Chapter 23 5.1 What color is the chameleon on the mirror?

In the early 1970s, Stewart Brand posed the above puzzle to Gregory Bateson.Bateson and Norbert Wiener are the founders of modern cybernetics.Bateson had the most orthodox Oxford education and the most heretical profession.He filmed Balinese dancing in Indonesia; he studied dolphins; and he developed a practical theory of schizophrenia.In his sixties, Bateson taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara.There, his eccentric and brilliant views on mental health and the laws of evolution appealed to a holistic, heterocultural crowd. Stewart Brand was a student of Bateson and a legendary advocate of cyberneticholism. In 1974, Brand presented this chameleon koan in his Whole Earth Catalog magazine.Brand writes: "Once I had a discussion with Gregory Bateson, and both of us were obsessed with thinking about what the function of consciousness is, or whether consciousness has a function (referring to self-consciousness). He posed the question. We, being biologists, turned the conversation to the elusive chameleon. Gregory asserted that the chameleon would eventually stop at the midpoint of its color range; Because the guy trying every means to disappear from the world of his own image, he will try all kinds of protective colors endlessly."

Mirrors can form a wonderful realization of an information loop.Ordinary two mirrors placed opposite each other will produce a house of wonder effect, constantly reflecting an object image back and forth until it disappears in the infinite backtracking.Any information between the facing mirrors will not change its form no matter how it is reflected back and forth.So what if one of the mirrors had a chameleon-like reaction that could both reflect and produce images?This attempt to align yourself with your own mirror image constantly messes up your own mirror image.Is it possible that it will eventually settle into some kind of stable state that can be accurately described?

Bateson thinks the system—perhaps similar to self-awareness—would snap into a state of equilibrium achieved by the chameleon changing between extremes of color.Conflicting colors (or conflicting viewpoints in a society of human minds) compromise toward "midtones," as if it were a democratic vote.Brand, on the other hand, argues that any kind of balance is next to impossible, and that the adaptive system would wobble without direction or end.He guessed that the color change (of the chameleon) would fall into a chaotic state like Tai Chi Yin and Yang. The chameleon responds to changes in its own image as the human world responds to changes in fashion.Isn't fashion the hive mind's reaction to its own reflection, taken as a whole?

In an interconnected 21st century society, marketing is the mirror and all consumers are the chameleon.When you put the customer in the market, what color should he be?Does he settle down to some lowest common denominator—becoming an average consumer?Or is it always on a frantic oscillating swing trying to catch up to the mirror image of its own circular reflection? Fascinated by the depth of the chameleon mystery, Bateson continued to question his other students.One of the students, Gerald Hall, proposed a third hypothesis to explain the mirrored man's final color: "The chameleon would retain whatever color it was at the moment it entered the mirror's reflective area."

In my opinion, this is the most logical answer.The interaction between the mirror and the chameleon may be so close and fast that little chance of adaptation occurs.In fact, once a chameleon is in front of a mirror, it probably won't change its color at all, unless external triggers cause it to change color or its own color-changing program goes awry.Otherwise, the mirror-chameleon system would freeze in its initial state—whatever that color might be. For the mirror world of marketing, this third answer means freezing the consumer.Either he only buys the brand he originally used, or he doesn't buy anything at all.

Of course there may be other answers.When conducting interviews for this book, I periodically posed the chameleon mystery to my interviewees.Scientists see it as a classic case of adaptive feedback.Their answers are varied.Here are a few examples: Mathematician John Holland: Chameleons can change like a kaleidoscope!Due to the time lag, its color will flicker continuously.A chameleon can never settle on a certain color. Computer Scientist Marvin Minsky: A chameleon may have several eigenvalues ​​or characteristic colors, so it will regress to several colors.If it was green when you put it in, it might stay green; if it was red, it might stay red; and if you put it in when it was brown, it might turn green.

Naturalist Peter Warshall: Chameleons change color out of some sort of fear response, so it all depends on their emotional state.It may be frightened by its own reflection at first, but then takes it in stride; colors change with its mood. Putting a chameleon on a mirror seems like such an easy experiment, so I figured even a writer could do it.So I set out to experiment.I made a little box, put a mirror in it, and bought a color-changing lizard to put in it.Although Brand's puzzle has been around for 20 years, as far as I know, this is the first time anyone has actually tried it. The lizard lying on the mirror was stable in one color—green, the tender green of new leaves on spring trees.It returns to this color every time I put it in.But it may stay brown for a while before going back to green.The color it rests on in the mirror box seems to be a different color than the dark brown it likes to stay out of the box.

