Abstract
In the previous chapter, I argued that communication research in its most general form is concerned primarily with attempts to study common features of the most puzzling known cases of emergence.
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Notes
- 1.
By this I do not mean to propose that we identify communication with the study of all known problems of emergence. This point was emphasized at the conclusion of the chapter “Emergence and Reduction”, but it bears refinement here. Chaos researchers teach us that complex and unstable systems are common. Such systems are often puzzling for all kinds of valid reasons, but they are not puzzling in the same peculiar and distinctive way that the emergence of life or consciousness is puzzling. And they are not as puzzling. This may become clear when we compare the tasks of explaining the emergence of life and of consciousness with that of explaining, say, the emergent properties of a typhoon (the storm’s direction, future speed, and even the moment of its formation). It may well be that there is no clear-cut criterion that allows us to regard the storm as any less an instance of communication than you or I. After all, even a typhoon can be described in certain known senses as having an “environment” in which it operates and which is a mirror image of our view of the storm as a distinct system. The willingness to define communication this broadly is not my own: indeed, it is my way of avoiding early undesirable conflicts with reductionists. For instance, in the opening paragraph of their classic essay, Shannon and Weaver (1949) use “communication” to encompass all the “procedures by means of which one mechanism… affects another mechanism”, and it is obvious that such a sweeping definition was designed to deliberately blur the demarcation between what the physicist calls “interaction” and what we have here termed “communication”, i.e., between what the physicist would describe as a system’s “tendency” or “direction” and what we are here calling an individual’s “purpose” or “goal”. Weaver in particular expressed the hope that the theory of communication would one day be fully reduced to mechanics (and in the chapter devoted to Shannon’s theory, I argue in detail that this hope was based on a cardinal misunderstanding of the nature of communication). Either way, it is commonly accepted that the central problems of emergence that we discussed here pose a challenge of a different order than that of the typhoon, or in other words, that communication is a particularly fascinating (if not always finely demarcated) subset of interactions. The reason for this strikes me as rather simple: the problems of emergence that we find most puzzling are those that stem from the overwhelming impression that a brand new property has emerged before us, such as the property of awareness to an environment. Since we have nothing like an absolute criterion for the identification of a property as “new”, this should not be mistaken for an attempt to justify a position but at most as a way of conveying a vague impression (which may well be based on prejudice—for example, on anthropomorphic aspects of our consciousness).
Systems theorists tend to refer to the typhoon and the organism alike as “complex systems” but to distinguish the systems studied by communication scholars by describing them as “self-adaptive complex systems”. The assumption, perhaps, is that the organism but not the typhoon adapts to its environment, and that this is the distinguishing feature that separates interaction from full-fledged orientation in a private environment. But this distinction is just as vague as the ones above and does not solve our problem. The air conditioner, for example, can easily be described as “adapting” to its environment when it adjusts its operation to the room’s fluctuating temperature, as Wiener noted (and we could just as easily view the temperature as “adapting” to the air conditioner if we discuss it as a system). It is best, then, to drop the “self-adaptive” title, observing that the very word “self” is too context-dependent here, and to speak simply of “systems with an environment”. This conclusion underscores the absence of any essential, objective, demarcating boundary that defines the phenomena studied by communication scholars: first, because the notion of an entity or organism adapting by itself is very vague, since even human beings (considered as early as Plato to be the epitome of self-propelled agency) are constantly influenced by various elements that make up their environment, and second, because even a markedly non-living system such as a storm has an environment in a certain loose sense, and this environment affects its “conduct”. The storm is not, however, a subject in any standard sense of the word, so that the metaphorical nature of any talk about the storm’s “point of view” or the storm’s “needs” is very pronounced in comparison with talk about the organism’s point of view or needs, and this is precisely the intuition that underlies the distinction commonly drawn between these two cases.
Let me sum up this point: the main claim of the chapters ahead is that the existence of (subjective) environments is inextricably linked to the attribution of goals (or problems, or challenges) to systems. This means that we are engaged in the study of communication wherever we are willing (!) to attribute goals (and thus an environment) to the phenomena before us (whether or not this willingness is backed up by a clear-cut criterion).
- 2.
