Fundamental Surprises Zvi Lanir Decision Research 1201 Oak ...

While Ashby’s organism’s system achieves stability in the face of external
disturbances by maintaining its internal fixed order, social systems begin to lose
their stability as the internal dynamic of these contradictions dwindles.
Contradiction does not imply disorganization, but a type of organization
that lacks central control, fixed order, and stability. Instead, it has a type of
organization that permits creative social evolution.
The essence of the social system’s creativity is freedom, nonuniformity,
and nonsynchronous behavior. Slack and buffers are prerequisites, which carry
the seeds of novelty. Social systems have to ensure a delicate balance between
freedom and control to prevent anarchy and rigidity.
Situational surprises have an important learning function, allowing
improvement in the performance of Ashby-type social subsystems. Fundamental
surprises potentially have an important function for the social system as a whole,
in sharpening the system’s self-awareness. No social novelty or fundamental
surprises provide rare opportunities for such awareness.
D. Fundamental Surprises and Fundamental Understanding
Situational surprises evoke a “problem solving” type of learning, about which we
have a reasonable amount of scientific understanding. However, fundamental
thinking is a different kind of thinking, which is not only rare, but also elusive and
nonexperimental. Its meaning can be experienced in vitro. My aim is to try to
reach some initial understanding of fundamental thinking.
1. In the logic of fundamental learning there is no gradual transfer from
situational to fundamental understanding. No amount of situational
learning can evoke self-consciousness and no amount of information can
help find a new context for self-definition.
2. Fundamental learning is not local. To learn fundamentally, one needs to
remove oneself from the time and place of the specific event that triggered
the thinking process.
3. Fundamental thinking is holistic. It needs the ability to look at the self and
its environment as one system with no division between subject and