People From London

"Gurdjieff said, “Change depends on you, and it will not come about through study. You can know everything and yet remain where you are. It is like a man who knows all about money and the laws of banking, but has no money of his own in the bank. What does all his knowledge do for him?” Here Gurdjieff suddenly changed his manner of speaking, and looking at me very directly he said: “You have the possibility of changing, but I must warn you that it will not be easy. You are still full of the idea that you can do what you like. In spite of all your study of free will and determinism, you have not yet understood that so long as you remain in this place, you can do nothing at all. Within this sphere there is no freedom. Neither your knowledge nor all your activity will give you freedom. This is because you have no …” Gurdjieff found it difficult to express what he wanted in Turkish. He used the word varlik, which means roughly the quality of being present. I thought he was referring to the experience of being separated from one’s body. Neither I nor the Prince [Sabaheddin] could understand what Gurdjieff wished to convey. I felt sad, because his manner of speaking left me in no doubt that he was telling me something of great importance. I answered, rather lamely, that I knew that knowledge was not enough, but what else was there to do but study?..."

"Every evening after dinner, a new life began. There was no hurry. Some walked in the garden. Others smoked. About nine o’clock we made our way alone or in twos and threes to the Study House. Outdoor shoes came off and soft shoes or moccasins were put on. We sat quietly, each on his or her own cushion, round the floor in the centre. Men sat on the right, women on the left; never together. Some went straight on to the stage and began to practice the rhythmic exercises. On our first arrival, each of us had the right to choose his own teacher for the movements. I had chosen Vasili Ferapontoff, a young Russian, tall, with a sad studious face. He wore pince-nez, and looked the picture of the perpetual student, Trofimov, in The Cherry Orchard. He was a conscientious instructor, though not a brilliant performer. I came to value his friendship, which continued until his premature death ten years later. He told me in one of our first conversations that he expected to die young. The exercises were much the same as those I had seen in Constantinople three years before. The new pupils, such as myself, began with the series called Six Obligatory Exercises. I found them immensely exciting, and worked hard to master them quickly so that I could join in the work of the general class."

"We do not know structures, but we know because of structures."

"There is no need in these mathematical days to defend the use of symbolism. It is regarded by many schools of modern thought as the only safe form of language. Wittgenstein treats symbols as something more than conventional signs, and regards them as corresponding in some way to the reality to which they refer. He would probably accept Gurdjieff’s dictum that: Symbols not only transmit knowledge but show the way to it. Even though other thinkers deny any objective reference to symbols, no one questions that symbolism has a power beyond that of ordinary language. It is different with the language of myth. This is despised by superficial thinkers, but the greatest philosophers have known its value."

"I must warn you that Gurdjieff is far more of an enigma than you can imagine. I am certain that he is deeply good, and that he is working for the good of mankind. But his methods are often incomprehensible. For example, he uses disgusting language, especially to ladies who are likely to be squeamish about such things. He has the reputation of behaving shamelessly over money matters, and with women also. At his table we have to drink spirits, often to the point of drunkenness. People have said that he is a magician, and that he uses his powers for his own ends... I do not believe that the scandalous tales told of Gurdjieff are true: but you must take into account that they may be true and act accordingly."

"Since we tend to see ourselves primarily in the light of our intentions, which are invisible to others, while we see others mainly in the light of their actions, which are visible to us, we have a situation in which misunderstanding and injustice are the order of the day"

"Ouspensky records a conversation in St. Petersburg during the summer of 1916 in which Gurdjieff discussed the problem of communication, and the impossibility of conveying in our ordinary language ideas which are intelligible and obvious only for a higher state of consciousness. Speaking of the unity between man, the Universe, and God, he said that the objective knowledge by which alone this unity is to be understood can never be expressed in words or logical forms. At this point, Gurdjieff made a statement which is a key to the understanding of his own subsequent writings. He said: Realising the imperfection and weakness of ordinary language, the people who have possessed objective knowledge have tried to express the idea of unity in ‘myths,’ in ‘symbols,’ and in particular ‘verbal formulas,’ which, having been transmitted without alteration, have carried on the idea from one school to another, often from one epoch to another. In All and Everything Gurdjieff makes extensive use of these three forms, that is, symbol, myth, and verbal formula...."

"Facts, that are no more than facts, are atomic and unrelated except by general laws. That is how the world was studied until the middle of the present century."

"The systematic principle is based upon the hypothesis that there is a structure in the real world that transcends the distinctions of subjective and objective experience."

