[Fis] On disinformation

[Karl Javorszky]

Dear Colleagues,



Some say, 2020 can’t be over soon enough. We may agree that we are indeed
living in interesting times. There are several reorganising processes at
work, coping with climate, energy, pandemic, economic, strategic crises all
happening in a supreme interaction. One can compare this phase with the
metamorphosis insects undergo during pupating. Wolfgang shows optimism by
suggesting that there are governing principles – the anthropology of humans
– that guide us towards a new form of complex interdependencies. Loet
appears more sceptical on this point.

In whichever form we exit the chrysalis, we shall hardly be able to
maintain world views based on monotheistic beliefs. The subject of our
current discussion, disinformation, leads one to this insight.

If disinformation is possible, there must exist several variants of a
message relating to a state of the world, from among which the lying sender
picks one and transmits, causing thereby in the recipient a false picture
of what is the case in the world. At this point one leaves the orthodoxy
and enters uncharted waters, because the whole system depends on the axiom
that logical sentences describe the world as the world is. It is a
grammatical error to arrive at a false picture of the world, according to
the catechism in force.

The problem lies in the fact, that the unknown and the unrecognised do keep
existing, and they do create situations, in which grammatically correct
sentences state something that is not the case. Take, for instance: “It is
evening now”. The truth of this sentence will depend on the time of the day
it having been uttered. Periodic changes allow us to create a vision of the
world, in which it is grammatical to say logical sentences which do not
cover what is actually the case, albeit restricted by a temporal reference.

The temporal ordering principle which determines, which sentences are true
at what times, is but one of *several *ordering principles which together
determine our existence. Food being poisonous or healthy, water being
sufficient or scarce, the biosphere remaining permissive or turning
sterile: these influences are ordering principles. They are related to
seasonal changes no question, but they are sufficiently distinct among each
other to deserve to be called ordering principles or factors on their own
merits. Our metamorphosis changes us by causing us to leave behind the
dogmatic age. In a world of emerging multipolarism, heterocausal
explanations and interlinked systems, where even multiple processors in
computers vie routinely for influence, in such a world no basic explanation
of the world by One, unipolar perspective can remain.

If we had a commonly agreed on reference table of words, corresponding to
mental images within the participants of a discussion, like we presently
have the system of natural numbers, we could find universal language to
transport ideas with. Such an invention is ready and at hand: interested
Learned Friends need only to invest a few days of a senior student’s work
and they can contemplate about which basic worldview-changes are coming
their way if they learn to count *a+b=c *with just a few hours of inner
interest. They used to say: “Well, it is true that no one speaks Latin
today, but having learnt Latin works marvels to understand how logic works,
what logic is, generally.” Similarly, one may not see the immediate need
for a social scientist, a microbiologist or a mathematician to look into
movement patterns of variants of *a+b=c*, but it helps immensely to have a
solid grasp of the terms order, hierarchy, coexistence, priority,
predictability and such, in whatever fields of academia one is practicing.
That Mendel was not an outstanding social success with his numbers is due
to the fact that numbers do not sell well. However, the examples of Galilei
and Huyghens give one courage: one can invite Learned Friends to look
through a newly constructed complicated device and perceive there something
quite interesting. In the present case, one may promise little green
Ordering Principles being at work.

In case we come to a rational insight about the Interaction of Ordering
Principles, the underlying, fundamental system of beliefs will be familiar
to followers of polytheistic or animalistic – naturalistic religions, but
will be considered heretical by followers of the Abrahamitic religions. The
existence of secondary or tertiary readings of the same state of the world
runs contrary to the concept of the symbol system being subject to One
ordering principle. (In short: if you want to understand theoretical
genetics, you must first convert to Hinduism or become a willing subject of
Zeus.)

Best to all,

Karl

Am So., 6. Dez. 2020 um 15:02 Uhr schrieb Loet Leydesdorff <
loet en leydesdorff.net>:

