"The more developed and detailed a branch of knowledge becomes, the smaller are the differences in opnion." (Fleck, p83)
Ludwig Fleck observed this feature of network phenomena 80 years ago. He made many similar observations and even outlined a basic network theory, although he certainly called it nothing of the sort.
Network theory did exist before the internet, and as far back as Fleck, in fields such as electronics and biology (although it was likely called graph theory at the time). But it was the linking of webpages and eventually the linking of people that made it so ubiquitous a phenomena in our world of today.
A book called
Linked comes out in 2002, right at the same time as
Friendster. By that summer, everyone knew the difference between "links" and "nodes" (although
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon circa late 1990's already gave people a very simple and accessible understanding of the idea.)
By the year 2016, the world would come to grips with the more nuanced (and insidious) features of the social network and digitally-mediated socialization in general, i.e., polarization, filter bubbles, echo chambers, etc.
Fleck explored the formation of a scientific fact. He studied the development of the idea of Syphilis, and found that over time, as the facts became clear and the idea crystallized, divergent views became less and less, concentrating on a unified theory.
He describes in great detail the way an idea developed from a vague ambiguity to a crystal clear and consensual episteme. For one, he turns to the use of "slogans", referring to the terms used in science such as "Deep Learning", or "Microbiome", and says that they have magical power:
"Whenever such a term [a slogan] is found in a scientific text, it is not examined logically, but immediately makes either enemies or friends." (p43)
Enemies and friends are polar opposites. So one of the ways in which the theory finds its unification, is by using a means to quickly send scientific texts into one of two directions, or into one of two piles, thereby organizing all the facts. Fleck's slogans are like codes embedded into a text to quickly determine which pile it should be thrown into. Eventually, one of those piles will be the winner.
You may recognize Fleck's "slogans" in their contemporary versions, such as metadata
hashtags and coded
dogwhistles. These keywords and codewords signal to people which side the idea* is on, and are used as a shorthand to identify text as immediately good or bad, but nowhere in between. It should be noted here that Fleck didn't give humans free will in his networks; they do not "examine logically", but instead follow the algorithm embedded in the network.
*I would love to call the author/idea a meme, but the word has lost its 1970's meaning in light of 21st century memetic engineering affronts, especially by coordinated inauthentic entities.
By this initial identification, the process of polarization is amplified and reinforced, and we end up with the
echo chambers and f
ilter bubbles that define socialization and the propagation of information in our contemporary society.
Later, Fleck goes way deeper into the dynamics of information propagation, describing in detail the way thoughts move throughout the scientific body, the noosphere of science, the "thought collective" as he called it.
Image source: Lund University Sweden, Faculty of Engineering, Course in Network Dynamics.
Network Dynamics
"New junctions [of trains of thought] are produced time and again and the old ones displace one another. This network in continuous fluctuation is called reality or truth." (p79)
"It is as if with the increase of the number of junction points, free space were reduced. It is as if more resistance were generated, and the free unfolding of ideas were restricted." (p83-84)
Fleck describes the facts about Syphilis as they move throughout the network. He calls this network the thought collective, and describes its purpose as a means of constraining, inhibiting and determining the way of thinking.
But I have to argue, do we say that the blood vessels constrain or inhibit the flow of blood? Differing from Fleck, I would say the thought collective
is the network. It
is the exchange of ideas. It doesn't inhibit, it facilitates. (~p159)
What inhibits is the spatial boundaries, which can also be thought of as the number of dimensions in the network. The facts (about Syphilis for example) are points within a space which we could call "Syphilis", but which may be called more generally the noosphere, to choose a term. Thoughts evolve and replicate their positions as they advance towards the truth (about the disease), all the while reconfiguring the network in noospheric space (Syphilis space).
The restrictions are set by the society's ability to handle the truth. As the truth becomes ever-faceted, and more complex, so does the network. The network does have limitations; so does our circulatory system in delivering blood to cells (a network bound by the three dimensions of the body), the highway system for delivering things and people (two dimensions). So the thought collective is bound in its ability to deliver facts to a society, and this by
n dimensions, although I can't tell you what
n is. Maybe it's the number of people, maybe it's the number of epistemological units. Maybe it is simply the amount of different ideas about the same thing that a homogenous group of people can maintain at once.
At any given time, a network can only process so many facts. And yet truth is a moving target.
