On goals, systems, and bhāvanā

An article by James Clear called “Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead” [Oh Upworthy, how I truly hate thee!] has been doing the rounds recently. It has received a lot of attention, but when I finally sat to read it a couple of weeks ago, I found myself deeply bothered by something I couldn’t quite get a handle on. It is only just now that I’ve realized what the problem was, and the answer came to me from Mīmāṃsā.

What on earth does a nearly 3,000-year-old Hindu tradition of ritual hermeneutics have to do with any of this? As it turns out, a lot! Mīmāṃsā’s primary intellectual concern has been with the Vedic sacrifice: how it works, how its descriptions in various ritual texts cohere, how it is organized, and so on. To do so, it has developed a formidable arsenal of techniques and frameworks. One of these, the concept of bhāvanā, was widely used and taken up in disciplines far outside Vedic ritual exegesis, including literary theory and imagination / meditation. (See my prior post on imagination for some other uses of the concept of bhāvanā in South Asia.) The time has now come to apply bhāvanā to yet another problem: motivating people to stay on track with difficult projects!

What is bhāvanā?

To massively oversimplify things, and with apologies to Andrew Ollet’s excellent article, a bhāvanā, a bringing-into-being, is a particular action (or a set of actions) designed to create something, undertaken by an agent. Every such bhāvanā has three essential components to it:

1. The desired end which the agent is trying to bring into being through this operation
2. The instrument using which the agent is carrying out the operation
3. The procedure which the agent is following with the instrument to bring about the desired end

These three are respectively called the kim (the “what”), the kena (the “by what”), and the katham (the “how”). These three things are very different from each other. Confusing them can be fatal to understanding how things are actually supposed to work.

The standard introductory Mīmāṃsā handbooks usually explain bhāvanā with an example from Vedic sacrifice. Here’s a rather different, much more quotidian scenario where the three components are nevertheless clearly distinguishable.

After a long, grueling day at work, you come home utterly famished. You don’t want to go out to get dinner, so you decide to make yourself a quick dinner. You have a microwaveable mac & cheese sitting in the freezer, so you take it out, read the instructions on the packet (you don’t really ever cook), stick it in the microwave, and a few minutes later, satiate your hunger with some piping hot coagulated carbs and fats.

In this scenario, it’s pretty clear that something new was created: the state of the world, and more importantly your own state, was transformed in this scenario. In not-so-technical Mīmāṃsā non-jargon, some sort of bhāvanā thingie occurred here. So what were the components of this bhāvanā? What was created?

It is tempting to think of the mac & cheese dinner as being what is created: after all, before you cooked it, it was just a frozen lump of carbs and dairy and preservatives, and it was your cooking it that transformed it into an (arguably) edible mush. However, this would be a major mistake, according to Mīmāṃsā: the mac & cheese was not the desired end of your actions. It wasn’t why you undertook all these steps. Instead:

1. the real end, the kim, must be the resolution of your hunger. 
2. the mac & cheese is the means, the kena, by which your hunger is resolved. 
3. the way you resolve your hunger, the katham, is by following the procedure outlined on the packet to cook and serve the mac & cheese.

Goals and Systems

If my quick overview of bhāvanā didn’t foreshadow it clearly enough, it should be clear what my beef with Clear’s piece is: he conflates kims and kenas when talking about goals, and therefore overemphasizes the importance of systems (which are not quite kathams). To see how he does this, let’s look at the section where he distinguishes between goals and systems:

What’s the difference between goals and systems?

• If you’re a coach, your goal is to win a championship. Your system is what your team does at practice each day.
• If you’re a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week.
• If you’re a runner, your goal is to run a marathon. Your system is your training schedule for the month.
• If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal is to build a million dollar business. Your system is your sales and marketing process.

Look carefully at the four things he describes as goals: winning a championship, writing a book, running a marathon, and building a million-dollar business. And look carefully at the four types of people he describes as having these goals: the coach, the writer, the runner, and the entrepreneur. Now, many of us would agree with these things as being described as “goals” (which to me only reinforces the fact that we live in a deeply instrumentalist society). But are they really goals? Are they more like the mac & cheese or like satiating the hunger for a hungry person?

