STUDY DIARIES: Background on Texts

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This is a catch-up post to bring you up to date with some of the study history from the last couple of decades. Actually it is not a long list since we truly have taken our time!

The first thing to say is that we initially wanted to focus on Steiner’s philosophical written work. This was driven by a wish to start right at the beginning and, for my part, NOT wanting to go through his lectures. He took a massive amount of care with his written work, feeling that he had a deep responsibility to his readers. Obviously lectures would not be able to have that same depth of care since they were more of a living experience.

[Background Point: Steiner initially did not want his lectures written down at all since he maintained that the lectures were delivered for the particular audience. However events somewhat overtook him and some of his critics started misquoting what he had said. Thus he felt the need to have the lectures transcribed by a stenographer. I believe there are about 6000 lectures available now.]

However when some lectures have piqued my interest I have actually found it good to listen to readings of them since it gives you that auditory experience which, I think, works well with the content. However sometimes you need to realize that he was talking at a different time. See Dale Brunsvold’s site where he has produced audio recordings of his readings – which has been a great resource for allowing me to listen to lectures in the car. A real labour of love I think and deserving of a small donation towards hosting costs if you do end up using his site a lot.

However, back to the study list so far:

1: Truth & Knowledge : 1892
The very beginning. Steiner’s epistemological doctoral dissertation and a prelude to the Philosophy of Freedom.

2: Boundaries of Natural Science : 1920
A lecture series with an exploration of how Goethean Science and the Philosophy of Freedom can help us go beyond the limits of natural science to provide a healthy foundation for social science.

3: Anthroposophy Science : 1921
A lecture series that somewhat covered our favourite subject of technology and its relationship the development of consciousness.

4: Philosophy of Freedom : 1894
Also known as the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, to highlight the fact that freedom is never a finished thing but requires constant activity. This is the main foundational book to all he subsequently worked on. In hindsight we should have perhaps studied this earlier.

5: Study of Man : 1919
This is a series of lectures given to teachers of the first Steiner School in Stuttgart.

In future posts I will attempt to summarize some of the earlier study texts but some of the content is now lost in the mists of time.

The main thing that I remember is that in the early stages of our study it was too easy to just skip through the texts without really grasping them. Thus it was that we really, really slowed it down and would not move forward if we did not think we had ‘got it’.

There was many a wrinkled brow, coupled with a feeling of “I am just not getting this”, which brings me to an important question that we and many other people have about Steiner’s output:

“For goodness sake, why is it so DIFFICULT to work with?”

From where I stand now, I can say that there is a very, very good reason for this.

Steiner is not giving us finished answers. His whole raison d’etre is to help us come to a different way of perceiving the world, something that our education beats out of us. In what he writes, he is trying to give you indications about different ways of seeing things, AS WELL AS doing it in a way that challenges you to try and develop this different way of perception as you study.

Remember I talked about congruence in a previous post between his content and method? But oh dear me, it really can make it hard going at times. The way I have come to see this now is that we are literally creating extra organs of perception in our thinking, and this is a long process. It is as if we have been given all the physical senses at birth, but now we need to take our own development in hand, creating new dynamic senses in our thinking.

So no quick fixes here.

[Definition: Anthroposophy was the term Steiner coined for his approach. Literally “wisdom of the human being”. Indicating that Steiner felt that it was important to understand and develop ourselves, embracing this task consciously, since we represent a strongly co-creative force in the world.]

STUDY DIARIES : Introduction

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Over 20 years ago I was a parent of 2 young kids, and we wanted to find a decent pre-school provision that was more about creativity and play rather than about cramming kids heads with facts. My wife and I found a gem of a kindergarten that was run on Steiner principles and so impressed were we that we joined with the other impressed parents and got on with founding a Steiner lower school. I even became trustee Chair at the time!

