By Gary McI. Boyd,

Concordia University, Montreal, CANADA

boydg@vax2.concordia.ca

Abstract / Introduction / The Argument in Essence is / Ontological Pre-Suppositions / The Oughts That Are / The Human 'Ought That is' / The Cybersystemic Levels / The Cybersystemic Levels System / Figure 1 / Values Inherent in the Cybersystemic Levels / Figure 2 / Some Discussion of Values Implicated in Each Level /  Values Hierarchies Used in Curricula Construction / Figure 3 / Conclusion Values and Educational Cybernetics / Acknowledgment / References / Appendix

Educating in the sense of "drawing out and realizing what is immanently there" applies more meaningfully to values and motivations rather than to factual or technical knowledge and skills. Conflicted, and tacit values are among the main inhibitors of significant learning for most people. This is because we are not ideal autonomous intentional Cartesian individuals, but rather are fluid socially embedded discursively and interactively evolving selves. It is asserted here that: We can as sociocybernetic educators, draw upon and capitalize on, existing values aims which have their origins in biological and sociocybernetic evolution. In particular it is argued that a structure of about nine emergent communication and control(cybersystemic) levels has evolved, and that each of the levels has its own characteristic immanent values criteria (and feedback control loops) which can and should be drawn upon to motivate and broaden and deepen the learning conversations which constitute education. What these levels are and how they relate to more conventional levels of motivations such as Maslow’s and also how they relate to conventional curriculum objectives levels such as those of Bloom et al. is exhibited. How learning activities should be developed to take leverage from and orchestrate the action of these " evolved-in values which are" in potentially discursively legitimating ways is discussed.

"VALUES" are defined here to be abiding directional and prioritising parameters used for decision making. It is understood however, that in everyday life "values" (Truth, Duty, Honour, etc.) are often invoked to provide post-hoc rationalisations for actions which were executed without any actual employment of values as decision criteria. Such rationalisations are part of maintaining self-esteem, social solidarity, educating, and keeping up respectable public appearances. Habermas (1983/1990) has nicely shown that Kant's categorical imperative should be reformulated to take into account that value maxims can have universal validity only so long as they are recurrently submitted to all interested others for purposes of discursive legitimation. What I am doing here is submitting an exhibition of what I take to be a science-coherent universal values educational clarification project to interested others. In a series of studies (Boyd, 1971-97) I have tried to exhibit in an educatively useful way , the historically evolved (cybersystemic) emergent levels system of communication & control. Here I argue that each of these levels has its own inherent value vector, and that if these existing communicontrol values are better understood sustainable eudemony can be achieved.

That each of the historically evolved emergent levels of steering, self-steering and mutually steering systems requires its own distinctive form of Control-Variety to Disturbance-Variety ratio to be equal to or greater than unity if it is to continue to function in its characteristic way. - Which is to say that the characteristic goodness value for each cybersystemic level is that its own type of C-V/D-V ratio (and those of its lower level constituent systems) must be greater than or equal to one. These requisite control variety values are inherent in the evolved systems as `Oughts which Are'. However, particular systems are continually emerging up to some level and decaying back down to more primitive levels (being made & destroyed) in their functionality. Education is the practice of helping human systems emerge onto successively higher levels of functionality, or at least helping them to learn to avoid being paralysed or debased or destroyed unnecessarily.

There are a four novel basic conceptions needed as part of the argument for the nine levels of modulations and their use in the practise of Educational Cybernetics:

1) Transcendental reality is assumed in conjecturing probable existence to the World of modulations and its' levels. See Roy Bhaskar's'(1989) Reclaiming Reality for the grounds for this assumption of existence.

2) What I call "IDENTI-MEMEPLEXES" exist as `programs' which are executed by and propagated on (at least) the human-social-animal substrate. That is: patterns of modulations form which on/in appropriate carriers: reproduce propagate, sometimes conjugate, and of course eventually disintegrate. The simplest sort are `computer viruses' which propagate through computercations networks as well as on/in people. Probably the most complex sort are natural languages or religions, with Jung's archetypes, Freud's Super-ego, Adler's `styles', and Burke’s Dramatis Personae somewhere in between.