Although I have performed this experiment, I am not very confident in the results of the experiment, mainly due to the following important reasons: I used not a real chameleon, but a chameleon, which can change colors than a real chameleon. Much less. (Real chameleons cost hundreds of dollars and come with a dedicated terrarium, which I don't want to buy.) More importantly, based on the few literature I've read about , there are other reasons why chameleons change color besides changing color according to the background color.As Warshall said, they also change color in response to fear.They are indeed quite scary.Chameleons are reluctant to enter the mirror box.The green color shown in the box is the same color it adopts when it is scared.The chameleon on the mirror may simply be in a constant state of fear—its own strangeness magnified and flooding its surroundings.If I was in the mirror box, I would definitely go crazy too.Finally, there's the observer's problem: I can only see the lizard if I put my face close to the mirror box and poke the blue eyes and red nose deep into the chameleon's territory.This behavior harassed the lizard, but it was unavoidable.

It may have to wait until the future, using real chameleons, and conducting more comparative experiments, to really crack this mystery.But I still have my doubts.True chameleons, like chameleons, are large animals that change color for more than one reason.The chameleon-on-the-mirror mystery is probably best kept in its idealized form only as a thought experiment. Even from a theoretical point of view, the "true" answer depends on specific factors such as the reaction time of the chameleon's color cells, their sensitivity to changes in hue, and whether there are other factors affecting the signal.All of these are important values ​​that are often found in feedback loops.If someone can change these parameters on the chameleon, he can demonstrate all the possibilities of the chameleon changing color on the mirror mentioned above one by one.In fact, this is exactly how engineers design control circuits to guide a spacecraft or control a robotic arm.By adjusting parameters such as lag length, signal sensitivity, and decay rate, they can tune a system to achieve a wide-area equilibrium state (such as keeping the temperature between 68 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit), or continuously change , or some dynamic equilibrium point in between.

We see this happening in networked marketing as well.Sweater manufacturers try to use cultural mirrors to stimulate consumers’ desire to buy and sell different styles of sweaters; while dishwasher manufacturers try to gather feedback from consumer behavior on a few common divisors. That is, launching only a few dishwashers because it is much more expensive to launch multiple dishwashers than a wide variety of sweater styles.The number and speed of feedback signals determine the type of market. The important thing about the chameleon-on-mirror puzzle is that the lizard and the mirror form a whole. "Lizard attributes" and "mirror attributes" are fused into a more complex attribute - "Lizard Mirror attributes" - which behaves differently than either a single chameleon or a single mirror.

Medieval life was extremely depersonalizing.The average person has only a vague conception of his own image.Their cognition of independent personality and social identity is achieved through participation in religious rituals and following traditions, not through behavioral reflection.In contrast, today's world is a world full of mirror images.We have ubiquitous television cameras, daily polls (“Sixty-three percent of Americans are divorced”) that mirror to us every detail of our collective behaviour.Continuous paper records—bills, ratings, payroll, catalogs—help us establish our personal identities.In the not-too-distant future, widespread digitization will surely provide us with clearer, faster and more ubiquitous mirrors.Every consumer will be a reflection mirror and reflector, both cause and effect. The Greek philosophers were obsessed with the chain of causality, and studied how to trace the source of the causal chain until they found the original cause.This backward and backward path is the basis of Western logic, that is, linear logic.The lizard-mirror system exhibits a completely different kind of logic—a web of causal loops.In the field of recursive reflection, the event is not triggered by the chain of existence, but by a series of karma that reflects, bends, and mirrors each other like a fun house.Rather than saying that karma and control diverge from its source in a straight line, it is better to say that it expands horizontally, like a surging tide, releasing its influence in a tortuous and diffuse manner.The shallow water is noisy, but the deep pool has no waves; it seems that the relationship between all things subverts the concept of time and space. Computer scientist Danny Hillis has pointed out that computing—particularly network computing—presents a nonlinear domain of causality.He wrote: In the physical world, the influence of one thing on another decays as the time or space distance between the two increases.Therefore, we do not consider the influence of Mercury when we study the orbits of Jupiter's satellites.This is the fundamental principle underlying the interdependent pair of concepts of body and force.The limitation of the acting force is reflected in the finite speed of light, in the inverse square law of the field, and in the macro-statistical effects, such as the reaction speed and the speed of sound. In computing, or at least in the old paradigm of computing, a random little event can, and often does, have a random big impact.For example, a small program can erase all memory; a simple command can stop the host computer.There is no such concept as distance in computing science.No memory cell is less vulnerable than another. Control trajectories in natural ecosystems also diverge into the realm of causality.Control is not only scattered across space, but also gradually blurred over time.When the chameleon climbs onto the mirror, the karma that induces it to change color dissolves into a realm of self-circulation of cause and effect.The deduction of things does not travel in a straight line like an arrow, but spreads out like the wind.