But there was more to it for me than just the education of the children. I connected strongly to the underlying philosophy that Rudolf Steiner brought to the world. He had a different take on epistemology – or the theory of knowledge – i.e. how we come to know things, that very much resonated with how I felt about the world. For the past 20 years this has resulted in me studying – on & off, though more on than off – some of Steiner’s prodigious output.

It is this that I want to start blogging about now in these Study Diaries. I have been shy about this until now – primarily because Steiner covered some fairly tricky areas, namely the generation of what he called a spiritual science and what it had to say about a spiritual world and associated beings.

So I want to start by making it clear how my path has been into his work.

Initially Steiner was an expert on Goethe’s work and hence was asked to edit the Goethe archives at Weimar in 1888. As some of you will know from my previous posts about Goethe and phenomenology, it was Goethe who began raising warning flags about the problem of over-hypothesizing , something that has become endemic in our modern scientific method and something which badly affects those of us who work with modern technology.

It was from this philosophical foundation that Steiner started his work, coming out with his seminal book: The Philosophy of Freedom, which addressed the issues of being truly free in our thinking. He named this sort of freer thinking: “Living Thinking”, and he characterized it as a spiritual activity.

It was his philosophical work that attracted me first, along with his adamant stance that no one should just believe what he said. He wanted people to listen and consider for themselves what they could take on and understand. He was deeply uncomfortable with anyone who treated him as any sort of guru, and it was this that caught my imagination since it is congruent with his wish that people remain free in their thinking. Indeed a foundation of his ideas on ethics is that human morality is defined internally, not imposed externally, but more of that later.

Thus I have always felt that I could respect the man – despite there being a lot of his output that I cannot take on or understand. And this respect is something that has not changed over those 20 years as I have learnt more.

The studying I have been doing – usually on a Friday evening – has been on a very small percentage of Steiner’s work. Though it is the quality of the study that matters, not the quantity, and there is a very definite ‘holographic’ nature to it – i.e. it doesn’t matter which part you cover you can still get to the main ideas. I have also been working with someone I met during the early years of founding the local Steiner school and we have since become close friends as we have traveled on this study path together over the last two decades. I am no longer involved with the running of the school, though my friend is, since it quickly became apparent that understanding Steiner’s philosophical thought, so radically different as it is, was going to need some focused work.

It is worth noting that Steiner touched many areas of human endeavour, I consider in a positive way, though of course there are some detractors who would contest that. Such areas have included: Education, Medicine, Architecture, the Arts, Social reform and Economics to name a few.

I have decided to start writing about this aspect of my life, and you are welcome to read along or not, but I must mention the initial disclaimer that, although I am not a religious person and do not go to church, I do think we have a spiritual aspect to our nature. Now in my experience this is not something you can prove or disprove, you either can go with it or not. If not, then perhaps these Study Diaries will not be for you.

But all I would ask is that you hold an open mind and – just as Steiner would wish – take on only what makes sense to you. Hopefully, in whatever small way, you might even find something helpful in the Diaries.

Thanks for reading.

Tango Acceptance

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I recently attended a weekend tango workshop given at Tango UK in Bramshaw by the wonderful husband and wife team, Daniela Pucci and Luis Bianchi. I do believe it was the best workshop I have attended in the 4 years of tango training I have been doing, concentrating as it did on the internal aspects of the dance – making explicit the actual muscles that were doing the work – thanks to Luis’ background as a massage therapist.

However the reason for this missive is that I am going to reblog a posting by Daniela that is so very much in line with my own feelings about dance. [Many thanks to Daniela for giving me permission to do so] I believe this alignment of feelings is no accident as Daniela also has a technical background and is one of those few perceptive enough to see its flaws.

Daniela’s story is very interesting and relevant to my interests in issues related to science and art. She was a Mechanical Engineering professor at MIT and gave it up to teach tango full-time! In this post she talks about technique and aesthetics and how such an improvisational dance as tango relates all these as well as including the acceptance of the flawed human beings that we are – something that our culture has tried to forget with its pursuit of certainty and the ‘perfect’.

