Hilgartner paper presented in Baden-Baden. (Membership Page).

Longtime ISGS member and GS scholar, Dr. C. Andrew Hilgartner, recently attended this year's meeting of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, which took place in Baden-Baden, July 29-August 3, 2002. There he presented an invited paper, entitled "Languaging for Survival."

"The invitation came both from the president of that organization, George E. Lasker, Professor Emeritus at Windsor University, and from Professor Wictor Adamkiewicz of the Technical Institute of Gdansk, Poland," Dr. Hilgartner told us recently.

"This invitation appears to have come about from previous contact. Professor Adanikiewicz attended the presentation which I gave at a meeting of another organization concerned with general systems theory, held in Liege, Belgium in August 2001. Another official of the Baden-Baden organization, Harry Schwarzlander, Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University, collaborated with me to revise the Liege paper, now entitled 'A Strictly Dynamic Notational Language For Science,' for publication in the Conference Proceedings of the Liege meeting. It will appear in the International Journal of Computing Anticipatory Systems."

Hilgartner's wife, Dr. Martha A. Bartter, of Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri, also prepared a paper for the Baden-Baden meeting and presented it immediately before Hilgartner's talk. Dr. Bartter's paper uses the frame of reference developed by Hilgartner, which provides a general theoretical framework for the biological sciences, to criticize Genetic Engineering. An abstract by Dr. Bartter describes this frame of reference:

In the most fundamental sense, all organisms stay alive through a single, vital process: they predict. Every organism survives in its environment by sensing its own needs, and predicting ways to fill those needs and ways to avoid harm. This ability has developed over several billion years as organisms transact with each other in their complex and ever-changing environments. If the organism's predicting fails, and it survives, it will throw out the unworkable guess and try again. Organisms which predict successfully and satisfy their physiological needs survive -- a little longer. If they survive long enough to reproduce, we deem them successful. Simple observation indicates that an almost infinite variety of organisms have succeeded in continuing to live.

The ability to predict with sufficient accuracy does not depend upon a static or even a stable environment. However, if the environment of our world behaved chaotically, so that predicting did not work, living organisms could not continue to exist. "Miracles" created by the "gods" of genetic engineering introduce chaos into this system, endangering predictability -- and survivability -- among microbes, plants, animals, and humans alike.

Hilgartner's long-term research project begins from Korzybski's central insight, which covertly posits a cosmos that has human observers in it, and overtly declares the logical construct of identity invalid. Hilgartner discloses a hidden untenable assumption -- a previously unnoticed usage of identity encoded in the generalized grammar, which underlies the tongues belonging to the western Indo-European (WIE) family of languages. This generalized grammar also underlies the specialized disciplines of the WIE tradition. Dr. Hilgartner holds that those who speak WIE languages, and those who practice Western disciplines, cannot help relying on that untenable assumption; and consequently cannot avoid making one survival-error after another.

"I first observed examples of these survival-errors, in myself-and-those-around-me, somewhere during the interval 1947-1950. In 1952, I came to a vivid insight concerning the ultimate consequences of such errors - self-annihilation of the culture and its members, and possibly, sterilization of the entire planet. Since then, I have spent virtually my entire research career, digging out, framing, asking and answering a pair of related questions: What do we assume that leads us to court -- actively seek -- species suicide and extinction and, perhaps, pan-biocide? And, what might we assume -- what alternative assumptions might we adopt -- that could in principle, and might in fact, support us to generate viable, sustainable, life-affirming ways for humans to live?

"Over the past few years, my collaborators and I have generated robust answers to both questions. As a result of this work, we humans now have a choice -- an alternative to self-annihilation. Will a sufficiently large proportion of today's humans examine this work with the care it requires? Will they bring themselves to understand the answers to those two questions, and the possibilities which they open up?

"More important even than that: Can we humans further develop the social chain reaction, which I have already initiated, and so reverse that deadly trend toward species suicide? My colleagues and I intend that our grandchildren's generation will have the opportunities to hold their grandchildren."

For more information on Hilgartner's work, and his discussions of a previously unnoticed usage of identity, go to www.hilgart.org or e-mail Dr. Hilgartner at [e-mail].

Please send me your news, care of ISGS, Box 728, Concord, CA 94522.

GREGORY SAWIN, EDITOR, MEMBERSHIP PAGE