> Dear Wolfgang:
>
> there is a worldwide trend towards self-interestedness, which needs to be
> countered by the insight into what is needful globally to govern our world
> to continue our existence. hope is there because we have the
> anthropological setting for turning around.
>
> wolfgang
>
> Do you happen to know what is "needed globally to govern our world to
> continue our existence?" How do the "anthropological settings turn us
> around? Is this a recipe?
>
> Best,
> Loet
>
>
> Am 06.12.2020 um 02:16 schrieb Howard Bloom <howlbloom en aol.com>:
>
> dai,
>
> as an indication that your idea that disinformation is the norm and
> consensus the exception,
>
> look how hard previous ages have worked to impose consensus.  spreading
> roman culture amongst tribal peoples in the days of the roman
> empire.  throwing dissidents to the lions. making sure that everyone's
> education was the same with the same roughly five books studied and the
> same alphabet used from roughly 200 bc onward in china.   hunting heretics
> once rome turned christian.  the inquisition.  the absolute rule of the
> tsar in russia, with all printing presses used for just one thing: printing
> the tsar's ukases.
>
> howard
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dai Griffiths <dai.griffiths.1 en gmail.com>
> To: fis en listas.unizar.es
> Sent: Sat, Dec 5, 2020 9:41 am
> Subject: Re: [Fis] On disinformation
>
> Dear all,
> We tend to think of 'surveillance capitalism' and other related trends as
> being a disruption of normality. But seen from a longer perspective,
> perhaps we are living in an unusual period (or the possibly the end of it)
> in which there has been relatively widespread social agreement about the
> nature of the world that we are living in. "Ask the priest" used to be the
> answer to questions of eschatology or social propriety (and often still is)
> but that doesn't help much in establishing who is giving the orders or why,
> and what is going on in the town over the hill. We have relied on
> newspapers for that, and, in the UK, the BBC. As a result, flat earthers
> haven't much traction recently compared with the conflict between Galileo
> and the church, and even McCarthyism was primarily about economic power and
> control, not as unhinged as the witchcraft hysteria that Miller (rightly)
> compared it to. If it is true that we have been living in an oasis of
> relative consensus, where did that consensus come from?
> I would argue that it emerged from the inherent limitations in access to
> printing technology, and the editorial, commercial, political and social
> processes that developed to cope with that limited access. It is these
> processes that generated the authority of some ideas over others, the
> generalised trust in some media rather than others, and the ability to
> identify consistent biases in those that were trusted.
> I suggest that we should recognise that disinformation, fake news, and
> plain old gossip, are the default state for human social interactions. It
> is evolved and designed social structures and institutions that overcome
> this. Our challenge is then to disentangle the way that that informational
> authority was generated in the past, and the (perhaps disfunctional) way
> that it is generated at present. My suspicion is that we won't get far in
> improving the situation unless we question the central role of the
> recommender algorithms that have taken over much of the work of human
> editors in determining what is seen heard and read, and by whom. To have
> any chance of achieving political traction in the face of commercial
> interests and personal preferences, proposals for change in that area will
> have to tell and extremely clear story about how we got to where we are,
> where we should try to go next, and how we could get there.
> Best
> Dai
> On 04/12/2020 14:06, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:
>
> Dear Terry and FIS colleagues,
>
> Thanks for the reflections--I will try to continue with rather
> disconnected ideas.
>
> The term 'surveillance capitalism' introduced by Shoshana Zuboff (indeed
> complemented with a parallel 'surveillance authoritarianism') is  addressed
> to cover the new negative aspects of current technological developments.
> However, my opinion is that these phenomena are inherent in all human
> societies in all epochs, for there is always a tension, say, between the
> individual "fitness" and the whole social "commons", which can be set in
> quite many different dynamic equilibrium points, basically maintained via
> circulating or communicating info flows. It is easy to see that
> information, disinformation, surveillance, persuasion, and coercion travel
> together in the socialization-communication pack. Historically, every new
> means of communication (then we land on McLuhan) alters those social
> equilibria and somehow demands a social or cultural reaction to
> re-establish an acceptable collective situation. The problem now, you
> mentioned in the previous post, is the enormous concentration of power, of
> brute info flows,  around these new media--without appropriate social
> curation at the time being. I doubt that these technologies can bring the
> solution by themselves . Institutional, social intervention would be
> needed...  Scholarly analysis might be important, providing cues on the the
> influence on individual and collective moods/personalities, on the possible
> counteracting institutional alternatives and on the needed new cultural
> norms to abide along these new forms of communication (sort of 'traffic
> regulations'), even a personal hygiene of communication...
>
> The problems are far more serious, complex, and faster than in McLuhan's
> time. We have to reinvent his views... But how can we organize a
> collective, cumulative discussion? I was thinking that a feasible first
> step, apart of what we can do directly in the list, could be calling for a
> Special Issue in some interesting, multidisciplinary Journal. Well, at the
> time being, Terry, Joseph, and myself are promoting a sort of ad hoc group
> to move things--anyone else would join??
>
> Best regards
> --Pedro
>
> El 01/12/2020 a las 22:54, Terrence W. DEACON escribió:
>
> Dear Pedro,
>
> Great suggestions. I like the idea of an ongoing separate thread
> addressing disinformation.
> Of course I only addressed Western disinformation and didn't even touch on
> highly massaged information that is often disseminated with centralized
> governmental control.
> This disinforms by selective censorship and redundancy and is increasingly
> taking advantage of the myriad new forms of surveillance that can be used
> to shape the information made available to different targeted audiences.
> And Yes McLuhan is definitely relevant.
> I wonder how he would think about the effects of these new media.
> How do they reshape the nature of content?
> How they can be understood using his notions of hot and cool?
> What is now in the rear view mirror within the new media that once was in
> the foreground?
> On these matters Bob Logan might want to weigh in.
>
> --
> Professor Terrence W. Deacon
> University of California, Berkeley
>
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> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
> pcmarijuan.iacs en aragon.eshttp://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
> -------------------------------------------------
>
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> -----------------------------------------
>
> Professor David (Dai) Griffiths
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