January 13, 2007 (3): Decisions!

It all began when one of my colleagues and I parlayed the insights of knowledge management into an attempt to identify the role of communication and understanding in corporate decision-making. This began to take the form of a critique of decision support technology or, more properly, the ways in which that technology has now been appropriated by more recent enterprise software; and, with my tendency to always “push back to basics,” I found myself asking more general questions about the current state of decision theory and how consistent it is with decision practice.

There was a real irritant in asking these questions, however; and it seemed to lie in how “understanding,” as we were trying to study it, serves to “inform us to make informed decisions” (allowing for a circular turn of phrase). Well, for a start, what is it that we need to understand? The answer to that seems to be that we need to understand the situation (i.e. state of affairs, where I am choosing that word “state” because this involves taking a flow of events and relationships in which we are embedded and rendering it as something static) in which one or more actions need to be taken; and those actions need to be selected on the basis of one or more decisions. In other words, as any number of philosophers probably discovered long before I did, any theory of decision making must rest on a foundation of understanding the situation.

At this point I have to share some frustration with a book I am trying to read: Narrative Policy Analysis by Emery Roe. At the very least this book should wean me away from too much indulgence in postmodern deconstructionism; but, putting aside his stylistic preferences (obsessions), Roe is reluctant to come right out and say that he is trying to explore how narrative can serve explanation. This is not an unreasonable point to make; but for anyone of a philosophical bent it opens a real can of worms (if not several).

The most important can of worms is the very nature of explanation itself. I had A9 do an exact phrase search on “nature of explanation;” and the Amazon.com frame came up with 1355 books. My guess is that most of them have their roots in analytic philosophy, all sharing a positivist streak that can be traced back to Hempel (or someone who inspired Hempel). In my own intellectual development this is basically the pile of manure in the barn that convinces me that there must be a pony somewhere in the vicinity (but not in the pile of manure)! All that means, though, is that I am still looking for the pony.

However, finding the pony is only part of the story. Once you home in on the nature of explanation, you still have to worry about communicating an explanation to others. In other words you have to account for an explanation, and usually we do this by articulating it through text. This is another can of worms, since we now encounter all the subtleties associated with different text types and how we arrive at communication and understanding through those text types.

On the other hand, if we go back to Ancient Greece (well, if we go back to either Plato or Socrates as Plato tried to represent him), we discover that the two cans merge into one. The label on that can is the Greek noun λόγος, which means all sorts of things that, taken together, seem to orbit around the concept of an explanatory account rendered as text. (This is why “ology” is such a great suffix. The validity of the explanatory account is not necessarily part of the story. So “scientology” involves λόγος as much as “neurology” does!)

The good news is that, with all my experience in writing, I am never afraid of text. Furthermore, as my own blog header tries to proclaim, I do not try to hide from uncertainty or complexity behind fear, superstition, and/or pettiness. However, this may be an occasion to reflect on some wisdom of Richard Feynman:

In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.

Thus, I am beginning to feel that just about any action we take (not to mention the decision-making preceding that action) cannot help but be “surrounded by uncertainty;” and all we can to do manage is to keep expressing ourselves through texts that we utter and/or write, knowing full well that they will never be clearer than our all-too-muddled thoughts! In other words the final say goes to one of Feynman's most honored predecessors, Niels Bohr:

Never express yourself more clearly than you think.

July 04, 2006: Does the Brain have State?

One consequence of trying to draw upon our understanding of digital computers to enlighten our understanding of the brain is that the former is grounded in the concept of state. The consequence is that we assume that we can apply this concept to the brain, but is this a valid or even desirable assumption? The usual argument is that, however, large the number of neurons involved may be, the concept of state, itself, can scale to any magnitude. So, while an accurate state description may be unwieldy, it is still (at least in theory) possible.

However, the real question we should be asking is whether or not it make sense to describe the brain in terms of a static object. Where many processes are involved, we can still make analytic progress by "freezing time" and examining the "state" of those processes at such a "frozen instant." However, that abstraction is only useful if we can think in terms of how the state we are examining is the result of a transition and what similar transitions are possible to proceed from that state. This is where we may run into trouble by applying such thoughts to the brain. The intimidating truth is that every single neuron is a dynamic processes whose nature we are still trying to understand. We talk about these cells firing as if that activity can be abstracted into a binary state, but that abstraction may be too coarse to explain brain behavior when matters such a memory are involved.

I have invested a fair amount of my own mental effort in trying to make sense out of a hypothesis that Gerald Edelman made about memory. His hypothesis rejects the idea that biological memory is based on a store-and-retrieve model. Instead, he argues that what we remember arises from ongoing processes of refreshment that take place in the brain. Edelman is thus talking about a dynamic process that, by virtue of its complexity, cannot be readily abstracted down to transitions across static states. I have no idea with Edelman's hypothesis will ever be settled in my lifetime; but I do know that, however we may choose to think about the brain using the digital computer as a model, in just about any practical setting we have not done very well by thinking about human memory in terms of a database! This is likely to be yet another situation in which it is more important for us to develop better skills for "thinking in time."