BOOK REVIEWS

THE DREAM OF REALITY

JOURNAL OF MARITAL AND FAMILY THERAPY    April 1987

Lynn Segal, The Dream of Reality: Heinz von Foerster's Constructivism. London. Norton, 1986. 184 pp. PETER BRUGGEN,  Psychiatrist, London).

 

Those who are interested in the discussions around paradox and reality and those whose family therapy involves the questioning the role of the observer may enjoy this book. Compared with so many writers on these subjects (especially, for me, Bateson and Maturana), Lynn Segal writes simply and it was easy for me to follow his understanding. He brings together neurology, cybernetics, systems theory, causality and how we think we know what we know better than any other book I can think of.

 

Of course, holes can be picked in it. I found the footnote system irritating and I found difficulty with some of his logic. I wish there had not been so many long quotations from von Foerster, interesting and delightful a man as he seems to be. But I enjoyed this book immensely and certainly plan to take Lynn Segal's advice of reading it again.

 

Family therapy is hardly mentioned at all, but for myself nearly all of this book was relevant to the way I work. I loved von Foerster's praise of misunderstanding and his warning of when we think that we understand each other. I am looking for somebody with whom to play  'the reality game'.  Those who are not interested in these subjects will not have read the review and should not be shown a copy of the book.

 

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JOURNAL OF MARITAL AND FAMILY THERAPY   April 1987

Segal Lynn. The dream of reality: Heinz von Foerster's constructivism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986, 184 pp., $22.95.

 

If it has not yet achieved household status among family therapists, the name of Heinz von Foerster crops up increasingly in the field's articles and books. In the course of a distinguished career in physics, mathematics, engineering, and, above all, in cybernetics, von Foerster helped establish and, for 20 years, directed the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Of immediate interest to family therapists, he was a prime mover (with such luminaries as Warren McCullough, Gregory Bateson, Norbert Wiener, and John von Neumann) in the later Macy Foundation conferences that helped develop and articulate the revolutionary implications of cybernetics. In time, of course, cybernetics was to become a core ingredient of family therapy theory.

If the development of cybernetics turned out to be crucial in the emergence of  family therapy, it is altogether fitting that Von Forester's more direct more direct introduction to family therapists should have occurred at the Mental Research Institute of Palo Alto in 1978. it only was there a common link with Bateson, but the MRI approach is, after all, the prime application of cybernetics and communication theory to family therapy. It is equally appropriate, now that Heinz von Foerster's provocative proposals have come to in written form, that Lynn Segal from MRI should have undertaken the task.

The Dream of Reality is Segal's reconstruction and interpretation of a series of workshops by von Foerster, given in Palo Alto from 1978 to 1982. While not a transcript the usual sense, much of the book is derived from Von Foerster's actual words. Many of the quotations are included in an attempt to convey the man, as well as his ideas. All diagrams and most of the examples and stories are von Foerster's own. In addition, gal has included a brief chapter on the ideas of Humberto Maturana, a sometime league of von Foerster's at the Biological Computer Laboratory, and familiar to family therapists through the work of Paul Dell, Brad Keeney, and others. The book closes with appendix in the form of an interview with von Foerster, conducted by Carol Wilder.

While a brief review can only fail to do justice to this richly provocative book, perhaps enough can be said to encourage others to read it. At the heart of The Dream of Reality is the constructivist notion that belief in objective reality is neither necessary even useful in scientific work. Traditional science assumes the independent existence of the outer world. Reality is conceived as "out there," independent of any observer, and ; task of traditional science is to discover (describe, predict, exploit) this unconditioned reality. In describing reality, the major function of science has been to formulate general laws or principles governing the relationship among classes of observables. These general principles are required to be consistent with empirical fact. That is, scientific investigation is concerned with establishing an objective grounding for systematic theory. The elimination of observer-bias is a central concern in this search for a truth that depends on stable relationships among events in nature. Thus, knowledge, as defined traditional science, gives rise to an epistemology of observed systems, i.e., what qualifies as knowledge is, by definition, independent of the knower.

 As over against the traditional view, Segal (following von Foerster) argues for an epistemology of observing systems, in which reality is constructed rather than discovered. re, everything begins with an observer which, closed to information from outside, assembles a reality from, and by means of, its own internal operations. No longer intent discerning stable relationships among events in nature, observing systems seek coherence among events in experience, both internally and in cognitive domains shared h others. With these basic assumptions in view, the reader is taken on a whirlwind  of the constructivist thesis through discussions of language, cognition, the central nervous system, Maturana's vision of observer-based science, autopoiesis, and the crucial, but difficult, notion of systemic closure.

