The Radical New Reality of Systems Science
Our Next
World View
The New 'Way That Things Happen'
From 'Action-->Reaction' to 'Interaction-->Agency'
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Science has Revealed a New 'Way that Things Happen'
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Chaotically turbulent activity can form spontaneous increases in ordering
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Increased organization can emerge unpredictably from less ordered conditions
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That basis of emergent ordering can synergistcally coalesce into self-ordering feedback networks
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These networks can become self-sustaining systems that act adaptively to promote their existence
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From cells to creatures, ecologies to economies, such complex adaptive systems create and maintain their 'selves'
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Such system behavior constitutes some form of purposefully self-directing 'network agency'
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Self-ordering and network agency arising from disorder pose a profoundly new 'way that things happen'
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It emerges in ways that cannot be fully analyzed or explained in mechanically deterministic terms
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There is a fundamentally mysterious impulse in nature that promotes self-organizing, self-directing systems
Seeking the Essential Insights of Complex Adaptive Systems Science
The objective of this web page is not to explain the technical details of complex system science. Those are staggeringly intricate and best presented by professional scientists in related fields of research. The aim here is to convey some essential aspects of what this application of scientific method has revealed over recent decades. We have not yet begun to incorporate its implications into our thinking and planning, much less its challenges to our common worldview -- or, 'how we assume the world works.' Those implications flow from evidence indicating that both the biosphere and society are not consequences of predictably deterministic causation alone -- or what we can term 'mechanistic processes.' It is now factual to claim there is another, remarkably different modality of order creation. And this 'new way things happen' has profound implications for our understanding of how our selves, our human systems, and the biosphere actually manifest. Further explanation of these phenomena is provided under the "New Science" tab of this site menu. Links to online sources for exploring the science are listed under the "References" tab.
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To begin this exploration, a sketch of the contrasts between our familiar sense of 'how things happen' and the more recently established one of emergent self-organization leading to selective system agency are provided below.
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Now, Two 'Ways that Things Happen'
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From Deterministic Actions to Emergently Self-Ordering Interactions
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Deterministic Causation: We are all familiar with the concept of deterministic actions, in which every event is caused by preceding ones. In this version of causation, changes occur in specific sequences, proportional to the preceding conditions or factors. The measurable states of matter and energy in each moment determine 'what can happen next,' thus how the world becomes arranged and ordered. Such progressively consistent dynamics are the '1,2,3' of 'every action has an equal and opposite reaction.' Thus the "output" of any system of actions will be equal to the "inputs." This has been the baseline story of 'how things happen' in our mechanistic modern worldview. It has led us to understand that all phenomena are effectively 'mechanical' processes, thereby being potentially controllable.
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​Emergent Self-Organization: However, the same reductive scientific method of quantitative and mathematical analysis that confirms such predictably deterministic causation has now revealed a very different 'way that things happen.' By studying the dynamical activities of larger scale systems, from weather to ecologies and biological bodies to societies, scientific reduction shows how these contexts manifest measurable changes in form that are not predictably deterministic. In these so-called "complex systems," deterministic actions interact with each other to become interdependent in ways that produce sudden synergistic increases of system organization -- changes that result in further unpredictable "properties" of those systems.
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​Reductive analysis can demonstrate that the 'out puts' of such systems, at a given moment, cannot be deterministically predicted from their preceding states, or the 'in puts.' They change in ways that are not entirely deterministic and that result in effects, or "properties," that cannot be explained entirely in reference to those of their component parts , nor from the identifiable actions occurring in or around them. Thus, their unpredictable ordering and novel properties have been termed "emergent," to distinguish these from predictably deterministic events. Further, once such systems become organized they can maintain their forms and functions, or re-organize into different forms and functions.
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Interdependencies are Different from Dependencies: This contrast between deterministic causation and emergent ordering can thus be understood simplistically as one between 'dependencies' and 'interdependencies.' Deterministic actions can be identified as sequences of proportional cause and effect. But emergent ordering derives from interdependent interactions that cannot be thusly sequenced as progressive individual changes. Interdependence here conveys a simultaneous interaction of factors and influences that 'happens all at once.' That non-sequential interaction is associated with the synergistic emergence of self-organizing relationships.
