Education and complexity: living and learning Nize Maria Campos Pellanda
“Knowing is living. Living is knowing”.
H. Maturana e F. Varela
Abstract. Departing from the aphorism by H. Maturana and F. Varela, scientists who have revolutionized the biology through their complex attitude of non-separating living and knowing, I am trying in this paper to carry out a kind of argumentation in a complex approach on education, based on in the idea/axis of learning as a personal experience. The studies developed by Heinz von Foerster in the evolvement of the cybernetics revolution have inaugurate the Second Cybernetics in which center is the observer’s eye. As a consequence of this emerged the idea of the impossibility of the existence of a world independent from the action of the cognitive subject. From this point begins to arise a complex epistemology to take account of this set of complex problems. These assumptions are of the fundamental importance for the education because they can lead to a construction of educational practices that can develop living methodologies that do not separate life from knowledge. What allow me to construct this text was the experience of a group of researchers that, working together in different research projects, made their studies to converge toward an axis “Education and Complexity”, such as “Narrative and cognition”, “Constructing a concept of Ontoepistemogenesis”, “Suffering in School”, “The new technologies and the self-invention”, etc. The methodology used by this group was “Conversations” in a cybernetic model that implies a kind of circular logic. In these conversational activities the researchers are disturbing input for the group and their elaboration, but at the same time they were disturbed. These movements had the effect of reorganizing and reconfiguring the participants. Furthermore, each researcher wrote a self-narrative in order to self-experiment his/her own transformation.
Key-words: education- complexity- cognition- learning- Biology of cognition
1. Introduction
What I am proposing in this paper is to report in a brief way an experience of research based on the work of a group of researchers in different subjects but converging toward the axis/theme “Education and complexity”. I then, intend from this central subject, to explain the practices of discussing our productions as well as the cognitive and subjective emergences that arises from the conversational practices.
Three axis cross this text and give it its logical structure: complexity, convergence and self-construction. I report here the option of the research group by the Complexity Paradigm, that is, the tendency of the science in articulating and integrating different dimensions of reality putting together “what was disjointed” described by Edgar Morin. (MORIN, s/d)
The question of convergence is inseparable from the complex thought because in the measure that the reality gets more and more complex, it converges in a process of self-organization. This idea is made explicit in a brilliant way in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who have already anticipated in the 50`s the revolution of complexity that following in the next years as a consequence of the cybernetic movement and others important discoveries of the last century in the frontiers of science. The words of this scientist let clear my former state: “...life is here and now entering into a new era of autonomous control and self-orientation”. (TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, 1975, p. 181) And ahead: “...the whole system rising unmistakably toward a critical point of final convergence.” (op. cit. 182)
The self-construction is a natural emergence of the complexity. The assumption that underlies this phenomenon is the inexistence of objective, deterministic, taken-for-granted and independent world from the action of the cognitive/affective subject upon it. This fact refers to the breakdown of the idea of
representation already proclaimed by Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault. Henry Atlan in 1971 in publishing “Organisation biologique et théorie de l´information” and Humberto Maturana with Francisco Varela in 1972 with the edition of their seminal work “Autopoiesis: la organización de lo vivo” have inaugurated a complex biology that does not separate the living from the knowing. These quoted authors in this introduction will constitute the hard nucleus of the theoretical framework of this paper.
In this beginning it is important to say some words about our methodology. Based on cybernetic principles the group has chosen the “Conversations” as the methodology. Through conversations the members of the group disturb and are disturbed each other in the presentation of their researches in such a manner that the whole system constitute a living system that has, as consequence, the reconfiguration of each member of the group in cognitive and subjective terms. (PASK, 1976), (MATURANA, 1999) and (PELLANDA, 2003)
2. Theoretical framework
In the beginnings of the 20th century, Freud’s Psychoanalysis with the unconscious concept and the Quantum Physics with the study of the infinitely small complicate the situation of the classic Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm. These two sciences gave a fatal blow to something that was more sacred to the positivistic culture: the emphasis in the apparent, in the objective and in the quantitative. Outside these elements, to the positivistic approach to reality, it is not possible to make science with rigor. To the positivistic science, besides the questions already posed here, it was fundamental to defend the statement of determinism. From this time on, then, the scientists started to approach more and more chaotic process facing the aleatory phenomena. The complexification of these approaches would lead later the scientists to admit the creative force of the chaotic processes and of the space of the undetermined. The physicist Werner Heisenberg formulates the uncertainty principle in 1927 when trying to understand the chaotic processes. As Morin wrote: “The conception of complexity, by its own, integrates the uncertainty.” (MORIN, 2004, p.24)
From these events on, other subjects that come from different areas of knowledge starts to be accepted as scientific. One of these wa the study of the mind and cognition, that in these times were considered mere speculations of philosophers.
