LIMITATION AND POSSIBILITIES
OF
COMMUNICATION
New Pathways in the Foundation of “Cybernetic Thinking”
by Rudolf Kaehr
and Eberhard von Goldammer
The question of unexploited
human (Brain) resources and their role in the development in the future leads inevitably
to two basic questions:
1)
What unnecessary barriers hinder the development of these resources?
2) Behind which unopened doors are to
be found these possible new resources?
The development of productive forces has
led to a situation in which it is no longer permissible to collectively gather social,
scientific and technological actualities or data into a single unified or unifying
context. The idea of a “Summum Bonum”, - whatever form this concept may want to
assume - has forfeited its synthesizing power.
It is necessary to develop a way of
thinking for the future which does not simply replace as the basic premise unity with
diversity but which rather deals with a more fundamental interplay supporting and relating
both these factors operatively and textually.
The opening of new resources in thinking
depends substantially upon wether the transition - a paradigm change - can be achieved
from the restrictive Gödel-McCulloch-Pitts era (the “mathematizing power of
Homo-Sapiens” E. Post) to a post-Gödelian epoch of scriptualizing and the
methods of symbolising.
The American second-order cybernetics
points in particular to the necessity of such a shift: "The logic of our western
industrial corporate society (with limited liability) is unidirectional, deductive,
competitive and hierarchical, and the keystones of its paradigm are the claim of
objectivity and the theory of types, which exclude in principle the autonomy of paradox
and of the individual. In the scientific revolution that we know create and experience,
however, we perceive a shift from causal unidirectional to mutualistic systemic thinking,
from a preoccupation with the properties of the observed to the study of the properties of
the observer". (Heinz von Foerster)
In order to open up and research the
range of possibilities, a concept of the “possible” must be worked out which is
freed from being bound to the present-tense as is the conceptualisation and methodology of
today. The range of the “possible” remains restricted to the “present”
when the possible is understood only in terms of the criteria of “what is”,
“what not yet is”, and “what in the future will be”. The compulsion to
determine the “possible” and the “future” from the present arises from
the now predominant way of understanding time. As is well known, the concept of time has
on the whole been eliminated from the natural sciences and has only recently been
reintroduced in the work of Prigogyne; and in humanities time is a non-operative concept.
That which cannot be grasped or expressed
from the fundament of logo- centric scientific thinking is an operative time-structuring
in which linearity and tabularity, the fields of ruptures, emanation and evolution are
communicated as complementary communication structures. Time as a complex system of
emanation and evolution is not thought of or conceived as “present” but from the
difference, differance (J. Derrida), i.e., the discontexturality of the contextures
“past” and “future” whereby time is freed from the concept of being
(G. Günther)
A further self-incapacitation of thinking
occurs not only through the prohibition of basal self-references in formal systems, but
also through the presupposition, the apriori of “Potential Realisability”
(Markov) forming the basis of all operative systems. An additional hinderance results from
its idealistic concept of infinity which absorbs considerable brainware energy and wastes
communication possibilities.
Future problems of communication will not
alone be mastered through new media because these problems are now pushing their way to
the surfaces between the paradigms themselves both in scientific discourse as well as in
social realities. In particular the communication between the natural sciences and
humanities has not yet been developed. The problem is one of an “Ecology of
Mind” which must be solved by this communication, i.e., through the development of a
position in which the reason for the differences between the two is recognized and the
communication barriers are de-constructed.
The so-called “New Logic of
Information and Communication” belongs to the old paradigm of logocentrism if it
is performed as a field of the “New Rethorics” (Perlman), the “Dialogik”
(Lorenzen), or the “Dialectical Logic” (Apostel, Arruda), because
their aim is the unification of the proponents and the oponents under the summum bonum of
rationality and truth. This “new logic of information” is not polylogic but
still remains monologic.
Transformation of Man-Machine
Communication: The purely instrumental understanding of technology which predominates
today both in engineering and in the humanities is insufficient. A new understanding of
the man-machine symbiosis as a heterarchical interplay between mechanism and creativity
needs to be developed and practiced in connection with the development of new
architectures in computer technologies. These will be developed prospectively; experience
and possible training methods will be discussed.
Conference Abstract for
“Challenge of the Future” |
