The Radical New Reality of Systems Science

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What do We have to Understand to Understand this New Science?​

 

How do We Understand what We do not Think is Real?

What could be more challenging than realizing that 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 predictably deterministic causation. If we must now adopt assumptions which validate unpredictably emergent, self-ordering, and agency-driven aspects of 'how things happen,' then 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. It is a practical necessity. But, it also has the potential to provide us us with an enhanced sense of meaning and purpose.

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Accepting that Reductive Science can Reveal What It Cannot Explain -- and Why

Perhaps the most challenging first step towards this next worldview involves our sense of 'scientific reality.' We must somehow comprehend that it is our exquisitely precise knowledge of deterministically causal phenomena that has provided us with evidence for unpredictably emergent ordering and subsequent system agency. It is our ability to measure and calculate the dynamical behaviors of systems that reveals their self-ordering, self-asserting properties. Our capacity to quantify changes in complex systems actually provides evidence for how these are occurring in ways that are not predictably deterministic. It seems fair to say that this is 'not what we expect from science.' But, it is what we are getting.

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Knowledge of deterministic causality does not lose importance in the worldview of complex systems science. Rather, it becomes a basis for discerning the dynamics of emergent ordering and the manifestation of agency. Indeed, systems science derives from applying a sophisticated understanding of causality to detect and tract self-ordering, self-directing feedback networks -- thus the manifestation of their characteristic forms of agency.​​ The scientific method has not changed. But our assumptions about what it can reveal must. The 'why' of how science can reveal what it cannot fully analyze and explain is in the insight it provides into the strange dynamics of complex adaptive systems: the actual self-ordering and self-directing of these systems cannot derive directly and only from deterministic causation. The laws of physics actually confirm this fact. The world and life are emergently ordered and agentic 'because' that is the only way such levels of complexity can manifest -- according to the laws of physics.

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The Re-Definition of Chaos as Spontaneous Order Generating Turbulence

The concept of "chaos" is often understood as 'the absence of order.' Complex systems science derives in large part from study of unpredictably erratic systems, such as weather. Though 'driven' by deterministic factors or forces, thus conceivably predictable if those factors could be measured accurately enough, such systems are shown to manifest in ways that are termed 'non-periodic.' They vary in unpredictably turbulent ways. At they same time, they tend to produce spontaneous increases in organization that, because these are not fully predictable, are termed "emergent." This ordering 'emerges' from the disorder in the system. This emergently order generating turbulence or chaos appears to be the basis of yet further emergent self-organizing systems that can actually sustain and even manipulate their own ordering -- termed "complex adaptive systems."​​

 

The Fundamental Concept of 'Harnessing' Emergent Order from Disorder in Recursive Feedback Networks

Unlike basic physics' description of deterministic causation, systems science does not offer easily conceived 'laws' for understanding complex dynamics. The 'rules' of comple​x systems, by which they self-organize and self-direct, are not strictly deterministic, but fundamentally unpredictable. Complex adaptive systems literally 'make up their own rules' --  they self-generate their ordering, and can change it purposefully.  These 'emergent' system properties and behaviors cannot be understood in strictly deterministic or mechanistic terms.

 

Perhaps the most important concept to bear in mind, if we are to incorporate systems science into a new/next worldview, involves how systems can create their forms and behaviors from their own internal turbulence -- or, 'order made from disorder.' To approach such phenomena, we must focus upon how recursive flows of 'intra-acting' influence among system parts and their network nodes occurs concurrently, or simultaneously, to synergistically generate their emergent properties. We might describe this as the concept that complex system feedback networks are the fundamental 'genesis' of emergently self-directing ordering and agentic system properties. In this way, recursive feedback networks can 'harness' the spontaneous order generation of turbulent or chaotic activity. Serious examination of feedback networks will transform our understanding of most natural and human systems.

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The Basic Challenge: Consciously Thinking through Two Contrasting Dynamics Using Both Our Brain Hemispheres

This science of what can be known about how complex systems 'do what they do,' as well as what cannot be known, is a mathematical odyssey. Comprehending its implications 'in the real world,' from our existing expectations, is torturous. However,  just as systems science has challenged our modern mechanistic assumptions about reality, by revealing emergent ordering and agentic systems, neuroscience confronts us with the reductive left brain hemisphere attentional bias of our thinking. Fortunately, this science of mind can assist our 'making sense' of this new dynamical model of 'how things happen.' To think in more realistic scientific terms, we must not only study systems science. We must also consciously analyze how we are using the 'two minds in our one brain' to attend to, interpret, and experience all complex phenomena.

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​The 'Why' of Complex Adaptive Systems -- Seeking Understanding of Agentic Phenomena through Purposefulness

One of the most confounding aspects of complex systems science is its evidence for agentic system behaviors -- that some systems can self-direct and reconfigure for the purpose of asserting their continued existence (as if manifesting agency). Further, systems without discreet biological bodies or brains can be shown to do so. This information poses a new basis for 'the question why.' The word why is defined as meaning 'for what reason or purpose.'  That is an inquiry into 'motivation.' Thus, to be accurate, one must be careful about confusing the question 'why' with that of 'how.' Defined as 'in what way or manner, or by what means,' the question how is reflexively reductive. It seeks the 'mechanism' of an event's occurrence. 'How' appears then to be a 'materialistic' inquiry. In this sense, the answer to 'how' must be quantifiable and definable. If the 'manner and means' of an event cannot be fully described and explained, then the 'how' of it is incomplete. There is then an inherent limitation to answering 'how' questions when it comes to emergent ordering and agentic systems. Indeed, If, when asking 'why.' as in 'for what purpose,' systems science indicates it that the 'how of why' is not a question that has any reductive, mechanistic answer. In other words, the question 'why' is always an inquiry into the agentic properties of emergent self-organizing networks.

