APPENDIX B: Information Systems and Social Ethics
by GEOFFREY VICKERS
On Information Systems
In [earlier chapters] you almost omit reference to what I regard as the most revolutionary scientific image change of our time (although you rely on it in later chapters). And insofar as you do refer to it in Chapter 4, you do not distinguish it from other later and still pending changes. I refer to the revolutionary impact of the distinction which science has learned to draw in the last 30 years between energy and information. This, more than anything else (in my view), has changed the scientific image of reality by negating reductionism and substituting a hierarchic concept of levels of organization, each dependent on but not explicable in terms of the level below (thus confirming what Michael Polanyi has been saying) [without its aid].
It has also legitimized the scientific study of human communication (which you barely mention) and thus introduced a new scientific image of man as communicating social man and of the hierarchic development of both persons and societies by attaining different levels of communication. D. M. Mackay, for example, has tried to show why and how dialogue differs from attempts at mutual manipulation by words. I once heard Professor Ham at Toronto interrupt a similar demonstration to show how far the diagram he had drawn fell short of the kind of mutual communication described by Martin Buber in I and Thou. Saul Gorn writes, "We spend the first year of our lives learning that we end at our skin, and all the rest of our lives learning that we don't." These men are a physicist, an engineer, and a designer of computer languages.
Note that this huge change results not at all (as yet) from studying ESP and all that. It comes from studying those familiar powers at which science had declined to look, even when it took them for granted. Science itself has always developed far more by listening, talking, and reflecting than by observing, experimenting, and reasoning. Knowledge of (not merely about) other human beings depends even more on social communication. Our main input comes neither from our five accepted senses, nor from our more esoteric ones, but from the activity of our own minds in intimate linguistic communication with others. This fact, emerging from scientific tabu, makes the human dimension respectable.
Brief references to this revolution are to be found in Chapter 4 (e.g. the reference to hierarchy). I would like to see them developed, separated and put earlier. . . . The revolution is itself both earlier in time and distinct in character from those to which you look forward. It has already taken place. It is a shift in scientific categories as important as the distinction of energy from matter which marked the previous 250 years. And, incidentally, it is essential to understanding how any kind of ethic arises.
Let me expand a little on the revolution. (I have written about this in many papers, e.g. in "Science and the Regulation of Society.") When Driesch in the 1890s asserted that his divided sea-urchin embryos could not grow into complete sea urchins unless they somehow knew where they were going, he wrongly postulated a goal-seeking force (entelechy) and was reviled, because forces must not be thought of as seeking goals. If he had advanced the much more daring, but more correct, hypothesis that every cell was saturated with information about the future shape of the whole, he would have been ignored because information was not then a scientific concept. It became a scientific concept half a century later — and within another decade Crick and Watson had identified (not broken) the genetic code. Three centuries earlier Descartes had had to postulate a special kind of matter (res cogitans) to account for mind, just as Driesch had to postulate a special kind of energy to account for form-making. Both men lacked an acceptable universe or discourse adequate to express their insights.
Similarly Freud, trying to describe form in terms of energy, was driven into difficulties which would simply not have arisen if he had been born a few decades later. His successors are beginning to fill out his concept of the ego as a creator of form, rather than a resultant of forces.
If this view is acceptable to you, I hope you will be able to squeeze it in, partly as an example of prematurity and tabu, but chiefly as the most important conceptual revolution of our time — hardly a debt to science (non-scientists have always known that men lived in a conceptual world of their own making) but the withdrawal of a scientific tabu which legitimizes human communication as the means by which men humanize themselves and their children and build a human world hierarchically distinct from the biological organ with which they build it. Every computer engineer knows that there is a category difference between a program and a computer. An un-programmed computer cannot compute. And even the activities of a programmed computer, if described in physical terms, give no clue at all to what the program is all about. Some psychologists and biologists may still think it a scandal to distinguish mind from brain as complementary categories hierarchically ordered. But such distinctions are common assumptions to programmers and electronic engineers.
So even if there were no other states of consciousness, we should be in for a major revolution by being allowed to think about the ones we know we have.
I am most interested in all Chapter 4 has to say about research into different states of consciousness and about psi phenomena. I find all this much more relevant and important than I expected. But I think it will greatly gain if you can separate it from this other element. This would also enable you to deal more adequately with general systems theory which owes its development on the psycho-social side to the concept of information. It would be well, in doing so, to mark the distinction between systems open only to the exchange of energy and those open also to the exchange of information. This is an important distinction in general systems theory as I understand it, and an essential ingredient in the building of hierarchies of organization.
On Social Ethics
This lacuna (as I see it) in your presentation seems to me also to weaken Chapter 5. . . . Ethics appear as something we need but we have been told virtually nothing about how they originate except that they are influenced by images of man. Now whatever their origin, ethics can only be understood (by me at least) as standards of what to expect from each other and from ourselves in concrete situations. They are possible only because we can engage through communication in these social and inter-personal transactions.
You rightly stress that these standards reflect images of man current in the culture. But because you understress (in my view) the specifically social nature of man (humanized by membership of a specific society), you leave the reader to assume that the cogency of an ethic in your view derives directly from belief in a metaphysic, i.e. that the "ought" is derived directly from the "is." Apart from the fact that this is generally regarded as very imperfectly true, it leaves a weakness which becomes apparent in Chapter 5 when we are invited to plan the development of an ecological ethic and self-realization ethic. From then on we search, almost in vain, for an indication that the new image of man is to imply any sense of responsibility towards his neighbour next door.
Now it seems to me self-evident that a world such as you describe would have to pay for being de-politicized and decentralized by a huge increase in social responsibility and that this would greatly limit all this self-actualization except insofar as it became (as it should) a main channel through which individuals actualize themselves. A more human world will be a more socially responsible world and this responsibility will have costs as well as benefits, limitations as well as enlargements in terms of "self-actualization." This verity is the great tabu of the counter-culture. It seems to me to have infected you also. The resolution or containment of conflict is not explained, but simply assumed.
Everyone knows that I do not further my neighbour's self-actualization by seeking my own any more (or less) than I further his wealth by seeking my own. On the other hand, to find one's own self-actualization simply in helping others to find theirs has always been one definition of a saint. Yet your summary of "an adequate image of man," suddenly replete with ethics, seems to have no room for social ethics at all. A duty to the ecosphere is the only duty expected of this abstract Man — except the duty to "actualize himself." It does not expressly deny that no one can actualize his potential in one way without denying its actualization in another, or actualize it in any way in isolation from his neighbour. But it makes no reference to the social demands and constraints within which this personal artistry is to be performed, and which are inseparable from its value.
So my basic question (if not yours) remains unanswered. An adequate image of man for the U.S.A. in A.D. 2000 would find a jointly acceptable position for the negro, assure integrity in the White House and produce a markedly different distribution of wealth, earnings, and incomes (I could produce a similar catalogue for Britain). It is not clear to me how these would flow merely from the changed images of man described in Chapter 5.
This comment is the residue of my original objection that changing images of man will not of itself change social ethics and cannot even be convincingly described without including an account of social ethics and the reciprocal effect of social ethics on it. In other words, it complains that all this thinking lacks an adequate sociological dimension. (Philosophical thinking nearly always does. I regard Man with a capital letter as a danger signal.) You cannot fully meet this point even if you wanted to, but I think it would help if you were to give more importance to the emergence of human communication as a subject for study at its familiar levels and not only at the higher levels which most interest you and thus to the current change in the image of communicating, social man, member, creator, and creation of a specific social group.