The only way to proceed is to force another dimension, another direction in thought. The paradigm shifts, catalyzes, and the final crystallization of the theory is formed. All of its dimensions are then flattened, and become a single point in higher dimensional space.
I cannot read Fleck's "unfolding of ideas" without seeing the unfolding of network dimensions in a fractal space; it wants to unfold and evolve, but restrictions become increasingly rigid, the rules develop sub-rules and ad infinitum, until they become airtight, and cancel any new idea that might come along.
In the same way that fractalization is a way to cram more stuff into the limits of dimensions available, the ultimate endpoint is the adding of an extra dimension entirely, or rather the collapsing of the previous dimensions, a dimension-reduction that allows more information into the same amount of space.
And what does this look like: Note the line drawings below; they are one dimensional lines, but drawn in a way that could eventually appear to fill the entire two-dimensional space to the point they might appear as a single two-dimensional object. But it only appears that way, the line instead develops more crinkles, rules and sub-rules and sub-sub rules.
 |
| 1-D to 2-D |
 |
| 1-D to 2-D |
 |
| 2-D to 3-D |
Still they would
appear to take on the identity of a solid two-dimensional object. Your blood vessels do this in order to try and get oxygen to as many parts of your body as efficiently as possible, to fill their entire three-dimensional vessel with the least amount of space necessary. This is the same for tree branches and highways and basically anything else that carries things or communicates ideas.
Esoteric vs Exoteric
Marching on, now that we have seen how Fleck's network behaves, we can get into the details. This is the part that begins to push the edge of what we know even today about networks.
According to Fleck, esoteric and exoteric are the two types of thought collective networks, one made of experts (eso-) and one of laymen (exo-). Scientific fact permeates from the eso- to the exo- and then reverses as feedback, so the process of social consolidation creates the facts and the knowledge. The most advanced states leave no room for differences of opinion.
But how do we explain
anti-vax phenomena? The concepts of disease, infection, immunity, etc, have already been fully-formed as bodies of scientific knowledge. Yet, as they traverse the larger exoteric networks of general society, they seem to come undone.
Perhaps what we are seeing is a network that is always trying to grow, and once it becomes too tight in its thought space, it needs to split in order to keep growing? Not the scientific theories of vaccines or disease, but the greater philosophical theories that allow science to be realized by the society as a whole.
Is anti-vaccination a feature or a bug of the network? And how would we know? It is certainly a threat to public health, just as syphilis once was; The global health body has declared it as such. Someone might easily say that it's a social problem, not a science problem. But if the purpose of vaccines are to get rid of infection, then they're not working regardless.
Let's take a quick look at a description about infowar and the anti-vax phenomenon:
"The [socialbot] campaign used sophisticated Twitter bots to amplify highly polarizing pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine messages, containing the hashtag #VaccinateUS..."
-"Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate". Broniatowski DA, Jamison AM, Qi S, AlKulaib L, Chen T, Benton A, Quinn SC, Dredze M (October 2018). American Journal of Public Health. 108 (10): 1378–84. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2018.304567.
Granted this is different than the pursuit of science; these particular socialbots are pursuing the opposite in fact. But this description echoes Fleck. Slogans (hashtags) categorize the messages so they can be organized (polarized) by the exoteric social network.
Socialbots, intelligentities, spread their information throughout the network not to inform but to take information away, I suppose, as to redistribute the network in Vaccine space, artificially forcing new dimensions into the debate that didn't get there from scientists, but anarchists (not sure what to call a malicious socialbot). On the receiving end, the misinformed hold a less-efficient Vaccine space in their mind. Fleck's Syphilis, on the other hand, is an esoteric network, where the senders and receivers are both scientists.
Perhaps it is the exoteric network of ordinary people, not the esoteric network of scientists, that is more susceptible to corruption in general. Speaking of corruption...
On the Expansion and Corruption of a Fact
The Sidereal Origin of Syphilis and the Development of Syphilogical Thought
-citing an Iwan Bloch in his 1901 Der Urspring der Syphilis (The Origin of Syphilis)
"Most authors assume that the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter under the sign of Scorpio and the house of Mars on 25.XI.1484 was the cause of the carnal scourge. ... The sign of Scorpio which rules the genitals, explains why the genitals were the first place to be attacked by the new disease." (p2)
This discussion on the origins of syphilis is a reminder that even in the esoteric network of specialized scientists, if you go back far enough, it could seem like a misinformation campaign. But Fleck describes this for us: We move away from "everyday experience ... to scientific specialization" (p82). This is all a part of the process, even astrological explanations had their rightful position in the configuration of early Syphilis space.
