Efficacy, Function, Vitality

Bringing together Kauffman, Bateson, James C. Scott, Bateson, and Richard Powers' The Overstory

Am I to be judged ineffective,
On the basis of stale designations,
Derived from perspectives bereft of context and,
our arrested imagination

Reindeer Lichen I encountered growing among mosses and grasses in Monongahela National Forest

We live in a world obsessed with optimization and efficacy.

But the idea of “efficacy” is frequently problematic.

To consider a thing “effective” requires that we decide what it’s for, and in many cases, that means how it benefits or inhibits us or the things we pay attention to. To subordinate that thing to this external, positionality-biased, pre-determined or essential function or purpose is to de-complexify it—to reduce its dimensionality. In a very real sense, the thing is objectively for whatever effects it happens to create, drive, impact, what it potentiates or will potentially potentiate… and the number of effects that that encompasses might as well be infinite.

Complexity is, as I understand it, the attribute of a thing being irreducible and boundless. A thing is complex in that its attributes and impacts are varied and ever-changing, and therefore effectively uncapturable—I would say incomprehensible¹. Its equilibriums and homeostasises (homeostases?) are fleeting, temporary. Its boundaries are diffuse and porous, making complex things negentropic—always forming new semi-stable patterns. It is formed most importantly not of components, but of processual relationships between components (which may be simultaneously components of other things, agents in other relationships), many unseen, which are roughly stable, but always changing and mean different things, having different implications and effects, from different standpoints and angles. From different angles and within different contexts, its attributes and impacts and effects and bounds appear to shift wildly.

A system made of only fixed components with fixed relationships, and sufficiently closed off from external interaction is, according to David Snowden’s Cynefin framework, an ordered system. I have tended to think of relationships of rigid function as tending a system towards this ordered type, and how frequently that invites dysfunction due to unseen and irreducible complexity. This view is in part motivated emotionally by my own experience attempting to be a whole, complex, changing human being within a society and an institution which is primed for function-based and efficacy-based judgment and treatment.

But in exploring this topic of perceived function, the basis for any determination of efficacy, I encountered a little friction with the point I initially wanted to make—in the ideas of Stuart Kauffman, who stated that “function” (a type of fixed/stable relationship) is a core aspect of the complexification of the universe, its evolution from a world of “mere physics” to a biosphere, which he calls a world “beyond physics”.

I should note that this differentiation of worlds was described similarly by the scholar Gregory Bateson as the world of “forces and impacts” versus what we might call the expansive, unbounded world of systems which can learn. He borrowed the Jungian/gnostic terms “Plemora” (for the world of forces and impacts) and “Creatura” (for biosphere or what he called ”Mind”))

Here’s G. Bateson on that in a 1970 lecture found in “Steps to an Ecology of Mind”:

In the hard sciences, effects are, in general, caused by rather concrete conditions or events—impacts, forces, and so forth. But when you enter the world of communication, organization, etc., you leave behind that whole world in which effects are brought about by forces and impacts and energy exchange. You enter a world in which "effects"—and I am not sure one should still use the same word— are brought about by differences. That is, they are brought about by the sort of "thing" that gets onto the map from the territory. This is difference. Difference travels from the wood and paper into my retina. It then gets picked up and worked on by this fancy piece of computing machinery in my head.

On the significance of “function” in the complexification of the universe beyond mere physics, in a 2012 essay, Kauffman said:

What is the function of your heart? Darwin would answer that it is to pump blood. But your heart makes heart sounds. Why are these causal consequences of beating hearts not the function of your heart? Darwin would answer that you have a heart because it was selectively advantageous for your ancestors to have a heart that pumped blood. Hence the function of your heart is to pump blood, not make heart sounds.

Three points are crucial here: i) The function of your heart is a subset of its causal consequences, here pumping blood, not making heart sounds. ii) A Kantian whole is an organized being in which the parts exist for and by means of the whole and the whole exists for and by means of the parts. You are a Kantian whole, as is a bacterium. iii) You and the bacteria are at a level of complexity where most complex things will never exist in the non-ergodic universe above the level of atoms.

