Anarchy 31/Anarchism and the cybernetics of self-organising systems

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Anarchism and the
cybernetics of self-organising
systems

JOHN D. McEWAN

s1

The intention of this article is to suggest that some of the con­cepts used by cyber­neti­cians study­ing evolv­ing self-organ­ising systems may be relev­ant to anarch­ist theory, and that some of the con­clu­sions drawn from this study tend to favour liber­tarian models of social organ­isa­tion. Much of the spe­cific­ally cyber­netic ma­terial is drawn from lectures given by Gordon Pask and Stafford Beer at Salford College of Advanced Technology. They are not, of course, respons­ible for any con­clu­sions drawn, except where expli­citly stated.

  Firstly, what do we mean by a self-organ­ising system? One defini­tion is simply ‘a system in which to order in­creases as time passes’, that is, in which the ratio of the variety ex­hibited to the max­imum possible variety de­creases; variety being a measure of the com­plex­ity of the system as it appears to an ob­server, the uncer­tainty for the ob­server regard­ing its beha­viour. A system with large variety will have a larger number of pos­sible states than one with smaller variety. Thus such a system may start by ex­hibit­ing very varied beha­viour, e.g. a large number of dif­fer­ent re­sponses to a given stim­ulus may appear equally likely, but over a period of time the heha­viour becomes less erratic, more pre­dict­able—fewer and fewer dis­tinct re­sponses to a given stim­ulus are pos­sible (or, better, have a sig­nific­antly high prob­abil­ity.)

  This def­ini­tion is, however, in osme ways re­strict­ive. The best such a system can do is to reach some sort of op­timum state and stay there. Also, if we regard the system as a control system at­tempt­ing to main­tain stabil­ity in a fluctu­ating en­viron­ment, the types of dis­turb­ance with which it can deal are limited by the fixed max­imum variety of the system. This point will be dealt with later. The essen­tial thing is that unpre­dict­able dis­turb­ances are liable to prove too much for the system.

  Such con­sidera­tions suggest that it would be more fruit­ful to in­corpor­ate in the defini­tion the idea that the max­imum pos­sible variety might also differ at dif­fer­ent times. Thus Pask re­stricts the term to situa­tions where the history of ‘the system’ can best be repre­sented as a series S₀ S₁ … Sₙ each term a system with fixed max­imum variety, and each self-organising in the first sense. With this defini­tion we are

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able to deal with control systems of the type found in living organ­isms. Indeed, with a few limited excep­tions, bio­logical and social organ­isa­tion are, up to now, the only fields in which such control systems can be found. Some of the excep­tions, in the shape of ar­tifi­cially con­structed systems, despite their crude and ele­ment­ary nature in com­par­ison with living organ­isms, do however exhibit re­mark­ably ad­vanced beha­viour, at least in com­par­ison with con­ven­tional con­trol­lers.

  For an example of self-organ­ising beha­viour in this sense, we may con­sider a human being learn­ing to solve certain types of problem, as his beha­viour appears to an ob­server. Over an inter­val the beha­viour may appear self-organ­ising in the first sense. When, however, the learner adopts a new concept or method, there will be a dis­con­tinu­ity in the de­velop­ment of the beha­viour, after which it will again be self-organ­ising in the first sense, for a time, but now in­corpor­ating new pos­sibil­ities, and so on.

  In many dis­cus­sions of control situa­tions the concept of ‘Hier­archy’ appears very quickly. This may tend to make the anarch­ist recoil, but should not do so, since the usage is a tech­nical one and does not co­in­cide with the use of the term in anarch­ist criti­cisms of polit­ical organ­isa­tion.

  Firstly, the cyber­neti­cian makes a very import­ant dis­tinc­tion between two types of hier­archy, the ana­tom­ical and the func­tional, to use the termin­ology adopted by Pask. The former is the type exem­pli­fied in part by hier­arch­ical social organ­isa­tion in the normal sense (e.g. ‘tree of command’ struc­ture in in­dustry), that is: there are two (if two levels) actual dis­tin­guish­able con­crete entit­ies in­volved. The latter refers to the case where there may be only one entity, but there are two or more levels of in­forma­tion struc­ture opera­ting in the system—as for example in some types of neuron networks. A compar­able concept is Melman’s ‘dis­alien­ated de­cision pro­cedure’. This idea might, I think, be sug­gest­ive to anarch­ists.