In the forties and fifties during the 20th century, arose the first really complex science: the cybernetics. This science constituted of different areas of knowledge, which organizes themselves in unified approaches of the phenomena. The unified sciences which constitute the cybernetics are: Epistemology, Mathematics, Linguistic, Artificial Intelligence, Biology, Psychology and Anthropology, among others.
Cybernetics approaches the question of the internal functioning of the complex systems applying the principles of self-organization and feedback as key-elements to understand an un-substantiated and circular reality in a constant flow, that constitutes itself in the effective operation of the system. There is a radical epistemological turn here in which the emphases are no more in the things but in the processes.
The involviment of Heinz Von Foerster at the cybernetic group during the Macy’s Conference gave birth to a new epistemology, which brings the observer toward the core of the process of knowing. For him, the objects “are not simply over there” also the laws of nature are not simply given since ever. (von FOERSTER, 1996, p. 17) What matters is to know how they appear and how we are involved in it. This is of fundamental importance to the cybernetic conception of the knowledge that deals with mental processes creators of reality. There is, then, a paradigmatic inflexion in these Forsrterian concepts with the passage from the observed system toward observing systems. This complex epistemology characterizes a second phase of the cybernetic movement. The first phase was already much linked to the deterministic processes but, it is necessary to make clear, this is very different from the traditional science due to the work with the principles of feedback and self-organization.
In this cybernetic path will appear the cognitive sciences that, in their beginnings, were yet marked by behaviorist and representational ideas that were destined, with the development of the cybernetics, to become revolutionary instruments with the cognitive complex sciences, that is, those that do not separate the biological from the cognitive. (MATURANA; VARELA, 1980, 1990), (ATLAN, 1992) Through this way, have arisen, as already referred, to the complex biological theories. The words of Maturana below illustrate very well this new spirit of science that was born in the cybernetic birthplace:
I decided to consider what should take place in the organism during cognition by considering cognition as a biological phenomenon. In doing this I found that my now apparently contradictory academic activity were not contradictory, and they were, in fact, addressed to the same phenomenon: cognition and the operation of the living system - its nervous system included when present - were the same thing.” (MATURANA, 1980, pp. XVI, XVII)
The circularity between living and knowing will be demonstrated in the referred complex theory of biology from the cybernetic assumptions. In this sense, I quote the Biology of Cognition by Maturana and Varela (1990) as well as the Atlan´s theory “Complexity from the noise”. (ATLAN, 1992) In both these cases the authors focus on the role of the organization, autonomy of living beings and the self-production of reality. Maturana and Varela, to take account of the description of the phenomenon of functioning of the living beings as beings that construct themselves, have coined the expression autopoiesis. These theoretical assumptions of autonomy and circularity of the living system as well as the centrality of the observer, constitute the convergence point in the research group around the conversational practices. With that, the researchers intend to rethink the education in the light of complexity.
A group of research from human sciences (education, literature, social sciences, social communication) working with different subject of research, have weekly meetings to discuss their investigation process in progress. Some of these projects are: “Narrative and cognition”, “Constructing a concept of Ontoepistemogenesis”, “Suffering in School”, “The new technologies and the self-invention”.
The central question that organizes the activities of the group is:
Considering the epistemological turn practiced by the Theory of the Biology of Cognition that states that nothing external can determinates what occurs with the living beings and considering also, as a consequence of this, the fundamental role of the observer, we ask:
How do know we in the complexity of the human ongoing process of becoming in the light of the assumption of inseparability of being/knowing?
