Certainty the deity, Uncertainty the chant - 2014 as a reverse process?

In 2014, several stereotypes were challenged. India’s mission landed on Mars, at a cost unimaginable in developed nations. A teenager won the Nobel Peace Prize. We also saw violent intrusions of physical boundaries and the vagaries of the human mind. Civilian planes were downed, went missing and lives go unaccounted for because of people choosing to fly. Storms like those in the Kashmir Valley worried many. Winter chills from the polar vortex affected Canada and North America.

The rouble crumbled, and the popular representations in geographical zones started to demonstrate momentum in India and the Middle East. Japan’s low electoral turnout may inefficiently hide frustrations of a proud collective. Despite a revolutionary Pope and a rising of e-commerce, there are fewer jobs to go around in 2014, than in 2008. Despite more stringent laws women and children are violated in mindless circumstance.

If this were the context in which we end 2014 what is striking for me?

I feel challenged on account of incomplete inward realisation and the outward means by which we advance our causes. To quote a more articulate view “We know that, for better or worse, humans are incapable of rationally resolving theoretical debates outside of the institutional framework of the sciences. If we’re out on a limb, you guys are clinging to twigs. And now that science is making real inroads across the humanities, that annoying empirical breeze you feel is about to get a lot more gusty.” So wrote R Scott Bakker of the debate between views from Thomas Metzinger and Graham Harman. You will recall my mention of the phenomenal self model earlier.

While the philosophical chatter may appear much like ether or feel like flake to those not invested in critical enquiry, much of what happens around us in the real and physical worlds are now up for scrutiny. Perhaps the language of categories and prejudice may be closer to your preference in understanding how and why people take sides in an argument. So here’s what may make matters explicit. Consider facts reported by Partners Against Hate, who infer that Addressing Youthful Hate Crime is an Imperative.

·         33% of all known hate crime offenders are under 18.

·         31% of all violent crime offenders and 46% of the property offenders are under 18. 

·         29% of all hate crime offenders are 18-24.

·         30% of all victims of bias-motivated aggravated assaults and 34% of the victims of simple assault are under 18.

What do we do, when, in the name of religion, creed, language or race, workplaces are blocked for outcomes and energy? While, I am not in command of facts that parallel those of Partners Against Hate, here are a few probable trends for your consideration.  

·         Of all known injustice due to prejudice, offenders are rarely identified at the workplace.

·         Of all  injustice at the workplace,  voice is most exercised only when monetary reward is lower than expected by the ‘victim’ in the situation. 

·         For most ‘surprises’ during a compensation and benefit revision, expectation setting and goal setting are taken for granted.  

·         Workplaces project the language of diversity. Yet, ‘mind-set’ professions such as Quality Management (QM) and Human Resource Management (HRM) are rarely  experienced as integrators.

·         Of known sources of error and workplace injustice, work design and organization design are rarely seen together as the source.

Which in a rather curious way, brings me back to the role of bias in optimism.

I’m glad I was introduced to the work of Yuval Noah Harari, who as scholar of history, brings to us a  possibility in his book Sapiens. He argues that the greatest myth we’ve lived with for thousands of years is the Agricultural Revolution. The agricultural revolution has not reduced man’s efforts, but only compounded it. Instead, it is crop and cereal like wheat or rice that domesticated homo sapiens. Surviving and flourishing over millennia, they’ve made us dependent on them. They’ve domesticated us on this planet! (what a contrarian appeal to our senses).

We may’ve thought we’ve domesticated cattle. But the cowbell’s new forms like the cellular phone and hand-held devices now aided by the stealth of technological prowess, seem to muddle our thinking. Being is even more majestically challenged than we may readily acknowledge.

We’re hurtling into an age, where spiritual and intellectual honesty may be difficult to reconcile.  I find forms of that reconciliation ruling the roost in organisational debates too.  Let’s just count some of these tensions here.

1.       There’s tall obeisance to ‘uncertainty’, and yet stock markets punish for the lack of ‘certainty’.

2.       There’s much ado in the name of complexity, and yet simplicity is touted even if end effects are about oversimplification.

3.       There’s praise to the intangible yield from human resources, and yet there are perhaps fewer jobs thanks to technology.

Insight of 2014? When fantasy and optimism make heady confluence, it is fueled by inter-subjective beliefs dispersed widely in a society or civilization. That is to say, that socialization enables the stability of beliefs that hold up the myths of our existence. This is fodder to revolutions!

