Many years ago I read some advice to shoplifters suggesting that the convex mirrors that we still see around sometimes in convenience stores can be reversed in their intended purpose of dissuading thieves. Basically, the shoplifter can look into the mirror and tell when the clerk is momentarily distracted and use that information to make the steal.
The mirror goes both ways. That’s an example of what I call reflexivity. This is a word used in very specific ways in psychology, sociology and economics, but here I’m using it in a more common-sense way that won’t earn me tenure anywhere but might help explain some stuff.
And, just to be clear: I have never shoplifted anything, and I do not encourage that kind of thing. But I start with this example because these mirrors and how they work are a common enough part of our experience. There’s a deeper point as well, which we will see as we proceed. My thesis is this: Reflexivity is built into the very fabric of reality, and depending on the wisdom and intent of those interacting with it, it can lead to all kinds of outcomes.
Before we go on, if the word ‘reflexivity’ as I’m using it here is unfamiliar to you and you want to attach it to your vocabulary, you can connect it to the word ‘reflectivity’ and remember the mirror example, because reflexivity and reflectivity are related.
Here’s another example. Journalists are part of a given society’s ability to reflect on itself. They function as mirrors, sometimes even a bit like anti-theft mirrors, helping us see things that are going on that we otherwise might not see. Reporting sends signals to the public on everything from city council meeting deliberations to more in-depth investigative work on commercial fraud and official abuses of power. The public can then generate its own signals in response. That’s the idea.
However, in much the same way that a criminal mind can reverse the intended purpose of an antitheft mirror, some folks see the mirror of the journalist as an opportunity to send their own signal. That’s one reason that we see journalists being, at one extreme, imprisoned, tortured, or killed, or less extreme, maybe just fired, “cancelled” or deplatformed. However it goes, that’s using a mirror to send a signal. You can bet that the other mirrors in the profession of journalism will be more careful about what they allow themselves to reflect on and the signals they generate after that. Signals get squelched. Stories get killed.
That’s reflexivity, too. Everything can be a signal in this reflexive world.
But it gets a little stranger than that, even. Things can start to behave as they are treated. I know this probably sounds a little outlandish, but if you treat a pet dog like it’s dead, not giving it food, water, exercise or attention, there’s a good chance that it will in fact die. Oh but that would never happen! Okay then, if individually or collectively we start thinking of certain people or groups of people as crazy or worthless or dangerous or whatever, that has an effect also. The mind is a mirror, and pretty soon the world can very easily start to reflect the contents of the mind.
Okay, let’s take a more positive example. Suppose that you somehow picked up the idea that every act of service is an act of sovereign personal power. How’s that gonna play out? Once when I was teaching adult ed in Ann Arbor I said to the custodian who cleaned my classroom: “This chalkboard is always spotless. Amazing. So nice to use. Thank you.”
He replied with casual matter-of-factness: “Yes. Everything I do is my personal signature.” That piece of wisdom shows a deep understanding of reflexivity. He conceived of his work as a reflection of himself. He knew he was sending a signal. I picked up on that signal as it was reflected in my own experience. In fact, the signal went out in all kinds of different directions. It affected reality. That was in 1990. I’m writing about it now. It is still affecting reality.
So I’m hoping you see that this is kind of a biggie: Ideas affect reality.
For some reason, probably because I was thinking about how to convey these ideas, I just looked up the word ‘heuristic’ in an online dictionary. I most often use Merriam-Webster, because I find that the first definitions that come up on the most popular engine quite often leave out some of the meanings of a given word. Thing is, especially because I was looking it up online, my search for the definition became a signal that went somewhere and helped to define me as computer user for various interested entities. I’ll likely get online ads based on the picture being created of me as an individual from my search history.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting here wondering what it means that the easy, top-of-the-page search results so frequently leave out so many definitions, usages, and shades of meaning of so many words I look up. That’s sending a signal, too, and not a particularly flattering one to me. It feels like a dumbing-down. Could it be that our brains might be like that dog that was treated as if it were dead — or at least, inadequately fed and exercised? If so, seems likely our brains might start to die, or at least get incrementally weaker. So, what’s my response?
Well, the fact that I’m noticing the simplification of language does motivate me to look for better and fuller definitions of the words I use. This browsing history in turn sends a signal to the people who run the better online dictionary to keep doing what they do — I hope. Of course, my refusal to be satisfied with the easy definitions at the top of the search page is also a signal to the people who put out those definitions, and this signal then becomes part of my online profile as well.
As does me writing about all this.
Reflexivity.
