For every part of the universe is connected with every other part … Cooperation and reciprocity are essential properties that are inherent in the unified system of the world of existence …
‘Abdu’l-Bahá
A New Blogger
Dear Friends:
Please welcome a new blogger – Hamid Y. Javanbakht. You may know him from some of his comments and from forum posts under the name koinotely.
The theme of his posts will be The Bahá’í Faith and Complex Systems – Towards A 21st Century Mix of Science, Systems Theory, Philosophy, and Universal Religion.
The universe, according to the Bahá’í Writings, is a highly interconnected place:
For every part of the universe is connected with every other part by ties that are very powerful and admit of no imbalance, nor any slackening whatever…. Cooperation and reciprocity are essential properties that are inherent in the unified system of the world of existence, and without which the entire creation would be reduced to nothingness.
A
ll things interrelate. “All created things are closely related together and each is influenced by the other.” According to `Abdu’l-Bahá:
Were one to observe with an eye that discovereth the realities of all things, it would become clear that the greatest relationship that bindeth the world of being together lieth in the range of created things themselves, and that cooperation, mutual aid, and reciprocity are essential characteristics in the unified body of the world of being, inasmuch as all created things are closely related together and each is influenced by the other or deriveth benefit there from, either directly or indirectly.
Complex systems are defined in Wikipedia as:
… a new approach to science that studies how relationships between parts give rise to the collective behaviors of a system and how the system interacts and forms relationships with its environment.
In short, modern complex system theory address a central component of the Bahá’í understanding of the universe. In a world where global warming – probably caused by us – is the new reality, our relationship to the world around us is assuming greater and greater importance. Again, the Bahá’í Writings:
We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life molds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.
Hamid will address that relationship through the lens of the powerful new sciences of complexity and their relationship to the Bahá’í teachings.
Occasionally, there will be difficult going. Hamid will delve into how complex systems exhibit stability, harmony, disharmony, crowd sourcing, new emerging phenomena, global coherence, interconnectivity, and all those wonderful notions that engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians and people in love with understanding love to explore. He has promised to make things clear.
And please consider the importance. Think of how a new era of world history started with the then startlingly new mathematical methods of Descartes, of Newton, and of Laplace 200 to 300 years ago. It revolutionized the world. Its happening again, but on a much large and more powerful scale.
So please welcome Hamid in his explorations of The Bahá’í Faith and Complex Systems.
Stephen R. Friberg
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Towards A 21st Century Mix of Science, Systems Theory, Philosophy, and Universal Religion – Cybernetics and How it Scared the Soviets
It’s amazing how much history there has been on this pale blue dot of a planet. It has endured so much, yet how little of it we are able to really know from the traces of evidence that various events have left behind for us to piece back together.
I find the era of the Soviet Union is one of the more interesting cases of unknown history. My perspective is that of someone born and raised in the United States by Iranian immigrants parents who were Muslim (nominally anyway) yet somehow resolved to send me to a Christian Montessori elementary school – both to protect me and to learn American values.
I remember studying a political map of the earth in my kindergarten class back in 1989, wondering what it would be like to visit the U.S.S.R. I couldn’t help but notice that it was the largest country in the world, at least geographically.
In a sense it was as if there were worlds within worlds. There was my Iranian culture, how my parents met as leftist revolutionaries during the overthrow of the Shah, my Christian school, and the “1st” world of democratic-industrial countries influenced by America), the “2nd” world of communist-socialist states influenced by the Soviets, the “3rd” world of countries not aligned with either side, and – please don’t forget – the “4th” world of indigenous peoples and cultural entities living within and across national boundaries.
While many are aware of Soviet contributions to scientific progress in space exploration and nuclear technology, there is another side to the history of the intellectual milieu of the Soviet Union and the influence of Marx’s ideas about historical and dialectical materialism. We are quick to relegate Karl Marx to the dustbin of history, but he did have some keen insights – for example, the distinction he makes between use value (Gebrauchswert) and exchange value (Tauschwert). He was a grand systems builder much like his predecessor – the famous German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Marx, in some ways, sought to become the antithesis of Hegel by eliminating all references to Hegel’s ideal notions – “world spirit” or “cosmic self” – by replacing them with their material counterparts. Certainly this is an oversimplification, but Marx is famous for turning Hegel “upside-down”.
In the Soviet era, certain sciences, such as genetics, were banned by Stalin, resulting in the imprisonment and execution of hundreds of scientists. One of those sciences was cybernetic – threat to the dogma of materialism according to the communist regime. In my first post – this is just an introduction – I will explore the life and work of Norbert Wiener – inventor of the field of cybernetics – and his explanations of “purposiveness”.
Hamid Y. Javanbakht
5 comments
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Hamid Javanbakht
January 15, 2013 at 2:54 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
“In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science.