Stereotype to be challenged? Corporate or institutional impact on our belief structures. This is not about Coke as a want and water as a need per se. This is not about ideology, religion, philosophic slant or cult activism as much as it is about relevance of our actions to our wakeful lives.

How may we influence our beliefs such that what we experience at work on a daily basis is a reflection of our faith in each other’sabilities to revere and serve each other? Will such be the accommodation we make for people we may call neighbors, family and community too? 

Who are We? The Phantomness of 'Self' among other things...

The last I heard a philosopher speak at a public event, was at Minneapolis in 2005. Peter Koestenbaum spoke of courage, will, ethics and reality from a business standpoint. A businessperson’s philosopher, I valued his perspective on guilt as a product of choice, and man’s essence as a chooser. His treatment of anxiety as the tunnel of growth left a mark from the relatively diminutive frame in which such sagely sense embodied itself.

Thomas Metzinger

Last evening I heard a German speak of the Phenomenal-self model (PSM). Thomas Metzinger says being a philosopher, he needs to wrestle conventional boundaries of the discipline as he traverses the neuro-sciences evenas he holds a chair on Theoretical Philosophy. The contrast for me between Koestenbaum and Metzinger had already been sharp.  Seeking neural correlates of the conscious self is a venture that modern day observations make possible through technology like virtual reality and even the relatively inexpensive $5 magic box of Viliyanur Ramachandran’s phantom limb fame.  

The brain as it turns out from Metzinger’s expositions yesterday has the capacity for self-deception too. The rubber hand illusion that constructs for us the sense of ‘ownership’ is one such piece of evidence. Hence Being No One is at once illusory and yet real. That robots can be designed to have a self-consciousness is something that scientists are already working on, as also constructing extension of this line of experiments via the internet.

Even if George Moore wrote early on the Refutation of Idealism, the transparency of our perceptions is composite now in the integrated internal representation of the organism as a whole – in the Transparent Phenomenal Self-Model. While this took me back immediately to System 1 and System 2 representations that Kanhemann talks of in terms of behavioural economics, the thin line between fantasy and constructionism began to develop meaning for me. Simultaneously, the following held sway in my mind.

1.       Marshall Mcluhan famously said nobody in the electric age will consider it sane to have a point of view, as one will pay attention to several aspects at the same time. Is the message the medium at all?

2.       What strange twist of attentional focus that I chose to look at Andre Beteille from the lens of philosophy itself?

3.       When virtual reality constructs images of the self technologically to confirm or disconfirm workings in the brain, parental re-imprinting and future pacing that we engage in NLP seem so much like cousins of the curiosity family with the connectedness gene.

4.       VERE experiments (Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-embodiment) hinge so closely to neuro-ethics, that the bias to watch for may continue to be a product of the optimism bias. Are researchers in this genre males, supremely confident of themselves, and held back in advance merely by the introceptive anchors in our body?

5.       The phenomenology of Immediacy and Identification or infinite proximity, may lunge us forward in hedonistic somnambulance, at the cost of reflective wholesomeness. Philosophy seems to be both urgent and important in this way to our times.

Like with the nature of paradoxes, the one that really resonates with me is this – that self-organising systems as may be in our body, may not have a physical correlate. Yet the self as subjectively experienced, or as psychologically constructed may contain the following elements :

1.       Temporal patterns of neural activity

2.       A neuro-biological self

3.       A representationalist self

4.       An unconscious self (although the relationship between psyche and soma is not yet clear)

5.       An Innate core – perhaps pre-existing even before we realise identity

6.       An evolutionary self that provides us with a body model for the self

7.       A Functionalist self

Metzinger’s work is both prolific and an invitation in empirical work to substantiate phenomenal experience. What struck me in the Bangalore audience was this. Questions were begging points of view from Thomas Metzinger, as in philosophical propositional logic. Like first-order conversations, while meaning requires second-order conversation especially if as in Metzinger’s work, evidence liberates us from convenient biases. There’s a pattern in our socialisation perhaps, that the arduous aspects of scientific enterprise are weighed down by a naïve self-understanding of the self. When in India would we ask questions of science?

Thanks again to the Azim Premji University, that I will now set my sight on Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty, one of several tunnels in which I may be right now. In the meanwhile, let us brace ourselves for the optimism bias of democracy in India, where again, the supremacy of male over-confidence would hold sway in an uncritical socialisation of sentiment.