"True sensitivity is the beginning of what Gurdjieff calls Objective Reason and which he says, cannot be in this body and can only belong to the Second, or Kesdjanian Body, and when it is formed it can begin to acquire this direct perception of how things are, combined with experience that gives this vision a practical and realistic application. Out of this comes what he calls Objective Reason"

"G. I. Gurdjieff's sexual life was strange in its unpredictability. At certain times he led a strict, almost ascetic life, having no relation with women at all. At other times, his sex life seemed to go wild and it must be said that his unbridled periods were more frequent than the ascetic. At times, he had sexual relationships not only with almost any woman who happened to come within the sphere of his influence, but also with his own pupils. Quite a number of his women pupils bore him children and some of them remained closely connected with him all their lives. Others were just as close to him, as far as one could tell, without a sexual relationship."

"Structure is a primary element of experience and not something that is added by the mind. In this respect, it can be said that the techniques of understanding call for a drastic revision of the usual modes of thought that treat being and understanding as independent or at least as separable from one another."

"The impulse to understand, and not merely to know and to act, is an impulse characteristic of man and apparently not shared by other animals. I am not concerned here with the origin and nature of this impulse, but with its implications that there is something to be understood and that understanding is not reducible to knowledge and action."

"Duration of selection. At this point a word should be said about how long a given act of selection may take, for when actual cases are examined, the time taken may, at first estimate, seem too long for any practical achievement. The question becomes specially important when the regulator is to be developed for regulation of a very large system. Approximate calculation of the amount of selection likely to be necessary may suggest that it will take a time far surpassing the cosmological; and one may jump to the conclusion that the time taken in actually achieving the selection would have to be equally long. This is far from being the case, however."

"General systems theory is considered as a formal theory (Mesarovic, Wymore), a methodology (Ashby, Klir), a way of thinking (Bertalanffy, Churchman), a way of looking at the world (Weinberg), a search for an optimal simplification (Ashby, Weinberg), didactic method (Boulding, Klir, Weinberg), metalanguage (Logren), and profession (Klir)."

"W. Ross Ashby is one of the founding fathers of both cybernetics and systems theory. He developed such fundamental ideas as the homeostat, the law of requisite variety, the principle of self-organization, and the principle of regulatory models."

"Throughout, we shall be exemplifying the thesis of D. M. MacKay: that quantity of information, as measured here, always corresponds to some quantity, i.e. intensity, of selection, either actual or imaginable"

"The most basic facts in biology are that this earth is now two thousand million years old, and that the biologist studies mostly that which exists today."

"Variety can destroy variety."

"The brilliant British psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and mathematician Ross Ashby was one of the pioneers in early and mid-phase cybernetics and thereby one of the leading progenitors of modern complexity theory. Not one to take either commonly used terms or popular notions for granted, Ashby probed deeply into the meaning of supposedly self-organizing systems. At the time of the following article, he had been working on a mathematical formalism of his homeostat, a hypothetical machine established on an axiomatic, set theoretical foundation that was supposed to offer a sufficient description of a living organism's learning and adaptive intelligence. Ashby's homeostat had a small number of essential variables serving to maintain its operation over a wide range of environmental conditions so that if the latter changed and thereby shifted the variables beyond the range where the homeostat could safely function, a new 'higher' level of the machine was activated in order to randomly reset the lower level's internal connections or organization... Like the role of random mutations during evolution, if the new range set at random proved functional, the homeostat survived, otherwise it expired..."

"Its importance is that if R[egulator] is fixed in its channel capacity, the law places an absolute limit to the amount of regulation (or control) that can be achieved by R, no matter how R is re-arranged internally, or how great the opportunity in T. Thus the ecologist, if his capacity as a channel is unchangeable, may be able at best only to achieve a fraction of what he would like to do. This fraction may be disposed in various ways —he may decide to control outbreaks rather than extensions, or virus infections rather than bacillary — but the quantity of control that he can exert is still bounded. So too the economist may have to decide to what aspect he shall devote his powers, and the psychotherapist may have to decide what symptoms shall be neglected and what controlled."

"[Constraint] is a relation between two sets, and occurs when the variety that exists under one condition is less than the variety that exists under another."

"When a constraint exists advantage can usually be taken of it."

"The fundamental questions in regulation and control can be answered only when we are able to consider the broader set of what it might do, when “might” is given some exact specification."

"Further, as every law of nature implies the existence of an invariant, it follows that every law of nature is a constraint."