But I shall let her own words speak for her:

“Connection is one of the wonders of Argentine tango, perhaps its reason for existence. Daily life often presents us with situations where the limitations of verbal language lead to misunderstandings and hurt feelings; where we are confronted with suffering that makes us feel completely lonely; where our individual paths at times seem so impossibly narrow that we are forced to go through certain stretches completely alone. In the midst of it all there comes Argentine tango, offering relief from the chasm that separates “me” from “you.” It’s intoxicating, really: unexpectedly, we happen upon an instance when the shared experience of dancing seems to take us as a whole, all problems and existential angst be dammed: all of a sudden the movement of one body seamlessly fits with the movement of another, the musical intuitions and emotions of both dancers so attuned that for the duration of at least that one tango, we seem to become a blissful single entity. I’d venture to say that, for a lot of us, the possibility of stepping into such perfect communion is what keeps bringing us back for another milonga, another festival, another trip to Buenos Aires.

Some seem to equate connection with a certain external form, or aesthetics. A few months ago a relatively new dancer told me he danced exclusively salon because of the connection he found there. In a class once, a student asked me how he could do a certain turn without breaking the connection — I soon realized that, for him, connection meant maintaining his partner’s and his stomachs in permanent contact. Most recently, someone else told me he had objected to the hiring of my partner and me to a certain festival because in past performances we often opened the embrace, and that he had thoroughly enjoyed the connection displayed in our close-embrace performance during that event.

I will not deny that, observed from the outside, different aesthetics definitely inspire different feelings in the spectator. However, my experience is that aesthetics have very little to do with the actual experience of the dancers.

I have danced with milongueros who dug his fingers into my ribs and twisted my right hand. I have danced with milongueros who led me with such gentleness that I could not pinpoint exactly where the lead was coming from other than that it was a pleasurable wave, sending me into tango bliss.

I have danced with salon dancers who had so little sense of timing that they often sent me bouncing against the edges of their stiff embrace. I have danced with salon dancers whose complete control of their body, subtle musicality and yielding, sensitive embrace filled me with awe, sending me into tango bliss.

And probably for the most maligned style of all, I have danced with nuevo dancers who fit all of the bad stereotypes, throwing me around into steps that seemed randomly selected with no relationship to the music and no regard to the constraints of the space, putting me in a permanent alert mode to avoid hitting other dancers. But I have also danced with nuevo dancers who adjusted the amplitude of their movements as dictated by the crowdedness of the milonga so that I never for a moment had to worry, and used the elasticity inherent to that style in open or close embrace to create delightful, dynamic musical interpretations… sending me into tango bliss.

The common point among these delightful dancers across all styles is that they had good technique: good control of their own movement and good understanding of their partner’s movement, so that the lead was gentle and yet clear and precise, consistent with the music and with the space available around us.

Aesthetics is not the same as technique. Good aesthetics will make a dance pleasant to watch. Good technique will make a dance pleasant to dance.

Technique is a wonderful thing: it frees us from concerns of how to do something so that we can fully immerse ourselves in the experience of doing, effortlessly.

And yet, technique is not the same as connection.

I want to elaborate on this but decided to give the sentence above its very own paragraph, hoping to drive this point home: technique is no substitute for connection. Technique is a servant to connection, a means to an end. Technique is a supporting actor, connection is the main actor. I could go on paraphrasing myself and I am sure in some way what I am saying is nothing new, we know this to some degree, but do we — myself included — really know it? And do we act consistently with this knowledge?

Where is our focus as we try to improve as dancers, as we think of a dancing ideal, as we select dancing partners in the milonga, as we go through each tanda?

Several years ago a well-known, top couple was visiting New York. To my surprise, at one of the milongas the leader invited me to dance. It was a fun tanda: he was obviously highly skilled and had a vibrant musicality. But what I remember the most is his dismissive attitude when the tanda ended: he did not even look at me as we thanked each other and parted ways.

