Cognitive opening and closing of strategic pathways

Strategic Challenge of Polysensorial Knowledge: bringing the "elephant" into "focus" (Part #13)

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Many authors frame their strategic recommendations for the future in terms of "ways" forward (eg Peter Ellyard, Designing 2050: pathways to sustainable prosperity on spaceship earth, 2008; Felix Dodds (Ed.), The Way Forward: beyond Agenda 21, Earthscan, 1997; Eward Goldsmith, The Way: an ecological world view, 1992; Homa Motamen-Scobie, European Monetary Union: the way forward, 1998; Parliament of the World's Religions, Pathways to Peace: the wisdom of listening, the power of commitment, 2004).

In a knowledge based society it is appropriate to "re-cognize" how these ways are engendered and comprehended as viable within the polysensorial world -- now acknowledged by neuromarketing. Especially problematic, as evident in religious or scientific fundamentalism, is the exclusive attachment to particular "ways" and "modes of knowing" -- implicitly or explicitly deprecating (or demonizing) alternative ways. In this respect, a "way" corresponds to a significant degree to a "sense" of direction, especially in times when there is no "sense of direction" (and there are calls for leadership to provide it). This is appropriately to be compared with understandings of the "sense of a meeting", notably as valued for collective decsion-making by Quakers.

The challenge in this context may be variously expressed as avoiding permanent closure within an essentially open system -- in the loght of the emphasis articulated by Hilary Lawson (Closure: a story of everything, 2001). For an information society, a fruitful case has been made for a dynamic approach to this challenge by Orrin Klapp (Opening and Closing: strategies of information adaptation in society, 1978) -- making comparisons with the adaptability of the iris in relation to the sense of vision. The concern has been otherwise expressed by Paul Feyerabend (Conquest of Abundance: a tale of abstraction versus the richness of being, 1999)..... and by other authors variously concerned with unfruitful loss of "abundance" ***

Given the manner in which strategic pathways are typically articulated in vision-speech-text mode, a fiundamental issue is whether a polysensorial approach to a knowledge society calls for a more subtle, self-reflexive method of indicating and distinguishing "ways" -- to avoid premature or inappropriuate cognitive lock-in (groupthink, silo thinking, etc). In other words, in how many "ways" ("senses") can understandings of strategic alternatives be embodied in a "closed" coding scheme that effectively exemplifies non-closure -- namely a scheme that paradoxically offers security against closure. It is a scheme with such curious characterisatics that offers a guarantee of requisite variety within the dynamics of the meta-pattern that connects -- the central thesis formulated by Gregory Bateson (Mind and Nature; a necessary unity, 1979):

The pattern which connects is a meta-pattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that meta-pattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect. (p. 11).

And it is in this connection that he warns -- with implications for any appropriately viable strategy development:

Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality. (p. 8). 

In the spirit of explorations of the calculus of indications (George Spencer-Brown, The Laws of Form, 1969) regarding the making of distinctions, it is a "self-reflexive coding scheme" -- effectively a form of self-mirroring coding -- that has been a preoccupation of various authors (Maturana ***.) But it is appropriate to note the multi-modal logical approach characteristic of Eastern cultures, formulated as a quadrilemma by Kinhide Mushakoji (Global Issues and Interparadigmatic Dialogue, 1988). This might be adapted as follows:

• Encoding significance A ("like-this")
• Encoding significance Not-A ("not-like-this")
• Encoding significance A-and-Not-A ("both like-this and not-like-this")
• Encoding significance Neither-A-nor-Not-A ("neither like-this nor not-like-this")

It is the last two modes, and the set as a whole, that are suggestive of further insight. Such an approach is well-recognized through the Sanskrit adage Neti Neti (Not this, Not that) which offers the most succinct description of a "cognitive dance" of requisite complexity.

[**** completion of this section in progress]

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