (in the case of non-dualistic thinking).
Any insightful act of understanding vitally needs the energy of
polarities expressed in dualistic thinking, as well as serenity
accompanying their reconciliation in the framework of non-dualistic
thinking. The way to take advantage of dualistic and non-dualistic
thinking simultaneously is through expanding our consciousness so that
we can flexibly switch from one to another mode of thinking, without
being attached to either.
1.9.1 Polarisation
Paradoxically, it is common to find the greatest polarisation in
situations where the two parties seem to have much in common, and
strong motives for reconciliation. In these situations, which are as
common and dangerous in differences between lovers, partners or dear
friends as between enemies or warring groups, the signature is the
intense passion and pain that seems to accompany key moments of the
discussion, as though disagreement and difference are not intellectual
matters but acts of betrayal. The two parties tend to occupy extreme
positions, seemingly in antagonism to the other, often expressed in
extreme language.
Superficially this may seem to be a case of the danger of non-fuzzy
positions, expressed in non-fuzzy language. But on closer inspection
the respective positions reveal themselves to be not precise, only
extreme. In fact they are normally full of internal contradictions, and
wildly imprecise in their extremism. Polarisation is a kind of
bifurcation, not precision. Fanaticism is an extreme manifestation of
this kind of dense fuzziness in thinking, when human ability to move
beyond an established dogma is entirely blocked.
One indicator of this state is that the points of difference do not
remain fixed, able to be argued against one by one in search of a
compromise or resolution. If one point is agreed on, it quickly does
not matter, as each participant finds another reason to fight the other
to the death. The principle of polarisation is highly creative to a
destructive end, producing a constant stream of reasons for the
struggle to continue, but never to find a common way out of it.
Another indicator that this polarisation is very different from
ordinary non-fuzziness can be seen in the fact that sincere attempts by
outsiders or mediators to be conciliatory and fuzzy, to look for common
ground between the two positions, to seek a consensus, will often be
greeted with equal anger, generating a new position equally opposed. So
ëfuzziness of thinking' as conventionally understood is not a road
to consensus, at least in conditions of intensity and polarisation.
In states of relationships where the emotional intensity is high and
issues are confused, (ëfar from equilibriumí states of
relationships, feelings) then bifurcations may occur, taking the form
of cascades of oppositions and polarisations. These polarisations are
not logical structures (such that from a basic difference in premises,
many other differences are logically entailed) but generative, able to
produce new elements of difference out of any random phenomenon, still
charged with much of the intensity of the original difference and able
to act in its stead.
When the process of polarisation reaches this stage it is no longer
possible to identify a premise that can be made fuzzy and brought into
consensus (eg ësome Jews are good peopleí for an Arab,
ësome Arabs love their childrení for a Jew), because the
differences are like the Hydraís heads, which Hercules tried to
cut off, but when he cut one off, two more grew in its place.
In such a situation, mediators (someone trying to achieve a ëfuzzy
consensus') will fail, and may be at risk to their life as well, as has
been the fate of many people in Northern Ireland who tried to cross the
boundary between Catholic and Protestant. Socrates was another such
victim.
1.9.2 'Transcendent' Logic of Social Fuzziology
The situations described above are so common, and so dangerous that
social fuzziology needs to theorise them in a way that is true to them,
and leads somehow to good outcomes (greater health, greater beauty,
greater love, greater wisdom) if that is possible. The ideas of social
fuzziology must be useful: able to help a world that constantly
collapses into bloody wars of brother against brother, oppressor
against oppressed. What kind of thinking, what kind of logic can help?
Part of the answer may be found in a kind of logic we call
'transcendent' - a logic where even the duality between fuzziness (both
A and not-A are true up to some degree) and its negation - the lack of
fuzziness (either A or not-A is true) ceases to exist, and researchers
find themselves in a state of creative nescience or creative emptiness,
characterised by extreme openness and responsiveness. In such a state
we are ready to experience new dimensions of reality or discover new
possibilities and meanings.
This form of logic is similar to what Kauffman calls 'virtual' logic:
"Virtual logic is not logic, nor is it the actual subject matter of the
mathematics, physics or cybernetics in which it may appear to be
embedded... It is the pivot that allows us to move from one world of
ideas to another" (Kauffman, 1997).
Vedic maxim "Do not reject anything! But do not remain with anything
either! Go beyond!" encapsulates virtuality of the transcendent logic
and points to its possible use in social fuzziology as a
mind-energiser, as a stimulator of human creativity and catalyst for
seeking mutual understanding and social harmony.