The closest conceptualisation to mine is that of Richard Dawkins (vid Hofstadter, 1985, Lynch,1998) complexes of mutually supporting "memes". The nearest thing to a formal representation is that of Gordon Pask with his conversationally self-sustaining and elaborating" `P-individuals" (Pask, 1981).

3) That the main reason for identiplexes existing is that human animals have the evolved capability, and the `built-in' imperative to propagate such modulations. The imperative I call TOTIS- The Ought That Is. It impels us as a top level imperative to: Acquire, Defend, find hosts for, and PROPAGATE identity complexes which we identify with or internalize (e.g. a super-ego, or just a personal style, or character). To make `TOTIS' a little more plausible one might consider Miguel Uanamuno's argument for an in-built imperative toward immortality, and Ernest Becker's(1975) discussion of the lengths that we go to to protect our individual and collective identities from even only imagined threats of dissolution.

4) Finally, when dealing with hetrarchical cybernetic systems it is essential to understand and model the teleology of the top levels of the system because those partly shape and steer everything below it. As Rom Harre’ has pointed out our conscious life is a sort of middle management working for a higher level which we can know only indirectly, and yet must know to make sense of what we actually do. (Harre' et al., 1985).

To discuss values immanent in the various cybersystemic levels of communicontrol which we exert on one another might be seen as committing the naturalistic fallacy of leaping from is to ought. What is actually being asserted here is: that certain kinds of effective values have been evolved as part of the core structures and processes of organisms and sociotechnical systems, and that these should be exhibited and clarified so that more rational and loving mutual steering, which necessarily must both exploit and over-ride the existing operant values, can be carried out. The task may be seen as analogous to Paul Tillich’s de-mythologizing of religious myths, and to Marx’s and the Frankfurt school’s critique of interests. What is being said, is: Here are the cybersystemic normative constraints which exist; use them for leverage, or change some of them. But, you cannot ignore them without having your actions be ineffectual, or produce un-intended and un-desired outcomes.

Because the evolved control norms exist within distinct levels of process and action, it is all too easy for higher level ventures to be undertaken without awareness of how lower level feedback controls will distort them. A simple example is the way in which innovative management strategies such as "Total Quality Management" when imposed from above, become re-interpreted on the shop floor so that eventually they are merely new labels applied to the same old habitual management practices.

In my view the several levels of systems called Human-beings are essentially characterised by our biologically evolved imperative: (What I call: TOTIs - The Ought That Is) to acquire, to conjugate and to propagate what seem plausibly to us to be indefinitely propagatable (immortal) identi-memeplexes (personality components). Finding attractive behaviour patterns, incorporating them into our individual & collective identities and encouraging others to copy them is central to our being human; it is what is intrinsically and characteristically meaningful for all human beings.

The most interesting, and perhaps most general, class of human decisions are those concerning what is to be propagated, and therefore also with what should be ignored, and what suppressed. What in our roles as receivers, is to be classified and acted on as desired signal; what as noise; what as an offer of collaboration, what as an attack? What in our roles as senders is to be reproduced, and what is to be re-created? In each case the "what" may include chunks of personal & collective identities. Those identity propagating questions are perhaps the central values-steerable questions of human life.

The above is a top-down exposition, whereas historically the valuing most highly of whatever appear to be indefinitely propagatable memeplexes, was selected bottom up (Dennett, 199) - at first by physical and biochemical processes (Prigogine's Order out of Chaos), and later also by humanimal-group actions (vid. Richard Dawkins, Merlin Donald, Gerald Edelman, and Daniel Dennett on evolution).

