The Radical New Reality of Systems Science

 

Confronting a New Reality is a Necessity

 

What could be more challenging that realizing one's basic assumptions about reality, about 'how things actually happen,' are dangerously inadequate? To be clear, what systems science confronts us with is not that our physics and concepts of mechanistic causation are false, but rather, that this way of understanding phenomena is incomplete. In one sense, this challenge to existing science-based assumptions is not new. Many times in recent centuries, the expansion of scientific knowledge has 're-written' its concepts of nature. However, this time it has overturned our cultural expectation that all scientific 'facts' would necessarily portray the world as a manifestation of deterministic causation. If we must now adopt assumptions that there are unpredictably emergent, self-ordering, and agency-driven aspects of 'how things happen,' the we are confronted with a fundamentally different reality.

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Both professional scientists and more non-technical people will understandably resist this preposterous conclusion. However, anyone who regards scientific method as the most reliable means of discerning what is 'actual' from what is not, must now give this new science serious consideration. Admittedly, it is tempting to dismiss it as somehow peripheral to a practical mindset. However, it turns out to be essential to understanding how and why modern civilization has both failed to attain its ethical ideals and promoted ecological collapse at the same time. Understanding this science is crucial to our very survival as a species. But, it also has the potential to provide us us with an enhanced sense of meaning and purpose.

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The Continual 'Re-Minding' of a Bi-Dynamical Worldview

The most fundamentl aspect of 'seeing' scientificially reality now involves a 'meta' awareness, in which we are constantly 'suspiscious' of how we are conceiving and interpreting phenomena. We must be alert to the fact that we tend to 'see' in one way or the other, reductively or inclusively.

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Considering the Basics of this Systems Science Inspired 'Next Worldview'

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The Fundamental Challenge to our Existing Worldview is not 'Material' but 'Dynamical'

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Awareness of Reality is Now Necessarily Contradictory or 'Cognitively Dissonant'

As complexity and systems science confirms that phenomena arise both deterministically and emergently/agentically, and that these two 'ways things happen' are 'entangled' in how systems become adaptively self-ordering and self-asserting, we are  necessarily confronted by a 'contradictory reality.' In this framing, some events and forms are 'ordered' by explicitly deterministic causation, while others are ordered by unpredictably emergent self-ordering dynamical relationships. We must learn to differentiate ordering determined by quantifible pre-existing order from increased ordering that emerges from less-ordered activity, or that occurs in unpredictable ways as a result of agentic selection in complex system networks. This is not a simple 'addition' of more 'mechanistic insight' into a purely causal reality. From the perspective of mechanistic causal determinism, this view is contradicts that understanding in ways that promote 'cognitive dissonance' for our modernist worldview -- it is fundamentllay 'incomprehensible'  to a mechanistic perspective.

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Relational Dynamics -- From Actions and Reactions to 'Intra-actions' and Emergent Agency

​How do we 'know?' How does our thinking differentiate 'one thing from another,' then 'how events happen' or change occurs?

Perhaps the most basic categories involve static and dynamics states. We think in terms of the actions or dynamics that generate things, forms, and events, or how dynamical relationships 'result' in specific phenomena.

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SO: The Next Worldview is 'Bi-dynamical' and Agentic

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'Relational Knowing' through Network Perspectives -- BOTH Causal and Emergent, Mechanistic and Agentic

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​Systems science is the study of all types of systems, using the fundamental scientific methods of quantitative reduction and mathematical analysis. It provides insights into both the predictably deterministic and emergently self-ordering aspects of systems. How we understand the data collected, how we interpret that data through scientific reduction, is fundamental to all our 'knowing.' It does seem 'reasonable' to assume that what ever exists, what phenomena are 'actual,' would exist whether human minds perceived and interpreted these or not. But all we can actually 'know' is what our minds 'do' with perceived data. And perhaps the most basic way to describe 'what we do with data' is as 'relating' aspects of it to other aspects, through our experience and intellectual analysis, 'by way of' sensations, emotions, intuitions, and reason. Our mind-ing detects contrasts, likenesses, patterns, sequences, concurrencies, actions, non-actions, interactions, processes, boundaries, continuities and discontinuities, states of greater or lesser organization -- to then discriminate 'relationships.'