As some of you may know, one of my areas of interest and advocacy is sustainable and local agriculture. As I continue to dig into this, the reflexivity principle seems to be at work in nearly every layer of the issues we face in modern food production. Just like a pet, if you treat your soil like it’s dead and doesn’t matter, you’ll probably kill it. It doesn’t usually die immediately from abuse, and unlike a dead pet there are ways to revive it, but until that happens, dead soil is a problem. Plants have trouble growing in dead soils — soils without a functioning community of microbes — for the same reason that we as people need healthy gut biology to obtain our nutrition.
Next thing you know the plants we expect to feed us can’t feed themselves. They get malnourished and weaker. Without knowing it, many of us are seeking our own nourishment from malnourished organisms. Starting to see the problem here? Taking it the next step, if we feed those malnourished, unhealthy plants to farm animals, what will happen is, we will start to see the animals themselves get weaker. Their lives will be shorter and they’ll be more prone to disease. With enough chemical or pharmaceutical intervention a farmer might be able keep these crops and farm animals alive long enough to get the crop off the field or get the animal, eggs, milk or whatever to market, but the hurry to do so just conceals the original problem, until someone gets sick from eating sick food. At that point the original mistake of treating life as if it doesn’t matter is more fully reflected in the mirror of cosmic reflexivity. Sick people and rising chronic illness statistics are sending a signal. It’s kind of important to pay attention to signals, sometimes. Ignoring signals also sends a signal. “La la la! I’m not listening!” It’s also worth paying attention when people start doing that.
Sometimes even the absence of a signal is a signal. Like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, where birds could not be heard signaling to one another as they normally do in the spring because they’d either moved away from an area where pesticides had been applied, or they died. That’s worth paying attention to also.
Thing is, though, “treating living things like they’re dead” might sound kind of extreme. But even the “moderate-sounding” operating principle that life is primarily a management problem also needs to be looked at. It seems reasonable at first: our activities in the world do benefit from some management. Bigger thing is, though, if we multiply this kind of managerial mindset across a population, we’re collectively feeding that signal into the mirror of our world, and as a culture pretty soon that’s how the world starts to look and feel to us: like a management problem. That’s how the principle of reflexivity works. Other ways of seeing, like looking for beauty or seeing the poetry in things, might tend get marginalized. Those signals don’t get through or get placed in a special box to be mostly ignored. And the world starts to reflect that.
Living in the midst of all this, such reflexivity stretched out over time can be tricky to spot. Still, sometimes an inner shift of attitude or focus or perspective can immediately — immediately! — open new doors and possibilities, for one person or even a larger group. That’s because not only does the world function as a many-leveled and multifaceted mirror, so do we. Change ourselves and we change the world. That’s easier said than done sometimes, but there it is.
Finally, to finish off Part 1 here I want to point out that, while some of this may sound a little esoteric, it’s really not. I once saw reflexivity at work in a herd of horses that got spooked by a coyote in the woods near their paddock. Thing was, I personally didn’t see the coyote but the owner of the horses did, and the only reason she looked was because she saw the horses in a state of agitation. In fact there might only have been one or two horses that actually saw or smelled that coyote — you might call them “the reporters” — but pretty soon the whole group was agitated and moving because they responded to one another’s anxiety signals. And that makes total sense. That kind of sensitivity is adaptive to horses, especially horses in the wild, because it means they can all rely on each other horse’s eyes and ears and nose and respond as a herd to a threat or predator once detected.
Well in case you haven’t noticed lately, people in groups can work much the same. And, like the shoplifter at the start of this essay, you can imagine how such reflexivity might be gamed and manipulated by folks with less than honorable intent, generating signals of various kinds and stifling other signals according to whatever might move people in a desired direction. Stock market or commodity panics or crazy run-ups can sometimes be initiated by well-positioned signal generators in the market, and this kind of thing makes an ordinary shoplifter seem quaint by comparison.
On the other hand, reflexivity and reciprocity can also propagate in ways that support and advance life. In fact, that’s how life works. A tree makes a cherry and a bird responds to its signaling color, flies over and gives it a taste. That sweetness is a signal, too. It means nutrition. So maybe the bird carries it off to eat. The seed falls, the bird either flies on or maybe back to the same tree. Eventually the bird has new baby birds, and the tree has new baby trees. Rinse and repeat. Life works.
Next in Part 2, we’ll look more closely at some of the moral and spiritual dimensions of all this. It gets pretty cool. Stay tuned.
Metaheuristics and hyperheuristics optimize algorithms, but humans still design and refine the generation process. Good news! What this says to me is that, in the end, we create our own reality. We traverse through our own creation, constantly modifying it. We're in control.