The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev’s political “thaw,” however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as “science in the service of communism,” but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into “CyberNewspeak.”"
http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/newspeak.htm
Hamid Javanbakht
January 16, 2013 at 12:10 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Explaining Biological Functionality: Is Control Theory Enough?
http://www.academia.edu/637327/Explaining_Biological_Functionality_Is_Control_Theory_Enough
Hamid Javanbakht
January 18, 2013 at 7:53 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
“Given this explicit adoption of Wiener into the Soviet scientific canon, it is surprising to note that the coauthors only quoted one line from any of his work. That line reads: “Information is information, not matter and not energy. Any materialism that cannot allow for this cannot exist in the present.”48
By distinguishing between information, energy, and matter, Wiener asserted two Kuhnian paradigm shifts: first from Newtonian physics of matter to an era of Bergson and thermodynamics, and second from the thermodynamics of energy to a new paradigm of information science and Wiener’s cybernetics. For many in the West, this quote meant that information is nothing but information, a value-neutral foundation upon which to rest objective science and the search for computable truth. The meaning was the same for their Soviet counterparts, but it also meant something more. By singling out Wiener’s alliance of materialism and cybernetics, the coauthors implied that Wiener had in mind the official philosophy of Soviet science: the dialectical materialism of Marxism-Leninism.
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In short, after years of anti-American, anticybernetic positions, they were first to voice an anti-American, procybernetic position in the Soviet press. In the mid-1950s the tone of subsequent arguments would begin distinguishing between the capitalist use of cybernetics, which was flatly condemned, and cybernetics in general, thus creating space for the ar- gument that the socialist use of cybernetics might be not only possible but even preferable.
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The Ukrainian computer pioneer Boris Malinovsky once lamented that “cybernetics was met with resentment” in the Soviet Union because “cybernetics . . . claimed to have a scientific validation of the control processes not only in life forms and machines, but in society as well. Unfortunately, [this claim was made] not on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, but on the basis of exact sciences such as mathematics, automatic control, and statistics. Thus, it contradicted long-cherished Soviet management methods.”84
Malinovsky’s quote is instructive because it points to institutional obstacles specific to the country, not to cybernetics, a subject that deserves further treatment elsewhere. Just as the early campaigns against American cybernetics had much to do with anti-Americanism and little to do with cybernetics, the long plateau of Soviet cybernetics appears to implicate the Soviet system more than cybernetics.”
http://nevzlin.huji.ac.il/userfiles/files/47.2.peters.pdf
Hamid Javanbakht
January 18, 2013 at 9:31 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
“Valentin Fyodorovich Turchin (Russian: Валенти́н Фёдорович Турчи́н, 1931 – 7 April 2010) was a Soviet and American cybernetician and computer scientist. He developed the Refal programming language, the theory of metasystem transitions and the notion of supercompilation. As such he can be seen as a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence and one of the visionaries at the basis of the Global brain idea.
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Turchin was born in 1931 in Podolsk, Soviet Union. In 1952, he graduated from Moscow University in Theoretical Physics, and got his Ph.D. in 1957. After working on neutron and solid-state physics at the Institute for Physics of Energy in Obninsk, in 1964 he accepted a position at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in Moscow. There he worked in statistical regularization methods and authored REFAL, one of the first AI languages and the AI language of choice in the Soviet Union.
In the 1960s, Turchin became politically active. In 1968 he authored “The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview”,[1] a scathing critique of totalitarianism supported by an emerging cybernetic social theory. Following its publication in the underground press, he lost his research laboratory.[2] In 1970 he authored “The Phenomenon of Science”,[3] a grand cybernetic meta-theory of universal evolution, which broadened and deepened the earlier book. By 1973, Turchin had founded the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International with Andrey Tverdokhlebov and was working closely with the well-known physicist and Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. In 1974 he lost his position at the Institute, and was persecuted by the KGB. Facing almost certain imprisonment, he and his family were forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1977.
He came to New York where he joined the faculty of the City University of New York in 1979. In 1990, together with Cliff Joslyn and Francis Heylighen, he founded the Principia Cybernetica Project, a worldwide organization devoted to the collaborative development of an evolutionary-cybernetic philosophy.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Turchin
“A dialogue on metasystem transition”:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Turchin/dialog.pdf
Steven
February 17, 2013 at 5:45 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
This reaction of Soviets seems part of a pattern. In 1962 in “Religion in the Soviet Union”, Walter Kolarz notes:
“Islam…is attacked by the communists because it is ‘reactionary’, encourages nationalist narrowmindness and obstructs the education and emancipation of women. Baha’iism(sic) has incurred communist displeasure for exactly the opposite reasons. It is dangerous to Communism because of its broadmindness, its tolerance, its international outlook, the attention it pays to women’s education and its insistence on equality of the sexes. All this contradicts the communist thesis about the backwardness of all religions.” – wikipedia entry