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This word 'relation' derives from the Latin relationem and relatio, translated as 'a bringing back, restoring, a report, or proposition,' which derive from relatus, translated as 'bring back, bear back.' Over time it has carried meanings of 'relationship, connection, correspondence, and emotional affinity,' even 'the act of telling or relating in words.' It appears in the word 'correlation,' meaning 'mutual realtion, interdependence, interconnection,' even 'the act of bringing into orderly connection.' To 'relate' is to 'connect,' and also to 'tell about in words' by 'bringing back' some information.

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Science involves seeking testable information about 'what is' and 'how it happens.' It seeks 'factual' information about how things and events derive from specific 'relationships.' Somehow, we moderns have come to assume, perhaps 'believe,' that the only relationships that can be 'real' are those reducible to deterministic causes and effects. But our own scientific methodology of 'knowing relationships' has now discriminated emergent relationships that are not entirely reducible to such predictable relationships.  The 'relatedness of reality' involves more kinds of 'connections and correspondences' than we have had scientifically-based categories for.

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A 'network perspective' can be framed as a general way of registering relationships between factors, parts, actions, and their effects. These are conceptualized as specific aspects, or "nodes," that are connected or 'relate to each other' by how each influences others, conceived as "links" or "paths." How these influences move among "nodes" manifests the dynamical activity that forms a network of relationships. These 'networked relationships' can now be differentiated as more specifically deterministic versus more unpredictably yet not randomly emergent. Their 'flows of influence' can be more dependently causal or, when they feedback recursively, become interdependently interactive, thus more likely to result in emergent properties of a system.  Thus we must consider this contrast in how relationships form and what effects that might be having.

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Even 'non-correspondence,' dis-connectedness, separateness, disorderly chaos, are a 'condition of association' to be 'related' in our understanding of complex dynamical systems. Whereas, in deterministic events, each relates to the next in a causally connected manner, in complex systems effects emerge with little direct relationship because the influences flow 'in' from all directions, 'collide chaotically,' with unpredictable results. Emergent results that can be demonstrably shown as purposeful, as agentic.

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When we 'make connections' to track complex relationships, we must perceive disruptions and discontinuities as aspects of how factors become related. We must seek to notice when and where disorder actually fosters new ordering. Here, what appear as oppositons or conflicts can be interdependent 'intra-actions' that are all dynamical aspects of a larger system. Events understandable as relationships of cause and effect can be emergent properties of such systems. That is, emergent agency can 'manipulate' causal events. 'Beautiful' things and events can be related to brutal and destructive ones. The world seen through a network perspective is not a 'black and white' realm. Its inter-realtedness is ultimately interminable.  A dynamical realm where distinguishing what is orderly and what not, what exactly causes what, becomes impossible. But that, according to this science, is 'the world as it is.'

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First of All, For 'The Likes of Us,' It is 'Un-Thinkable'

​If systems science has indeed validated the role of emergently non-deterministic order creation from less ordered conditions, leading to unpredictably self-organizing and self-asserting agentic systems, then how do we now configure references for a scientifically realistic worldview? How can we 'incorporate' this knowledge to our existing 'body of knowledge,' our modern mentality dominated by assumptions about mechanistic causality, to create an 'expanded sense of reality?' Thus far, systems science has been effectively 'contained' within our existing cultural worldview as 'just more reductive information about phenomena.' Its implications for the validity and potential transformation of that worldview have rarely been addressed. This evasion is quite understandable: those implications are effectively incomprehensible from within a mentality dominated by mechanistic assumptions.