In the endeavour of fuzziology to transcend duality between fuzziness
and non-fuzziness lies an essential difference between fuzziology and
pyrrhonism - a radical skepticism initiated by the ancient philosopher
Pyrrho of Elos, 4th century BC. Pyrrhonism postulates that certainty of
knowledge is unattainable, so there are no ways to go beyond its
inherent fuzziness. For fuzziology such ways exist and social
fuzziology aims at exploring them in the context of individual and
social realisations of human dynamics.
1.10 Consciousness Resonance
1.10.1 The Possibility Theorem
We CAN understand as much of the world as we have developed and
realised within ourselves.
The validity of this proposition follows from the Principle of
Fractality and from the Second Impossibility Theorem. The Principle of
Fractality makes us understand why the macrocosm mirrors the microcosm
and the world outside reflects the world inside us, through a
self-similarity that is never identity. The inner world is made not
only of our senses, feelings and thoughts shaped into images, ideas,
aspirations, expectations, hopes, dreams, but also of our deep
spiritual attitudes and beliefs. We perceive the world around us
through all of them. The power of our will is also in the inner world,
together with our infinite potential to create and realise ourselves in
innumerable activities. We never cease to modify the external world
through actions emerging from our inner worlds.
The external world also affects the world inside us. The lower the
level of consciousness, the stronger the influence of the external
world, the more silent the voice of the inner world and the weaker our
spiritual drives for self-realisation.
From the Second Impossibility Theorem follows that when we grow in
consciousness, we are able to see more of its projections onto the
world around us, to develop and realise outwardly more of our inner
potential to create. It is then that another type of fuzziness,
inaccessible from the previous levels of consciousness, starts to
irritate and challenge our minds and souls.
1.10.2 Journey Beyond Limitations of Fuzziness
In one of his book B. Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at
Columbia University, writes: "Although we are technologically bound to
the earth and its immediate neighbors in the solar system, through the
power of thought and experiment we have probed the far reaches of both
inner and outer space. During the last hundred years in particular, the
collective effort of numerous physicists has revealed some of nature's
best-kept secrets. And once revealed, these explanatory gems have
opened vistas on a world we thought we knew, but whose splendor we had
not even come close to imagining." (Greene, 2000)
As far as the process of revealing "nature's best secrets" never stops,
what "we think we knew" yesterday inevitably changes today, and new
vistas "whose splendor we had not even come close to imagining"
constantly open to those who are thirsty for knowing.
The fuzziness of knowing never ceases to exist. And this is a paramount
characteristic of human knowing, which challenges humanity and
constantly propels its search for truth and understanding the secrets
of reality.
Fuzziness has its own dynamics and potential to 'pull itself by its own
bootstraps''. When our understanding deepens, the dynamics of the
fuzziness tend to shrink; when our consciousness expands and our minds
'jump' into a higher level of reasoning, the fuzziness pulls itself
also at the new level. So, it keeps accompanying the process of our
understanding.
While exploring fuzziness, fuzziology reveals also ways of transcending
it and thus expanding the field of the human inquiry. The fuzziness of
understanding problems emerging out of complexity of life as it unfolds
cannot be resolved at the same level of knowledge that we have when
these problems appear. (One can see here an analogy with the
Gödelian problems in mathematics and other fields of knowing -
they cannot be resolved using the same assumptions under which they
have appeared). Only when our consciousness is expanded or 'raised to a
higher level' of reasoning and understanding, then the tension fades
and the problems, being seen in a new light, are no longer problems.
When problems dissolve, we say that the fuzziness related to them has
been transcended.
1.10.3 Activating Consciousness Resonance
The qualitative jump in consciousness to a higher level results in
transcending fuzziness accumulated in one's experience and knowing
related to lower levels of consciousness. As far as consciousness is a
holistic characteristic of human dynamics and not only a product of
mind, the growth of consciousness is possible when the factors
responsible for the integrity of all three inseparable constituents of
human individuality - body, mind and soul, become simultaneously
activated. We shall refer to this simultaneous activation as a
consciousness resonance.
Consciousness resonance involves all factors responsible for human
integrity. What are these factors? First of all,factors which
contributes in keeping human body healthy and human mind capable to
think and decide, no matter what kind of logic it prefers - fuzzy,
binary, inductive, deductive, abductive, etc. But these factors are not
enough!