Not too long ago I danced with a gentleman who was not as skilled or as musical. He held me with incredible gentleness and made me feel like a treasure. I was overcome by great emotion as we danced in the simplest of ways. That we were dancers dancing Argentine tango was completely irrelevant during those ten minutes: we were two human beings, reaching out from the isolation of our individual paths but for a brief moment, filled with appreciation for the privilege of holding one another.

What do you wish for in your path as a dancer, social or otherwise?

What I wish for is that in each dance — performances included — I may have the courage to present myself with complete authenticity, a flawed human being before another flawed human being, feeling safe in the certainty that I will be fully accepted for who I am. I wish that my partner will allow me to see him in his emotional nakedness, reassured that I will embrace him in his totality. In that moment of exquisite vulnerability when we take each other in the arms, we will make a pact to share our emotions for the next ten minutes. All sincere expression that arises from our encounter will be not only acceptable but, in fact, perfect. We may giggle lightheartedly, inspired by a silly melody and because we are feeling so good to be here right now, all problems left at the entrance of the milonga; we may join each other in a focused physical experience, delighting in the sensory feast of movement and music; we may just be still together, nursing a raw pain that feels too heavy to carry it alone and that doesn’t lend itself to expansive movement, but that feels a bit lighter in the sacred space of the embrace.

This is what I ask from each dance: that you come to me in a spirit of openness and acceptance, and I come to you in the same spirit, and we agree to make the most of our time together. As we share of ourselves generously, we will connect. I won’t require anything more, but won’t accept anything less.”

By Daniela Pucci Original date: 13-Sep-2012
Original found at the Tango Secrets website.

Thank you Daniela – I could not have said it better myself.

I would suggest looking at her interview on youtube:

Phenomenal Software Development : Key Observations

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G_TOWS_Lasham_TugThe Importance of Energy

A fairly obvious observation but one which needs stating as it is easily forgotten when we acclimatize ourselves to the job of programming.

It takes a significant amount of mental energy to do this job.

When programming we will be making decisions minute by minute, if not second by second, and this requires a large expenditure of mental effort. It means that when I get home after a day at work I just do not want to make decisions. I am all “decided out”. This is why I will rely on my partner to decide what to eat for dinner!

It is obvious how much this affects the rate of progress on a project and any experienced technical lead will realise that a significant concern is the level of energy in a team. It usually falls below the radar during the heat of trying to hit deadlines.

Non-Linear Thinking

We need to notice the difference between what I call linear and non-linear thinking.

Even though we may not consciously recognize it, a faculty I see time and again that highlights the difference between programmers and non-programmers is the realisation that we need to do as little as possible to create a solution that has as much impact as possible. Laziness if you will, though I prefer to call it non-linearity.

A good programmer will try to minimise the amount of code they create, or will create firm foundations to allow them to minimise the amount of code they have to create later. While this is being done there may not be much outwardly visible progress, maybe none if it is all in thought patterns. This, along with the fact that programming is not a numbers game (i.e. more people equals faster progress) can be a big cause of strife between techies and managers.

See Robert Glass’ book Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, fact number 13: “There is a disconnect between software management and their programmers”, which has an interesting story of how different the two disciplines are in their view of projects.

GoingFlyingThe Foundation in Play

Many early programmers were amateur electronics or radio enthusiasts who then turned professional. I remember going to a radio club meeting where one of the members had built a Z80-based system that had 64KB of RAM! A full complement of memory in those days and we all duly drooled. But at the time there was no software to fill it with that could make any use of that much memory.

We were enthusiasts and at the beginning of the PC revolution many programs were games. As the field progressed there was a transition from programming as play to programming as an economic activity, though the games drive has remained strong.

So here we are now with a very lucrative IT industry that is based on this energy and we forget this foundation in play at our peril. It is a fundamental human activity that fosters resourcefulness. Confirmed by recent research by Sergio Pellis about self-directed play – as if we needed to be told. Self-directed play fosters resilience and resourcefulness, faculties that any company would want in its employees.