 

Secondly, to be Realistic, We Must Attempt to 'Think Through' this Science

Nonetheless, there is 'wiggle room.' We can find aspects of 'how we think' that lead us closer to 'thinking complexity' and its dynamically interactive interdependencies. Though there is much indicated by the science which is 'beyond' our familiar terms of causality and logical reasoning, it does not determine that complexity and its dynamics are 'beyond experience,' or cannot be symbolically re-presented. It provides a basis for engaging our reasoning to 'get beyond' our mechanistic rationalism, and our imagination to engage the 'technical mysteries' of a self-organizing, agentic world. We must 'think through' the emergent dynamics it reveals, but cannot fully describe or explain, to 'get as close as we reasonably can' to comprehending those ultimately unfathomable dynamics. Then we can turn to our vast panoply of artistic and literary symbolism to 'read it' as the re-presentation of those 'strange ways things happen.'

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Learning to Know 'Both Ways Things Happen -- It's More Radical than We can Think
 

Re-Thinking How We Think about 'How' and 'Why' Events Occur

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'The World Turned Upside Down' -- Dynamically Speaking

In its strictest interpretation, deterministic causality posses a reality in which the only relevant questions are those concerning 'how' events occur.  If all change is predetermined by preceding physical conditions, understanding events if purely a matter of discerning 'how' one set of those conditions determines a subsequent one. Thus, there can be no question of 'why' events occur because there cannot be any purposeful action, no 'intentionality.' As such, a strictly deterministic worldview would be something like this:

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• Because all phenomena are the direct result of deterministic causation

• thus have no purpose and cannot involve any selective 'free will' or 'spiritual animation'

• thus are potentially controllable by direct manipulation

• then it is possible to discern exactly how any event happens or can happen

• from which knowledge we can engineer environments, plants, animals, humans, and societies with predictable results

 

Obviously, few if any of us literally live our lives thinking and acting exclusively from such a perspective. To be human involves at least the experience of some capacity to choose actions selectively -- even if one denies that such a possibility exits according to the laws of physics. It seems impossible to act as a social agent and not feel compelled to speculate on 'why,' or for what purpose, other people 'do what they do.' Having a 'theory of mind' in one's own 'mind' regarding the selective behaviors of 'other minds' has even been experimentally confirmed in dogs. So, it is not as though we moderns lack a de facto sense of 'network agency' and its potential influences upon 'how things actually happen.' Some among us do dismiss this 'experience' an an illusion, an epiphenomena that results from deterministic causation, thus is not actually a purposeful action. Others regard it as a psychological trait of humans, perhaps animals, but not otherwise manifest in nature. In so far as we are taught any scientific explanation, the bias there is toward reduction to explicitly deterministic causation: minds are merely biologically-based computational mechanisms, or computers. So, though we experience 'free will,' and often think in terms of purpose, or the 'why' of events, we generally lack any empirical basis for its existence beyond our mechanistic physics. We live a contradiction in which we experience agentic systems, particularly our 'selves,' for which we have not scientific validation .

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Whatever one thinks about 'free will,'  modern lives are entirely configured around our incredibly effective use of deterministic causation to manipulate and control the world around us.  Our industrial technology and computational electronics readily appear as a factual affirmation of the concept that all that happens happens in a deterministic dynamical manner. So, whatever role our experience of 'free will' and purposeful action might play, it must be 'minor' at best. At least, this appears factual and logical, until one engages complex systems science, where the same scientific method that supposedly confirms the universal validity of deterministic causality, arrives at some very different factual evidence. Lo and behold: here there is both empirical evidence and mathematically based theory to pose the actuality of agentic phenomena, even 'free will,' and thus the reality of purposeful action and 'the question why.' More problematic still, for our reflexively reductive, mechanistic assumptions, this science indicates that most of the ordering in the biosphere emerges unpredictably from less ordered conditions and then sustains itself by selectively reconfiguring itself -- in adaptive ways that can only be understood as for the future purpose of its continued existence.