• For a coach who is hungry for a win, winning a championship will certainly satiate his hunger. But it is not obvious to me that people become coaches in order to win championships. It can be argued that the real purpose of being a coach is to, well, coach a bunch of players to the best of their abilities, so that they can perform superlatively on the field. If the team can do that consistently, then they may very well end up winning a championship. It seems to me that winning the championship is really just a means (a kena) to the real end (kim): the joy that comes from watching people do their best on the field. (It is possible to win a championship and yet be dissatisfied, because perhaps your opponent defaulted; it is possible to lose a championship and yet be pleased, because you did your absolute best and fulfilled your “duties”, so to speak.)
• Writers don’t write in order to create books; they write books in order to do something else: tell a story, persuade their readers to act, create emotional states in their readers, convey some valuable information, or even simply feed their families. The book is clearly just a kena. The kim is whatever motivates the writer to write.
• As with the example of the coach, it may well be that running a marathon is a real kim for some people. However, it is again quite likely that there are other satisfactions here: enjoying the endorphin rush, raising money for a valuable cause, staying in shape, or whathaveyou. In all of those cases, the marathon is just a kena that is subordinated to the more significant kim.
• Again, it certainly is the case that some entrepreneurs are just in it for the money. In that simplest of cases, the business is the kena to their real kim: making a boatload of money. But as Guy Kawasaki has said many a time: “make meaning, not money” is the heart of entrepreneurship. Whether your business is worth a billion dollars or a hundred, the real purpose should be to do something that creates meaning for you and for the people you engage with. In such a view, the mere instrumentality of the business is even more strongly pronounced.

None of the four examples of goals here is clearly and precisely a kim: an end that people strive for and desire. Some of these could possibly be treated as kims, but Mīmāṃsā argues (and Clear would agree with this, as he himself writes) that to do so would be to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of each of these sets of actions.

Clear has correctly identified one problem: the so-called “actionable goals” he describes are notoriously bad at actually getting achieved. The real reason for that is because they aren’t in fact goals: they are means to other ends. These other ends are the real goals we should keep in mind. In the absence of those real goals, people wouldn’t act at all!

The problem isn’t with goals at all; it is with the fact that Clear is using two terms (“goal” and “system”) to describe three distinct pieces (the [real] goal, the means to the goal, and the procedure; to use a different metaphor, the destination, the means of transport, and the particular path you navigate). Because of this conceptual blurring, he emphasizes “systems” more than they can bear: what he calls systems are just glorified procedures. 

The real system is the the whole triplet that Mīmāṃsā describes, and this systems needs all three pieces to succeed: a real goal to motivate us to act, a means by which this goal can be achieved, and a procedure that can be followed (with all the useful tips that Clear provides).  

ADDENDUM

One of the subheadings in Clear’s piece gives the game away to the reader who is keyed into Mīmāṃsā: He describes one of the faults of the goal-based approach as being the fact that “Goals reduce your current happiness.” This is exactly what sets kim apart from kena in Mīmāṃsā! Take the typical injunction that Mīmāṃsā analyzes: yajeta svarga-kāmaḥ, “The heaven-seeker should perform a sacrifice.” Lots of Hindus have desired to perform sacrifices, and still do to this day. But Mīmāṃsā argues that the real end here, the real kim, here has to be heaven. The sacrifice itself is only the means by which this end is brought about. And one of the arguments is this: a sacrifice is a difficult, expensive, resource-intensive, and physically taxing undertaking. No rational (pleasure-maximizing, pain-minimizing) human would perform a sacrifice for its own sake. Therefore, a sacrifice must be the means to some other end: the promised result. To follow Clear’s line of reasoning, you would focus on the individual actions of a sacrifice (its procedure) but ignore the coherence of the sacrifice itself as an instrument, and altogether forget about the real goal, the heaven that is the result of the sacrifice!

“Practical” Universities

David Brooks has a new column out in the New York Times in which he argues that online education will force a transformation of universities. Drawing on Michael Oakeshott, he argues (or really, just states) that universities today offer two kinds of knowledge: technical (the what) and practical (the how). Brooks claims that, because technical knowledge can easily be transmitted online, we will see people gravitating towards MOOCs where they pick up “just the facts, ma’am” from star online teachers. However, since practical knowledge can only be picked up from experience, he thinks that universities will shift increasingly towards offering this sort of irreplaceable knowledge.