I believe that the next 2 issues of Boundary Crossing and the Inner World are the most important observations I have to offer.

AsleepBoundary Crossing

What do I mean by boundary crossing? Let us look at the characteristics of technology.

  • Tools or technology are amplifiers.
    We use technology to amplify or extend our capabilities. Cars amplify our movement and aeroplanes allow us to fly. But an amplifier has no knowledge of good or bad and will also amplify and extend our mistakes. During the Industrial Revolution we created devices to amplify or enhance our physical capabilities, but with the development of information technology we have created devices to amplify our thought.
  • Technology use has transitioned from External to Internal problem-solving.
    As the nature of our tools has changed, the effects of our use of them has moved from being externally visible to others, to being internal and hence invisible to others – as the effects take place in our heads. This is a Significant Shift (which is worth the capitalization) and has many side-effects. My thesis is that this has largely gone unnoticed within IT, especially given the primary focus we have had on the physical gadgets rather than the psychological effects. I take you back to Dykstra’s comment that:

    “…their influence will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture, compared with the much more profound influence they will have in their capacity of intellectual challenge without precedent in the cultural history of mankind.”

  • The Technological Paradox.
    Tool usage requires us to be more awake since it amplifies our actions and thoughts. The paradox with technological use is that we tend to go to sleep more as we let technology take over faculties. (Just look at how people drive – but don’t get me started on that) It is why an incremental process works so well and why Agile techniques have become so popular.

This transition is part of what led me to post about software development requiring an evolution of consciousness and I believe we need an updated vision of the discipline in order for there to be constructive progress.

DiscusPanelThe Inner World

What I find fascinating about the process of developing software is that despite its heritage in a rational scientific process, we have been led into this inner world and no matter how hard we try, will not escape it. For me it is a source of livingness in the job.

Programming involves the creation of a completely human made world where there is little feedback and few checks against an external reality. Indeed we have had to dope silicon away from its natural state to make machines that can be completely controlled by what are effectively our thoughts.

It can be helpful to identify what happens internally when we write software and I believe a simple view goes as follows:

  • First we engage in thinking about the problem and carry on thinking to come up with some possible solution. Notice the verb tense here: thinkING.
  • With this thinking we create mental models or more finalised thought constructs that define our solution to the problem.
  • It is these mental models or thought constructs that we can transcode into software.

Thus the computer is running a network of these thought constructs. It is worth noting that this is NOT the same as the process we use when thinkING about the problem and its possible solution. This is why I am highly sceptical about the promise of so-called artificial intelligence.

As they [try to] run these mental model networks computers will mirror back the quality of our thought process as programmers. Thus any self-respecting programmer will need to become self-aware about their own process and learning in this area of their own thinking.

Initiation in Thinking

I believe that this whole domain can be seen as an initiation in thinking which in former times would have been the province of mystical and religious orders. But the current ideas of religion are not appropriate to this domain although there are some similarities if you think in terms of ritual – but that is a whole other touchy subject to be dealt with later. This move into the inner world is why a developer’s attitude is as important as their technical ability – if not more so.

Next time I will take a trip into the philosophical side of things and link up to some of the great thinkers of history.

The Importance of being an Amateur

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Just recently I have been preparing a talk that I shall be giving at ACCU 2013 in Bristol. Luckily the Bath & Bristol chapter of the ACCU asked me to come and give a dry run of the talk recently and thanks to their many constructive comments I have just finished tweaking and finishing the talk for the main conference.

In preparation for the talk my main texts have been a combination of Henri Bortoft with his “Taking Appearance Seriously”, Iain McGilchrist and his magnum opus “The Master and His Emissary”, and finally- of more import for the techies among us – another magnum opus from Christopher Alexander, his “The Nature of Order” series (which I shall refer to as NoO!).

During the preparation I have been reading these works primarily in “reference” mode, making notes and actually trying to “study” them more. However, now that the main prep is over, I decided to jump forward to the last of the four books from Alexander. So far I had only got to half way through the second one.