Consciousness resonance cannot occur when neglecting the soul factors:
among them sensitivity and responsiveness, awareness and ability to
stay awake, passionate desire to get out of the 'attractor' of
egocentric thoughts and desires, compassion and love, willingness to
explore more subtle dimensions of reality and to share with others
skill, knowledge and wisdom.
Consciousness resonance does not eliminate fuzziness. Fuzziness is an
eternal companion to any process of knowing. At the same time, when
conscious resonance helps us go beyond the limitations of the fuzziness
or succeed in making some problem dissolves, it opens space for new
problems to emerge bringing with them new types of fuzziness to puzzle
our thoughts and feelings. At any level of consciousness there are many
phenomena and processes challenging the 'swarm' of our perceptions, our
beliefs and hopes, views and attitudes, aspirations and dreams.
What the consciousness resonance does is firing the bootstrapping
algorithm of the fuzziness present at a certainlevel of the individual
consciousness.
The consciousness resonance is a creative instant of a illumination, a
flash of intuition, a sudden understanding of the truth of the
phenomenon (process, event, actor) on which one's thinking and feeling
has been focused. The initial impression is that the fuzziness has
disappeared entirely, that one has succeeded in experiencing the truth
of the studied phenomenon as it is, without using any mental or
emotional filter, any borrowed-from-outside knowledge. Yes, the
fuzziness has withdrawn itself - has 'pulled itself with its own
bootstraps' - from a certain level of one's thinking, experiencing,
understanding and knowing - from a certain level of development of
one's consciousness; but it has not disappeared forever. It is 'ready
to explode' and spread again at the new level of understanding and
hence at the new level of development of one's consciousness.
1.10.4 The 'Bootstrapping' Theorem
Consciousness resonance provides both the necessary and sufficient
conditions for the fulfilment of the bootstrapping algorithm.
The proof of this proposition lies in the holistic character of the
human consciousness - it determines our humanness, it is both the cause
and the effect of our human nature; without consciousness we are just
animals. The three constituents of the human individuality - body, mind
and soul - are three pillars, three powers supporting the individual
consciousness and its ability to evolve and grow without limits. The
body epitomises the human power to act in the physical world, the mind
expresses the power of our thoughts and feelings (and includes the
power of the human heart as a source of our deepest emotions, longings
and love), and the soul connects us with the infinity of the human
spirit. The resonance between the three human powers represents an
apotheosis - the highest peak in the realisation of the creative
potential of the human consciousness (at the level of development
reached by the individual). Moreover, the resonance triggers also a
further growth of the individual consciousness,as there are no other
powers in the human nature to support this growth, beside those of the
human body, of the human mind and heart, soul and the spirit.
The growth of our consciousness is at the same time a growth of our
capacity to understand (experience, learn and know), and therefore it
inevitably affects the fuzziness inherent in this capacity. When our
capacity to understand increases, the fuzziness becomes 'thinner' and
'weaker' and folds its dynamics; when there are obstacles on the way of
our understanding, the fuzziness becomes 'denser', 'stronger' and
expands its dynamics. When the fuzziness 'jumps' from one level of
understanding to another, it 'pulls itself by its own bootstraps'. By
bringing the mind power to the top of its realisation, the
consciousness resonance makes it possible for the individual to 'jump'
from one level of understanding to another; in this sense, the
consciousness resonance 'provides' fuzziness with the necessary
conditions to initiate its bootstrapping. And vice versa, when
the fuzziness completes the 'bootstrapping algorithm', it disappears
from one level of understanding and appears at another, possible
deeper, level (the fuzziness can never be eliminated in an absolute
way). The disappearance and re-appearance of the fuzziness represent
jumps in the human understanding and hence demonstrate spontaneous
occurrences of consciousness resonance. So, the consciousness resonance
provides also sufficient conditions for the fulfilment of the
bootstrapping algorithm of the fuzziness in the individual
understanding.
Consciousness resonance is like a spontaneous coherence occurring with
a swarm of 'agents' (insects, birds, ants, neurones, thoughts,
feelings, and even people when acting under critical conditions) - all
the apparent fuzziness of the swarming behaviour suddenly disappears in
a magic way. ëAgents' become able to act in sync and harmony, as
if they are at-one - one multi-agent entity, one multi-facetted unity,
one inseparable whole - a flash of understanding whose light is able to
penetrate though any layer of fuzziness.