One of the more provocative ideas advanced by The Dream of Reality, and central ton Foerster's argument, is the idea of closure. Most of us have soaked up the notion of systems as input/output arrangements and go on to assume that a thing called formation" shuttles between systems as some kind of product. If, as von Foerster invites us to consider, systems (the nervous system in particular) have no inputs and puts, what might the nature of exchange between them be? While the discussion e, as it weaves through neuronal nets, semantic computation, non-trivial machines, may leave the reader's mind reeling, its conclusions will be recognized by some readers as similar to Maturana's model. As summarized by Jantsch (1980, p. 203), communication between autopoietic systems does not include any transfer of products knowledge. What happens is based on a reorientation of the indigenous processes of system by the self-representation of another system and the processes which are  indigenous to it. In other words, a system experiences only perturbations (and these, too, are internal) which restructure its internal (autonomous) operations. Thus there is no instructional interaction nor any exercise of power, and the autonomous construction of reality by the system is preserved. As Jantasch (1980) says: " The Verbal description of a colorful sunset transmits nothing of the real experience, if not by way of remembering a comparable experience of one's own(p. 203). 

           

As counter to any feeling that the idea of the autonomous closure of systems necessarily betokens an atomistic universe peopled by Kantian I's forever doomed to solitude, Von Foerster's revision of social life is startling. A basic of his constructivist thesis is the substitution of choice for certainty in human affairs. As over against traditional science, a subject-dependent approach cannot generate necessary answers. One’s relation to the exterior world is neither self-evident nor assumed as necessary.  

               

Even one's connectedness to another person, the sine qua non of family therapy systemic Method  is chosen. If it is not chosen, the observer, indeed, languishes in a solipsistic nightmare of mono-logic and monologue -- the center of its own and only universe. If, the other hand, one chooses identity with the other, and if one abandons the notion

of reality as some necessary state of affairs (von Foerster’s choice here is to invoke the principle of relativity), then Reality = Community. This chosen identity with the Other leads directly to the ethical imperative at the heart of von Foerster’s argument: Act always so as to increase the number of choices; or, as someone else put it -- "Do unto

others as you would have them do unto you." Thus, cooperation, and not competition, becomes the guiding light of social existence.  Life is a non-zero sum game: all players win or all players loose.

While this last comment, and indeed, many others throughout the book, bear Obvious  relevance to the practice of psychotherapy,    Segal remains true to von Foerster's original presentations by refraining from such applications. This will disappoint some readers, especially those still wishing for a ready-made product that can be tried out on the next client.  Consistent with its central thesis, The Dream of Reality, itself, is more in the nature of a perturbation  than a set of instructions. If it infuriates, mystifies, and dislocates the  readers enough for them to choose, again, their current models of practice, the outcome would likely be pleasing enough to both von Foerster and Segal. For Some, of course, it will lead past the familiar to new experiences as therapists and persons.

In the same spirit, even the reviewer's obligatory list of the book's shortcomings are somehow transformed (internally of course) into self-invitations to action. If I wish that pace had been given to developing how the contours of family life might appear constructivist terms, I may have to look to myself to develop something along these lines. If I would have liked to have heard more of how my prior constructions of reality ( my prior  social, political, gender-based, etc., commitments) constrict my next act of construction,  I may just have to think more about that. If I worry that the basic notion
of an individual constructing reality is, itself, a construction which occurs within a cognitive  domain (and, for example, can hardly be said to be prior to language), that to, is grist for my mill.

All of this is to say that Lynn Segal has perturbed this reader in ways he experiences as enlivening. He has, along with the wit and wisdom of Heinz von Foerster, presented himself.  While  predicting how those other non-trivial machines, known as readers, will experience The Dream of Reality is hazardous,  I urge them to experience it for themselves.

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THE ANNENBERG SCHOOL OF COMMUNI CATIONS UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

3620 Walnut Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania  19104

Nourishing the core

The Dream of Reality: Heinz von Foerster Constructivism by Lynn Segal. New York and London: Norton, 1986. 184 pages. $22.95 (hard).

A review by Klaus Krippendorff

University of Pennsylvania

Our language leads us to believe in a world of objects, things, or events whose properties we need to discover to be certain about what we may do with them. Accordingly, we too are things, living organisms to be sure and endowed with the intelligence to inquire into this world and to derive knowledge from what exists outside of us. In this conception, science is appointed to mediate between the objective reality and our subjective experiences of it, methodically replacing illusions with objectivity and thus accepting objective reality as the ultimate ruler over all our affairs. The constructivism presented in this book refutes this common belief and, turning it inside out, presents the basis of a new way of looking at the world, specifically including us as participants. It asks not what exists and what we may therefore know but how we come to know and bring about our rather stable experiences. These questions are not only central to philosophy but could provide the basis of a radical reformation of all disciplines concerned with knowledge, including communication.