"As shorthand, when the phenomena are suitably simple, words such as equilibrium and stability are of great value and convenience. Nevertheless, it should be always borne in mind that they are mere shorthand, and that the phenomena will not always have the simplicity that these words presuppose."

"The concept of "variety" [is] inseparable from that of "information.""

"[A] famous photograph... showing McCulloch (1898–1969) and Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) with British Cyberneticians Ross Ashby (1903–1972) and Grey Walter (1910–1977), first appeared in de Latil (1953) with the caption "The four pioneers of Cybernetics get together in Paris", and encapsulates a view of the development of cybernetics that has slowly become more accepted: that there were important British contributions from the outset."

"There comes a stage, however, as the system becomes larger and larger, when the reception of all the information is impossible by reason of its sheer bulk. Either the recording channels cannot carry all the information, or the observer, presented with it all, is overwhelmed. When this occurs, what is he to do? The answer is clear: he must give up any ambition to know the whole system. His aim must be to achieve a partial knowledge that, though partial over the whole, is none the less complete within itself, and is sufficient for his ultimate practical purpose"

"Cybernetics treats not things but ways of behaving. It does not ask “what is this thing?” but “what does it do?”... It is thus essentially functional and behaviouristic. Cybernetics deals with all forms of behavior in so far as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible. The materiality is irrelevant... The truths of cybernetics are not conditional on their being derived from some other branch of science. Cybernetics has its own foundations."

"Cybernetics is likely to reveal a great number of interesting and suggestive parallelisms between machine and brain and society. And it can provide the common language by which discoveries in one branch can readily be made use of in the others... [There are] two peculiar scientific virtues of cybernetics that are worth explicit mention. One is that it offers a single vocabulary and a single set of concepts suitable for representing the most diverse types of system... The second peculiar virtue of cybernetics is that it offers a method for the scientific treatment of the system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be ignored. Such systems are, as we well know, only too common in the biological world!"

"The most fundamental concept in cybernetics is that of "difference", either that two things are recognisably different or that one thing has changed with time. Its range of application need not be described now, for the subsequent chapters will illustrate the range abundantly. All the changes that may occur with time are naturally included, for when plants grow and planets age and machines move some change from one state to another is implicit. So our first task will be to develop this concept of "change", not only making it more precise but making it richer, converting it to a form that experience has shown to be necessary if significant developments are to be made."

"Cybernetics was defined by Wiener as “the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine” — in a word, as the art of steermanship, and it is to this aspect that the book will be addressed. Co-ordination, regulation and control will be its themes, for these are of the greatest biological and practical interest. We must, therefore, make a study of mechanism; but some introduction is advisable, for cybernetics treats the subject from a new, and therefore unusual, angle... The new point of view should be clearly understood, for any unconscious vacillation between the old and the new is apt to lead to confusion."

"Every stable system has the property that if displaced from a state of equilibrium and released, the subsequent movement is so matched to the initial displacement that the system is brought back to the state of equilibrium. A variety of disturbances will therefore evoke a variety of matched reactions."

"The primary fact is that all isolated state-determined dynamic systems are selective: from whatever state they have initially, they go towards states of equilibrium. These states of equilibrium are always characterised, in their relation to the change-inducing laws of the system, by being exceptionally resistant."

"By a state of a system is meant any well-defined condition or property that can be recognised if it occurs again. Every system will naturally have many possible states."

"Many workers in the biological sciences — physiologists, psychologists, sociologists — are interested in cybernetics and would like to apply its methods and techniques to their own specialty. Many have, however, been prevented from taking up the subject by an impression that its use must be preceded by a long study of electronics and advanced pure mathematics; for they have formed the impression that cybernetics and these subjects are inseparable. The author is convinced, however, that this impression is false. The basic ideas of cybernetics can be treated without reference to electronics, and they are fundamentally simple; so although advanced techniques may be necessary for advanced applications, a great deal can be done, especially in the biological sciences, by the use of quite simple techniques, provided they are used with a clear and deep understanding of the principles involved. It is the author’s belief that if the subject is founded in the common-place and well understood, and is then built up carefully, step by step, there is no reason why the worker with only elementary mathematical knowledge should not achieve a complete understanding of its basic principles. With such an understanding he will then be able to see exactly what further techniques he will have to learn if he is to proceed further; and, what is particularly useful, he will be able to see what techniques he can safely ignore as being irrelevant to his purpose."