1.10.5 Resonance at Social Level
The term resonance has a clear meaning in physics - it is a process of
initiating a vibratory response in a receiverthat is attuned to an
emitter. The emitter is considered as a source of vibrations - they can
be periodic, aperiodic or chaotic. In the process of resonance these
vibrations 'fire' sympathetic vibrations in the receiver, the magnitude
of which is often greater than the magnitude of the vibrations
generated by the emitter.
We know about the existence of mechanical, acoustical, electromagnetic,
quantum and superstring resonance. The Adaptive Resonance Theory
developed by Grossberg (Grossberg, 1988) and widely applied for
modelling human cognitive processes by artificial neural networks, uses
resonance between two major neuron fields to explain how these networks
can learn to recognize, classify and predict patterns and events of the
environment both in supervised and unsupervised (without teacher) modes
of learning.
Human life crucially depends on the process of resonance. Lehar (Lehar,
1999) argues that the muscle of the heart demonstrates a kind of
chaotic resonance, for "the individual cells of the cardiac muscle are
each independent oscillators that pulse at their own rhythm when
separated from the rest of the tissue in vitro. However when connected
to other cells they synchronise with each other to define a single
coupled oscillator". In the quoted paper Lehar sees the whole brain as
a kind of resonator "whose natural frequency of oscillation as a whole
is observed in the global oscillations detected in the
electro-encephalogram. This fundamental oscillation sweeping across the
whole brain establishes a reference frame or coordinate system in the
form of a spatial standing wave, and the higher harmonics on this
standing wave represent the spatial percepts of objects perceived in
the world, with the phase of those harmonics relative to the
fundamental determining the location of the percept in the perceived
world".
Resonance is widely used in descriptions of dynamic interactions at a
personal or interpersonal level that are unusually effective,
spontaneous, and complete.
"We say that we 'resonate' with an idea or another person when we share
an unusually rich set of perceptions that implies to us that we are 'on
the same wavelength' - another form of the metaphoric link to physical
models. It is a common experience that often is striking in the
strength and complexity of shared understanding, and it is associated
with successful interactions in pairs and groups of people, and with
universally recognized shared experiences. Productivity and creativity
are evidently enhanced, and cooperative responses to emergencies and
catastrophes seem to be facilitated" (Nelson, 1999).
The world wide web and Internet communication, by making possible
instantaneous sharing of people's thoughts, skills and feelings serve
as powerful catalyzers for the resonance to occur at the level of
society.
The idea of resonance occurring at the level of society closely relates
to the concept of noosphere - a term coinedin 1944 by the Russian
academic Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945) to describe a new emerging
"sphere of intelligence, wherein humanity could employ its evolutionary
gifts as a creative collaborative agent of evolution - and where the
widening conflict between technosphere and biosphere could be
transformed into synergy" (Allen and Nelson, 1986).
The same term noosphere was used in the book "The Future of Man" of
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (published after his death in 1955). He
suggested that the Earth in its evolutionary unfolding is growing a new
organ of consciousness, called the noosphere. The noosphere is
analogous on a planetary level to the evolution of the cerebral cortex
in humans. The noosphere is a "planetary thinking network" -- an
interlinked system of consciousness and information, a global net of
self-awareness, instantaneous feedback, and planetary communication.
In order to plug in the noosphere, the individual needs to discover the
'password'; the role of the password is the level of development of
one's own consciousness. Without this password, the noosphere is only a
gigantic pile of facts and ideas, pictures and graphics, hypotheses and
theories, descriptions and explanations of findings in different
branches of human knowing. It is the individual who needs to
transform the pile into an integrated whole - a whole which has meaning
for this individual, if and only if s/he has succeeded in discovering
the 'password'.
How to discover the password? By concentrating one's physical, mental
and spiritual efforts and igniting the consciousness resonance. So, it
is the consciousness resonance - the bootstrapping of the fuzziness of
one's individual understanding - that can give the individual access
and key for understanding the exciting secrets of the noosphere.
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Chapter
2 Bridging the Study of
Complexity with Social Fuzziology
Social fuzziology is inseparable from the new awareness of nonlinear
dynamics in every area of human and social life, of living and
non-living processes in the universe. The fuzziness of human thoughts,
which is at the centre of fuzziology, is humanityís most
precious resource in understanding the new world of dynamics waiting to
be explored and incorporated into science. It is also the key to the
creativity that humanity will need in ever greater abundance to achieve
profound and respectful resolutions of the otherwise intractable
problems that are building up, and to discover new unsuspected
opportunities in surprising and paradoxical places.
