Coherence
Chapter 1 - Worldview
Previous page: Attractor - Coherence - Next page: Life
Back to Book content or directly to Main Page or Worldview
.
Welcome to the Coherence page
.
Coherence is a process
.
The aim of all the elements of the 'free energy principle' - autonomy, active inference, surprise and attractors, is to achieve coherence with your existing worldview.
.
Key take-aways from the deep dive
- Your brain evolved to handle fragmented patterns
- Coherence is a state in which all your ideas fit together well so that they form a united whole
- Coherence is a precursor to consciouness
.
Deep dive
.
Definition
| Coherence is a state or situation in which all the parts or ideas fit together well so that they form a united whole. Someone's belief is true if and only if it is coherent with all or most of his or her other (true) beliefs. (1) |
| Content source | |
|---|---|
| (1) | Wikipediia 2024 - Coherence |
.
Coherence as a partial definition of consiousness
| Consciousness is a state of high coherence among modalities that rely intensely on implicit features of the environment and of the working brain itself. (2) |
| Content source | |
|---|---|
| (2) | The coherence definition of consciousness. - von der Malsburg, C - Cognition, computation, and consciousness (pp. 193–204). Oxford University Press |
.
Coherence and knowledge management
When you miss something, it bothers you that things don't hang together. Consider: "... give him...". In any language, that is a bothersome sentence. Something essential is missing here, and it rings an alarm bell in your brains. You go in search of an implied "what" and try to guess what will make the words all hang together into a complete thought.
Coherence is closely related to knowledge management. Dave Snowden formulated seven principles.
Knowledge can only be volunteered. It cannot be conscripted
You can't make someone share their knowledge because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can't determine if a senior partner has genuinely passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case.
We only know what we know when we need to know it
Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers, we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things, we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast, a computer would need to be rebooted.
In the context of real need, few people will withhold their knowledge
A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand, asking people to codify everything they know before a contextual enquiry will be refused (in practice, it's impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artefacts.
Everything is fragmented
We evolved to handle unstructured, fragmented, fine-granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the Internet or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However, creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns, not information.
Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success
When my young son burnt his finger on a match, he learned more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction could provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoiding failure has a more significant evolutionary advantage than imitating success. Attempting to impose best practice systems is flying in the face of over a hundred thousand years of evolution that says it is terrible.
The way we know things is not the way we report we know things
An increasing body of research data indicates that in the practice of knowledge, people use heuristics, past pattern matching, and extrapolation to make decisions, coupled with a complex blending of ideas and experiences in nanoseconds. Asked to describe how they decided after the event, they will tend to provide a more structured process-oriented approach that does not match reality. This has significant consequences for knowledge management practice.
We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down
This is probably the most important. The process of taking things from our heads to our mouths (speaking them) to our hands (writing them down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified.
| Content source |
|---|
| Rendering Knowledge - Dave Snowden - October 10, 2008 - Cynefin co. |
.
.