Elsewhere (Boyd, 1995) I have argued based on Mario Bunge’s (1969) work (see appendix below) and from a methodologically pragmatic (Rescher, 1977) standpoint for the plausibility of asserting the real existence of this evolved cybersystemic levels structure. However since here I am arguing for its use in sociocybernetics to help us develop better mutual steering systems and ventures, the pragmatic value of the methodology of using these levels is being asserted, so to avoid circularity the grounding needs to be something other than methodological pragmatism. Roy Bhaskar’s (1986) critical transcendental realism is probably the solidest philosophical ground on which to build. Ernst VonGlaserfeld's radical constructionism was also considered, but does not provide enough constraint to support this venture. In the spirit of critical realism the levels and values put forward here are defined so that at least quasi-experimental Popperian falsification tests, and also Habermasian discursive legitimation are in principle possible.

Following on my previous papers in this series (Boyd 1971-1997) we begin by assuming two `worlds', the physical world of CARRIERS, and the world of MODULATIONS. This paper discusses working values inmplicated in the evolutionarily emergent levels of the world of modulations.

The aspect of levels is crucial to modelling and explaining because it enables various kinds of partitioning of the immensely complex coupled system of the universe. If partitioning can be done along `natural' levels, we can better understand parts and reconstruct them into wholes which still give us prognostic if not full predictive capabilities. Consequently one crucial aspect of the theory of human-machine learning/teaching systems which is essential for educational cyberneticists (qua innovators) to understand and model is whatever intrinsic functional stratification (hetrarchy or hierarchy) they may possess.

The, historically and recurrently emergent, levels of cybernetic(= control-communications) are given in Figure 1.

All the cybersystemic levels are levels of communication and (mutual) control. As such at each level the characteristic signals reduce a receiver's uncertainty about what to do in terms of the characteristic actions of that level. Whereas "noise or disturbance variety" at a given level increases decision/action uncertainty at that level- and at all higher levels. Therefore the main value intrinsic to all these levels is a good or high signal to noise ratio (S/N ratio), or Control-variety to disturbance-variety ratio to use Ross Ashby's more general terminology. His law (derived from Shannon's tenth theorem) states that Control variety must be greater or equal to disturbance variety for control to be possible.

However each level has its own characteristic forms of disturbance and control variety so that a detailed expansion of the basic scalar S/N ratio value into a multidimensional vector is desirable. In this necessarily short illustrative essay the expansion can not be carried on beyond two or three dimensions at the most.

Two of the most interesting supplementary C-V/D-V ratio dimensions are the aesthetic dimension which emerges with the emergence of the viroidal communicontrol level, and the ethical dimension which emerges with the emergence of the negotiative communicontrol level. Which is to say that cybersystems of these two levels of agents (which are much less evolved than complete human beings) can make aesthetic and ethical (fairness-trustworthiness) decisions.

A conventional classification of considerable educational relevance is that between "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" values. At first glance it would appear that the S/N ratio values of the cybersystems, they being steering-systems, are all instrumental values. This is not the case because for human beings the top levels (Conjugative, Liberative, PhiloScientiSophic, & Existential) are activities pursued for their own sake as well as being instrumental for sustaining higher level being. Indeed even negotiative level functioning is often elevated and joined in to be part of a person's identity (e.g. traders vid Jane Jacobs) and hence becomes an intrinsically rewarding end in itself.

From a socio-cybernetic standpoint the effectual carrier level simply supplies available energy, and accepts waste. The implicit value is that of the goodness of having an ongoing supply of available energy (Hekergy) & continually available sinks for degraded energy (Entropy). Both are necessary, but definitely not sufficient, "goods" for all sociocybernetic systems. (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971, Robinson, 1982) 