The Wisdom of Ants - Book Review

Few can write of economic history as Shankar Jaganathan does. Recommended by Rahul Dravid, Mohandas Pai, and reviewed by champions in education, sustainability and the behavioral sciences, this is no standard output. 

This is the second book that Shankar has brought to our world. While the first was examining corporate history through voluntary disclosures made by companies in legal frameworks in the public domain, the essence of unraveling significant points of departure and phase transitions in the evolution of financial reporting stands out in this volume too. It is near probable that the second book, like the proverbial Russian doll, was born in the making of the first. By that token, a reading of the Wisdom of Ants, will give hint to the next volumes waiting to be written. 

However, this book is far more important than the author's efforts. It is the reader that will benefit more, as seldom, have we got answers to questions of economics as have been distilled from events and trends in thinking of economics. The reader is usually concerned with how it affects contemporary pursuits like profession or vocation. So even if the section on Ideological strands gives clues to thinking on economics from across the world, it is the way it shapes our thinking and the challenges of breaking its shackles that will weigh on our minds. The recent crises of the global financial meltdown and continental uncertainties of economic union are triggers that capture popular attention. Yes, the author may lead you to his personal recommendation to deal with the inequities produced by the recent ravages of structured doctrines in the administration of economics. Yet, like stars against the sun, it leaves no scar on your own choices. Written with a profundity of rare genre, it gets to fundamentals without frills or needless fancy. At once, the reader will find the simplicity and profundity hugging the bare essentials of economic history. 

Academics will begin to seriously ask questions of the epistemology of economics, for its classification as a science may seem even more suspect when this longitudinal view is read. Philosophically speaking, the functional form of economics may seem like the linear extension of argumentation in the pure sciences, but for the impurities that human behaviors and predispositions provide. 

Eventually, when we look back at our lives, we begin to pose ourselves deeper questions of Purpose. That money, economics, and social regulation was couched in assumptions of order and stability, or let us say predictability, stands exposed as a bruised and perplexed stance that beguiled our confidence in social systems. Hence, even from a very personal perspective, this book can transport us into facile comprehension of activity as in the enterprise of ants, grasshoppers and our very own illusions of societal and personal wisdom. It is quite likely then that the lens of finance, economics and commerce will not seem foggy anymore.

Poetry in the life of Social Media - Maiden Attempt

I thought I should slowly distinguish personal writing from professional scripts in blogosphere. I was particularly impressed when I read Deepa Bhalerao's poetry that she proficiently pens on Facebook. While that is not flattery, I am putting up a piece I wrote over the weekend to give a different complexion to my blogposts. Will also like to write blogs of professional nature on our upcoming company website - more when that comes up..

In the meanwhile let me know how this reads...

The narcissist pervades the media

In search of an adoration sublime

The realist scrambles in wanton hysteria

Both creatures numbed in their climes

This world has its chasers of fantastic dreams

Market-worship, shaman-rituals all yearning for eternity

Then the unexpected surrender in delirious screams

Like refugees - to love they turn, awash in hope of serenity

The mist of cold and the gasps of dust twitch the skin in between

Seasons of moods, and tears and laughter intervene

Remote from the awakening unseen

The insight that emerges in awareness within

Prayers sung for a patch of wieldy sanity

Are drowned out by acts of untamed futility

The poet’s eye scans for the pen of verity

That will ink upon the pad of reality

Frivolous nerves renting its moments

Snatching away at shards of Eternity

Meaning it seems will make its advent

And simply emerge in resilient profundity

  

Iain McGilchrist: The divided brain | Video on TED.com

Iain McGilchrist: The divided brain | Video on TED.com

I believe this is one of the most illustrative expositions in the recent uncovering of our neural pathways. Philosophically compelling, Iain McGilcrhist makes the case for an integrated view of how we perceive as also what we have done with our gifts. Enslaving rationale is being amused to death by a dogma that can at best dream of liberation. Liberation ironically means having a consciousness of the context, The appreciation of an  inclusion of others when we apply what we know makes for an aesthetics of grace.

Watch this and enjoy the video.

Collectivities - Going Nowhere Furiously?

