The Aesthetics of Change

Is an excellent book by Bradford Keeney. This is its second set of book snippets. Here's the first. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages...

Whenever there is feedback, mental characteristics will be evident.

To adopt a cybernetic view is to enter a radically different world of description.

Symptoms are a sort of "escalating sameness." Symptoms indicate a system's effort to maximize or minimize a particular behavior or experience.

A paradox in ecology is that the most flexible species are the dullest.

A necessary ingredient of effective sociofeedback in therapy involves the introduction of random "noise."

Cybernetics is the appropriate science for studying mental and living processes.

A graduate student at Yale in the days when they were all running rats in mazes said, "Why do we run rats? Why don't we get an animal which lives in mazes. Like a ferret." A ferret is a small pole cat, a weasel type which is a parasite on rabbits. It lives underground most of the time in rabbit quarters which are mazes. And it bites like hell! So he got himself a couple of ferrets, some gloves and a sack. And he built what seemed to him a suitable maze for ferrets. He put a piece of rabbit in the reward chamber and started the ferret off from the entrance. The ferret systematically went down every blind alley until he got to the reward chamber where he ate the rabbit. He was put back to the beginning and the experimenter put another piece of rabbit in the reward chamber. The ferret systematically went down every blind alley until he came to the one going to the reward chamber which he did not go down, because he had eaten that rabbit.

When two people interact, each member punctuates the flow of interaction. If an observer combines the views of both individuals, a sense of the whole system will begin to emerge.

As two eyes can derived depth, two descriptions can derive pattern and relationship.

Stability and change, as cybernetics puts it, represent two different facets of the same systemic coin.

Cybernetics proposes that change cannot be found without a roof of stability over its head. Similarly, stability will always be rooted to underlying processes of change.

The cybernetic view is to see all requests for change as requests for change and stability.

Change within the system leads to stability of the whole system.

It should not be surprising that experimental epistemology discovered that the nervous system closes on itself. This is operationally necessary for an organism to be able to think about its thinking.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The whole is the organizational closure of its parts.