Setting the scene:

In my first philosophy class the tutor promised that he would lift the mist from our eyes and show us how to see the world differently.

I believe that I can make the same assertion about this article.

This article discusses seven concepts and some interconnections between them.

It will change the world as you see it.

Concepts

To set-up the article let me first discuss briefly what I mean by a concept. A concept is a word that doesn't simply name an object. For example, an apple is not a concept, neither is cider, but fermenting is a concept.

In this case fermenting is a process, but a concept could equally describe something more abstract, for example democracy.

I use the term concept to mean any word that describes the inter-relation of objects or other concepts.

7±2

Firstly, let me explain why I have chosen 7 concepts.

This concept is based around the idea that we have a finite capacity for anything in our conscious attention - that there is only so much stuff that we can be aware of at once.

Working from this assumption, Harvard psychologist George Miller conducted studies to discover how many things we can be aware of at once, and what the limit might be.

The range was between 5 and 9, and hence '7±2' is the number of concepts that can be handled at a time by the average person. Thus I have chosen 7 concepts as most of you should be able to handle that number!

Obviously with such a small limit one of the big problems facing humans is information overload. To enable us to cope with more than 7±2 concepts at once we create abstractions, generalisations, combinations, etc, which serve as convenient bundles of other concepts.

Think of our earlier example of democracy, in order to understand this concept, you need to be aware of many other concepts, for example:

1. government
2. people
3. voting
4. constituencies
5. MPs / representatives
6. parliaments
7. counting
8. equality
9. ...

But wait, that's more than seven. We've just run out of processing power, and there are still more things to understand to comprehend democracy.

Thus we don't consider all of the component concepts when we consider democracy; we simply use the convenient term 'democracy' as a bundle for them all.

Language is everything

Just as your limited processing power limits the number of concepts you can cope with at once, there is an ultimate limit to the total number of concepts: your language.

Simplistically, this means that if there is no word in your language for a given concept then you cannot conceive of it.

For example, Gaelic Scottish has a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey: Scriob. As a mere English-speaker I have trouble conceiving of exactly what that is in the same way as a Gaelic speaker.

This is because language is not just the medium of communication between us, but within as well. You cannot have a thought outside of language, for what else can thoughts be constructed in?

Another example:

"You white people are so strange. We think it is very primitive for a child to have only two parents"

Australian Aboriginal Elder

This example illustrates a fundamentally different meaning of the word parent in another language. Thus, I cannot conceive of exactly what this man means by parent.

In the same way as there are language differences between communities, there can be language differences between individuals in the same language community. For example, the Inuit language famously has many words for snow, whilst English has just one. In the same way, some people have just one phrase for 'management stuff' instead of an entire vocabulary for transformation.

If I speak to you of creating meaning in the workplace, or holding one's personal standards high as an act of authenticity, but you believe that work is about command and control, not only don't we achieve communication, but we can't achieve communication. It is not the skills of speaking and listening that need to be improved, but the introduction of concepts (through language) to each other so that it is even possible to conceptualise what the other is talking about.

Thus, the aim of this article is to introduce you to new concepts so that we can enrich our conversation, just as the site logo illustrates...

Learning changes brain structure

50 years ago, it was thought that each neuron (brain cell) was equivalent to a single concept or fact, e.g. your grandmother's birthday. Then someone calculated how many neurons the average person would need to have and realised we'd need brains several miles across.

A new theory showed that instead it was the connections between the neurons that 'store' the facts or concepts.

There were many more possible combinations of connections between neurons in the brain than there were neurons, so the storage issues were solved. The variation of these connections creates a complex pattern that 'stores' information.

Thus, the process of learning is the process of strengthening some connections relative to others. This is the underlying method by which our past experience influences our present - by changing our brain structure - varying the strength of connection between neurons.

Thus as Aristotle said, "you are what you repeatedly do".

You make your own reality

A key branch of philosophy is epistemology, what Deming refers to in the System of Profound Knowledge as 'theory of knowledge'. Put simply, this is the study of how we observe the world and thus gain knowledge of it. The basic premise is that if you understand the human machine, you understand better the results it produces.

For some years there were two competing theories of how we gain knowledge of the world (i.e. how we sense it). Realism supposed that we saw the world directly and it was exactly as we saw it. Idealism on the other hand argued that we only see our mind's picture of a world and that there is no external reality.

Realism is too literal, it does not allow for illusions or people seeing things differently. Idealism is too individualistic, it implies that objects cease to exist when you're not looking at them.