The Hartley-Shannon (in a sense objective) information level depends directly on the available energy, but given enough of that, it functions well for us if we receive clear and unambiguous inputs which reduce our uncertainty about parts of the world. At this emergent level, the necessary virtues are: 1). a good signal/to noise ratio (which depends on power and bandwidth, and redundancy), and 2) inputs which are neither boringly simple, nor so complex that our nervous & computer systems can't process them. That is, there is a good range of information input flow: too much is bad because it overloads; too little is bad because it does not tell us much in a given time (Hartley, 1928, Shannon, 1949). "Noise" here is whatever inputs increase our uncertainty about parts of the world. All communication & steering depends on adequate but not overwhelming information flows, so "good-closing" is as important as good-opening". Ross Ashby’s law of "Requisite variety" for satisfactory steering decision-making (The control variety must be equal to or greater than the disturbance variety) is actually a corollary of the Hartley-Shannon laws(Ashby, 1970).

The Third emergent level is that of subsisting automata (Artificial Life has gotten this far) and living cells. Food has to be distinguished from poison, threats have to be avoided, comfortable temperatures have to be recognized. Here the information is "subjective" in Klaus Weltner's sense (1973), and "situated" in Keith Devlin's (1991) sense. Goodness here is above all pragmatic a good outcome survival and growth, means the information received was good. However, semantic relevance, and syntactic well-formedness are necessary for such good outcomes, i.e. for the information to be beneficially conducive to the subsistence (viability) of autopoietic systems it must be relevant to the needs of those systems, and to the opportunities and threats common to their environment.

The emergent level of Viral information, or "memes" as Dawkins(1976) refers to a subset of them, have two intrinsic virtues:

This is the level of A-life and biological life genetic communication and control. Genetic survival is THE value.

Since autopoietic systems compete for necessities of life( food, shelter, warmth etc.) and since some can cater to other's most urgent need in exchange for less urgently needed goods & services, living systems naturally form bartering and even warring communities. The NEW kind of information which emerges at this level is information about trustworthiness and fairness, i.e. moral information. Notwithstanding Oscar Wilde's saying that "Morality comes into play when you don't like people!"

• Actually it comes into play when you depend on others in an ongoing relationship such as the "tit-for-tat" solution to repeated "prisoner's dilemma" games.

Our identities both as animals and as human beings have been generated by establishing more or less permanent symbiotic relationships with various parasites. This is most interesting at the "conjugidentity information" level. Here the parasites in question are meme-complexes which we acquire mainly through primary socialization, and which constitute our "character" or habitual personae. The implicit "goods" at this level are whatever memes appear as though they will comfortably join into the fabric of our existing core-personality meme-plex, and enhance its attractiveness to others, and hence its pseudo-immortality as an indefinitely propagatable archetypical persona in the culture.

Unfortunately we often acquire meme-complexes which at first seem to be symbiotic parts of our personal identity, but which later prove untenable under changed circumstances. So we need to divorce and grieve, and largely forget parts of our core selves. This liberation from old robotic parts of ourselves cannot be carried out without reframing and permission, and grieving information from significant others (family, therapist, priest teacher etc.) Here the virtuous information is whatever enables participants to accept the setting aside of parts of themselves and the adding of new symbiocytes(Boyd, 1991,1998).

The unique emergent aspects of rationally-formalized and technologically-supported scientific communication and control are what enables science to be more coherent, more efficient, and more consistently negentropically progressive, and at the same time in a sense to be more creative, than other human constructions. Popper(1979), Rescher (1977), and Bhaskar(1989) have to be read together, possibly with Habermas (1984), and against Feyerabend(1972). Each poses tests for scientific practice which are necessary, perhaps all five add up to what is sufficient normative guidance, if anything can be, in an open-ended autopoietic evolutionary system. Summarising their work: good scientific information is: rationally well-formalized, fairly coherent with the rest of science, explanatory, and predictive enough to be modifiable or eliminable by experience, experiment and discourse. The necessary scientific virtues are then: honesty, discursive-rationality, formal-coherence, predictivity, tentativeness, and creative-heuristicity.

The recent emergence of the existential level of being and becoming, coincides with the emergence of an awareness of the massive misery of humankind, the limited possibilities for progress, and of one's personal ephemerality. Hence Camus’ fundamental existential question: "Why not commit suicide?"