I have noted of late a few disquieting trends. It reminds me often of the debate between being pessimistic and realistic. Am also reminded of anchors that may make me revel in thoughts other than the optimistic. However, denying a reality is no better than self-adulation and fantasy. Let us say my inspiration for this blog arises from the gritty bureaucrat who appeared on television at an event that sported anti-corruption crusaders. I record a few citations that make for my observations as below.

1.   The Indian bureaucrat working within constraints: He mentioned that in the space of a year, he was witness to an average of 4 transfers per official. He thought that was the limit to his powers, and the porosity of the social system. Stoking the appeal for a Team India, he talked of an SMS (Short Messaging service) based initiative that Indian citizens could use to upload evidence of wrongdoing via GPRS enabled software. Spoken as Vijay, and spelt as VIGEYE, the spirit of the man was not lost on me (http://182.18.181.234/vigeye/).

    The reason was that he referred to the Constitution of India as he mentioned the ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ responsibilities of the citizen towards the state. What an amazing sub-conscious to refer I thought to myself. The Article 51 on the Fundamental Duties of the Indian citizen states in section ‘j’ as follows “to strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity so that the nation constantly rises to higher levels of endeavor and achievement”. It has been no accident I thought to myself, that the civic society acts as a system too.

2.  Morality and Fate : I know of a group of 8 interested souls working on the contours of a proposal for Economic Development that will be a viable alternative to irresponsible capitalism. One among the 8, namely Shankar Jagannathan (http://www.corporatedisclosures.com/index.htm) shared a provocative and hard-hitting link with me. A telling web-site name http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/22-4 was not where the sharing stopped stirring me. Rebecca Solnit has a writing style, that is imperial and majestic in its sweep, and yet, liberating and pulsating in its effect. She assumes that the acts of Dominique Strauss-Kahn are a fait accompli.

      That apart, every argument she weaves is a testimony of our numb sensibilities. She writes “In one of the more remarkable apologies of our era, Bill Clinton -- who had his own sex scandal once upon a time -- told the United Nations on World Food Day in October 2008, as the global economy was melting down: “We need the World Bank, the IMF, all the big foundations, and all the governments to admit that, for 30 years, we all blew it, including me when I was President. We were wrong to believe that food was like some other product in international trade, and we all have to go back to a more responsible and sustainable form of agriculture.”  Clinton’s outpourings here are more intense than his public reputation and sadly it is less heard too.

3.  Going Nowhere - Fast :   The famous Development Dimensions International (DDI), founded by Bill Byham and Douglas Bray, were at it again in their forecast for 2011 (http://bit.ly/jsD55q ).  The opening lines of this year's post is very telling indeed of the signs of our times. “After six iterations of examining the state of leadership worldwide via our Global Leadership Forecast, you’d think nothing would surprise us. You’d be wrong. Here is a look at some of the findings. BUSINESS IS CHANGING… LEADERSHIP IS NOT If there’s one phrase that comes to mind when thinking about this year’s data, it’s “We are going nowhere. Fast.”  It is only recently that we knew of Lawler and Worley through their book Management Reset http://indiatimes.uread.com/book/management-reset-christopher-g-worley/9780470637982 . Within DDI’s report is a work of collaboration with Gary Hamel that reveals group dynamics at the top of the corporate hierarchy - it badly needs a relook.  You may like to add Rajeev Peshawaria's RED framework http://rajeevpeshawaria.com/book to your list of why there are more bosses than leaders today.

4.   Social Cognition is distributed Capacity :   The anchor that most strongly resonated with me was that of a bold theoretical proposition by Gabrielle Lakomski, when I met her at the University of Melbourne in January 2005. (http://bit.ly/mPknsd ). What she mentioned in that book on Managing without Leadership was a culmination of social cognition, tacit knowledge management and indeed general management theory itself. Today, we see more and more after the Great Reset, that the behavioral response of leadership has been one of buckling under pressure than being additive or creative about situations. (http://bit.ly/ioEpLR ). e.g. At CISCO John Chambers regresses away from council based structures, it is reported; even as fundamental questions about the management model of modern day enterprise rage on unanswered in the world. Lakomski was far ahead of our times, it would appear.

Facilitating the leadership space that holds answers to the link between the individual and the collective is but an obvious responsibility. The economy, the society and the realm of the subjective moral self seem to be coming home to roost faster than leadership and their facilitators are ready for. Perhaps, philosophical questions seem remote to the urgency of the situation. The importance of the issue is ignored at our peril in these essentially ‘developmental’ phases of our lives.