At the same time fuzziology does not directly explore complexity as a
"non-linear behaviour of systems at the edge of chaos"; the study of
this kind of behaviour is the focus of complexity science. So
fuzziology is not merely a part of the research in complexity, and nor
is complexity reducible to fuzziology. Zadeh's principle of
incompatibility makes the connection explicitly: as the complexity of a
system increases, human ability to make precise and significant
statements about its behaviour diminishes until a threshold is reached
beyond which precision and significance (or relevance) become mutually
exclusive characteristics.
This principle locates fuzziness in human capacity to make or find
meaning in statements (or in the thinking that leads up to and flows
from statements), not in the objects themselves. This situates the
centre of fuzziology outside the complex systems and the complex world
these statements are about. Fuzziology is not a substantive science
making truth claims about the world. It is a kind of meta-science
concerned with the human capacity to make sense of the world. Yet the
fuzziness of human experience and thinking is inseparable from the
nature of theworld.
The study of fuzziness is of interest not only because of its role, as
was thought in traditional science, in obscuring the clarity of crisp
truths, but also because of its crucial importance in enabling ways of
experiencing - thinking, feeling and acting - that are more powerful in
understanding and dealing creatively with the most intractably complex
aspects of reality. In social fuzziology there is no dualistic
separation of a thinking mind from an unrelated world. The nature of
the world considered as an inseparable unity-in-dynamics of the outward
world - the world around us - and the inward world - the world of each
individual soul - is the engine of social fuzziology, in general and in
every instance. At the same time, it is the engine of our creativity.
2.1 Complementarity and Mutual Enrichment
Zadeh's principle of incompatibility uses the notion of system - a
natural or artificial concatenation of elements, which function as a
whole. There are of course many phenomena which are not ordered by any
'systematicity' that has yet been discovered, which therefore exist
outside the scope of this principle, the world of chaotic phenomena
that for many centuries has remained outside science itself. Fuzziology
does not propose order in this surrounding chaos, but on the contrary,
it recognises the presence of chaos in what had been previously
supposed to be the world of order and system. A kind of fuzzy threshold
is assumed to exist somewhere at the boundaries of the domain of
systems thinking, beyond which its rules and assumptions would cease to
apply.
The threshold mentioned in Zadeh's incompatibility principle can be
connected with the idea of the ëedge of chaosí of Chris
Langton (Langton, 1987). For Langton and before him Prigogine
(Prigogine and Stengers, 1984) the zone between order and chaos was
highly productive. For Prigogine it was where new more complex forms of
order were born, order out of chaos. Zadehís major contribution
to this thinking was to realise that as this boundary or threshold is
approached, the old rules of thinking become inapplicable and break
down.
Chris Langton described the experience he had which led to his concept
ëedge of chaosí. He was scuba diving off the coast of
Puerto Rico, and at one point his instructor took him to the edge of
the continental shelf, at about 2000 feet:
"It made you realise that all the diving you had been doing, which had
certainly seemed adventurous and daring, was really just playing around
on the beach. The continental shelves are like puddles compared to
ëthe Oceaní. Well, life emerged in the oceans, so there you
are at the edge, alive and appreciating that enormous fluid nursery.
And thatís why ëthe edge of chaosí carries for me a
very similar feeling: because I believe that life also originated at
the edge of chaos. So here we are at the edge, alive and appreciating
the fact that physics itself should yield up such a nursery" (Waldrop,
1992).
We make three observations arising from this statement.
(1) The concept ëedge of chaosí appeared fuzzy to our mind,
and needed to be so. It is ëpoeticí rather than
ëscientificí, though it was created as a result of computer
experimentation with cellular automata. It connects with sensuous
physical experience at the same time as it makes links between physics
and biology.
(2) The concept is therefore simultaneously a major concept in
complexity and also a significant example of the creative and
productive use of fuzzy thinking to put into the laboratory of social
fuzziology.
(3) Thus, fuzziology and the theory of complexity and chaos are not
adjacent but related fields of thought, and are more like complementary
traditions that flow into the same broad stream of thought. Complexity
and chaos theory has so far been exciting and productive as an
invisible and unacknowledged branch of fuzziology, renovating the
resources of scientific thinking, rather than directly contributing to
the stock of scientific knowledge.