Thus a compromise solution was proposed, representative realism. This proposes that what we see is the 'mind's eye' impression and that the impression is caused by an external reality.

Representative realism has since been the generally agreed model for how we observe the world. This has two consequences for what we can know about the experience of others and whether it is like our own experience.

We cannot know about experience for another type of being. As Thomas Nagel famously argued, we could not imagine what it is like to be a bat, because our sensory organs don't allow us to 'see' the world as bats do, the transfer from the 'real' world to the mind's eye is different to ours at a fundamental biological level (i.e. c > b in the diagram).

However, there are also differences between us as individuals in the same species. These are the differences in our brain structures introduced by our different previous experience. This will influence the transfer from the mind's eye to the conscious observer even if we share sensory organs (i.e. b > a in the diagram)

Thus, other people literally see the world differently to you. You cannot see it how it is from their perspective, because although you share similar sense organs, you do not have their history with which they make sense of the world.

This has another significant consequence for your world. If your past experience influences your view of the world then your learning can also change your view of the world. Simple: learn a concept, change the world as you see it.

Systems thinking: interconnection as the source of complexity

As we saw in an earlier example, the number of possible interconnections between points is much greater than the number of points themselves. Because of this, any system that involves even a moderate degree of interconnection is inherently complex.

The problem for us is that nearly all systems are heavily interconnected and thus highly complex. In our lives this takes the form of our companies, our circle of acquaintances, our computers…

However, we know two things. We know that our primitive machinery can only consciously cope with 7±2 things at once, and we also know that we do cope with a bewildering array of complex situations so it obviously manages somehow.

As there is too much information in this complexity we have evolved two key methods of reducing the amount of information to levels we can handle.

The first is to 'chunk down', to look at the situation in increasing detail until we can comprehend what is happening at that level. By combining many of these snapshots we get an understanding of the complex situation. This is the fundamental basis of the scientific method, to reduce complexity to realistic levels by focussing on detail, by zooming in as it were.

As this photo of London shows, there is overwhelming complexity in a city

Scientific method: zoom in to manageable chunks

Systems thinking: represent the realtionships of interest and disregard the rest

Systems thinking, in contrast, reduces the amount of data by zooming out. Thus much of the detailed data is lost, reducing the information overload, but the interconnections are preserved, keeping the broader meaning.

This is not to criticise or promote either method, but to show that there are different approaches. In taking a different viewpoint a system can be seen very differently, and I would suggest that highly complex interconnected systems, such as the environment, demand a new way of looking at them, the scientific method is not necessarily the best tool for the job.

In learning about systems thinking, you will have more choice about how to view the world, in effect expanding your mental toolbox.

To recap so far, we have begun to look at the machinery with which we view the world. We are examining whether this explains some of the ways in which we see the world and communicate to others in it. We have seen that we are very limited in what we can conceptualise at once, that we use language to get around this and the shared heritage of language forms the way in which we think. Because of this we don't see the world as it is, but filtered through our language and thinking, which means that we can increase our range of responses to choose from by learning.

Location of the self: dualism

Where are you? Do you feel that your nose is somehow more a part of you than your feet? Is your experience centred in your head? At what point do you become aware of your surroundings?

Let's follow the path of incoming data to examine at what point the self becomes aware.

Incoming sense data first reaches the oldest, most primitive brain structures. These sort the data into patterns and compare these abstractions to memories to classify the input as something to be frightened of, something to eat, something to mate with, etc. This is purely reactive, and although complex, could most likely be predicted if understood in sufficient depth. Learning cannot realistically be expected to change this instinctive, visceral mind.

The next level is the unconscious mind. It contains logic, advanced reasoning and adaptation, cognition, language and expert skills. This is where the conscious mind delegates frequently repeated and familiar tasks, a process that can also be described as learning. The unconscious mind is the source of most behaviour in human adults - it reacts to known situations automatically for you.

The central part of your mind is consciousness, the part that is, for all intents and purposes, you as you see yourself. This is the part of the mind that makes choices and is self-aware.

Now because your consciousness can only handle 7±2 things simultaneously, the primitive and unconscious parts of the brain must decide what is sufficiently urgent to warrant conscious attention. For example, you don't normally notice your peripheral vision unless something out of the ordinary is going on.

