Page 182 - Deep Learning

Creative Insight Writ Large 165

A. F. Wilkins came up with the basic idea for what was then not yet radar; it
does not matter for chemistry exactly by what cognitive processes Mendelyiev
produced the first version of the periodic table; and it does not matter for the
computer industry example how the personal computer was first thought of.
It is the very ability to have novel ideas that has the power to trigger a causal
cascade upward though the system levels. The only property of insight that
punches through to the historical level is the very ability to create.
We should expect novel change mechanisms that have no counterpart
at the lower levels to appear at higher system levels. Maintaining a society
requires transmission across generations, a process that can either facilitate or
hinder change. Parenting and schooling are powerful ways of controlling the
perspective of the next generation, and to the extent that parents, teachers and
recognized authorities speak with a single voice, transmission will tend to sup-
press rather than disseminate novelties. Social mores and practices cover all
aspects of life, so there is no locus at which change could start, because every-
thing is subsumed under the status quo. Indeed, there are striking examples of
such continuity: Classical Egyptian civilization, medieval Europe and samurai
Japan replicated themselves over centuries, even millennia.
However, intergenerational transmission has a fatal twist: The members
of the transmitting generation eventually die. The important consequence is
that they lose control over what they transmitted. Texts that attempt to regu-
late life – the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, Emily Post’s Etiquette – are forever
reinterpreted. The larger the transmission slippage, the more the replace-
ment of one generation by another opens up possibilities for change. To men-
tion a single, arbitrarily chosen instance: To the generation of 1870, a union
between France and Germany would have seemed beyond unthinkable; today,
the European Union is a fact. As the members of each generation explore the
wiggle room left them by transmission slippage, society morphs.
To summarize, the pattern of alterations in mode and tempo recurs at
historical scales. Impasses due to the projection of past concepts, principles
and practices onto a current situation recur at every level of collectivity.
An impasse can take the form of a problem solver with a blank mind, an
engineering project stalled by a series of obstacles, a team wasting time in
meetings that are as endless as they are fruitless and a political stalemate that
causes one parliamentary crisis after another. The explanation of any par-
ticular period of stagnation must describe the cultural, social, economic and
political mechanisms by which individual concepts, principles and practices
are translated into collective practices, and these mechanisms vary from one
type of historical system to another. The explanation of how such a period