Toward a New Cybernetics Research Program on the Emotions, Language and Bodies
When one’s so-called narrative integrity, a “self-story,” with indexical memory between the past and the present, breaks down, so to speak, either due to trauma (Bessel Van Der Kolk and others have made rigorous what PTSD means) due to the minds’ changes in the natural process of dying, or from other “difficulties of the spirit” such as institutional betrayal, one certainly has the capacity to use what philologists and computer scientists call universal grammar but more often than not one doesn’t. Typically, a predictable shutting down of one’s will to communicate and predictable & measurable patterns of grammar changes emerge. History abounds vast examples.
In my sci-fi stories, I call the “people of the word” those folks who keep up the ability to hold onto language to cooperate with their collaborators and themselves (collaborators in a cybernetic system are proxies for ourselves) over time, including as they age, in an increasingly dystopian world.
My insight was that, as we age and hit barriers to our own understanding of our capacity for integrity, meaning barriers to the principles of action our younger selves would recognize as ‘stand-up’ behavior. These barriers can be modeled because they affect our ability to use language to express preferences and communicate productively. By implication, this insight refers to a long-standing philosophical debate about the psychological nature(s) of a human being. It questions whether an agent with principles that call for taking action to overthrow various forms of injustice can live productively while still situated in a political world and still possess the motive to correct one’s errors. I ask how challenging it is to stay connected to one’s justified true beliefs, aka to a sense of ‘reality’ and commonly aligned objectives.
This program has both concrete and symbolic meaning. I talk about this in terms of free energy minimization being inevitable at the limit of no free energy, which the environment can create.
Information-theoretic metrics promise to be productive when studying the use of grammar and language changes therein and can shed light on non-obvious adversarial language and omissions of content in complex negotiations (either by an individual or single/multiple counterparty interactions or in an institutional setting when objectives are seemingly misaligned).
When we encounter institutional violence or betrayal, for that matter, any strong form of morality that broaches our own private ethical judgments, the empirical structure of these emotions manifests as changes (muscle contraction, appearance, etc.) to the body and often to the use of language and capacity for language itself. Signaling intent in adverse or cooperative interactions has a measurable and cybernetic structure.