Thus, by the time 'you', the conscious mind becomes aware of data from the outside world, the primitive brain has processed most of the data and junked it as not worth paying attention to - e.g. the data from your peripheral vision. The remainder is passed to your unconscious, which tries to fit the data within your existing lexicon of concepts (language) to find patterns and to judge a suitable response. This process of pattern finding and response selection in the unconscious is where your previous experience and habits will influence how you perceive and act in the world.

Only then do any of the altered, abstracted forms that were partially influenced by some of the data from your imperfect senses reach your consciousness. You really have no clue what is happening in the 'real' world, but use some very advanced computing power to make educated guesses based upon your past noticing of patterns.

As Vilanaur Ramachandran of the California Institute of brain and cognition says:

"Your conscious life is nothing but an elaborate post-hoc rationalisation of things you really do for other reasons"

Because of the apparent disconnect between your consciousness and the myriad unconscious process in the background, it feels as if you exist separate to the machinery around you.

This is the basis of classical dualism, the idea that there are two sides to humans. In Christian-based philosophies, this has been seen as the base and the divine, the idea of a body and a soul. Ramachandran, asked about the fundamental difference between humans and animals, stated that we are the only animal that seeks to transcend itself. He described the human condition as 'feeling like an angel trapped in a human body'.

But surely this dualism idea is wrong? Consider for a moment what would it be like to be a human without a body? To be human is to be a consciousness co-existing with human machinery, and all of the problems that this may entail. The very meaning of the word human, as we understand it entails a body and consciousness.

However, dualism is the inheritance of our culture and language. Other cultures do not all have a tradition of dualism. Our tradition ensures that learning is not associated with the body.

Logically we can see that being human means to have a body. Therefore one way in which we can expand our learning is to open ourselves to learning with the body as well as the mind.

Learning about the human machine, however, does not constitute a complete explanation of the human condition. To be human is to be related to others in a society.

To examine this let us look at the story of the 'private language argument'.

In philosophy, scepticism was a major obstacle to knowledge. You can doubt almost anything. How can I tell whether what is happening now is a dream? Or that I'm not just a brain in a vat being fed false data by some evil genius?

Descartes answered the problem with the famous "I think therefore I am"; literally if there is doubt, then something is doubting, and it is me.

From this he argued that I know what is going on in my own head when I do certain things, and so by extrapolation I can guess what others are thinking when they do similar things - the argument from analogy.

The trouble is that I cannot see their thoughts, they are concealed from me, private. In fact, I have no proof that they have minds at all. They could be convincing robots. This is the problem of other minds - in attaining some certainty about myself I am forever trapped in my own mind.

Wittgenstein argued the fallacy of this position. He gave the example of a private language, only used by one person. This would not only be useless, but would not even satisfy the requirements of a language as a communication tool. Language by definition is public, a set of rules and conventions shared between people and used in a common way.

This demonstrates that people must therefore think in a similar enough way to agree common rules and customs between them, in essence people think as I do and thus this solves the problem of other minds.

More than a philosophers' curiosity, however, it has far wider implications.

To examine this, lets us look at what language is. Language is a set of rules that are common within a community. Everyone within this language community follows the same rules or else risks not achieving communication properly.

For example if when I say money, I mean scuba-diving and no-one else follows this rule, I will have frustrating communication experiences. Language only works by virtue of a community of people following the same rules.

However, these rules are not like mathematics, where there is one correct answer. I might also say 'moolah' or 'dosh' in place of money; these rules are more complex, relativistic, context dependent.

The rules that govern language, or indeed any public phenomena exist and function only insofar as the community agrees with the rules, follows them regularly and brings up its children to follow the same rules.

Children don't learn the rules explicitly at first; they observe the actual use in the community and make logical deductions. Only later might they be taught the 'correct' grammar, but by this stage they will have their own experience of the use of the language in actuality, which may differ from the explicit, written rules.

This is the key property of public phenomena; they are defined by what is actually done and they require the collusion of the whole community to exist.

Writing a new rule doesn't change the actuality - the rule only changes when actions change.

Summary

So, we've looked at seven concepts:

The fundamental design problem of the human brain is information overload. Thus we have developed a series of abstractions to allow us to consciously consider more of the world at once. This is language, which strictly constrains how you think. What you can think is constrained by your brain structure and how this filters incoming data to your mind. However this structure can change with new experience.

As each individual has their own past through which they filter the world, the context with which they observe and act is unique. Thus, no one viewpoint or tool is 'right' it just may be more or less successful in achieving a goal in that given circumstance.

Everything is connected and this provides a very rich level of complexity. This requires a certain methodology with which to view the world: systems thinking.