But calling back to anti-vaccination, we see movement from specialization back into the everyday, and the network must struggle to fit its new topography. The harmony of illusions can no longer be sustained.
***
The anti-vax story is another step in the evolution of disease control, and Fleck's ideas provide a great substrate for understanding this.
In the case of anti-vaccination, the disease has evolved a new method for infecting people -- namely the use of socialbots, e.g., socially malignant intelligentities, to infect the population's belief system. Which is another way of saying it is attacking the exoteric network itself, without which there is no esoteric network.*
*Granted, the anti-vaccination belief system began alongside vaccines themselves, thus long before the internet.
Viruses want to reproduce. Our immune systems try to stop them, but some figure out a way around that. We discover vaccines, and that works for a while. But then the virus figures out another way; it stops the vaccines from working through the use of misinformation. It attacks the esoteric network of public information and understanding of infectious disease, for example, or of science in general.
If it is not obvious, this is a tangent from Dawkins' memetics, where he looks at evolution from the point of view of the gene -- the s
elfish gene that wants to reproduce. In this case, it's the selfish virus, using socialbots to increase its chances of success. It is attacking the network itself, or from its point of view, reconfiguring the network to optimize its own existence.
Is it a natural process? Are mutations natural? Is disease natural? Does it sound like I'm permissive of socially malignant intelligentities (or a good contemporary term, "coordinated inauthentic behavior")? As long as acknowledgement does not equal permission.
But I would like to discover the error correcting codes hidden within Fleck's thought collective, that we might be able to withstand, or rather adapt to, our ever-evolving noospheric maelstrom.
Notes
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
Ludwig Fleck, 1935 (Switzerland).
Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton
Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn
Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn
Published by University of Chicago, 1979
Post Script
Great book by Geoffrey West, also check out the Santa Fe Institute:
Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies. Geoffrey West, 2017.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314049/scale-by-geoffrey-west/
Where it all starts:
Linked: The New Science of Networks. Albert-László Barabási, 2002.
http://barabasi.com/book/linked
Twitter bots for good: Study reveals how information spreads on social media
Sep 2017, phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-twitter-bots-good-reveals-social.html
Fleck describes the "marginal man" as cruscial for the exchange of ideas between different thought communities. This sounds to me like descriptions of fringe agents in network theory (the opposite of the hubs of the network), who are almost wholly responsible for intra-cluster transmission of novel ideas; see "The Strength of Weak Ties" by Mark Granovetter, 1973; he uses the word "marginal" and "liason" in similar ways to Fleck.
American Journal of Sociology. 78 (6): 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469.
On Free Will, Decision Making and Sovereign Awareness:
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2019/09/on-free-will-decision-making-and.html
On Memes and Misonformation:
Securing the Noosphere
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2017/10/securing-noosphere.html
Bose-Einstein Condensate, Fitnees Models, Scale-Free Networks, Preferential Attachment, Zipf's Law, Benford's Law, Stigler's Law of Eponymy:
Laws Metaphysical
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2013/02/laws-meta-physical.html
A Bit On Networks
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-bit-on-networks.html
First mention of an internet meme; in this case Godwin refers to the his eponymous Law of Nazi Analogies as a counter-meme against the "comparing people to Nazis" meme found too often on usernet forums:
Meme, Counter-meme, Mike Godwin for WIRED, Oct 01, 1994.
https://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/
And to take the final paragraph, because it hasn't cooled down a bit since /94:
"While the world of the Net is filled with diverse critical thinkers who are ready to challenge self-indulgent or self-aggrandizing memes, we can't rely on net.culture's diversity and inertia to answer every bad meme. The Nazi-comparison meme has a peculiar resilience, in part because of its sheer inflammatory power ("You're calling me a Nazi? You're the Nazi in this discussion!") The best way to fight such memes is to craft counter-memes designed to put them in perspective. The time may have come for us to commit ourselves to memetic engineering - crafting good memes to drive out the bad ones.
Otherwise, plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose."
[The more it changes the more it's the same]