The vast majority of scientists who are reductionists are also materialists—that is, they argue that the basic items that make up reality are investigated by physics (quarks , electrons, etc.). But it is important to note that there are also many reductionists who suggest that all known phenomena should be reduced to basic components of a mental rather than a physical nature. They are called “idealists ”. Leibniz, for example, who was one of the greatest scientists of all time, was such an idealist, as were the physicists Arthur Eddington and Erwin Schrödinger . I will not elaborate on their views since the metaphysical controversy between the materialists and the idealists does not concern us here. For present purposes, it is important only that we notice that materialist reductionists, who reject any talk of goals, find themselves in a very limited position vis-à-vis the basic phenomena that the researcher of communication finds so fascinating.
- 3.
- 4.
The idealist reductionist does not concern us here, but we should nonetheless note that while he avoids the problem of the material existence of systems, he does face the problem of their mental existence, which is no less consequential or severe: if, for instance, the only existent substances are simple feelings, or elementary sensations, then we cannot explain the precedence of certain complex concepts (certain images of systems) over others.
- 5.
These problems lie at the heart of the philosophy of Descartes, the most important and influential modern reductionist. Descartes’ metaphysics is a particularly interesting testing ground for the problems I presented here because it provides a wonderfully lucid catalogue of the basic problems that his reductionist approach creates for anyone who wishes to acknowledge the existence of communication. Descartes sought to reduce the known world to two basic substances: a material substance, and a mental substance. But since substances, as we have seen, cannot communicate with one another as a matter of principle, he assigned responsibility for this communication to a third substance… an omnipotent God. Moreover, not out of consistency, Descartes divided the mental substance he had posited into many different mental substances, wishing thereby to ensure the compatibility of his philosophy with Christian dogma, which is founded on the eternal existence of distinct souls. This division did not sit well with his view of the mental substance as one by virtue of the common essence of all souls. The result was that the question of communication between the distinct souls posited in Descartes’ theory, like the question of communication between mental and material substances, remained an unresolvable mystery (and once again the third substance, God, was brought into provide the miraculous solution). By contrast, the essence of matter, its fundamental property, Descartes identified as extension—in other words, the ability of matter to take up space in the geometrical sphere. In this, he yielded to the Parmenidean stance that the world of matter is an uninterrupted, undivided whole: for in the Cartesian picture, any particular item, whether a table or a person, is not essentially different from the medium that surrounds it (the essence of both, in the final analysis, is extension). Here, therefore, Descartes comes up against the Parmenidean problem of distinguishing the bodies from their surroundings—or carving them up, so to speak, as distinct slices of reality (the body and its surroundings have the same essence, extension, and therefore ultimately cannot be distinguished). It goes without saying that this problem is not satisfactorily resolved in Descartes’ theory. His success as a physicist is due in large part to his avoidance of it. Incidentally, Spinoza’s theory, according to which the natural world is all one indivisible substance of which mind and matter are different attributes, represents a brave attempt to tackle these difficulties, even if its implications remain somewhat vague. Here too, however, communication between individual items and their distinction from their environment is ultimately an unresolvable mystery, since for Spinoza as for Descartes, we are ultimately not at all distinct from one another (from God, who is also Nature). For Spinoza, the view that we are distinct entities is merely an expression of our relative ignorance.
- 6.
Plato and Aristotle claimed that the human soul is the only substance capable of moving itself, and indeed identified the operations of the soul, or human consciousness, with the power to move without being moved by an external cause, i.e., with the ability to possess a motive, or “mover” (which they identified with intention or purpose). William Gilbert, the sixteenth-century pioneer in the study of magnetism and electricity, argued that this definition applies also to the magnet and that we should therefore acknowledge either that the magnet has a soul or that other substances also possess the power to move themselves. The magnet, then, is the first material substance to which an unmistakable motive was attributed, that is, the ability to initiate change without coming in direct contact with anything other than itself. Newtonian gravitation is also such a property, though it is obviously not described as an “initiative”. But the fact remains that all the fundamental forces in mechanics (and most prominently, attraction and repulsion) are based on mental verbs. This is not accidental: it reflects the kind of double language used to express a central aspect of the problem of reduction.
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Bar-Am, N. (2016). Is There Communication in the Reduced World?. In: In Search of a Simple Introduction to Communication. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25625-2_7
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