Maslow(1971) treats possible answers to this question tolerably well in his "B-values" essay, but doesn’t come up sharply against the irrational leap of faith vs. rational despair question. Possibly the question has an answer through consciousness of universal unity or suchlike mystical transcendence "whereof we cannot speak". Of course the presumed existence of such an emergent transcendental level of being may be just another heroic palliative delusion (Becker, 1975).

Perhaps the educational question which arises at this level is: Can we, (to avoid evil =t he propagation of despair causing procedures) change ourselves so that we all transcend the evolved-in imperative toward the transcendence of death, without destroying meaning, love and joy?

VALUES HIERARCHIES USED IN CURRICULA CONSTRUCTION</P>

The most commonly used values hierarchy is that of Abraham Maslow(1971), while the most commonly used instructional design hierarchies are those of Bloom, Krathwol & Madaaus(197). The Maslow hierarchy of values roughly corresponds to some of the cybersystemic levels used here. The Bloom et alia taxonomy system arbitrarily divides cognitive, affective, and psychomotor objectives into three separate hierarchies (for convenience in use by instructional test-makers and designers) and has an even looser relationship as shown in Fig. 3.:

The problem for educational cyberneticists is how to design, build and legitimately `sell' something to transform pathologically reproductive schools and other media, into emancipative and ecologically realistic identity re-constructing agents. Some intelligent tutoring systems, and also some Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Systems are perhaps prototypical precursors of the discursively legitimate dramatic cybersystemic identity transformers that we need. However, such pragmatically produced prototypes are not going to evolve quickly enough without a better prescriptive theory than is currently available to guide their evolution.

The purpose of this work is to contribute to the prescriptive theory needed for designing and developing legitimate effective, collaborative, educative Identity Transformers - ones which can be used in the reconstruction and/or replacement of schools, and distance education systems. As a start toward the construction of such a theory, the cybernetic levels (of communication and control) which have most to do with the formation, maintenance, propagation, and transformation of human identity and their implicit values have been explored in this paper.

At this juncture it is too early to conclude that a systematic analysis of the levels of communication & steering and their implicit value criteria is a sufficient basis for educational reforms to achieve eco-co-cultural symbiosis (the least bad state of life on Earth) but perhaps the necessity for using such analyses is becoming more plausible?

-------------------------------------------------

Acknowledgment: The series of papers on which this is built have been presented at and received helpful criticism from discussion at the Dutch System Group's "Problems of..." Conferences (1981-1997).

Ashby, W. R. (1970) An Introduction to Cybernetics. London, Chapman & Hall.

Becker, E (1975) Escape from Evil. New York, The Free Press.

Berry, Christopher J. (1986) Human Nature, Atlantic Highlands N.J. Humanities Press International.

Bhaskar, Roy (1989) A Realist Theory of Science. London, Verso.

Boyd, G.M. (1997)"The Identification of Levels of Action Through the Use of Stratified Computer Communications Media; The THOUGHTACTORIUM". SYSTEMICA Vol. 13. -in Press.

Boyd, G (1995) "Excavating the Emergent Levels of Cybersystemics, with a View to Concerted Progressive Action", Systemica 12, 1, (in press.)

Boyd, G (1993) "Educating Symbiotic P-individuals through Multi-level Conversations" Systems Research 10, 113-128.

Boyd, G M (1987)"Emancipative Educational Technology" Canadian Journal of Educational Communications, 16, 2, 168-173.

Boyd, G.M. (1971) "The appropriate Level of Sophistication of Computer Languages For the Writing of Tutorial Models and Courses" pp. 449-455. In Packham, D. Cleary, A. Mayes, T. (eds.) Aspects of Educational Technology V. London, Pitman.

Boyd, R.D. (1991) "Personal Transformation in Small Groups". London, Routledge.