The material for the book stems from many lively lectures by Heinz von Foerster, a biophysicist, who prominently participated with Warren S. McCulloch, Norbert Wiener, W. Ross Ashby, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson, among many others, in the early Macy Foundation conferences on cybernetics and subsequently founded the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois, where he is now an emeritus professor. The Mental Research Institute at Palo Alto acquired his publications and tapes of several of his presentations. Instead of transcribing the latter for wider circulation, Lynn Segal, a social worker and family therapist at this institute, rephrased much of von Foerster's technical language, added background material, and provided bridges among the multitude of ideas. Segal thus amicably succeeded in making rather profound insights seductively easy to read and in maintaining von Foerster's oratory flair one can virtually see von Foerster talk when reading the book.

The book has a foreword by Paul Watzlawick and contains seven chapters, an appendix, notes with references, and an index. In the first chapter, von Foerster suggests the traditional notion ,of objectivity, to be a myth in need of exposure. He gives a brief history of objectivity from theology to Newton's spiritless mechanism and, using examples from perception, shows the absurdity of maintaining the belief that people make (process and store) pictures of what objectively exists outside of them when all they have are the images they experience. He plainly reverses the general semanticists' battle cry by claiming that there is no "territory" without a map. We cannot conceive of a reality without an observer.

The second chapter concerns difficulties in language that become obstacles to understanding cognition. One problem arises out of what von Foerster calls re-presentation, the tendency to project properties that emerge in our visual apparatus onto an outside world and the consequent claim to represent them inside our heads. Another problem, nominalization, refers to our tendency to make processes and even such abstractions as information and knowledge into "things" that can be named, traded, and stored. A third, localization of function, reveals our inability to deal with whole systems because of our strong preference to assign different purposes to different areas of the brain--as if the brain were composed of memories for different kinds of things; coding schemes, information processors, and control devices. This inadequate use of computer metaphors significantly impedes our understanding of ourselves.

A fourth problem is that we confuse logic with how the world operates, preferring certainty, which comes from our ability to make infallible deductions, to chance, which arises from our inability to make infallible inductions. Our preference for linear causal explanations turns out to be the result of a logic that neatly separates cause and consequence, stimulus and response, but also explanations and what they claim to explain. Aristotle, who was one of the first philosophers to contemplate causality, distinguished four kinds, of which we tend to recognize only the one that is logically most conclusive.

Paradox arising out of self-referential statements is another problem in language elaborated here. Logicians since Aristotle have feared such statements, as they make logical systems indeterminate. Russell even went so far as to formally exorcise self-reference from the foundations of mathematics by the invention of his theory Books of logical types. Since scientists seek logical explanations, they have accepted the same rejection of self. referential constructs and are thereby prevented from seeing such everyday experiences. What if self-reference, which is a special case of recursive computation, is indeed a modus operandi of the human organism, as von Foerster suggests?

 The third chapter applies Humberto Maturana's work on the biology of cognition to scientific observation. It moves the act of drawing distinctions to the foreground of all scientific activity and shows that scientists participate in the phenomena they claim to describe. For communication researchers, it suggests that it is the distinction between senders and receivers that brings communication about. Such distinctions and their experiential consequences are no more objective than other distinctions one may be able to draw.

In the fourth chapter, Segal reviews work on the biology of the human nervous system, and in the fifth he summarizes what von Foerster had to say about computation. The latter contains a particularly useful distinction between trivial and nontrivial machines. Trivial machines are essentially input-governed. We like trivial machines for their predictability and, consistent with our preference for causal explanations, we inappropriately use them as models of human communication and behavior, thereby leaving a sender in control of the process. In contrast, von Foerster pleads for other kinds of models that contain at least some circularity or recusiveness. These models can be equally deterministic in their procedures but are no longer easily analyzable from the outside. The notion implicitly challenges communication researchers who tend to compromise on the complexity, of human communication processes by settling on linear models and on naturalistic methods of analysis, both of which tend to "trivialize people." The sixth chapter, on biocomputation, applies these notions to human cognition.