"The invasion of psychology by cybernetics is making us realize that the ordinary concepts of psychology must be reformulated in the language of physics if a physical explanation of the ordinary psychological phenomena is to become possible. Some psychological concepts can be re-formulated more or less easily, but others are much more difficult, and the investigator must have a deep insight if the physical reality behind the psychological phenomena is to be perceived"

"If intellectual power is to be developed, we must somehow construct amplifiers for intelligence — devices that, supplied with a little intelligence, will emit a lot."

"Two main lines are readily distinguished. One already well developed in the hands of von Bertalanffy and his co-workers, takes the world as we find it, examines the various systems that occur in it - zoological, physiological, and so on - and then draws up statements about the regularities that have been observed to hold. This method is essentially empirical. The second method is to start at the other end. Instead of studying first one system, then a second, then a third, and so on, it goes to the other extreme, considers the set of all conceivable systems and then reduces the set to a more reasonable size. This is the method I have recently followed."

"During the last few years it has become apparent that the concept of "machine" must be very greatly extended if it is to include the most modern developments. Especially is this true if we are studying the brain and attempting to identify the type of mechanism that is responsible for the brain’s outstanding powers of thought and action. It has become apparent that when we used to doubt whether the brain could be a machine, our doubts were due chiefly to the fact that by ‘‘machine’’ we understood some mechanism of very simple type. Familiar with the bicycle and the typewriter, we were in great danger of taking them as the type of all machines. The last decade, however, has corrected this error. It has taught us how restricted our outlook used to be; for it developed mechanisms that far transcended the utmost that had been thought possible, and taught us that ‘‘mechanism’’ was still far from exhausted in its possibilities. Today we know only that the possibilities extend beyond our farthest vision."

"[T]he concept of “”, so simple and natural in certain elementary cases, becomes artificial and of little use when the interconnexions between the parts become more complex. When there are only two parts joined so that each affects the other, the properties of the feedback give important and useful information about the properties of the whole. But when the parts rise to even as few as four, if every one affects the other three, then twenty circuits can be traced through them; and knowing the properties of all the twenty circuits does not give complete information about the system. Such complex systems cannot be treated as an interlaced set of more or less independent feedback circuits, but only as a whole. For understanding the general principles of dynamic systems, therefore, the concept of feedback is inadequate in itself. What is important is that complex systems, richly cross-connected internally, have complex behaviours, and that these behaviours can be goal-seeking in complex patterns."

"What is the use of ultra-stable systems which have the property that if you subject them to some influence, they change to an equilibrium state but don't even remember where they were? Warren McCulloch was a great fan of Ashby, and so finally I asked him, "Well, why do you think this is so important?" And he said, "Because he explains it so clearly." I went back and read Design for a Brain again and couldn't but agree with McCulloch that Ashby had managed to explain something more clearly than everyone else put together. The fact that the systems didn't do anything was a little bit disappointing, but that was as nothing compared to the clarity. So, if you want to explain something, you should read Design for a Brain and use that as a model for your next paper."

"Every isolated determinate dynamic system, obeying unchanging laws, will ultimately develop some sort of organisms that are adapted to their environments."

"“Frankly Jess, on the grand scale—” “You can’t think on the grand scale. You have to think on the small scale. Otherwise no-one’d ever do anything.”"

"That’s almost like the daft things you believe when you’re really little, like I use to believe I could fly. I believed it for years, but it had to be kept secret. I knew if I ever told anyone or showed it off to anyone, I’d lose the power. And if I doubted it, and tried it out just to see, I’d lose the power — so I didn’t. I believed in it. I knew I would be able to fly when there really was a need. Which, fortunately for me, there never was."

"I thought it was normal, that’s the thing. When you’re little you think everything is normal. If your mother had a pointed head and green ears you’d think it’s normal. Only when you grow up do you realise that not everybody is like that. Gradually you can even come to learn that the time you are living in is strange too, that it hasn’t always been like this. The more you feel uncomfortable and unconfident and want to find a way to be like everyone else and fit in, the more normality runs away from you because there isn’t any such thing. Or if there is, you have to find someone else who’ll agree with you what it is. Which I seem singularly unable to do."

"But naturally people fussed and objected like they always do when someone tries to do something positive."

"Every other method of resolving this difference of opinion has failed. We are reduced to violence, which is the last resort."

"“If you opt out, you don’t change anything.” “Why should I run round helping to get power for a group of idiots who’ll end up just as dangerous as the ones already in power?” You really don’t think anyone can make things better?” “No. What’s going to happen will happen.”"