Thus, when Darwin tells us that the function of your heart is to pump blood, he is also telling us why hearts and you exist in the non-ergodic universe.

This last paragraph is the central truth I wish to point to: Once a complex Kantian whole exists in the non-ergodic universe above the level of atoms, we can legitimately discriminate the causal consequences of the parts that help sustain the Kantian whole from causal consequences of the same parts that are mere side effects.

The former causal consequences, here the heart pumping blood, are the legitimate Functions of the parts, and are no longer mere Happenings. Functions of parts help explain why complex Kantian wholes exist in the universe above the level of atoms.

Bateson defined information, the foundation of that communication which facilitates effects in the world of Creatura, as “difference that makes a difference”, and it is interesting to observe that Kauffman is exploring two kinds of difference-making in the organ of the heart—the difference of making sound and the difference of moving blood. Perhaps we might say the “difference that makes a difference” in hearts (from the perspective of the Kantian whole of the animal body) is that they pump blood, not that they make heart sounds. Does this mean the fact that it makes heart sounds is not in fact “information”? Well… no. An obvious demonstration can be found every time a doctor puts that cold little amplifier against your chest and listens. Heart sounds are exactly what “gets onto the map from the territory”. Any observation of difference or reaction to encountered difference is a difference being made by difference, as the very process of observation via sense organs involves the transform of difference (e.g. as movement is transformed to sound and sound is transformed to synapses firing in a coded message) through and across the interconnected circuit of Creatura which includes our bodies and brains, and which Bateson called “Mind”. The significance of particular attributes (blood-pumping-ness or redness or noisiness) being “functional” or “non-functional” and whether they matter differently from different angles, in different contexts, or at different time-scales becomes apparent when you learn about the evolutionary significance of exaptation.

So per Kauffman, a key aspect of what makes a thing complex is the fact that it has parts which it sustains because they sustain it, because they serve a function. And they sustain it because it sustains them—the whole serving a function for the part. Ultimately this mean a functional relationship in nature is mutualistic in some way. Excessive exploitation of a part is not a sustainable relationship between part and whole and thus will not survive evolutionary selection (see Bateson’s concept of complimentary schismogenesis). So a system tending towards the resilient expansion or emergence and thus sustainment of life is decidedly mutualistic.

Add to this Gregory Bateson’s point (from the aforementioned lecture) about the unit of selection in evolution being decidedly not “the breeding individual or the family line or the subspecies or some similar homogeneous set of conspecifics” as previously believed under Darwinian evolutionary theory:

The old unit has already been partly corrected by the population geneticists. They have insisted that the evolutionary unit is, in fact, not homogeneous. A wild population of any species consists always of individuals whose genetic constitution varies widely. In other words, potentiality and readiness for change is already built into the survival unit. The heterogeneity of the wild population is already one-half of that trial-and-error system which is necessary for dealing with environment…

And today a further correction of the unit is necessary. The flexible environment must also be included along with the flexible organism because, as I have already said, the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment.

While “function” (a type of stable relationship between part and whole) and its maintenance might be a core aspect of what makes a thing complex, an essential characteristic of that complexity is change over time in relation to the context/ environment, because things don’t exist in a vacuum, and stability is always having to be re-gained/renegotiated within a complex context. This is abductive process, described beautifully by Nora Bateson in the paper “Aphanipoiesis”, and it describes how all living things and their components all the time are generating hypotheses based on the communication of difference in interiorities (such as memories or perhaps schemas) and exteriorities, and they are changing in response to all of this—reflecting detected difference, and thus becoming “descriptions” themselves of the environment with which they interact. Abductive process, being inherently mutualistic, helps us understand how, as G. Bateson explained, “the unit of survival is a flexible organism in its environment”. Another way to consider this is that nothing is in fact only “in” its environment. It is also part of its environment, a reflection of its environment, and facilitates, as if one of thousands of integrated sense organs, the abductive process of that environment within its context as well.

Holding a complex thing fast to any snapshot of it from a particular angle arrests what had been a process in continuous, emergent motion. To declare it is any one thing and interact with it as such is to inhibit its becoming, a becoming facilitated by constant seen and unseen communication with environment and other systems. Life, as described above, is not a state of being but rather an endless becoming.

