This is great. The PKD quote about reality not going away when you stop believing in it also came to mind for me in orienting to the reflexivity thing.
It seems to me that we need a similar quote that captures the way self-fulfilling things also have a reality to them. I almost stop wanting to talk in terms of truth and more in terms of... stability? Reflexive stability? Of which singular objective truth is a degenerate case.
I talk a lot about "trust as what truth feels like in first person"; to some extent trust might be this thing; it can have this reflexive stability property.
But here we potentially get multiple mutually-exclusive attractors, none of which is more true than the others, but if we can relax our current view enough to consider the other possibilities, we can assess them not in terms of their stability property but in terms of their usefulness to us. At which point two different people/groups might have two different coherent attractors. It opens up a pretty big can of worms, but it's also exciting in terms of true plurality—not relativism where things can't be compared/judged, but allowing for different standards of comparison/judgment, within which some things ARE better/worse.
I really liked reading this, thanks for writing it! "One of these ideas will die in the crucible of looking at reality" was a very evocative sentence for me that really got me looking around at everything with fresh eyes
I hadn't considered the idea of reflexivity much, and I find myself thinking of it as a somewhat simplified version of a system/complexity. This is confused, but may perhaps point towards helpful language: if objectivity depends on no observer, subjectivity depends on one observer, reflexivity refers to two things affecting each other, systems/complexity refers to N things affecting each other in a web?
That might suggest that complexity science may have some insights into scientific process in reflexive domains. This post certainly opened up a new space of curiosity for me, I imagine I'll continue mulling this over.
I don't know anything about complexity science by name. Might be highly relevant; I don't know!
I think you might be over-reifying "observer" in the frame you're offering. The relevant part of reflexivity, in my opinion, is that there's ambiguity about what defines an observer. A system is objective when you *don't* have that ambiguity: you can clearly distinguish between the system examining and the system being examined. Reflexivity is entanglement between the two such that attempts to observe are part of what's being observed. So you can't separate observer from observed anymore.
I don't think that's about how many distinct observers you have. That's more what game theory is about: you have distinct agents with distinct scores interacting with a distinct payoff matrix.
Game theory gets weird when applied to humans in part because we're *not* just clearly distinguishable game theory agents: what I decide is intertwined with what you decide and vice versa. We try to model this with recursive modeling. But there's also straight-up mimesis (i.e. mimicry) where we're both subject to e.g. cultural structures we both just copy. Like when you put your hand forward for a handshake, I'm going to do the same, not because I'm doing a careful game theory computation but because it kind of directly accesses my habits. The point of the handshake is to offer a credible signal that we're running under the same structure and are partially copies of the same cultural background.
Likewise with gap junctions for cells. Cells align their evolutionary incentives in part by making their "I have a problem!" signals ambiguous as to which cell they're about. Which makes selfishness aligned with protecting your cellular neighbors. The whole point there is that there's a blurring of which agent is which.
I bring up reflexivity in the context of subjectivity because a subjectivity isn't separable from the observer who has that subjectivity. So we can't use observer/observed distinctions as a reliable foundation for subjective scientific methods. They might *help*, but they can't be the *foundation*. Not the way they are in e.g. chemistry, where there's a very clear delineation between the chemist and the chemical reaction being observed.
You *can* get it in part by having a separate observer looking at *someone else's* subjectivity. But precisely *because* what they're observing is a subjectivity, they can't get most of the data. They have to look at correlates. That's where attempts at subjective science have been stuck for well over a century. Hence using observational studies and statistics and surveys to dig into psychology.
So I think what I'm pointing out about subjective science really is different from systems involving a bunch of observers. The latter depends on "observer" being ontologically clear, and the whole problem with subjectivities is that they're looking at what constitutes what we intuitively refer to as "an observer". So who's looking? Gosh, that question sure is troublesome!
Your post actually continued to sit with me and affected how I opened and framed the Festival for Re-imagining the Economy that I'm hosting. I framed it as an attempt to create different patterns (in some important ways), through X, Y, Z mechanisms, and that we'd be including reflective processes to sense what patterns are forming.
These processes are within the system being observed. The system has been told it is being observed. I wonder if a kind of placebo effect may happen, where the transparency around the attempt to test our hypothesis may increase the odds of the hypothesis not being disproved.
Hard to tell, because not all Festival participants are aware of the hypothesis and reflective processes, while some are actively participating in them. I'd guess that the folks who are more active in these processes will report a greater sense of 'new patterns' and larger change than the folks that remain less integrated in the Festival.
This is great. The PKD quote about reality not going away when you stop believing in it also came to mind for me in orienting to the reflexivity thing.
It seems to me that we need a similar quote that captures the way self-fulfilling things also have a reality to them. I almost stop wanting to talk in terms of truth and more in terms of... stability? Reflexive stability? Of which singular objective truth is a degenerate case.