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This new view that 'how things happen' demonstrably involves 'the question why' not only alters how we can think about our human 'mindfulness,' but perhaps more profoundly, how such agentic purposefulness plays a primary role in all manner of non-human and even non-animal systems. The primacy of deterministic causation might well 'underlie' such phenomena, but it begins to look much less universal as 'the only way things can happen,' at least when it comes to the 'ordering of life itself.'  It is as if 'the world has been turned upside down,' dynamically speaking. In terms of understanding life, the biosphere, thus our human selves, deterministic causality's predominance over agency has be reversed. It has been dynamically subordinated to unpredictably emergent self-ordering and its agency enabling properties.

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In so far as our cultural worldview, and the social system it begets, are 'based upon' an assumption that deterministic causality 'makes the world and everything in it,' that worldview is now scientifically inadequate, if not delusional. In so far as modern thought has manifested concepts about agency, free will, meaning, and mind or psyche as 'something more than materialistic phenomena,' even as 'forces that make the world,' now deserve reconsideration -- through the perspectives of complex systems science. In addition, all pre-modern cultural worldviews that generated such notions now deserve reconsideration. Perhaps pre-scientific humans intuited aspects of reality that we are only now factually confirming.

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Dynamical Reality Beyond Mechanism
 

The 'Bi-Dynamical' Paradox of a Causally-Based yet Emergently Self-Ordering, Agentic Self and World
If we consider the contrast between predictably deterministic causality, producing events that are effectively purposeless, and unpredictably emergent self-organizing events, which can selectively generate purposeful forms and functions, we can conceive a 'bi-dynamical reality.' We can confirm that there are causally deterministic dynamics (or change) and emergently self-ordering dynamics. The causal type are predetermined by preceding conditions, the consequences of which are predictable. The emergent type are not only unpredictable result in interdependent interactions with synergistic effects that include selectively purposeful or agentic system self-direction. Such 'action for a future consequence' or purpose is termed "teleological," meaning events that are understandable only in terms of their consequences, not their deterministic causes. Thus, causal dynamics can be understood in technically mechanical terms of 'how things happen.' But emergent dynamics can result in effects that must be understood in terms of 'why things happen.' or 'toward what purpose?' These contrasting dynamics are technically different, but the emergent version cannot be entirely described or explained in technically causal terms. We are confronted with a paradoxically contrasting reality in which a deterministic aspect somehow enables the emergence of a non-deterministic, selectively purposeful one. In an ontological sense, there are two dissimilar dynamical conditions for 'what comes into being.' Metaphorically speaking, we inhabit 'two dynamical worlds that are one.'

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Approaching this Scientific Version of 'Two Worlds in One' In Simple Terms

Where pre-modern cultures once conceived of two or more 'worlds,' as in there being 'upper, lower, or other' worlds, science now confronts us with its version of 'two worlds in one.' We might approach this dynamical paradox in terms of what is 'ordinarily understandable' from our practical experience of mechanistic cause and effect, and what is 'extra-ordinary' from the perspective of such experience.  If the 'ordinary' is what can be demonstrated as causally deterministic, then emergent dynamics which cannot be thusly explained could be regarded as 'extra-ordinary.' In a literal sense, we can 'see' cause and effect, even though there are many aspects of deterministic causation we cannot literally 'see.' But even those aspects of causal events can be accurately represented, or 'seen,' through our techniques of measurement, and calculation. We can 'see' them through abstract concepts in definitive ways. But emergent dynamics tend to be neither literally visible nor technically calculable. So, we might consider that there is an 'ordinary' aspect to the world that can be 'seen,' either literally or through technically abstract but definitive methods, and another that cannot be definitively 'seen' in these ways, and thus is 'extra-ordinary' and effectively 'un-seeable.' This notion again echoes an archaic one posing 'visible' versus 'invisible' aspects of reality.

