Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

implementation of the right program. The mind is not just a functional organization ofmatter 150 .The human nervous system interacts with the environment by continuallymodulating its structure, and emotions and experience play a large role in human intelligence,human memory and decisions (this will be further addressed in the next chapter). Moreover,conceptualizing the brain as an information processing devise is flawed for the human mindthinks with ideas, not with information. Ideas create information, they are the integratingpatterns that derive not from information but from experience. As Paul Davies suggested toBoyd, ‘the essential ingredient of the mind is information. It is the pattern inside the brain,not the brain itself, that makes us what we are’ 151 . Moreover, in the computer model ofcognition, knowledge is seen as context and value free, based on abstract data. But allmeaningful knowledge is contextual knowledge, and much of it is tacit and experiential. AsBoyd was aware, the psychologist Jean Piaget and later neo-Darwinists Monod, Dawkins andWilson all talked about mental structures. Dawkins and Wilson advanced the idea thatgenetics and culture (in that order) play a substantial role 152 . Thus, the cognitive revolutionmade common currency of the view that complex behavior is, in large part at least,controlled by inner representational states 153 . As Piaget stated, ‘all learning and rememberingdepend upon antecedent structures’ 154 . This does not invalidate cybernetics, merely theunwarranted metaphor of the mind as a computer 155 .In systems thinking, and in Boyd’s model, these insights are partly incorporated byintroducing the concept of generative learning - or double loop learning - and the notions of mentalmodels, or cognitive maps. A cognitive map is an internal image or other mental representationof spatial relationships (or other kinds of knowledge), which allows one to choose alternativepaths towards one’s goals. Mental models consist of general ideas that shape one’s thoughtsand actions and lead one to expect certain results. They are theories in use, based mostly onobservation and experience. They form belief systems. They give meaning to events. Weinterpret our experience in light of them. They are formed through socialization, culture andexperience, elements Boyd would include in his OODA model as well 156 .In generative learning we allow our mental models to be influenced, perhapschanged, by the feedback. It provides one with a wider number of choices, new strategiesand decision rules to apply. It leads to questioning one’s assumptions and seeing a situationin a different way 157 . When a person becomes exposed to a new perception or an experience,150 Rick Grush, 'Cognitive Science', in Machamer and Silberstein, pp.273-277. This revolution wasbrought about by (among others) Noam Chomsky who's work was explicitly directed against Skinner'sbehaviorist theory of language. Chomsky provied powerful arguments to the effect that no purelystimulus-driven mechanism could possibly learn the structure of natural language, and that rather,language learning seemd to require at least some innate cognitive representational structures whichcircunscribed possible grammars that were then selected from by exposure to linguistic data. Rat brainresearch (which Boyd read about) furthermore suggested the presence of cognitive maps.151 Davies (1983), p.98.152 In Structuralism, Piaget advanced the idea that there are “mental structures” that exist midwaybetween genes and behavior. Mental structures built up as the organism develops and encounters theworld. Structures are theoretic, deductive, a process. Interestingly, Piaget was influenced by , a.o.,Ludwig von Bertalanffy. See Watson, pp.629-630.153 Grush, p.275.154 Piaget (1971), p.51.155 Capra, 1996, pp.51-68.156 O’Connor & McDermott, pp.63-65. In the next chapter the concept of schema(ta) will bediscussed in the context of complexity theory. Schemata can be considered similar to mental modules.157 Ibid, p.124.110