Given the slides I had prepared for the talk, some of which included the titles “The Importance of Energy” and “The Foundation in Play”, I was surprised to see just how well they meshed with Alexander’s approach in his Book 4 of the NoO series.

I was particularly struck by his comments about Chartres cathedral and was desperately trying to relate it to software development when a particular thought struck me between the eyes. Although Alexander never mentioned the word, one of the main drivers that the artisans making cathedrals would have used would have been the LOVE of the job, particularly given the religious context so prevalent at that time.

I then reflected upon the background history of software development and realized that it has usually been the polar opposite of this approach, since its main roots are in the military and past war efforts, particularly WW2 and the work at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb. So I then realized that a major reason why I am interested in this more human approach is in order to counteract the lack of humanity that is prevalent in software development, an easy trap to fall into given the focus on technology, and its associated roots in the military.

I then remembered the root within the word amateur – i.e. doing it for the love of it – and realized that this is an important driver for taking the time to make software development truly become a craft and an art. Thus, in order to ‘heal the Cartesian split’, as I mention in the talk, we need to bring more of this feeling of doing it for the love of it, and this is exactly what Christopher Alexander is driving at. He has a great story about getting his students to paint Easter eggs in order for them to learn how to create buildings with good centres or beings as he is also calling them.

I have included the section entitled ‘Innocence’ here as I feel it says a lot about what is needed to truly be an ‘architect’, whether of a building or of software. But unfortunately I am not usually given the time for such exercises and have had to develop this perspective in the background throughout my career. I suspect this is a common experience. But maybe I am just too much of a dreamer…

Extracted from Book 4 of “The Nature of Order : The Luminous Ground” by Christopher Alexander. pp99-100.

12 / INNOCENCE

It may help for me to describe a class I once conducted, in an effort to improve the students’ ability to form buildings from beings. I first asked each student to give an example of an innocent process of drawing or making an ornament which they had most enjoyed. I was looking for something which had been truly joyful for them, not part of their student training. They gave various answers. As I listened, I noticed that the smaller the examples were the more true – that is, the more innocent they were, the less contaminated. Then one student said, in a very soft voice, that he had enjoyed painting Easter eggs in his childhood. That was something that was pure joy, unaffected by guilt, or by a feeling that he must “do well.” At first I could not hear him. He was shy about it, didn’t want to repeat what he said. I persuaded him to speak a little more loudly, and finally we all heard him say, embarrassed, that he had loved painting Easter eggs.

I felt at once that this love, of all those which had been mentioned, was one of the most pure. It was simple. In that work, there is nothing except the egg and the pattern on its surface, no mental constraints of what one “ought” to do – only the thing itself. No one really judges or censors the outcome – so it is easy and alright, not festering with complicated concepts about architecture when you do it.

So I asked each student to make holes in the ends of a raw egg, blow out the yolk and white, and then paint the egg, decorate it like an Easter egg. I made it clear that they did not have to use the fifteen properties. All I wanted them to do was to make the egg beautiful, to enjoy what they were doing. Here are some of the eggs they painted. The shapes and spaces in the ornaments took their shape, and became what they are, just to be beautiful and to have the maker’s depth of feeling visible and shining in them. That was the only principle which governed them. And this, I believe is what one has to do to make a serious work. Naive as it sounds, it is this, too – I believe – that the great traditional builders did.

The students’ other architectural work improved greatly once they understood that making a good building is more like the joyous work of painting an Easter egg than like the practical task of being an “architect.”

Problems of the Inquiring (or Technological) Mind

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Well it has been a long while since I last posted here, and for that please accept my apologies, but there have been good reasons. I have been re-assessing life somewhat. I am hesitant to call it a mid-life crisis, since it feels like it has been happening for most of my life!