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But How to Know what is Definitively Unknowable?
In so far as predictably deterministic causality manifests fully measurable and calculable dynamical phenomena, it provides the basis for what we can know with certainty about the 'unseeably' aspects of unpredictably emergent ordering. Thus, reductive scientific analysis has led to the insights of complex systems science about how emergent self-ordering 'emerges' from a deterministic basis. The confounding aspect of this investigation of emergent dynamics by way of examination of its deterministic basis is that we gain evidence for the actuality of non-deterministic emergence from the science of deterministic causality. We have 'approached the causally unknowable' through knowledge of the causally calculable. Though this investigation is still proceeding in contemporary systems science research, it appears that there is some inherent limit to it. In some sense, our reductive analysis can ultimately only 'circumambulate' the 'intrinsic mystery' of emergent dynamics. That is, there are limits to what we can know definitively about the emergence of self-organizing systems and their purposefully agentic properties. Nonetheless, to understand and act realistically, we must have ways to perceive and interpret these ultimately unknowable dynamics and their purposeful influences on the 'material world.' That will require some significant changes in 'how we seek to know what we need to know.' As systems science shows, a reductively deterministic perspective on reality is insufficient for a realistically adaptive worldview.

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A Review of the Contrasting Dynamical Categories of a 'Networked Worldview'

If we take a systems science perspective on phenomena as manifesting through, or as, specific relational networks, which can involve primarily deterministic dynamics or more complex and emergent ones, then we can conceive of a 'networked worldview' as one that attends to the full range of dynamical phenomena. In this sense, 'networks' represent things or events as 'parts' that can be associated as identifiable 'relational fields.' These are 'entities' that can be differentiated by actions or interactions that designate some 'boundary' and 'wholeness,' relative to surrounding contexts and conditions in space or over time.

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More deterministic, causal, or mechanistic:                 More unpredictable, emergent, or adaptive

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The Cognitive Reorientation of Systems Science

 

Same Science, New Cultural Worldview

It is important to emphasize that the shift from a deterministic based worldview to one that incorporates unpredictably emergent ordering and agentic systems is neither ideological nor even technically methodological. The underlying principles and quantitative methodologies of science remain the same. What changes is our understanding of the science and thus our cultural orientation to a 'bi-dynamical' reality. We are not compelled to reconfigure our reflexive assumptions about 'how things happen' and our non-scientific efforts to comprehend the 'unseeable' and definitively unknowable, yet factually demonstrable roles of complex adaptive systems in how 'we and the world actually work.'

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A Simplistic Dichotomy of How to Think 'Bi-Dynamical' Reality Holistically

With this framing of reductive science essential to investigating the 'ultimately irreducible' emergent dynamics of complex adaptive systems, we can reduce the cognitive challenge posed by systems science to a pair of complimentary questions:

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> 'What is the causal mechanism?'

> 'What are the emergent feedback effects?'

 

Each question focuses upon different aspects of phenomena. The first tracks changes in quantifiable states that occur in progressive causal sequences resulting in predictable effects. The second tracks recursive flows of influence between parts and factors which can result in non-sequential or concurrently intra-active feedback, thus unpredictably synergistic effects. Most importantly, understanding of the latter requires knowledge of the former. Insight into sequential causation provides references for tracking the emergent effects of recursive flows of feedback among system parts or between systems. We must ask both 'questions' if we are to gain even a general sense of the relational wholeness of any system. When analyzing more linearly dynamical or mechanistic systems, the first question focused on causality provides fairly complete assessment. But any system that manifests the more complex nonlinear dynamics associated with emergent properties requires extensive examination through both questions to generate even a crude understanding of 'how it does what it does.'  The point is, investigating 'causal mechanisms' is essential to identifying feedback-driven emergent effects even though it cannot fully 'penetrate' those dynamics in a definitively descriptive and explanatory manner.