Social fuzziology needs the ideas of people who work in the field of
complexity and chaos because these ideas are such wonderful examples of
holistic thinking at work in the sciences. Complexity and chaos need
fuzziology as a framework for them to recognise what it is and what it
needs to do so that it can do it more and better, and be understood and
valued for what it is.
The danger complexity and chaos face is that they may be dismissed as
only a popular fashion, a trendy set of metaphors easy to replace by
another set in the minds of the fickle public. This is the essence of a
critique by the science writer John Horgan of what he christens
ëchaoplexityí:
"So far, chaoplexologists have created some potent metaphors: the
butterfly effect, fractals, artificial life, the edge of chaos,
self-organizied criticality. But they have not told us anything about
the world that is both concrete and truly surprising, either in a
negative or in a positive sense. They have slightly extended the
borders of knowledge in certain areas, and they have more sharply
delineated the boundaries of knowledge elsewhere." (Horgan, 1996)
Horgan is right to note that chaos and complexity theories have not yet
produced new and startling knowledge about the world. However, he does
not note that this was true of Newton also, whose great achievement was
to make new sense of what was known. Science has never been merely a
set of facts. Even more it has been a productive way of thinking.
Fuzziology is a laboratory in which a new way of thinking about the
universe is being explored, freed of some key assumptions about good
(scientific) thinking that have been dominant for 400 years. Theorists
of chaos and complexity are workers in that laboratory, collaborators
in a single enterprise so large it is invisible to someone like Horgan.
2.2 'Three Body Problem' in Fuzziology
2.2.1 KAM Theorem
The theorists of chaos and complexity acknowledge significance of the
theorem of Kolmagorov-Arnold-Moser (1978) - so called 'KAM theorem' -
that deals with the unresolved 3-body problem of Laplacean-Newtonian
celestial mechanics - a problem firstly approached by the French
mathematician Henri Poincaré (1890). The problem consists in
describing mathematically trajectory of an object, the motion of which
is influenced simultaneously by the gravitational forces of three
bodies. Facing an insurmountable computational difficulty when trying
to solve this problem, Poincaré saw possibility of existence of
a non-wandering - dynamically stable nonlinear solution of extreme
complexity, and thus did the first step into the new mathematical
theory of chaos.
KAM theorem asserts that the trajectories studied in classical
mechanics are neither completely regular nor completely irregular, but
they depend very sensitively on the chosen initial states: tiny
fluctuations can make them chaotic.
What has to do the above result with fuzziology?
The dynamics of nature are universal. Its energies and forces act
everywhere - in the macrocosm and microcosm, in the so-called
non-animated world and in the world of the living organisms, in the
human body as well as in the human mind - only the scales of
manifestation of nature's dynamics are different.
2.2.2 Dynamics of Fuzziness
We do not know much about the nature and sources of human dynamics, but
we know that it is because of them that we exist as thinking and
feeling creatures. Our urge to know is a force that can rich great
magnitude. While centred in this force, the fuzziness of knowledge is
not a static 'object' either; it moves - expands and shrinks,
bifurcates or ëexplodesí into many streams. It can become
dense and almost impenetrable, but it can become also transparent and
transpicuous; it can whirl in a vortex together with our turbulent
thoughts and emotions, or become quiet when our mind is still.
In this sense, we can speak of dynamics of fuzziness of human knowing,
no matter that we can not see and map their phase portrait on the
screen of the computer. Our awareness of fuzziness - our ability to see
and feel it expanding and amplifying, when we are in captivity of
ignorance, or shrinking and almost dissolving, when we transcend its
limitations, is the proof that its dynamics exist. The dynamics
of fuzziness includes the energies, forces, sources and attractors that
produce and sustain it, condense and dilute it, make it move and
transform.
However strong the human urge to know, it is oriented towards three
main 'bodies' of attraction:
(1) natural environment
(2) society
(3) ourselves
While experiencing the 'forces of gravitation' of the above three
bodies operating in parallel, the dynamics of fuzziness ingrained in
each of the three streams of knowing may easily become chaotic:
extremely sensitive to perturbations in the pulling forces,
unpredictable and hard to be controlled. One cannot say whether
fuzziness is going to expand or shrink, strengthen or weaken, evolve or
transform.
When moving - stretching, folding, increasing, decreasing,
'bifurcating' and reproducing - in unpredictable ways, fuzziness helps
us make meaning of our thoughts and feelings, of the thoughts and
feelings which others share with us.