The seventh and final chapter posits the principal thesis of the book: that human cognition essentially is a Closed system that is merely perturbed and reacts to this perturbation while maintaining its autopoietic closure. The doubts in an objective reality, the difficulties of language, our knowledge of the human nervous system and of recursive computation all lead to this hypothesis, and this chapter explores some of its ramifications: autopoiesis as a special case of closure, hierarchies vs. heterarchies of values, objects as the eigenvalues (stable computations) in the nervous system. It contains a particularly cogent rejection of solipsism, making use of the principle of relativity that is of particular interest for communication scholars. The principle suggests that a hypothesis which holds for A and B separately should be rejected if it fails to hold for ^ and B together. Consequently, as soon as two "solipsists" start talking to each other, each can no longer maintain to be the center of the universe and relegate the other to the content of a dream. It is through the construction of another human being similar to oneself, through the possibility of dialogue or, as von Foerster suggests, of "community," that reality becomes constituted. Needless to say, this moves human communication into the very core of reality constructions and implicitly assigns communication scholars the responsibility of nourishing this core.

The book is a short one (184 pages). It reads easily, probably largely because Segal, a family therapist with one foot in the social sciences and the other in the practice of therapeutic communication, had to struggle through von Foerster's multifaceted cybernetic insights himself. It clearly presents a challenge to the dominant view of the world and the models we choose to live by. Whether these models are of language, cognition, or society, von Foerster suggests that they are our choice. True to one of cybernetics' ethical imperatives--that choices should always increase the range of options available--the book opens more doors than it closes. Perhaps Segal could have been more critical and have explored the alternative paths behind these doors. But, having gone only as far as he did, in this book he invites readers to venture further into yet untested constructions of mind.

THE    DREAM OF REALITY: HEINZ VON FORSTER'S CONSTRUCTIVISM

Lynn Segal.

New York: Norton, 1986.

Reviewed by: Klaus Deissler, Marburg, Germany

When Steve de Shazer asked me if I could write a book review from time to time, I hoped that it might not be too soon or too often. But shortly after I had agreed to do so, a book arrived.    I have to admit, I was not very happy. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the book Steve proposed for reviewing: Author, title and subject were most appealing to me.    So work turned out to be something enjoyable.

I first learned about the ideas of von Forster some years ago after reading and listening to what Maturana had to say.    In a workshop, I discovered Heinz von Forster to be one of the most brilliant live-teachers on epistemology/constructivism imaginable.    If you attend a workshop led by Heinz von Forster you certainly will not be bored; even the most abstract ideas turn out to be a joyful event when von Forster explains them with his humor and wisdom. He is one of those rare teachers one always is looking for and to whom students like to listen~ He knows how to elicit eagerness for learning.

Von Forster's writing is somewhat different to me; for a non-mathematician or non-computer scientist it is often hard to follow and for therapists it isn't always relevant. Hence, Segal's book.    It fills exactly this gap; it is a systematized collection of the ideas of Heinz von Forster - ideas most of which were presented by von Forster in workshops. So Segal achieved his important aim. The systematization is done in a way that makes it especially relevant for therapists.

Among the important issues Segal deals with are the myth of objectivity, language and self-reference, the observer and the operation of distinction, different concept of closure, the nervous system as a closed unit capable of computation, trivial and non-trivial machines, autopoiesis, etc.

Two concepts, or lines of thought, were especially relevant for me. The first is that of the dilemma of the solipsist. If one does not adopt the objectivistic position - and Heinz von Forster does not all arguments, theory, results of experiments and computation could be construed within a solipsistic position: Ail that I observe is my own creation, it exists only as long as I "receive or create" it - even another observer. So the other observer, e.g. you, can be regarded as a mere apparition as I consider myself as the center of the world. Heinz von Forster argues against this position, introducing his principle of relativity - recognizing that the views of the other observers are equally valid. The dilemma of the solipsist vanishes in von Foerster's relativistic view. Reality can be understood to be what several observers - neither one the center of the world - agree upon. So, summarizing: Reality = Community (p. 147).

The other concept especially relevant for me is 'recursive function theory': This is because I have developed a concept (DEISSLER, K.G. 1986: Recursive Creation of Information. Circular Questioning as Information Generation. [In preparation]) without knowing recursion theory. This concept looks similar to recursive function theory but it is, as opposed to it, without any mathematical claim.    It is just a form of notation for "circular question" and playing around with them. Perhaps a synthesis of the two would be possible; applied recursion theory leads to something like "eigen-values" of e.g. a one person unit.    Combined with my proposal for notation of "circular questions" maybe it could yield "eigen-values of multi-person systems" "systemic eigen-Values" in the language of a family therapist (a formula of consensus of the relationships of multi-person systems). For the moment this is mere fantasizing and exceeds my mathematical capacities.

Be that as it may, Segal has done a very good job.    I recommend the book to all therapists who are interested in epistemological or constuctivist problems.