  Secondly, even in the case of ‘ana­tom­ical hier­archy’, the term only means that parts of the system can be dis­tin­guished dealing with dif­fer­ent levels of de­cision making and learning, e.g. some parts may deal dir­ectly with the en­viron­ment, while other parts relate to activ­ity of these first parts, or some parts learn about indi­vidual occur­rences, while others learn about se­quences of indi­vidual occur­rences, and others again about classes of se­quences.

  Even in the ana­tom­ical sense, then, the term need have none of the con­nota­tions of coer­cive sanc­tions in a ruler-ruled rela­tion­ship which are common in other usages.

  An im­port­ant phe­nomenon in self-organ­ising systems is inter­action between the in­forma­tion flowing in the system and the struc­ture of the system. In a complex system this leads to Redund­ancy of Poten­tial Com­mand—it is impos­sible to pick out the crit­ical de­cision-making element, since this will change from one time to another, and depend on the in­forma­tion in the system. It will be evident that this implies that the idea of a hier­archy can have only limited ap­plica­tion in such a system.

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  I will now attempt to give a brief sketch of a partly arti­ficial self-organ­ising system, in­volv­ing the inter­action be­tween human beings and a machine. This pro­vides ex­amples of the con­cepts intro­duced, and also, I feel, sug­gests import­ant general con­clu­sions about the char­acter­ist­ics of self-organ­ising groups—char­acter­ist­ics which may sound familiar to liber­tari­ans. The machine in ques­tion is a group teach­ing machine de­veloped by Gordon Pask.

  Prior to this Pask had de­veloped indi­vidual teach­ing ma­chines which were import­ant ad­vances in the growth of applied cyber­netics. However, on con­sider­ing the problem of group teach­ing (for skills where some calcul­able measure of the pupils’ per­form­ance, the rate of change of which will serve as a suit­able in­dica­tion of learn­ing, exists), he did not simply combine indi­vidual ma­chines.

  The import­ant insight he had was that a group of human beings in a learn­ing situ­ation, is itself an evolu­tion­ary system, which sug­gested the idea of the machine as a cata­lyst, modi­fy­ing the com­mun­ica­tion chan­nels in the group, and thus pro­ducing dif­fer­ent group struc­tures.

  In the de­velop­ment of the indi­vidual teach­ing ma­chines, the possi­bil­ity of the pupil domin­ating the ma­chine had already arisen. This Pask now ex­tended by intro­ducing the idea of a quality ‘money’ allo­cated to each member of the group, and used by each of them to ‘buy’ for himself control over the commun­ica­tion struc­ture of the group and over the partial spe­cifica­tion of the solu­tion pro­vided by the machine. Now, in the indi­vidual machine, the degree to which the pupil was helped was coupled to change of his degree of success. If he was becom­ing more success­ful then the help given was de­creased. In the group machine, the allo­cation of ‘money’ is coupled to two condi­tions—in­creas­ing success and in­creas­ing variety in the group struc­ture. This second condi­tion is the key to the novelty of the system.

  The system, then, has chan­ging domin­ance and ex­hibits redund­ancy of poten­tial com­mand.

  In practice, each pupil sits in a little cubicle pro­vided with buttons and indic­ators for com­mun­ica­tion, and a com­putor is used for control, calcul­ating the various meas­ures, etc. The oper­ator is pro­vided with some way of seeing what is going on, and can de­liber­ately make things dif­ficult for the group, by intro­ducing false in­forma­tion into the chan­nels, etc., seeing how the group copes with it.

  The prob­lems which Pask, at the time, had used in these group ex­peri­ments had been form­ulated as con­vey­ing in­forma­tion about the posi­tion of a point in some space, with noise in the com­mun­ica­tion chan­nels. The group had been asked to imagine that they are air traffic con­trol­lers, given co-ordin­ates spe­cify­ing the posi­tion of an air­craft at a certain time, for ex­ample.

  He sug­gests, however, that prob­lems of agree­ing on a choice of policy on a basis of agreed facts is not, in prin­ciple, very dif­fer­ent from the case in which ‘the facts’ are in dispute, and there is no ques­tion of adopt­ing any future policy—except of course the policy to adopt in order to ascer­tain the true facts and com­mun­icate them; this being the problem which the group solves for itself. It is in this sense that

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the group may be re­garded as a de­cision maker.

  It will be noted that the state of the system when in equi­lib­rium is the solu­tion to the problem. Also that this solu­tion changes with time. This is also the case in the first example from purely human organ­isa­tion which oc­curred to me—a jazz band (an example also sug­gested by Pask).

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