2.3 Chaotic Attractors of Meaning
The attractors emerging out of chaotic dynamics of fuzziness of the
thoughts and feelings, which 'swarm' in the mental space of an
individual, can be interpreted as emergent meanings.
Mathematically, a chaotic or strange attractor is defined as an
attracting set with zero measure (that is, a set capable to be enclosed
in intervals with arbitrarily small total length) in an embedding
n-dimensional space (called phase space) and has a fractal structure
(that is, a structure, which displays self-similarity on all scales of
its manifestation). Every attractor has a basin - a limited area in the
phase space, where the pulling force of the attractor acts; if an
object enters the basin of a chaotic attractor, it starts to skip
randomly - in an apparently chaotic way. No matter how chaotic the
trajectory of the objects appears for an observer, it stays attached to
the attractor.
The cause for a meaning to emerge can be any sign - object of senses,
experiential event, word, text, idea, story, etc. - projected on one's
mental space. As far as such a projection is only an energy pattern - a
kind of whirlpool in the overall fuzziness of the flow of one's
thoughts and emotions - it can neither be seen nor touch but only
abstractly expressed in an arbitrary small 'attracting set' of mental
perception. In this sense, its 'measure' is zero.
Once a certain sign makes sense to an individual, this individual has a
capacity to 'zoom' deeper and deeper into the meaning of the sign.
Although each level (scale) of the meaning differs from any other
level, there is similarity between the levels, as they all relate to
the nature of one and the same sign interpreted by one and the same
individual. In this sense, the structure of an emergent meaning can be
characterised as fractal.
The 'phase space' where meanings emerge is provided by the human mind;
we refer to it as a mental space. Human brain is the material
embodiment of the mental space.
The mental space is a space of our thoughts and feelings; the meanings
that emerge in the mental space of an individual encapsulate the
fuzziness of his or her understanding.
Every meaning has its own 'basin' - a zone of relevance (significance,
validity, value) - an area in one's mental space that includes the
thoughts and feelings supporting one's fuzzy understanding of this
meaning. If a thought (or a feeling) is in the basin of an emergent
meaning, it serves to convey this meaning. The 'trajectory' of the
thought may appear chaotic to an observer, as the thought can 'live'
and 'move' in difficult-to-predict and sensitive-to-perturbation verbal
or non-verbal contexts. No matter how chaotic this trajectory appears,
if it is located in the basin of an emergent meaning, it conveys this
meaning.
For example, if an emergent meaning is egoistic, that is, its basin is
imbued with excessively selfish thoughts and exaggerated feelings of
self-importance, whatever the contexts in which these thoughts and
feelings become expressed, they covey the egoistic meaning.
Now we are ready to justify the application of the notion of a chaotic
attractor to the meaning that emerges out of the dynamics of fuzziness
in one's mental space: each meaning is a specific kind of an attracting
set with 'zero measure' and fractal structure. Therefore it resembles a
chaotic attractor. But this is not enough. The proof of existence of an
emergent chaotic attractor consists in showing the effects that this
attractor is able to produce. Is an emergent meaning able to produce
effects?
To make meaning of a sign implies an ability to respond to this
meaning, to react to it, to undertake corresponding actions. It is the
meaning that informs human actions. If there is no meaning behind one's
action, the latter is meaningless; it is just a waste of energy. So the
'mission' of an emergent meaning is to produce effects, that is, to
transform the fuzziness, which it encapsulates, into action(s).
2.3.1 Emergence of New Meanings
New meanings correspond to new chaotic attractors brought to life out
of fuzziness in the mental space of an individual (a group, an
organisation, society). According to complexity theory, emergent
phenomena are likely to occur in critical zones of the phase space,
that is, in zones where some characteristic parameters of their
dynamics reach critical values.
In such zones of criticality, chaotic attractors may undergo four types
of crises:
* two (or more) chaotic attractors can simultaneously lose their
dynamic stability and merge to form a new attractor - a
phenomenon known as attractor-merging crisis
* one chaotic attractor can become suddenly destroyed - a phenomenon
called boundary crisis
* one chaotic attractor can dramatically decrease or increase its
size - phenomena called folding interior crisis or expanding
interior crisis, respectively
* one chaotic attractor can split into two or more attractors - a
phenomenon called attractor-splitting crisis.