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The 'Doubled Vision' of Bi-Dynamical Perspective and the 'Two Minds of Our One Brain'

​From the perspective of the neuroscience of our two brain hemispheres, our modern worldview has been biased toward the reductive, 'parts and sequence' perspective of our left hemisphere attentional mode. In our relentless pursuit of industrial technological manipulation and control of phenomena, be become obsessed with 'seeing' only the mechanistic dynamics of deterministic causation. This mental emphasis is fundamental to our reductive scientific method and understanding. Ironically, and most unexpectedly, the elaboration of this way of knowing in modern science has led to the strangely contrasting evidence of systems science for emergent dynamics. It is now evident we require ways of perceiving and understanding that emphasize the concurrently interactive, feedback-driven, interdependent relational wholeness of self-ordering, agentic systems indicated by scientific reduction.

 

It is essential to acknowledge that we necessarily employ both brain hemisphere modes of attending in a continual, if somehow alternating manner. Our mechanistic modern worldview has not eliminated the inclusive perspective of right hemisphere attention but rather philosophically diminished, even demoted, its importance as a basis for how we interpret thus understand phenomena. Systems science now provides a factual basis for amending that philosophical basis from one that privileges left-hemisphere attention biased attention and interpretation to one that promotes more of a 'dialogue' between the two.

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We require a kind of 'doubled vision' to perceive and understand more realistically. Because emergent dynamics cannot be reduced to 'ordinarily sequential' causal sequences, some additional mental modalities are needed to 'get some impression' of emergent dynamics and their agentic properties. We must somehow 'go beyond' mechanistically reductive perception and understanding to 'imagine' and even 'experience' the 'unseeable' dynamics of these phenomena. That suggests reliance upon metaphoric symbolism as an essential 'epistemological method' for 'knowing emergent dynamics realistically.' The neuroscience indicates this capacity requires overt promotion of our right brain hemisphere mode of attention, with its more inclusive, relationally holistic perspectives. But further, we need to overtly experience the contrasting 'doubled vision' of these 'two minds in our one brain' so as to appreciate the 'bi-dynamical' reality our science has identified. To be scientifically realistic seems to mean 'holding both' modes in some simultaneous state of awareness. That presents reality as a rather 'paradoxical dynamical totality,'  and one that will always manifest fundamental ambiguity and unpredictability. This seems to be where archetypally characterizing symbolism becomes essential to human understanding.

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Accomplishing this mental feat of 'doubled vision' can be conceived as having five stages:

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1. Preparation: Become overtly aware of the difference between our two 'ways of attending'

2. Orientation: Deliberately employ the right hemisphere mode to perceive an overall relational field or system

3. Reduction: Shift to prioritizing our left hemisphere mode of reductive analysis

4. Incorporation: Transfer that left hemisphere insight back to a right-hemisphere framing of relationally networked wholeness

5. Symbolization: Attempt to correlate these references with archetypal categories of phenomena and system behaviors that symbolically characterize both their dynamical and agentic properties

 

In some such manner, one can orient awareness to relational fields involving both causal and emergent potential so as to differentiate or identify these as particularized relational wholes relative to characteristic configurations of archetypal traits.

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A Fundamental Shift in How We Attend To and thus Interpret Phenomena

The notion of  a 'bi-dynamical' perspective on 'how the world actually works' can seem confusing, even irrational, to our familiar mechanistic understanding. But its basis is surprisingly simple.

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 The Cultural Implications of a Networked Centered Perspective

self, society, and culture in an agentic world view

--society as 'creaturely' in ways relative to its network configurations and feedback flows
--living as, in, with fundamental mystery and ambiguity
--new view systems, society, culture, identity,
--a shift impossible directly from our existing left hemisphere biased mentality
--A Cultural Bias Toward Right Brain Hemisphere Understanding

--conundrum of education divided by left-hemisphere biasing causal realism vs 'everything else'

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-necessity of status quo subversion through practices 'out side' hierarchical social systems

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The 'Ethical Response-ability' of Agentic Capacity for Experiential Empathic Affinity

 

From a non-agentic mechanistic to an agentic emergent worldview

--The Necessity of a Culture of Agentic Science or 'Naturalistic Spirituality' that Affirms Fundamental 'Mystery'

 

Though the questions 'how' versus 'why' are familiar to our understanding of behavior in human agents, systems science now compels us to apply these as distinctly different modes of 'dynamical understanding' about complex systems that are not human persons. That means asking something like, 'why did a social system act in that particular way?' Scientifically speaking, this is not a question about the personal motivations of agents participating in that systems. It is a question about how that system's feedback network configured itself for some 'future purpose.' We now have to regard complex system networks as 'agentic' or agent-like entities. That means we must, in some sense, regard them 'psychologically.'