Leaving aside the merits and demerits of Brooks’s piece, I am quite intrigued that he ignores another, crucial, kind of knowledge that universities offer: the why. Now sometimes this knowledge seems like anti-knowledge from the outside, because it is about limits, about ends, and about asking the right kinds of questions. But these are critical issues to think about—admittedly, not for everybody, but for society as a whole. A city full of carpenters, or of philosophers, is not a city but an unnatural monoculture.

This is all the more surprising because a threefold distinction of knowledge was known to Aristotle, who called them epistemē, technē, and phronesis. (Of these three, phronesis directly overlaps with Brooks’s practical knowledge; while technē seems to largely make up, but not exactly correspond to, technical knowledge.) A polis needs all three to flourish. I am curious to know where Brooks thinks epistemē will be found in his post-MOOC world.

“Transcendence and Self-Transcendence”

Michael Polanyi: chemist and philosopher, brother to Karl Polanyi, historian and sociologist. One of Michael Polanyi’s important shorter pieces is this one, called “Transcendence and Self-Transcendence”, published in 1970.

Some of the interesting bits that emerge (no pun intended) from this work:

I introduce the concept of hierarchical levels. A machine, for example, cannot be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. Machines can go wrong and break down—something that does not happen to laws of physics and chemistry. 

In fact, a machine can be smashed and the laws of physics and chemistry will go on operating unfailingly in the parts remaining after the machine ceases to exist. Engineering principles create the structure of the machine which harnesses the laws of physics and chemistry for the purposes the machine is designed to serve. Physics and chemistry cannot reveal the practical principles of design or co-ordination which are the structure of the machine.

And:

The more intangible the matter in the range of these hierarchies, the more meaningful it is. This is my criticism of all redactionist, mechanistic programs founded on the Laplacean ideal which identifies ultimate knowledge with an atomic topography, the lowest level of the universe.

Most provocative:

I have elaborated in schematic fashion a multiple hierarchy which leads on to ever more meaningful levels. Each higher level is more intangible than the one below it and also enriched in subtlety. And as these more intangible levels are understood a steadily deeper understanding of life and man is gained. These understandings constitute transcendence in the world. 

Unbridled detailing, the ideal advocated by Laplace and his modern followers, not only destroys our knowledge of things we most want to know; it clouds our understanding of elementary perception—our first contact with the world of inanimate matter and of living beings and our initial act of self-transcendence.

I must confess that these fragments of his essay, pulled out of context, do not convey its full meaning. The whole thing is worth reading.

Indulge me, por favor

I don’t normally soar away in flights of fantasy; I enjoy feeling grass underneath my feet and sand between my toes far too much. But just this once, I request you, gentle reader, to forgive my rhapsodizing. If it doesn’t make sense, well, it wasn’t necessarily meant to!


So here goes: Each of us is a link in an infinite chain of being that spans space and time. Each of these links is, of course, comprised of smaller links, ad infinitum; each of this links, of course, participates in a greater link, ad infinitum. Do I exaggerate when I speak of twin infinities? Maybe, and maybe not.


What I’m really trying to say is that everything is doubly emergent.


Now materialist reductionism is the idea that things can be understood entirely by parsing them into their constituent material parts. It is a remarkably powerful, persuasive idea, and the basis of much modern theoretical and practical advancement, but according to at least some thinkers, it cannot explain the phenomenon of emergence. For them, an anthill is more than the sum of its parts; similarly, each of us human beings is more than the sum of our parts. There is something about our complexity that is irreducible to the parts that constitute us. (Note that emergence does not automatically reject materialism; it does, however, reject reductionism.)


But at the same time, we ourselves are also parts of a bigger, emergent reality—society, we call it. We take it for granted and thus forget how much of who we are (of our emergent selves!) is both affected and effected by this layer of abstraction that lies atop organized collections of interacting human beings. 


We are different from computers because our operating systems are able to rewire the physical hardware on which they run.


And paradoxically, the more “concrete” and “elementary” our constituents get, the more conceptual and abstract they become! We smash atoms into electrons and protons and neutrons, only to find that these “elementary” particles are probability distributions; we take them apart even further, and are ultimately left with vibrating 26-dimensional strings. And yet somehow causality travels up this chain in powerful, largely well-understood ways!