One of the problems of having an inquiring mind, a curious mind, an analytical mind, is that you tend to deconstruct everything, i.e. you pull it apart. Sometimes there need to be boundaries as to what you will and what you will not pull apart. I must confess I have had problems with where to place those boundaries. And I think I am not alone in this. As I have mentioned before, the puzzle becomes the thing ,and if you have an analytical bent, you can easily forget why you wanted to solve the puzzle in the first place, or maybe sometimes you don’t even know, which means you are usually doing it just for fun.

The impulse to re-assess has come from a number of directions and has a lot to do with a dawning realisation about just how damaging this sort of mind can be.

Firstly has been my attendance at a Science conference in Stourbridge on a rainy weekend in late February (see footnote 1); secondly I have recently started reading what I am finding an inspiring management book called “Theory U” by Otto Scharmer (see footnote 2); and thirdly an article recommended by a friend about a breathtaking display of technological hubris by neurology professor, Henry Markram at the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne (see footnote 3).

So what on earth is it that pulls all these threads together and is giving me such a hard time? Well… deep breath… I have been finding it harder and harder not to worry about various environmental concerns and bury my head in the technological sand, saying that we will be able to find solutions to the issues coming our way. A tipping point was when I watched a TV program about James Lovelock originally broadcast in April 2010 (Episode 2 of the “Beautiful Minds” series). Here is a man who is a great polymath and a scientist who is quite happy to be on the outside of the mainstream, pointing out the inherent problems of working within mainstream science at this time.

These different threads have led me to the point where I feel very strongly that there are not just limits implicit in the current mode of thought we have, but that there is a fundamental flaw that is causing wide scale havoc with our environment.

Favourite Metaphors, Quotes and Insights
Thanks to the minds of various giants I like to think I am able to stand on their shoulders and have assembled here some of my favourite thoughts from them that, together, encapsulate some of what I am going on about.

J.W. Goethe: Life is a Conversation. Ah yes, the wonderful idea of Delicate Empiricism.

David Bohm: Thought as a System which creates the world and then says “I didn’t do it!”. So our collective thought is creating organisations which are prisons, and then we can blame the “system” for all the problems, which, remember, we have created.

Rudolf Steiner: The problems of Dualism and the terrific difficulty of getting to Monism (which I link to a holistic way of seeing), though Henri Bortoft helps…

Henri Bortoft: We cannot know the whole in the same way as we know a thing.
This is worth more words here: The whole is not a thing. The way to the whole is through the parts. It is not to be encountered by stepping back and taking an overview. The whole is to be encountered by stepping into, and passing through, the parts.

Couple these ideas with the realisation from my own experience of how difficult it is to recruit competent, thoughtful, software developers and perhaps you can see why I am going through a rather angst-ridden period.

Conclusions
So I have now come to realise that we must must must change the way we collectively think. Obviously this requires us to individually be more clear in our own thought, but there are issues of social technique that we need to learn, which I believe are key to how we turn this around. Now here is a kicker, there is a major link with the whole Risk Averse rant I usually bore friends with. The trouble with all this tech is that there is a risk of letting it do the thinking for us.

My favourite example is the use of a satnav. I hate using a satnav that is telling me which way to turn. I once tested one and found its route choice to be flawed at best. No. I will choose the route thank you very much, and I will use the machine as a very useful map follower which traces where I am on the map. This is exactly what pilots are recommended to do when flying with a GPS. This is a prime of example of how to consciously use the technology.

So… the link to risk aversion. Well if you do not consciously use the technology, you stop thinking. This is comfortable, but in the end, dangerous. It is also very convenient for any government. Since to have a population who are quite willing to follow orders is just fine by them. Risk aversion also puts you in a comfort zone. Again this means you stop thinking. Which is of course tied up with existence :-), as Descartes realised:

I think therefore I am…

And thats enough for now.
See you soon.
Thanks for reading.