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That means, if we want to change such a systems behavior, we must understand how that system's exixting network configuration feedback loops are self-asserting and might resist our efforts to reconfigure those. That means that what appears to our ordinary perspective to be a 'technical problem' that could easily be solved by some changes in deterministic causation -- like reducing CO2 emissions to slow climate change -- is actually a phenomena driven by agentic socio-economic system networks that will purposefully resist any such changes. That is, there are 'extra-ordinary' emergent dynamics involved in the context which cannot simply be directly manipulated in causal terms. Significant change can only result if the existing system networks collapse, or their feedback becine reconfigured in ways that promote a different 'purposefulness' in the overall system self-assertion. The point is, attempts to reconfigure those feedback loops will likely be met with considerable resistance by the dynamical momentum of their existing configuration -- its current agentic purposefullness ,or 'characteristic behavior.'  It is this factor that so often obstructs or even 'co-opts' attempts at system reform, whether educational, political, or economic. We are not capable of conceiving how change in institutional systems involves the 'agentic psychology' of those system's evolved self-asserting networks. The 'problem of change' here is not merely one of 'ordinarily pragmatic action' but involves a kind of 'spiritual conflict' between agents seeking change and the habituated agentic impetus of our (creaturely) systems -- and, as significantly, how the self-assertion of agents is entangled in that of those existing social system networks.

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We cannot significantly alter the behavior of our super organism socio-economic systems, by re-configuring their feedback networks, we must consider that 'they' can and do manipulate us as agents even as we attempt to manipulate them. And, further, that those systems are intrinsically psychopathic, they can act to self-assert but cannot feel empathy or act ethically like human agents. Nor can these system networks be 'reasoned with.' Once they become hierarchically configured, institutionalized, and technolgoically enabled, with a cadre of human agents whose own self-assertion is 'identified with' that of the system, they can manifest profound resistance to change or accommodation to the concerns of 'others.'

--Engaging Metaphoric Symbolism as Insight into Complexity
 

Facing Futures

--not 'what to do' but first 'how to do differently'

--through lens of interdependency rather than dependency

 

Cultural Values and Worldviews

 

From Ecological Embeddeness to Civilized Alienation to Embodied Psychic Participation?

 

A Practical Necessity in the MetaCrisis
--from command/control to co-operative facilitation
--Confrontation with out 'Monstrous' Human Systems

technology as manipulative methods emerging from cultural values but then becoming self-asserting sub-systems

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Humans Create Systems that Create Unintended, often Disastrous Human Behaviors

Many complex adaptive system networks are composed of individual agents, from ant colonies to human societies. The collective interactions of these agents gives rise to the purposeful agency of the entire network. These have been termed "super organisms" because they behave like creatures -- even though they have not brain.  But with human  systems, their networks have vastly greater collective intelligence and power -- most importantly technological power. From institutions to governments and corporations, these super organism social networks are not human. They are incapable of empathic feeling or genuine ethical motivation. Thus their self-asserting impetus can work against the very values that humans create them to promote, such as equity, justice, and freedom.  Their self-organizing, self-promoting 'drive' can manipulate the humans that compose them into assuming that their systems are synonymous with the purposes for which these were created. Thus, it is to be expected that human systems cannot be fully controlled and inevitably generate unexpected, even disastrous behaviors. From a mythological perspective, such systems are prone to becoming 'monstrous' -- to seek power and influence by exploiting other systems without regard to any consequences. To be realistic about human systems is to "live by the law of unintended consequences" and remain constantly suspicious of our own system's behaviors.