Humans are hopelessly interconnected with their bodies and so to be human is to be both a mind and a body - to consider them separately has no meaning. This provides more areas in which you can change your viewpoint of the world.

In the same way, to be human is to be connected with others, which generates public phenomena. Language and rules constrain whole communities, but only by the collusion of the members of that community, A rule doesn't exist, it is merely a description of the actions of a community. If no one follows it, it is not a rule.

Therefore:

• Learning changes how you see the world and how you choose to act upon it
• If we introduce people to new concepts then they can have conversations with each other that they could not before
• It is fundamentally your responsibility how the world is and what you do in it. To say otherwise is to separate your machine from you and blame it for your problems.
• Everything is connected - being connected with others is part of the definition of being human
• Therefore you can change everything and touch everyone

I'd like to invite people to have conversations around the interconnections between these concepts. We know that interconnection is the source of complexity, there should be 42 possible 1:1 connections.

Its Simple

The fundamental connection between these concepts is that all of them are simple.

Stuff happens; you see it in a certain way.

Because you see the world in a certain way you make choices based upon biased evidence.

In knowing more about your biases you can exercise more control over your choices - to respond rather than to react.

That's basically it.

The concepts are simple, but the applying of them into your life is very difficult.

People have a huge need to attach meaning to events. This or that terrible thing must have happened for a reason. What is really scary is that all events are equally mundane. Events just happen, we choose to create the interpretations of good and bad. Terrifying as it seems, cause and effect will roll on forever with or without you. There is no special meaning; you are just someone else in amongst 6 billion others.

Knowing this and acting from it does not mean that the significance we attach to things is bad, wrong or less meaningful. It just means that in knowing more about how you are connected with the world you can make different choices.

"We're not being offered anything, there's no carrot being dangled, no eternal life, not the love of Jesus, simply the chance to be our best selves during the short time we have on the planet"

Armistead Maupin

People are paralysed by not knowing what to do, but failing to act is an action in itself, and if enough people do it, it becomes the rule of our community.

"Life is a test. It is only a test. Had it been real life you would have been instructed where to go and what to do"

Are you still waiting for the instruction manual? It's not technically complex; it's merely terrifying. JFDI!

Conclusion: Act

"The link between hospital employee management practices and patient mortality emerged as strong in this study. The largest, that between appraisal and deaths following admissions for hip fractures, shows that for hospitals of equal size and local population health needs, an improvement of one standard deviation in the extensiveness / sophistication of the appraisal system is associated with, on average, a drop of 0.494 standard deviations in deaths after hip fractures. This is equivalent to 1090 fewer deaths per 100,000 (age standardised admissions) - more than 1% of all admissions, or 12.3% of the mean number of deaths."

Professor Michael West et al - The Borrel West Report
Recommended by Ian Mather of www.allotmenteer.com

So we could save the lives of 12.3% of all people who die in hospital after hip fractures if we appraised the staff properly…

Now our reaction to this statement as a community is to say, "well, it's more complicated than that, there's things you don't understand, if you worked at the coal-face in the NHS you'd know it's not that simple, etc, etc".

Maybe, but taking the systems view and zooming out, I still see that the decisions of some people end up killing other people. Because we are not willing to confront this as a community there is a rule established that we will ignore these causal relationships with the phrase "it's more complex than that".

It's not complex, but it is terrifying. Sometimes when people act, people die. Let's not deny this by looking at our feet and saying it is more complex than that. It is that simple, and if we recognise that as a community then the rules that constrain us from acting have ceased to exist.

"How can I hear what you say, when what you do thunders in my ears?"

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Consider what it is that forges your identity. You are what you do. If you are always late, you are a bad timekeeper. If you want to change, do you expect some revelation within and thenceforth be changed? No, the act of turning up on time makes you a good timekeeper. Nothing but the action of turning up on time defines your identity as a good timekeeper.

"It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than to think yourself into a new way of acting"

Michael Pascale

Thus, it is all about action, specifically, as Deming reminded us by quoting Lloyd S Nelson we should act:

"If you can improve next year with no change, why were you not doing it this year"

Lloyd S Nelson

We are all interconnected with everyone else. We all have the burden of machinery and we can all exercise control over it. We can all choose to change the world and choose to change how we act on it. The rules and constraints exist only because you haven't broken them yet.

Fundamentally, if you believe that you have free choice, then what is it that is holding you back? If you have free choice, you have a moral imperative to act.

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