So as I stated at the start, to subordinate a thing to any external, positionality-biased, pre-determined or essential function or purpose is to de-complexify it.

To de-complexify a thing is to devitalize it.

In this sense, projects of optimization can be powerfully devitalizing, because to optimize a thing demands that in some way we reduce its internal, churning movement, we cut it off from communication with those things whose channel of interaction depended on that movement. We prioritize a finite number of current aspects and flows within it and with it, and then selectively or ignorantly degrade all of the relationships which don’t prop up those aspects or flows. We replace an abductive process, from which mutual coherence emerges, with an engineering process, which breaks relationship.

To optimize a thing is to know better than that thing what it is and is for and then trap it in our own myopic configuration of those concocted limits.

James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” offers several powerful examples of this, how taking a schematic view of a complex thing—accounting for its visible “component parts” and “functions” and “purpose”—motivates humans to behave as though the schema is the thing itself, and engage with it in ways that manipulate it into resembling this schematic fiction, diminish its dimensionality, deny, damage, and degrade its complexity. From Scott:

“The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.”

In “Seeing Like a State”, Scott offers a potent example of this infernal pattern in the history of scientific forestry—how the wild, infinitely complex forest, in the interest of efficacy and production, was converted in 18th century Germany to scientific tree farms, which ultimately failed at the predetermined “purpose” (because the complexity which was diminished had been vitalizing in unseen ways), and also drove converted forests to fail at all of the many unseen “purposes” for other unseen vital things from their particular angles and contexts, and those things were devitalized in their contexts, and the devitalization ripples outward. In the case of scientific forestry, this damaging project originated from simply taking a point of view, in which the tree was perceived as primarily a commodity, subjugating all other possible meanings and roles and relationships beneath that designation. In this way, capitalism is devitalizing, because of how it commodifies, rendering mono-valent those things which had previously been multi-valent.

In the short run, this experiment in the radical simplification of the forest to a single commodity was a resounding success. It was a rather long short run, in the sense that a single crop rotation of trees might take eighty years to mature. The productivity of the new forests reversed the decline in the domestic wood supply, provided more uniform stands and more usable wood fiber, raised the economic return of forest land, and appreciably shortened rotation times (the time it took to harvest a stand and plant another). Like row crops in a field, the new softwood forests were prodigious producers of a single commodity. Little wonder that the German model of intensive commercial forestry became standard throughout the world. Gifford Pinchot, the second chief forester of the United States, was trained at the French forestry school at Nancy, which followed a German-style curriculum, as did most U.S. and European forestry schools. The first forester hired by the British to assess and manage the great forest resources of India and Burma was Dietrich Brandes, a German. By the end of the nineteenth century, German forestry science was hegemonic.

The great simplification of the forest into a “one-commodity machine” was precisely the step that allowed German forestry science to become a rigorous technical and commercial discipline that could be codified and taught. A condition of its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all variables except those bearing directly on the yield of the selected species and on the cost of growing and extracting them. As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying “outside the brackets” returned to haunt this technical vision.

In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted. “It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many of the pure stands grew excellently in the first generation but already showed an amazing retrogression in the second generation. The reason for this is a very complex one and only a simplified explanation can be given.... Then the whole nutrient cycle got out of order and eventually was nearly stopped.... Anyway, the drop of one or two site classes [used for grading the quality of timber] during two or three generations of pure spruce is a well known and frequently observed fact. This represents a production loss of 20 to 30 percent.”

A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora--which were, and still are, not entirely understood--was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest.

Before the project of optimization, the forest was boundless. Its components were ever changing, most of them unseen. Its vitality was all tied up with mutualistic relationships learned and taught in communication with other complex systems and living things, in and above the substrate, with processes of destruction and decomposition and fungal breakdown and electro-chemical alchemy with sky, water, minerals, gravity, climate, light, creatures, plants, humans, cultures…

After the process of commodity-motivated optimization, it was a stunted and sterile thing. A non-vital and devitalizing freak—Frankenstein’s wretch, ultimately taking life because it was denied access to life, by being cut off from the unseen flows which mutualistically sustain vitality (in the monster’s case, the flows of human connection).