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To take account of this subject each research in the meetings presents the state of his (her) studies and discusses around a text read by the group. The methodological tool for these discussions is “conversations”.
Why conversations? We use conversations in a cybernetic way, that is, as a tool that have the potential power of triggering transformations in the members of the group in such way that emerges a system functioning with a circular logic. (PELLANDA, 2003) In this system the role of the observer gets clear while the author of his/her own cognition that emerges in the group and, at the same time, he/she disturb all the other members with his/her observations. The second order cybernetics shows us, paradigmatically, the passage from the studies of the observed system to the observing systems. This means the functioning of the conversational system with cognitive and subjective implications. In other words: the conversations tool allow the subjects to transform themselves due to the inclusion in such system that creates disturbs all the time what implies in the active role of the observer included in the studied system. In this sense, we can state that by becoming observers of "others", we may enter in the domain of self- observation.
The self-narratives, another cybernetic tool, produced by each researcher systematically are showing clear signs of the complexification cognition/subjectivity because it gets evident that the subjects make an increasing number of relations between different themes and they are able to make abdutive reasoning (BATESON, 1991). These emergences arise from the act of the observation of others and from the self-observation.
4. Final considerations
Trying to weave together the threads that are discussed here, I would like to finish by emphasizing that what we are doing with these studies, from an epistemological and methodological point of view is to create a second order cybernetic model to construct knowledge in a living way, experiencing in ourselves the process of knowing, and, at the same time, articulating our different discussions. As von Foerster used to say in their informal talks: “life is studied in vivo not in vitro”. (von FOESTER, 1970)
With that I would like to raise the question of knowing as being inseparable from the living process. This fact has deep implications for the epistemology and for education. The existing educational practices, in general terms, are directed toward the idea of the existence of an objective reality outside of the cognitive subject and independent from the action of this subject on the world. With these practices we intend to develop a complex methodology in order to allow the group to offer orientation to educators who desire to harmonize their practices with the recent discoveries about the science of complexity. The experience that was briefly reported here show to the group the strength of this learning strategies through the use of the “conversational theory” and have had as the main result the metacognitive elements that guide learning to a higher level of complexity.
In finishing this presentation I would like to bring the words of B. Scott to justify my option for a cybernetic model in choosing the “conversational theory” as a device to design an open system of construction knowledge/subjectivity:
Understandings are personal knowing. An observer is free to intend matters as well as to describe and explain. Cyberneticians, like other people, "manipulate metaphors" but they know that that is what they are doing. Strategies for effective learning may be characterized but
learning to learn is an open-ended activity. Cybernetics supports learning and learning to learn. (SCOTT, 1996, http://www.thehope.org/Bernard_Scott)
I am conscious that I have made here an overview of such complex questions. I would like to justify this as being due to the short time that I have had for this presentation.
References:
ATLAN, H. O cristal e a fumaça. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1992. BATESON, G. Spiritu y naturaleza. Buenos Aires: Amorrutu, 1991. MATURANA, H. Transformaciones. Santiago: Universitária, 1999.
MATURANA, H.; VARELA, F. Autopoiesis and Cognition. London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980.
----. De máquinas y seres vivos. Santiago: Universitária, 1995. ---- . El árbol del conocimiento. Santiago: Universitária, 1990
MORIN, E. Introdução ao Pensamento Complexo. Lisboa: Instituto Piaget, s/d)
----. O complexus, aquilo que é tecido em conjunto. IN: BENKIRANE, R. A complexidade – vertigens e promessas. Lisboa: Instituto Piaget, 2004.
PASK, G. Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology, Elsevier, Amsterdam. 1976
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SCOTT, B. Second order cybernetics as a cognitive methodology. http://www.thehope.org/Bernard_Scott , 1996
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Von Foerster, H. Thoughts and Notes on Cognition. In P. Garvin (ed.),Cognition: a Multiple View, Spartan Books, New York, 1970 25-48.