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​Emergent Self-Ordering through Networks of Interdependent Feedback: This new story of 'how things happen' gets ever stranger because it is evident that this emergent organization 'emerges' from less orderly conditions. Instead of one state of order determining the next, relatively turbulent, even chaotic conditions can give rise to sudden increases of more ordered patterns and relationships between parts. This cannot happen in deterministically mechanical systems. Such emergence of order from disorder is traced to actions that become interactively interdependent with each other. That involves the concept of "feedback." Here, influence or effects of actions upon each other 'feed back' recursively to generate interactions. Thus, sequences of events 'loop back' upon them selves and can then become ongoing networks of mutually modifying, interdependent feedback flows that occur both instantaneously and continuously, or concurrently, over time. As a result, there less distinguishable sequential causation within the system. Everything is effecting everything all at once.
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Progressive sequential change Recursive feedback influence Fully interactive feedback network
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​The formation of feedback networks can result in sudden syngergistic, inconsistent increases in patterned ordering. Here we become able to distinguish between progressively consistent dynamical events and inconsistently emergent ones.​
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These differences have to do with what are termed "linear and nonlinear dynamics." In linearly dynamical events, there is a predictably consistent 'trajectory' of 'what happens next.' But in nonlinear dynamical events, the 'trajectory' varies in a much less predictable manner. That contrast in 'how things happen' plays a primary role in 'how the world actually works.' In nonlinear dynamics, the 'order of things' can change exponentially, or in sudden inconsisten 'leaps.'
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Consequently, we must now think of systems, whether in weather or biology and society, in terms of emergently self-organizing feedback networks which are manifesting as mutually modifying, simultaneous interdependent interactions, in every instant and over time. Such interactivity necessarily involves considerable instability and disorder. Yet, that appears essential to the increased or sustained order that emerges from underlying disorder in a feedback network.
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Continually Emerging, Dynamically Self-Organizing, 'Wholes' that are 'More Than the Sum of Their Parts'
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​Somehow, through mutually influencing interactions, relative disorder becomes 'looped' into recursive networks, in ways that create increased organization, which can then sustain and even adapt itself. The generative creativity of underlying disorder is constrained into an overall system of relationships. In this manner, the parts of a system become interactively linked, from which emerges the relative 'whole' of the system. And such systems can then manifest unpredictably "complex adaptive behavior" that promotes their continued existence, as they interact with their external environments, by re-self-organizing to accommodate to changing factors.
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​Most importantly, the 'whole' of a system that emerges from its interdependently interacting parts typically manifests traits or properties that are not evident in the parts, nor could be predicted from the properties of the parts. Thus a "complex adaptive system" is measurably 'more than the sum of its parts.' So, the ordering of the system arises unpredictably from the interactions of its parts and its overall properties (its forms, functions, capacities, and behaviors) continually emerge from those interactions, and their inherent instability, over time.
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Self-Organizing Systems Create and Animate the World: From hurricanes to fish shoals and societies, emergently ordering interactive feed back networks create system forms, functions, and even adaptive behaviors that are continually emerging out of relatively disordered conditions. These complex systems exist because they are continually, actively, emerging from underlying, partly unstable, interactive feedback networks. That makes them fundamentally unpredictable. AND -- they are the 'agents' that create and order both the biosphere and human societies.
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The New Scientific Story of 'How Things Happen'
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​The Mysterious Ordering of Nearly Everything: From this knowledge arises the 'new scientific story' of 'how the world actually works.' Deterministic causation is inherent in phenomena, but so is unpredictably Emergent Self-Organization AND Selective System Agency. The trouble is, we can't fully explain how this happens, how ordering emerges unpredictably from deterministic events, and then goes on to sustain itself out of disorder. We can only confirm factually that it happens by measuring the changes in systems 'before and after.' Yet this mysterious emergence of increased and adaptive ordering turns out to be the pervasive source of most of the ordering in the biosphere.
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​Despite the evidence for emergent self-organization as a somehow unpredictable, non-deterministic mode of order creation, there appears no conclusion that it 'violates the laws of deterministic physics.' Rather, the implications seem to be that those deterministic 'laws,' which constrain the forms and behaviors of matter and energy, form the basis in our universe for emergent ordering through feedback networks from more disorderly conditions. Thus, we must re-conceive our worldview to include the interdependence of these 'two ways that things happen' -- together they 'make the world,' but in importantly different ways.
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Further elaboration of these concepts can be found under the "Elaborating Intros" tab of this website menu.
Links to online sources for exploring systems science are provided on the "References" page.
For more on how this knowledge of emergently self-ordering system networks changes our perspectives, see
"New Self-Directing Systems."​
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