In another example, James C. Scott describes the “planned city” and how it fails. How massive projects to produce an “optimized” city have historically resulted in these devitalized and devitalizing things. Because a healthy city is far more than what it appears in its fully developed state. It is the outcome of countless unseen, constantly changing processes contributing over long periods of time. Tended from within, not engineered from above. Its “inefficiencies” a stable and supporting aspect of its myriad “successes” at being the vital thing that it is.

This isn’t a description of how nature succeeds at a strategy of intentionally producing functional things. Things which are truly natural do not operate on holistic strategies, but emerge from mutualistic learning among and within systems that are in constant contact and communication. With no long-term end in mind, nature emerges into systems which are always becoming, necessarily moving in the direction of living coherence, because that is their nature. That is what happens in living contexts .

Where this natural process of steady complexification through the tending and selection of increasingly complex and mutualistically coherent life gets interrupted is when human agents make the grave error of thinking they can comprehend the incomprehensible, make judgment calls about the preferred function of the omnifunctional, and optimize efficacy in that function by manipulation into simplified, devitalized versions of a living thing. Cut off from those unseen flows, failing to abductively describe the living realities of their context, like Frankenstein’s wretch, they will serve only to interrupt the vitality of those they encounter. Perhaps this is what we will see from the perfusion of AI.

The “hyper-effective” forest less resembles a forest and increasingly resembles the non-living fiction of the scientific schematic, and the schematic lacks countless features and aspects which props up the resilience of messy, diverse, old-growth forests.

This trajectory that I’ve described of a prolonged history of the ever evolving and complexifying biosphere being interrupted by the human obsession with non-vital, engineered growth reminds me of Richard Powers’ book The Overstory, particularly the last sentence of a speech in which the character Patricia Westerford describes the history of life on earth:

“Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells. Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town. The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout—backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run. Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour. Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.

By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter”

And humans, in the planned pursuit of extreme efficacy at their determined or institutionally designated function, will often find they have diminished their humanity. Prolonged periods of being a captured organelle within a non-living system, treated as a non-complex being, and optimizing for those attributes deemed “effective” often leads to existential crisis.

The reversal of these harms, in individual cases, might conceptually be quite simple—we increase movement and meaningful communication within the arrested system (yourself, your context) and with other vital systems, and by doing so, increase opportunities for multi-valent abductive process—this is how living systems learn, how they tend towards vitality within a context. It aligns well with what Nora taught us in Warm Data Theory training about how to avoid immanent schismogenesis: expand context or add more contexts.

This may have been alternately described by the Persian Poet Shams Tabrizi when he said:

Try not to resist the changes, which come your way. Instead let life live through you.

I think as Kauffman made clear, it’s not as simple as “we shouldn’t view living things as having a function within living systems”. Trees have served beautiful and complexifying purposes for humans for millennia, as they serve functional purposes and create niches for countless other living things. It wasn’t just the perception of them as useful or functional that necessarily results in forest death in Germany. It was the failure to account for how over-optimization for the observed function can easily devitalize even the most robust living systems, how over-optimization is heavily potentiated by large-scale institutions such as states and corporations who operate on the basis of simplifying schematics, and how avoiding over-optimization is not something that can be worked out schematically.

True repair and revitalization cannot be scaled, schematic engineering projects. Repair is only possible at the local scale.

I actually think the lesson here was put beautifully, simply, and ambiguously enough to form a powerfully provocative metaphor by Richard Powers in the most succinct, thematically grounding sentence in “The Overstory”:

“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

1. I actually spent a long time this week thinking about the term “comprehensible” and its etymological relationship to “comprehensive” because both invoke this idea of grasping or seizing something (physically or mentally) in its togetherness or wholeness, and I settled on complex systems being incomprehensible because “the thing is never just the thing and nothing more”. We can only ever really seize a part of it, and in no time at all that little piece will also slip through our fingers