ICEBreaker 002 - Excession

Whoops!  Somehow the details of an Excession - an Unknown Unknown - got cut from Episode 36.  Fans of Irony will be enjoying this, I'm sure.  Kick back for another Icebreaker in this bonus episode, an addendum to Nescience and Excession, with an actual explanation of the thing that was in the title.

Transcript

In a recent episode of the ImplausiPod, we talked about the idea of unknown unknowns, a concept that became more widely known due to statements made by Donald Rumsfeld in the early 2000s, and the concept of the unknown unknown, that Excession, is so powerful that I forgot to include a detailed explanation in the podcast itself.

Whoops, my bad, as our people say: d'oh. This was kindly pointed out to me in an email from a listener of the podcast, so, thank you, much appreciated, and I confirmed it with a Control F on the transcript of the show, finding that the word Excession only appeared in the title itself, which was not my objective.

I don't know if the concept of an Excession, an unknown unknown, is behaving a whole lot like The Silence from Doctor Who or, Forgetmenot, from the X Men comic books, but the irony of the whole situation is not lost. Regardless, we'll get into the explanation here in a quick bonus episode that kind of revives the Icebreaker format that I tried out about two years ago.

An unknown unknown is something that we don't know we don't know. It's outside of our awareness, outside of our scope, our frame of knowledge, our context, or even our ability to observe or intuit. And that's exactly what an Excession is. It's an outside of context problem. It is more than simply a black swan event, it is by definition something that is unknowable.

I first encountered the term accession in the context of the sci fi novel of the same name by Scottish author Iain M. Banks. Excession was originally published in 1996 and is the fifth installment in Banks' Culture series of sci fi novels, and is perhaps my favorite book in the series and one of my favorite books of all time.

Within the novel, the AI minds that are part of the culture and control the ships discover something completely outside their frame of reference, something from outside the known universe, perhaps. The appearance of this Excession in the story demands immediate reaction, so what would you do if you run into something that's completely outside your reality?

Further observation? Marshaling resources? Outright flight or fight? I mean, ask yourself, what would you do if you're walking through the forest and encounter something for which you have no frame of reference? You might freak out a little bit, especially if you think, you know, you're master of the universe and you know everything that's to be known.

But the big takeaway, and here's a bit of a spoiler for a 30 year old novel, though I do suggest you give it a read, it's fantastic, is that an Excession might be so detached from your frame of reality that the best solution is just to let it pass on by. Because it's an outside of context problem, it's an unknown unknown, you don't know that that's the best solution until after letting it do its thing.

It could destroy your universe as well, so how do you react? An Excession becomes an inciting incident because the very presence of an Excession changes your worldview, the context for everything that comes after. Because before your model of the world didn't have this thing in it and now Afterwards it must account for it.

It's like the prompt for a Kuhnian paradigm shift that occurs within our sciences. So if you encounter an Excession, well, welcome to the wider and wilder universe. You now know a little bit more than you did before.

Now you might be asking yourself, why Excession to describe an unknown unknown? Well, one, I really like the word, so I want to find an excuse to use it more often. But two, it helps provide some distinction between that idea of Nescience that we discussed before. Nescience, the act of not knowing, could describe the known unknowns as well as the unknown unknowns.

But if we break it down this way, so that nescience is restricted to just the known we have an intentional act of not knowing something. Excession fills that gap and provides something that encompasses our unknown unknowns, those things that are completely outside of our context. So that's it, we needed a name for it, and naming things that positivist empiricist act of structuration - of providing a structure for things - helps us understand our world a little bit better by having a name for something. We don't necessarily have to speak in metaphor or analogy even though those can still be present and by using something unique and distinctive it allows us to separate this from other things that might be confusing so Excession The Unknown Unknown.

Use it wisely. Use it on social media. Tell your family, tell your friends, and tell people about the Implausipod Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. This episode is a bonus episode and still licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license. We'll be back in a few days with a full episode and a further look at Soylent Culture.

Until then, take care, have fun.