Achilles’ Tortoise

What is communication?

Wikipedia simply defines communication as “the process of sharing informaton.” Webster says communication is “a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior.”

Sounds reasonable, right?

Recently I was looking at the work carried out by two Chilean biologists: Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.  These two guys did some influential work on cognition and collaboration; the latter gave me some insight about communication that I didn’t have before.

Maturana and Varela made two fundamental observations:

1) Everything said is said by an observer. We are what we observe. How we think, what we say, how we feel, all are culturally and environmentally specific.

2) All knowing is doing, and all doing is knowing. An organism’s thought processes are closely tied to its physical nature. So, to understand a creature’s actions, we must discern its form – that is, understand its physical make-up.

From these insights, Maturana and Varela introduced the concept of autopoeisis. An autopoeitic system is self-producing and self-organizing – it continually regenerates its own components and its internal processes for a specific goal (e.g, survival.)

Bare with me, we are getting to the communication part, I promise.

In autopoeitic terms, the defining responsibility of a system is to maintain its internal processes. This dictates how systems collaborate with each other. They must do it in such a way so that both of their internal processes will be preserved. Sometimes a small deviation is okay, as long as the deviation does not have a permanent damage.

So, let’s look at communication again. First of all, communication is not in fact the transmission of knowledge from one party to another, since, well, both parties already have different perspectives on life and everything else and will make up their own minds about any information that is passed on to them.

So why communicate?

Autopoeitic theory asserts that communication is all about the transmission of intent. The purpose is to encourage the all parties to synchronize their behaviors so that an interaction can proceed without interrupting each party’s internal processes.

Translation: in human speeches, it implies that what you say is not all that crucial, but how you say it is.

For example:

a) Provide the right mechanism to allow the parties to engage conveniently.

b) Be congenial to prevent relations breaking down.

c) Indicate clearly the intentions of the parties involved, so as to permit coordination of individual behaviors.

Interesting, no?

Blogging is a form of communication. Does this theory apply here? Is this forum used by us to transmit some type of intent?

hmm…