We have become accustomed to thinking of causality purely in instrumental terms. In that sense, it is of course true that it is the parts that alter the whole. But we forget that the word “cause” used to have a much wider sense. What we think of as the “cause” these days is only the Aristotelian “effective cause”. We have forgotten that other “causes” exist and have real effects. The “formal cause”, for instance, can be seen as the way in which higher layers of abstraction limit and direct lower layers. Again, this does not necessitate a belief in a Platonic realm of Forms. When a carpenter builds a chair, it is obviously true that his tools operating on the wood are the “effective causes” of what is produced. But is it not true that a “formal cause”—an understanding of what it means to be a chair, which is necessarily influenced by his social position—also has a part to play in this? We no longer think of this as causality, but as a result we are unable to fully grasp what’s going on here. Causality goes both upwards and downwards (and maybe sidewards as well!) over the web of existence.


Levels of description matter. “Romeo loved Juliet” is as true as “a certain well-structured collection of organic compounds produced certain levels of serotonin and oxytocin in the presence of a similarly well-structured collection of organic compounds”, but they don’t mean the same thing. Even if you ignore the fact that Romeo and Juliet are literary figures! Levels of description matter, and although the same truth can be expressed at different levels, it is significant in different ways at those levels. This is very similar to Karl Popper’s “Three Worlds”, but I think “Three” is too much and too little: too much, because there is only one world; too little, because that one world exists and interacts at many, many different levels. This is not the same as saying there are “Two Truths”; there aren’t, and there cannot be. But the same truth can be expressed at different levels.


Some who face this tower of concrete-yet-abstract layers dismiss it all as illusion or as emptiness. I think the exact opposite is the case. This is reality: a unified whole, an infinitely diverse, infinitely layered, fractal, organic tower that grows, breathes, becomes self-conscious, tries to comprehend all of itself, and shrinks.

Resilience and complex systems

Another article in SEED Magazine, by Carl Folk, on the ecological term resilience applied to other complex systems like the global economy. The author defines resilience as "the capacity of a system—be it an individual, a forest, a city, or an economy—to deal with change and continue to develop," in other words, to respond to perturbations and even catastrophes in innovative ways.

So what does this mean? For one,

"systems are understood to be in constant flux, highly unpredictable, and self-organizing with feedbacks across multiple scales in time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmark features of complexity."

This ability of a complex system to adapt to variations does not necessarily mean that such adaptation is smooth or predictable. Indeed, the non-linearity of feedback loops means that complex systems can behave in what seems erratic (from the perspective of a linear model). This includes wild oscillations between dramatically different positions, such as a lake fluctuating between hyperoxygenation and algal bloom, or for that matter the Earth going from polar regions covered in dense vegetation (as during the Mesozoic era) to iced-over tropical regions (Snowball Earth).

The risks of interconnectedness

This is a tremendously interesting article in SEED Magazine, titled "On Early Warning Signs", by George Sugihara that draws on the author's background in biology to depict some of the limitations of the modern tendency to use linear systems (plus perturbations) to model fundamentally non-linear systems. Among other things, non-linear systems show high levels of interconnectedness that tends to fluctuate (technically heteroskedasticity), which makes predicting their behavior using linear models very difficult.

The author further notes:

"Leading up to the crash, there was a marked increase in homogeneity among institutions, both in their revenue-generating strategies as well as in their risk-management strategies, thus increasing correlation among funds and across countries—an early warning. Indeed, with regard to risk management through diversification, it is ironic that diversification became so extreme that diversification was lost: Everyone owning part of everything creates complete homogeneity. Reducing risk by increasing portfolio diversity makes sense for each individual institution, but if everyone does it, it creates huge group or system-wide risk. Mathematically, such homogeneity leads to increased connectivity in the financial system, and the number and strength of these linkages grow as homogeneity increases. Thus, the consequence of increasing connectivity is to destabilize a generic complex system: Each institution becomes more affected by the balance sheets of neighboring institutions than by its own."

An interesting analogy drawn from nature, this time from plants and pollinators:

"[T]he same hierarchical structure that promotes biodiversity in plant-animal cooperative networks may increase the risk of large-scale systemic failures: Mutualism facilitates greater biodiversity, but it also creates the potential for many contingent species to go extinct, particularly if large, well-connected generalists—certain large banks, for instance—disappear. It becomes an argument for the “too big to fail” policy, in which the size of the company’s Facebook network matters more than the size of its balance sheet."

Very interesting stuff.