Precise behavior can emerge from imprecise knowledge

From The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman, page 54.

It is easy to show the faulty nature of human knowledge and memory. A common classroom exercise in the United States demonstrates that students cannot recall the pairing of letters and numbers on their telephones. One of my graduate students found that when professional typists were given caps for typewriter keys, they could not arrange them in the proper configuration. American students dial telephones properly, and all those typists could type rapidly and accurately. Why the apparent discrepancy between the precision of behavior and the imprecision of knowledge? Because not all of the knowledge required for precise behavior has to be in the head. It can be distributed - partly in the head, partly in the world, and partly in the constraints of the world. Precise behavior can emerge from imprecise knowledge for four reasons.

1. Information is in the world. Much of the information a person needs to do a task can reside in the world. Behavior is determined by combining the information in memory (in the head) with that in the world.

2. Great precision is not required. Precision, accuracy, and completeness of knowledge are seldom required. Perfect behavior will result if the knowledge describes the information or behavior sufficiently to distinguish the correct choice from all others.

3. Natural constraints are present. The world restricts the allowed behaviors. The physical properties of objects constrain possible operations: the order in which parts can go together and the ways in which an object can be moved, picked up, or otherwise manipulated. Each object has physical features - projections, depressions, screwthreads, appendages - that limit its relationships to other objects, operations that can be performed to it, what can be attached to it, and so on.

4. Cultural constraints are present. In addition to natural, physical constraints, society has evolved numerous artificial conventions that govern acceptable social behavior. These cultural conventions have to be learned, but once learned they apply to a wide variety of circumstances.

Because of these natural and artificial constraints, the number of alternatives for any particular situation is reduced, as are the amount and specificity of knowledge required within human memory.

This seems to me linked in some fashion to the thoughts of Steven Johnson in his book Where Good Ideas Come From but also mentioned in his recent article, The Genius of the Tinkerer.

Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses. The evolutionary theorist Francois Jacob captured this in his concept of evolution as a "tinkerer," not an engineer; our bodies are also works of bricolage, old parts strung together to form something radically new. "The tires-to-sandals principle works at all scales and times," Mr. Gould wrote, "permitting odd and unpredictable initiatives at any moment—to make nature as inventive as the cleverest person who ever pondered the potential of a junkyard in Nairobi."

You can see this process at work in the primordial innovation of life itself. Before life emerged on Earth, the planet was dominated by a handful of basic molecules: ammonia, methane, water, carbon dioxide, a smattering of amino acids and other simple organic compounds. Each of these molecules was capable of a finite series of transformations and exchanges with other molecules in the primordial soup: methane and oxygen recombining to form formaldehyde and water, for instance.

Think of all those initial molecules, and then imagine all the potential new combinations that they could form spontaneously, simply by colliding with each other (or perhaps prodded along by the extra energy of a propitious lightning strike). If you could play God and trigger all those combinations, you would end up with most of the building blocks of life: the proteins that form the boundaries of cells; sugar molecules crucial to the nucleic acids of our DNA. But you would not be able to trigger chemical reactions that would build a mosquito, or a sunflower, or a human brain. Formaldehyde is a first-order combination: You can create it directly from the molecules in the primordial soup. Creating a sunflower, however, relies on a whole series of subsequent innovations: chloroplasts to capture the sun's energy, vascular tissues to circulate resources through the plant, DNA molecules to pass on instructions to the next generation.

The scientist Stuart Kauffman has a suggestive name for the set of all those first-order combinations: "the adjacent possible." The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. In the case of prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup. Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside that circle of possibility. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven't visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn't have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you'll have built a palace.

Basic fatty acids will naturally self-organize into spheres lined with a dual layer of molecules, very similar to the membranes that define the boundaries of modern cells. Once the fatty acids combine to form those bounded spheres, a new wing of the adjacent possible opens up, because those molecules implicitly create a fundamental division between the inside and outside of the sphere. This division is the very essence of a cell. Once you have an "inside," you can put things there: food, organelles, genetic code.

The march of cultural innovation follows the same combinatorial pattern: Johannes Gutenberg, for instance, took the older technology of the screw press, designed originally for making wine, and reconfigured it with metal type to invent the printing press.

And I would link these ideas with the idea that the structure and nature of a language can facilitate or retard the capacity to comprehend the world. I wonder whether the blossoming of innovation and productivity in the Classical Liberal world/Age of Enlightenment/Anglosphere was not in some way a function of the efficiency of the English language married to its amoeba-like tendency to absorb new words and concepts from other languages lending it not only efficiency and precision but also adjacent possibilities. The richer the population of disparate concepts, the greater the probability that there will be serendipitous leaps forward in productivity and conceptual discovery, precision, and exploitation.

Competence without comprehension (tomorrow) and precise behavior from imprecise knowledge. Paradoxes galore. Chesterton would have had something to say.