In “The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name,” Heinz Von Foerster describes the concept of “triviality” at great length. To be trivial is to be stable, predictable, in many ways predetermined. Foerster gives the example of an operator which takes any value received and multiplies by two.
These machines become trivial as a function of their synthetic-ness; they are necessarily constructed which as a function creates a determinable, trivial result.
The problem emerges when one ventures beyond the realm of the synthetic. Triviality, Foerster argues, is a result of controlled and artificial creation, not the universe acting and reacting within and without. The operators in this case are always reacting and changing. To create a trivial system out of any not created to be such necessitates “…cut[ing] a piece out of the world…say[ing] how it will proceed or how it operates, [then formulating] the analytical problem for units or phenomena that are cut out of the world.” In doing this, one excises all which is non-determinable from the system, and thus creates what is essentially an entirely new system, practically unrelated to the original it derives elements from.
Foerster goes on to specify this trivial/non-trivial dichotomy continues down into the smallest cell, the most infinitesimal units of being. In his conception of the nerve cell, contrasting to the conception that cells respond and fire when a requisite amount of stimulus is received, his conception dictates that, for each stimulus received, the threshold for reaction changes; where one amount of stimulus generates reaction once, “…the next time the impulse reaches the cell and it says, ‘Not enough.’”
Foerster’s interlocutor creates the image of two opposing daemons, “… one extreme we have Laplace’s daemon, who tells us that the universe is built as a trivial machine: ‘Give me any point, and I will tell you the future and the past.’ At the other extreme is Foerster’s daemon, saying, ‘Everything is nontrivial. Give me any point— and here I will stay, I can go no further.’”
Triviality is, on the whole, the complete invention of a certain kind of civilization and society, one where certain outcomes are deemed desirable and others to be avoided and discouraged. It is not a reckoning with the world as it is but a manipulation into the world as we want it. A dealing with the non-trivial is a reminder of the ways we are not masters of our domain, but collaborators in a reality that is constructing and dismantling past, future and present at every moment.