Cybernetics leftovers
In lieu of actual writing, flinging down what could not make the cut (Qian Xuesen metasynthetic engineering, extrasensory perception)
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It is important to find someone that will tolerate your idiosyncrasies. Find someone that enjoys or seems unbothered by your strange notions about the world. Find someone to whom you can submit a ten thousand word article that ranges from Pasadena and the dismantling of interwar non-interventionism to Qian Xuesen’s meeting with Wernher von Braun to Song Jian reading Limits to Growth to the marriage of extrasensory perception and information theory to smart cities. God bless them. They are the ones that will have to work on editing it down to something acceptable.
The role of the editor or curator has been diminished in the present-day article economy. What a shame.
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PLEASE READ: THE GENEALOGY OF CHINESE CYBERNETICS
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As I said, the piece was much too long and much too unfocused in its earliest versions. One version took the Shanghai lockdown as the narrative anchor, presenting it as a late example of failed cybernetic thinking; another version began with a personal recollection, telling the story of an unregistered girl that I met while living in Guangzhou.
This is something that was cut out of an earlier, longer version of the piece. This section concerns Qian Xuesen’s later interest in extrasensory perception (special abilities—tèyì gōngnéng—was his catch-all term for this, which he filed under somatic science—réntǐ kēxué) and attempts to build on cybernetic theory through his ideas of open, complex, giant systems and meta-synthetic engineering.
I believe it is important, but it’s not necessary to the finished product. It also probably requires another several thousand words to explain. As it is, it was superfluous.
In the late 1980s, Qian had already organized information theory, systems theory, and control theory under “systems engineering” (applied roughly the same way as I have applied “systems cybernetics”). He proposed a more general classification of science and technology into a dozen departments, including mathematics, systems science, the arts, and somatic science. Each department was linked to the fundamental layer of Marxist philosophy through bridges: social science, systems science, and cognitive science, for example, were linked to Marxism through, respectively, historical materialism, systems research, and epistemology. Each department could also be divided by theoretical foundation, technical basis, and applied technology.
This was an attempt to break out of scientific reductionism, by bringing social sciences and natural sciences together. He also included within his reorganization space for somatic science, sometimes translated as “human body” science, which included paranormal phenomena, like extrasensory perception and telekinesis.
Qian’s detour into metaphysical investigation is crucial to his thought in the 1980s and 1990s, but, like his contributions to the Great Leap Forward, usually elided or misunderstood.
The final years of the Cultural Revolution had seen the official rehabilitation of traditional Chinese medicine and the emergence of folk healers promoting exceptional abilities in qigong, a method of cultivating, managing, and projecting qi, or life force. During Reform and Opening the tension between these pseudoscientific phenomena and new scientism had to be resolved—and it was Qian and scientists at the Institute of Mechanics that led the way.
As early as 1978, qigong masters were invited to the Institute to test what was going on physically when they cast their blasts of qi. In 1979, Qian took notice of a story circulating in the national media about a boy in Sichuan that could hold an envelope up to his ear and read letters written on a card inside, and began backing experiments into what was called “extraordinary function.” From his positions within the scientific establishment, particular his posts at the National Association for Science and Technology and Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, Qian enthusiastically promoted research into somatic science.
Qian Xuesen's interest in the extraordinary abilities of qigong became slightly suspect within China after the vicious reaction in the early 1990s to the popular explosion of affiliated new religious movements, including Falun Gong, and their penetration into elite Party circles. A vigorous skeptic movement didn’t have much time for Qian’s attempts to prove telepathy was real (in addition to those experiments, he also wrote frequently about UFOs). But he was not alone: the 1980s saw many attempts to connect advances in quantum theory with the paranormal, as Qian and other somatic science researchers did, and his interest in telepathy and telekinesis was shared by the CIA and Sony's parapsychology-focused ESPER Lab.
For American intelligence and Japanese researchers, as well as Qian, research into parapsychology was conducted for potential application in control systems. Extrasensory perception held promise as a means of human interface with digital, wireless information systems. Xiao Liu writes in her chapter on Qian Xuesen in Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China, "The two strands [extrasensory perception and wireless technology] converged around the cybernetic logic of incorporating humans into the real-time information circuits.“
The interest in somatic science and extraordinary functions is what pushed Qian to attempt to rewrite scientific thought in his model of qualitative-to-quantitative meta-synthesis
What he proposed was a method of synthesizing qualitative and quantitative observations. This was an attempt to unify natural and social science, since his model of analysis included social phenomena, qualitative experience, and scientific method. In the context of somatic science, an observation—a man can by applying touch soften the metal stem of a spoon to the point that it can easily bend—is made based on subjective experience, which is then integrated with quantitative data (the quantitative data will not necessarily support or prove the qualitative observation). This subverted the scientific method of hypothesis, experimentation, analysis, and conclusion. Qian explained this idea in a 1993 paper co-authored with Yu Jingyuan of the Institute of Information and Control and Dai Ruwei of the Institute of Automation:
Empirical hypotheses (judgment or conjecture) are put up which cannot be proved by rigorous scientific methods. … [T]heir accuracy can be checked on models built from empirical data and reference material, with hundreds and thousands of parameters. … Through quantitative calculation and repeated collation, conclusion is finally reached. This conclusion is the best to be found at this stage of knowledge of reality. This is quantitative knowledge arising from qualitative understanding.
Qian came up with a model to implement this new method, which he called in his own English translation the “Hall for Workshop on Meta-synthetic Engineering.” A proposition is fed into the model, then integrated with quantitative data, interdisciplinary expert opinion, and information analysis software or other artificial intelligence.
He termed the knowledge created through this qualitative-to-quantitative method “meta-synthetic wisdom.” This was only knowledge capable of grasping what Qian called “open, complex, giant systems.”
To understand all of these ideas together, Qian Xuesen suggested the human body as an example. It is an “open” system, since it exchanges energy, information, and material with the outside world; it is a “complex” system because of the level of complexity found not only in its basic composition but also within its subsystems; and it is “giant” because of the number of subsystems it contains. To return to the proposition of someone bending a spoon, meta-synthetic wisdom is produced through integrating quantitative physical data, contributions from experts in—taking Qian’s own list—“physiology, psychology, Western medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, Qigong, psychokinesis, etc.,” and analysis with information and computing technology. Since the human body is an open system, the analysis must also take into account ideas from physics, political science, and ecology.
The Hall for Workshop on Meta-synthetic Engineering, meta-synthetic wisdom, and open, complex, giant systems are concepts invisible in English, except in the occasional machine-translated academic paper, but they have become as influential in Chinese high-tech social governance discourse as Qian’s work from the 1970s and early 1980s. The idea of synthesizing human and artificial intelligence lends itself particularly well to and informs thinking on smart cities, the "urban brain," and AI- and surveillance-enabled urban management.
What Qian’s theories provide beyond another take on systems cybernetics is a way to integrate the immaterial within hard systems. Just as telekinesis can be integrated into a study of the human body, concepts like spiritual civilization can be reconciled with analysis of social systems. Qian's theories reinforced the guiding principles of the Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, and Xi Jinping Thought advanced under Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and the present General Secretary, since they are themselves attempts to combine economic, spiritual, and political philosophies.