Bunge ,Mario (1969) " Metaphysics, Epistemology and Methodology of Levels" Whyte L.L., Wilson A., Wilson D. (Eds.) Hierarchical Structures pp. 17-28. New York, American Elsevier

Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press.

Dennett, D. (199) Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Devlin, K (1991) "Logic and Information". Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press.

Donald, M (1991) Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge Mass. Harvard Univ. Press.

Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger. London, Routledge.

Feyerabend, P (1972) Against Method. London, Verso.

Georgescu-Roegen, N.(1971) "The Entropy Law and the Economic Process". Cambridge Mass. Harvard Univ. Press.

Habermas, J (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston, Beacon Press.

Habermas, J. (1983, trans. 1990) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge Mass. MIT Press.

Hampshire, Stewart (1972) Freedom of Mind, Oxford, Clarendon Press

Harding, D.W. (1952) Social Psychology and Individual Values. London, Hutchinson.

Hartley, R V L (1928) "The Transmission of Information", Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 3, pp. 535-564.

Harre', Rom, Clarke, David, & DeCarlo, Nicola (1985) Motives & Mechanisms, London, Methuen.

Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1985) Metamagical Themas, New York. Basic Books

Huizinga, J.(1950) Homo Ludens. Boston, Beacon Press.

Maslow, A.H.(ed. 1959) New Knowledge in Human Values. N.Y. Harper & Row.

Maslow, A.H. (1971) The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. N.Y. Viking.

Pask, Gordon (1981) "Organizational Closure of Potentially Conscious

Systems", in Zeleny, M.(ed.) Autopoiesis: A Theory of Living Organization, New York, North Holland.

Popper, K R (1979) Objective Knowledge; an Evolutionary Approach. Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press.

Rescher, N (1977) Methodological Pragmatism. New York, New York Univ. Press.

Robinson, H (1982) Renascent Rationalism, Rockwood Ont. Speedside Pub.

Rosaldo, Michelle Z. (1984)" Toward an Anthropology of Self & Feeling" in Shweder, R.A. & Levine, R.A.(eds.) Culture Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press

Shannon, C. (1949)"Communication in the Presence of Noise", Proc. I.R.E. vol. 37, pp. 10-21.

Vickers, G. (1968) Value System and Social Process. London, Tavistock.

Weltner, K (1973) "The Measurement of Verbal Information in Psychology and Education" New York, Springer-Verlag.

FORMAL DEFINITION OF EVOLUTIONARILY EMERGENT LEVELS SYSTEMS

Mario. Bunge's(1969) definition of evolutionarily emergent levels systems is used. As an ideal, I will make use of Mario Bunge's(1969) definitions here. He formally defines a level by first defining a `level

structure': "Def: L is a level structure if and only if, it is an ordered pair L =<S,E> where S is a family of sets of individual systems, and E is a binary relation in S, such that: i) every member of S is a set of systems that are equivalent in some respect.

ii) E is a one-many, reflexive and transitive relation in S.

iii) E represents (mirrors) emergence, or coming into being of novelty, of qualitatively new systems in a process. - and then he defines a `level':

" Def: A set of individual systems constitutes a level, if and only if it

is a member of the family S of a level structure L.(that is, an homogeneous collection of things constitutes a level provided neither E nor its' converse hold among members of the collection.)"

S here is the family of `MODULATIONS'.

also: A level is newer than another level if the former has emerged from the latter." Note: Such levels are not technically `hierarchical' in that no unilateral dominating control is necessary, although in some cases it could be possible, and also an hetrarchical levels structure - a generalised directed (emergence direction) graph is possible.

The levels which I discuss here, see figure 1. pretty well fit Bunge's definition of emergent levels, although they do not simply correspond directly with the levels that he identified at that time. As my `E' is neither fully reflexive, nor fully transitive. E here refers to the constitution of that sub-set of the level below which has better long-term survival potential. (It is to be noted that at levels where it can exist, the desire to survive is just as important to this potential as the ability to do so.)