The Dream of Reality Heinz von Foerster's Constructivism Second Edition Springer Science+Business Media, LLC Lynn Segal The Dream of Reality Heinz von Foerster's Constructivism Second Edition With Forewords by Heinz von Foerster and Paul Watzlawick With 20 Illustrations Springer Lynn Segal 1080 San Mateo Drive Menlo Park, CA 94025 USA Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Segal, Lynn. The dream of reality : Heinz von Foerster's constructivism / Lynn Segal.-2nd ed. p. cm. lncludes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-387-95130-0 ISBN 978-1-4613-0115-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4613-0115-8 1. von Foerster, Heinz, 1911-= 2. Constructivism (Philosophy) 1. Title. B809.13 .S44 2001 121'.092-dc21 00-061269 Printed on acid-free paper. First edition published 1986 WW Norton, NY © Lynn Segal. © 2001 Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. in 2001 AlI rights reserved. 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Typeset by Matrix Publishing Services, lnc., York, PA. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 978-0-387-95130-0 SPIN 10778761 About the Author Lynn Segal, a licensed clinical social worker, received a B.A. degree in psychology from Hofstra University (1966) and his Masters of So­ cial Work degree from Adelphi University (1968). From 1972 to 1995 he was a research associate of the Mental Research Institute (MRI) and a member of MRI's Brief Therapy Project. He is co-author (with Fisch and Weakland) of The Tactics of Change: Doing Therapy Briefly. Additionally, he has authored numerous articles on MRI Brief Ther­ apy and family systems therapy. Currently he maintains a full-time private psychotherapy practice in Menlo Park, California, dividing his time between doing clinical work and coaching high-level Silicon Val­ ley executives. About Heinz von Foerster Heinz von Foerster was born in Vienna in 1911. After studying physics in Vienna and Breslau he worked at various industrial laboratories in Germany and Austria. In 1949 he accepted a position at the Uni­ versity of Illinois in Urbana as well as an invitation from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation to participate, together with Gregory Bateson, Warren McCullough, Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and others, in a series of conferences on circular causality. He was the editor of the proceedings, published as five volumes of Cybernetics. In 1958 he founded the legendary Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois, in which mathemati­ cians and neurophysiologists, epistemologists and physicists, logicians and computer scientists, all of international stature, worked coopera­ tively on problems of cognition. Such important ideas as self-organi­ zation and the practical application of parallel computation were first elucidated at the BCL. The author of more than 100 publications, he has been retired from the University since 1976 and currently lives in California. v Reality-The Eighteenth Camel A traveling mullah was riding on his camel to Medina, when he saw several camels standing next to a group of three young men who clearly were in distress. "What befell you, my friends?" he asked, and the eldest replied, "Our father died." "Be he blessed by Allah. I sympathize with you. But he must have left you something in his will." ''Yes,'' said the young man, "these seventeen camels. That's all he had." "Rejoice! What then ails you?" "You see," the eldest brother continued, "his will says I should get one-half of his possessions, my younger brother one-third, and the youngest here one-ninth. But however we try to distribute these camels, it never works out." "Is this all that troubles you, my friends?" the mullah said. "Then take my camel for a moment and let's see what we can do." With 18 camels now the eldest brother got one-half, that is, nine camels, and nine were left. The next in line got one-third of the 18 camels, that is, six, and three were left. Since the youngest brother got one-ninth ofthe 18 camels, that is, two, one camel was left. It was that of the mullah, who mounted it and rode away, waving the happy brothers good-bye. To this Heinz Von Foerster says: "Reality, like the eighteenth camel, is needed as a prop that can be discarded when everything else is clear." vi Foreword BY HEINZ VON FOERSTER s a matter of fact, the Heinz von Foer­ ster who writes these lines and whom one can see or hear among family ther­ apists on one occasion or another is an invention of Paul Watzlawick. I met my inventor for the first time more than ten years ago in Cali­ fornia. My services to the University of Illinois, after about 30 years, had come to an end, and I was looking for a place where my wife and I could retire and spend the rest of our lives procul negotiis. Paul Watzlawick first introduced himself over the telephone in an Austrian dialect similar to mine, telling me about common friends, for instance, Gregory Bateson, and common interests, for instance, pathologies in logic. Soon afterwards we met, and in our mutual enjoyment of obvi­ ating the obvious and doubting certainty the seeds for a friendship were planted. When he invited me to speak on the occasion of the Second Don D. Jackson Memorial Conference to members and guests of the Mental Research Institute of Palo Alto, I accepted. On the first evening Gregory Bateson gave his address to the plenary session, and I on the second. In Bateson's lectures there were always some points that impressed me very much. Somebody asked him whether or not a certain some­ thing was the cause for another certain something. Roughly he replied that "cause," "fear," "tension," etc. are the inappropriate words. It is the un-real problem to ask whether the cause of this phenomenology is to be found in physics, physiology, psychology, genetics, etc. And then he said (and now I quote): "These divisions are fashionable. But they are insane." What impressed me as crucial was that he did not say that these divisions are useless, or misleading, or blind alleys, or whatever. He said they are "insane." He added that what he is aiming at and look­ ing for is an epistemology in which these concepts are woven into the whole epistemology. Later I overheard some participants commenting on Bateson's style of giving puzzling and mystifying answers to simple and clear ques- Vll Vlll FOREWORD BY HEINZ VON FOERSTER tions. Hence, I opened my presentation, entitled, "Contradictions, Paradoxes, Vicious Circles, and other Creative Devices," by saying that the trouble with the utterances of great men is that they are so trans­ parent. But, paradoxically, what is transparent cannot be seen. There­ fore, my plan is to make some of these issues opaque so that they can be seen, at least for a moment, before they slip away when clarified. Apparently this strategy had appeal. On the other hand, I became acquainted and fascinated with the spectrum of problems that were discussed at this conference; they touched on problems in philosophy and theories of knowing and communicating in which we, at the Bio­ logical Computer Laboratory of the University of Illinois, were very much interested. In essence, these are problems of cognition, and it was, and still is, this point of common competence and ignorance that kept the dialogue between the therapeutic profession and me alive and well. Also, it came to pass that a friend and co-worker-and-thinker of mine, Humberto Maturana, the "neurophilospher" as he liked to be called, participated in and enforced the biological end of this dialogue, in which all parties recognized the need for a language that includes the observer (therapist) in the ongoing process of interaction and in­ tervention, a posture that the orthodox frame of mind, based as it is on the premise ofthe independence and exclusion of the observer, does not permit. On the many occasions that later offered themselves for continuing this dialogue I had finally the opportunity to see through the one-way mirror for family therapy in action. Most of the time I was sitting on the edge of my chair in the darkened observation room, watching the unfolding of a universe, the family, experiencing the various blind­ nesses of its members toward each other, even blindness regarding their own blindness: they don't see that they don't see. On one occasion, when my colleagues had left the observation room and I was left alone, I had a most surprising and revealing experience. I became curious about whether I could detect unspoken clues of com­ munication better without the audio on. So I turned it off. What then happened was very eerie indeed. Here were five people sitting around a table; as if in slow motion they turn their heads to face one another, lips from time to time opening and closing.