I talk a lot about "trust as what truth feels like in first person"; to some extent trust might be this thing; it can have this reflexive stability property.
But here we potentially get multiple mutually-exclusive attractors, none of which is more true than the others, but if we can relax our current view enough to consider the other possibilities, we can assess them not in terms of their stability property but in terms of their usefulness to us. At which point two different people/groups might have two different coherent attractors. It opens up a pretty big can of worms, but it's also exciting in terms of true plurality—not relativism where things can't be compared/judged, but allowing for different standards of comparison/judgment, within which some things ARE better/worse.
Huh this quote from Jay's Reflexivity article is an okay first candidate for alternate quote:
> “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” —Ralph Hodgson
...implied is that these things *are real*.
I really liked reading this, thanks for writing it! "One of these ideas will die in the crucible of looking at reality" was a very evocative sentence for me that really got me looking around at everything with fresh eyes
Reflexivity is what got us into quantum physics where experiments were thought to be objective but weren't.
The double slit experiment ignores the fact that any detector uses however tiny amount of energy to detect, thus influencing the photon.
We need to factor in other influences to realize that a seemingly objective experiment and method were actually reflexive.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkdAkAC4ItcFyNFBywN0wiZ45pCnMr-Ay
I hadn't considered the idea of reflexivity much, and I find myself thinking of it as a somewhat simplified version of a system/complexity. This is confused, but may perhaps point towards helpful language: if objectivity depends on no observer, subjectivity depends on one observer, reflexivity refers to two things affecting each other, systems/complexity refers to N things affecting each other in a web?
That might suggest that complexity science may have some insights into scientific process in reflexive domains. This post certainly opened up a new space of curiosity for me, I imagine I'll continue mulling this over.
I don't know anything about complexity science by name. Might be highly relevant; I don't know!
I think you might be over-reifying "observer" in the frame you're offering. The relevant part of reflexivity, in my opinion, is that there's ambiguity about what defines an observer. A system is objective when you *don't* have that ambiguity: you can clearly distinguish between the system examining and the system being examined. Reflexivity is entanglement between the two such that attempts to observe are part of what's being observed. So you can't separate observer from observed anymore.
I don't think that's about how many distinct observers you have. That's more what game theory is about: you have distinct agents with distinct scores interacting with a distinct payoff matrix.
Game theory gets weird when applied to humans in part because we're *not* just clearly distinguishable game theory agents: what I decide is intertwined with what you decide and vice versa. We try to model this with recursive modeling. But there's also straight-up mimesis (i.e. mimicry) where we're both subject to e.g. cultural structures we both just copy. Like when you put your hand forward for a handshake, I'm going to do the same, not because I'm doing a careful game theory computation but because it kind of directly accesses my habits. The point of the handshake is to offer a credible signal that we're running under the same structure and are partially copies of the same cultural background.
Likewise with gap junctions for cells. Cells align their evolutionary incentives in part by making their "I have a problem!" signals ambiguous as to which cell they're about. Which makes selfishness aligned with protecting your cellular neighbors. The whole point there is that there's a blurring of which agent is which.
I bring up reflexivity in the context of subjectivity because a subjectivity isn't separable from the observer who has that subjectivity. So we can't use observer/observed distinctions as a reliable foundation for subjective scientific methods. They might *help*, but they can't be the *foundation*. Not the way they are in e.g. chemistry, where there's a very clear delineation between the chemist and the chemical reaction being observed.
You *can* get it in part by having a separate observer looking at *someone else's* subjectivity. But precisely *because* what they're observing is a subjectivity, they can't get most of the data. They have to look at correlates. That's where attempts at subjective science have been stuck for well over a century. Hence using observational studies and statistics and surveys to dig into psychology.
So I think what I'm pointing out about subjective science really is different from systems involving a bunch of observers. The latter depends on "observer" being ontologically clear, and the whole problem with subjectivities is that they're looking at what constitutes what we intuitively refer to as "an observer". So who's looking? Gosh, that question sure is troublesome!
Your post actually continued to sit with me and affected how I opened and framed the Festival for Re-imagining the Economy that I'm hosting. I framed it as an attempt to create different patterns (in some important ways), through X, Y, Z mechanisms, and that we'd be including reflective processes to sense what patterns are forming.
These processes are within the system being observed. The system has been told it is being observed. I wonder if a kind of placebo effect may happen, where the transparency around the attempt to test our hypothesis may increase the odds of the hypothesis not being disproved.
Hard to tell, because not all Festival participants are aware of the hypothesis and reflective processes, while some are actively participating in them. I'd guess that the folks who are more active in these processes will report a greater sense of 'new patterns' and larger change than the folks that remain less integrated in the Festival.