Similar crisis phenomena may occur with the chaotic attractors of
meaning (CAM). The role of the main characteristic parameter for the
dynamics of CAM is played by the degree of fuzziness in understanding
of its meaning - understanding expressed by an individual or a group of
individuals. Example of activities that strongly affect this degree of
fuzziness in one's understanding can be various forms of learning, of
strengthening individual or group awareness, honing one's intelligence,
training the intuitive components of thinking, etc. These kinds
of activities 'push' CAM into critical zones where some of the crises
described above occur.
From experience one knows that one and the same sign - text, formula,
event of life, hyperlink, piece of music, dance, ritual - can be
meaningless for some and full of meaning for others. And even for one
and the same person, signs perceived initially as meaningless can be
transformed into meaningful ones later, and vice versa. This kind of
transformation requires again conditions of criticality to arise in the
mental space of people; without people's efforts to learn and grow in
knowledge, in awareness, intelligence and wisdom, these conditions can
hardly come to existence.
The 'crises' which facilitate the emergence of new meanings or
destruction of old ones are:
* attractor-merging crisis
* attractor-splitting crisis
* boundary crisis.
The folded form of an interior crisis is non-productive; this type of
crisis results in gradual lost of an already attributed meaning - the
attractor shrinks in time and disappears without being able to
stimulate emergence of any other CAM.
The attractor-merging and attractor-splitting crises directly lead to
emergence of new CAM; the boundary crisis brings energy back to the
mental space - the energy liberated when the attractor subject to this
type of crisis has been destroyed - and thus increases the capacity of
one's mental space to conceive with a new CAM.
There are signs, which can trigger so-called 'chain reactions' bringing
to life more than one emergent meanings. Often these signs represent
words and expressions able to simultaneously 'fire' several creative
crises in one's mental space.
In Zen Buddhism, words and expressions used by advanced Zen-masters can
trigger "satori" (a state of spiritual climax, enlightenment) in their
disciples. The release of this kind of orgasmic power hidden in certain
words and expressions resembles a sudden jump of all CAM existing in
one's mental space directly into a 'boiling' zone of criticality. Such
a jump can be accompanied with emergence of new CAM associated with a
higher level of understanding (expansion of consciousness). The new
meanings may appear clear (non-fuzzy) from a standpoint of a disciple
who has succeeded to go beyond the fuzziness related to the previous
(lower) level of understanding; yet, the emergent meanings are bearers
of 'new' fuzziness ready to be explored at the new (higher) level of
understanding.
2.3.2 Meanings of Dominance and Suppression
In the light of complexity theory, the process of formation of a
dominant meaning can be explained through the expanded form of the
interior crisis of CAM: a certain meaning attractor expands up to such
a degree that it starts to dominate every other meaning emerging in
one's mental space. A 'classical' example is the ego-centred
meaning attractor that 'dwells' in the mental space of each of us and
often dominates this space with one's high opinion about oneself and
inflated feeling of pride and superiority to others.
When the egoism is embraced as a doctrine that dominates one's
behaviour, it tends to influence any other emergent meaning. In other
words, the ego-centred meaning attractor can expend and become
influential up to such degree that any other CAM emerges already in the
basin of the swollen ego-centred attractor and therefore conveys the
same meaning of swelled-headedness and self-conceit.
Similar to the meanings centred in the human egotism are the meaning
attractors implanted in one's mental space through propaganda, social
brainwash, suppression, violence and other direct or subtle, rough or
gentle, simple or sophisticated methods of mind control. This kind of
attractors also acts as an activator for the expanding interior crises
to burst out in the mental space of many individuals at the same time,
and thus to impede the emergence of new creative attractors of meaning.
The implanted attractors are even worse than the egoistic ones. The
latter are created by us and express the selfishness that is present in
human thinking, although the degree of its manifestation differs from
an individual to another. The former are created by others, imposed
upon us or made us voluntarily accept them as expressions of much
stronger ego-centred intentions, ambitions and cravings for power. Why
they are much stronger than the selfish desires of an individual only?
Because they pursue a gigantic selfish effect while spreading their
ego-centred intents simultaneously through the brains of millions of
people. Today we are witnessing of such kind of effect harvested by the
largest financial corporations in the world franticly involved in the
establishment of global economic order.
The folded form of an interior crisis is considered non-productive;
this type of crisis results in gradual lost of an already attributed
meaning - an existing attractor of meaning shrinks in time and
disappears without being able to stimulate emergence of any other CAM.
2.3.3 'Optimal' Degree of Fuzziness
While precision thrives on fixed and locked meanings, fuzziness implies
flexibility in interpretation, openness for evolution and potential for
transformation of the existing meanings. The characteristic para