Footnotes
1: This was Science from an anthroposophical perspective (the Steiner lot if you don’t know what the word means). I co-presented one session about the “Conscious use of technology”. The conference in general was a positive experience that has started me tentatively re-approaching some of Rudolf Steiner’s ideas. In preparation I read Paul Emberson’s book called “From Gondishapur to Silicon Valley” which I found a difficult read as I felt it was rather too evangelical about just how nasty our present computer technology is. In recent days I have come to have a better view of this, but more about that in a later post.

2:
I have found that, so far, the book called “Theory U” by Otto Scharmer is an inspiring read. It is early days as yet since I am about one third of the way through, but his insights from a personal perspective stop it being a dry book, for me at least, and I can relate to a lot of what is being said. His drive is to get to understand why we carry on doing things that are so destructive, and don’t seem to be able to change the results.

3:
A close friend sent me a link to an article in the Daily Mail about Prof Henry Markram trying to make a conscious computer system. As far as I can see this is all an effort to get some more funding and investment. His approach is breathtakingly short sighted and is yet another instance, to me, of someone playing with their toys.

The Path of Technological Development – A quick overview of recent history

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Lets start with some overview of the love affair that the human race seems to have with technology.

In the 30 or so years I have been working in the profession, computers have moved from being the province of nerds to now being a fashion item. And, yes, I was a spotty faced geek with glasses spending all hours in front of a keyboard playing some of the early computer games like Dungeons and Dragons – “Get in bucket. Drop bottle. Pick up matches” – usually eliciting the response from the game – “You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike”. Those games did not need much computing power. Now if you have a Smartphone, it has more power than many desktop PCs of the 90s.

But the question that has puzzled me is why there has been an inordinate amount of time, money but above all, human energy invested in developing computer software. Where I work, for example, there have been over 2 person centuries of effort expended in writing the software, which now stands at over 16 million lines of software, if not more. This is not out of the ordinary in industry.

Information technology is just the latest result of a continuum of technological development stretching from thousands of years ago. However it has a special attribute which I will come to later.

As with the movie character Shrek, even though he didn’t like being compared to an onion, there are a number of levels here:

The Development of Craftsmanship
Humans are consummate toolmakers and the computer is the latest in a long line of inventions that have given us more power to predict and control our environment. However, every tool has two sides, just like the proverbial two-edged sword. On the plus side a good tool amplifies our capacities. The down side that is usually forgotten is that any tool will place obstacles in our path which we must overcome by training ourselves to use it properly. Eventually, with effort, we develop more skill and a good tool becomes transparent to us as we use it. This has resulted in the development of craftsmanship and the professions.

The Development of Automation
If we look at the beginning of the 20th century, Henry Ford introduced the assembly line to help speed the construction of the Model T car. This was a major change in the way work was carried out and was met by strong opposition. He doubled the pay of his employees, segregated the work, yet stayed profitable because he was able to triple the running speed of the assembly line (see Shop Class as Soulcraft reference). This was the beginning of a massive development towards more automation in the workplace. Automation is about defining sets of rules to follow, and this can be done with some non-physical work, culminating in the current so called Expert Systems. For example I would expect the legal profession to see quite a few changes in this area in the years ahead.

The Development of Software
And so we come to software development. Why do I consider it to have a separate place from the automation of other work? With software programming the rules of work are almost impossible to pin down. Software is always written in an unambiguous machine-friendly language, and requires a lot of human effort create, since we have to use the ambiguous human languages to define what we want done. Now to automate software development, which uses a language, you have to… you guessed it… use another language. This means that to improve software development you have to do even more software development! With computing this has been the story so far with many new languages appearing every year, and it does not look like slowing down.

And so…
In terms of tool use and development, we have reached the top of a pyramid, moving up from physical work to thought work. We can automate repetitive physical work by using our thinking. But to automate repetitive thinking, we can only do more thinking, but at a higher-level. Of course we need to recognise that we are talking about the more utilitarian mode of thought here, but of course, as you might expect, the view of the path starts to get murky.

More to follow…

Reference
“Shop Class as Soulcraft – An Inquiry into the Value of Work” by Matthew B Crawford, Penguin.