POSIWID
The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does
The purpose of a system is what it does:
According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for a bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.
-Stafford Beer, October 2001, University of Valladolid, Spain
As Stafford Beer says elsewhere, “there is, after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.”
I take it for granted that the systems around me are designed, so I often fool myself by looking for a final cause. For Beer, this is getting it backwards. From the cybernetic point of view, purposes arise from within, rather than being imposed from without. Goals and goal-seeking emerge from feedback.
It is true that many systems are designed, at least at first. But the minute a system is subject to selection pressure, it becomes an evolved system. This changes things! The purpose of an evolved system is to survive and propagate. It has to be, since any system that does not prioritize its own survival will disappear pretty quickly.
The purpose of wheat isn’t to produce me grain. It is to produce more wheat. The grain is a byproduct of this autopoiesis. Whatever purpose I might have for a system, it is incidental to the feedback loops which support its continued existence. When I plant the wheat, I ensure its continued survival and tap into this feedback loop, becoming a symbiotic part of it. If I forget that the purpose of an evolved system is its own survival, I risk killing the system.
But even here, the term purpose isn’t quite right. Let’s try again… There are things that continue, and things that don’t. The things that continue, continue because they do things that can continue. A tautology. A loop.
If something cannot go on forever, it won’t.
-Stein’s Law
Only that which can change can continue.
-James Carse
Well, but, participants in an ecosystem do seem to have purposes. When I look at an ecosystem, I see predator, prey, parasite, primary producer, keystone species, all arranged into complex food chains. The ecosystem seems to have certain job descriptions it wants filled.
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
(Charles Darwin, “On the Origin of Species”)
Aristotle is back, this time in the statistics. So, isn’t that purpose? But where do these goals come from? Who set them? It seems that these purposes have arisen from within the system, rather than being imposed from without. They are statistical attractors that dependently arise from the structure of feedback networks in the ecosystem. Biologists call this kind of emergent-from-within goal-seeking teleonomy, to distinguish it from imposed-from-without Aristotelian teleology.
When this exists, that comes to be. With the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be. With the cessation of this, that ceases.
( Samyutta Nikaya 12.61)
One way I can engage with POSIWID is to look at a system and the gap between purpose and performance. Is the system doing what it claims to do? A valid question, but not the only one. And it is worth noticing what I am doing: I am lobbing POSIWID like a grenade, away from me, toward the system. I am outside the blast radius of judgment.
This moral judgment carries one bit of information: good/bad. But evolution doesn’t operate at this binary level. The relationships in ecosystems are deeply high-dimensional. Nothing has a purpose. Nothing has a purpose.
Ecosystems can’t possibly exist for a particular purpose.
-Hayao Miyazaki
Every part of an ecosystem is many things at once. When I force my one-dimensional judgment onto this high-dimensional network, I destroy information, and how much sense does that make? Do rocks sin? Does a hurricane have a motive? Morality is for monkeys like me. It’s great for relating to one another, but often less useful when trying to understand ecosystems.
Instead of lobbing POSIWID outward, what if I turn it inward? Every system is made up of other systems, after all. Perhaps I can gain new understanding by applying POSIWID recursively.
What is the purpose of my judgment? What does it do? Am I a part of the system that I judge? Could this be part of what the system does? What evolved purpose might that serve?