The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 11

Summary of Chapter 11: Language, Confusion, and Jam

This concluding chapter starts off with a promising idea: Wiener states that he will explore the “philosophical assumptions” underlying the work of Benoit Mandelbrot and Roman Jakobson. However, he ends up making no more than passing reference to these two, namely that:

They consider communication to be a game played in partnership by the speaker and the listener against the forces of confusion, represented by the ordinary difficulties of communication and by some supposed individuals attempting to jam the communication. (187)

[Another thing: Based on the title of the chapter I was really hoping W was going to use the word “jam” in some jazzy/beatnik-derived sense, which would have been adorable and also refreshing. “Jam” in that sense could have been an opening for a positive sense of entropy and/or disorder as something creative, which W is lacking.]

This is based on Von Neumann’s game theory, in which one team tries to communicate a message, and the other tries to “jam” it. He then makes the point that, strictly speaking, in Von Neumann’s theory of games, both sides are pursuing rationally optimal strategies; they will not “bluff” to confuse each other, but are being in a sense perfectly honest and open, despite being opposed. He relates this to a quote from Einstein: “God may be subtle, but he isn't plain mean.” (188)

The point being that, unlike humans, nature is not deceitful. This means that scientists, used to studying nature, are naïve out of necessity. Scientists are not like detectives, a kind of thinking which has its role in other fields, e.g., “official and military science.” This kind of thinking is counterproductive in actual science, as it is a waste of time:

I have not the slightest doubt that the present detective-mindedness of the lords of scientific administration is one of the chief reasons for the barrenness of so much present scientific work. (189)

[whatever “barrenness” means]

Thus, a position of being overly “suspicious” like a detective makes you no good at science, because scientists have to trust that nature is honest, not deceitful. [He does not address this, but his odd anthropomorphizing stance must break down when it comes to the social sciences, which study humans, who can be deceitful.]Another kind of position that is bad for science is the “religious soldier,” who is a follower of propaganda of either the right or the left (he singles out “the soldier of the Cross, or of the Hammer and Sickle” (190)).

He ties this back to his earlier distinction between Augustinian and Manichaean perceptions of the devil: the first is just a force of nature, in the service of God (and thus equivalent to entropy in his worldview). The second is willfully malicious and in fact has some chance or belief in the chance that it can prevail (like Milton’s Satan). Scientists need to maintain an Augustinian view, but this is difficult because

The Augustinian position has always been difficult to maintain. It tends under the slightest perturbation to break down into a covert Manichaeanism. (191)

This is because Manichaeanism has more emotional and dramatic attraction; and also because Manichaeanists of the right and left create political conditions which they force upon scientists.

In this present day when almost every ruling force, whether on the right or on the left, asks the scientist for conformity rather than openness of mind, it is easy to understand how science has already suffered, and what further debasements and frustrations of science are to be expected in the future. (190)

A Manichaean suspects the world of being dishonest, and so adopts dishonest strategies in turn; this is obviously not good for science and the search for truth. There is an irony that the world created by these Manichaean faiths undermines the possibility of faith, which requires the existence of free choice. Science requires its own form of faith:

I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the accept­ance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. (193)

The needs of science, and of a free and democratic society, necessarily dovetail:

Sci­ence is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith. A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a com­munity which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthily growing science imposes upon it.

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapters 5 and 6

Summary of Chapter 5: Organization as the Message

This brief chapter has as its key point the idea that what is most essential to a living organism is its pattern, which it maintains against entropy and which in theory could be sent as a message, reduplicating the entity. Various analogies from the real world of biology are listed, and sci-fi scenarios involving sending humans by telegraph are lightly explored as a “phantasy."”A comparison/contrast is made with the religious idea of a “soul,” apparently as an analogy for the “pattern” he has identified as the core of being an organism: “The physical identity of an individual does not consist in the matter of which it is made” (101). One difference would be that there is no reason why a living, copied individual could not fork into two individuals with the same past, growing different thenceforward like cells splitting in two. [iirc there was some story, possibly a Jack Vance story, in which this was possible: though the copies that had been sent for communication purposes were made out of perishable material and did not last long; their memories somehow had to be uploaded back to the original, or they would die without the original knowing what they had experienced]. Wiener seems to imagine something more like scanning the body and destroying it as it goes, so the replica becomes the only existing version, a sort of immortality through replication idea [immortality of the pattern, that is, since wouldn’t the consciousness be destroyed each time? I’m trying to recall what Chalmers would have said: for the consciousness evoked or whatever by another copy of the same physical pattern, to be the exact same consciousness (not just a replica) would be pure dualism]. Wiener makes a silly comparison to the amount of information in an Encyclopedia Britannica, which is obviously not even comparable.

 

Summary of Chapter 6: Law and Communication

In this chapter Wiener appears to be demonstrating the application of cybernetic theory by giving a cybernetic theory of law. Basically the purpose of the law is to communicate clearly the expectations of behavior (and punishments for bad behavior) that will be enforced by the "community" or "the state" in the name of certain cultural understandings of "justice." Such an idea of justice will vary cross-culturally: Wiener provides what he understands as the Western Tradition as an example. This appears to be a very typical functionalist theory of law. How law should work is obtained rationally from the definition: it should communicate clearly. Wiener notes that this is obviously not always the case, but exactly how and why intentional ambiguities or unfairness are introduced is not something he seems ready to analyze in any depth. Instead these are accidents or from some other effect external to the purpose of the law: indeed, "noise." He notes with some apparent disdain or irony that lawyers are allowed and encouraged to introduce noise as confusion, bluffing, etc. in the courtroom – he feels this is unusual in, or rather extrinsic to the proper functioning of, a communicative system.

Within a culturally relativist framing, he describes his understanding of the dominant tradition, of Western Civilization with some influence from the East) and what it entails:

The best words to express these requirements are those of the French Revolution: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. These mean: the liberty of each human being to develop in his freedom the full measure of the human possibilities embodied in him; the equality by which what is just for A and B remains just when the positions of A and B are interchanged; and a good will between man and man that knows no limits short of those of humanity itself. These great principles of justice mean and demand that no person, by virtue of the personal strength of his position, shall enforce a sharp bargain by duress. What compulsion the very existence of the community and the state may demand must be exercised in such a way as to produce no unnecessary infringement of freedom. (105-6)

[Summarized: 1) this is justified solely by tradition/cultural attachment to these ideals, they are not presented as natural or eternal; 2) each human is to be free to "develop" "the full measure of the human possibilities embodied in him" [a phrasing which could be open on the one hand to de facto inequality (as different persons have different "embodied possibilities;" I was going to say "on the other hand," an expression of the unique, but the measure is still the presence of "human possibilities," so this is a humanism, not a Stirnerian unique-ism.]. 3) equivalence of subject positions (A and B can be interchanged) [here we see an example of the “as if” that assumes that persons of any race, class, gender, sexuality and so on, are interacting in a world that is already equal or “as if” equal, and their actions can be evaluated in this light]; 4) no one can exert strength or duress to get a better deal; 5) a community or state enforces this, and can use force, but only in a way that avoids "unnecessary infringement of freedom," i.e., a subtractive view of "freedom" which in fact takes the existence of state power and “duress” for granted.]

[There is also clearly a limitation to the functionalism of the cybernetic theory of law, as presented in this chapter. It is presumed that since law should be clearly communicated/ing, by definition, then any examples of ambiguity must be explained away as aberrant and to be improved on. The interpretation of such ambiguity as intentional and exploitative is not seen as an inherent or essential aspect of the law as an expression of power or domination, but only accidental and peripheral to the true workings of law in the system.]