 

If we seek understanding of 'how' agentic systems 'do what they do,' we must necessarily seek information about 'why.' In so far as agentic systems act purposefully, then these 'do what they do,' resulting in material effects that can be measured, by emergent self-ordering for future purposes. What information about the 'how' of this 'why' that we can access is found by analyzing ways system feedback networks promote particular system forms, properties, and behaviors in relation to their potential continued existence. That approach to 'why' is not limited to animal or human intentionality. It is not limited to 'feelings.' It is not primarily an investigation of 'emotion' or 'opinion,' or even 'reason' -- all of which can now be seen as emergent properties of animal complex systems' capacity for purposeful self-assertion -- which also manifests in non-animal systems. A simplistic summary statement might be: the 'how' of deterministic causation somehow provides the basis for emergent self-organization, which is the 'how' of the 'why' of agentic system behaviors -- only, that latter 'how' is not entirely deterministic.

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This emergent 'how' of the 'why' of system self-direction and self-assertion appears to involve the turbulent flows of feedback across a system's connective network. An appropriate amount of disorder or 'un-decidedness' in how those flows interact then become coordinated or 'synchronized,' provides options for how a system will re-organize itself in response to external conditions. That necessarily involves a semiotic processing of data into meaningfully actionable information for the system. There is a fundamental mystery here in just 'how' a system interprets its environment then shifts its feedback flows to alter its forms and behaviors.  The baseline 'why' of agentic systems seems to be 'animated' by some intrinsic impulse in nature to 'continue to exist.'

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In seeking to understand 'why' more complex adaptive systems 'do what they do,' we can examine how their feedback networks channel influence so as to discern what purposes this serves. We can associate observed past network feedback flows then associate these with the consequences or outcomes of system behaviors to get indications of what purposes the system is selectively promoting. We cannot have significant insight into our own human systems, especially large scale super organism socio-economic ones, without close examination of their underlying purposefulness deriving from the configuration of their influence distributing feedback networks. Only through such analysis can we differentiate between our intentions for those systems and what purposes, or what 'outcomes,' their agentic self-assertion is actually promoting, or resisting.

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The 'Doubled Vision' of 'Seeing Bi-Dynamically'

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To perceive in terms of the 'two ways things happen' can be thought of as 'seeing bi-dynamically,' or both in terms of deterministic causation and emergent ordering. Somehow, we require a kind of 'doubled vision' that provides awareness of ​when phenomena are occurring in one manner or the other. Yet, also, how these are inextricably entwined in the emergence of complex systems and agentic networks.

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​'Seeing both ways at once':

 

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So What do We 'See' when We 'See Bi-Dynamically?'

The Oscillating Bi-Hemispheric Attention of Bi-Dynamical Awareness​​

From the perspective of systems science, forming awareness of a bi-dynamical reality and its fundamentally relational phenomena would seem to be an evolutionary necessity. To survive we must have this capacity. And indeed, we do have bilateralized brains evolved to provide it. Our contemporary problem is that we have not been using 'both sides of our brains' adequately.

 

For we mechanistic moderns, this 'bi-dynamical' perspective for 'seeing' the new scientific reality' is profoundly challenging. It requires a kind of 'meta' awareness of how we are attending to and thinking about phenomena. Because our default mode of understanding is in terms of deterministic causation. we must be constantly 'suspicious' of how we are conceiving and interpreting 'how things happen.' We must be alert to the fact that we tend to 'see' reductively rather than inclusively, that we reflexively interpret in terms of deterministic causation, while ignoring emergent ordering and its agentic effects. This is the primary practice of re-configuring our worldview. It can be promoted by becoming more aware of the roles our two brain hemispheres play in forming our awareness and modes of interpretation.

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It has been posited that our bi-hemispheric brains, with two different attentional modalities, evolved to function cooperatively, yet in a kind of circular process that promotes the right hemisphere's inclusive perspective. In this view, the inclusive right hemisphere modality initiates awareness that is then examined by the more reductive left hemisphere mode, whose interpretations are then 'passed back' to the right for overall integrated interpretation. In contrast, modern attitudes are regarded as being biased toward the left modality in ways that obviate the operations of the right as the 'final arbiter' of 'how things happen' and 'what that means.' If that view is correct, then it provides guidance for how we need to re-direct our perception and interpretation of phenomena. The right hemisphere's inclusive, holistic attentional inflection is essential to a network centered, agentic worldview.

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Network Vision: 'Seeing' in Terms of 'Relational Phenomena'

 

Things , Events, Systems as the Properties of Relationships -- Deterministic AND Emergent or Agentic​

A network centered perspective is essential to appreciate the implications of systems science and the behaviors of agentic systems. That includes the ability to differentiate when systems are being directed by deterministic factors versus emergent ones.  Complex system networks manifest self-ordering and agentic self-assertion that are emergent properties of their synergistic interdependent feedback flows. That means meaning those properties cannot be predicted or explained in reference to the material parts of the system, nor its preceding history. Thus, the 'behavioral whole' of such systems is an interdependent 'relational phenomena.' Self-organization and agentic purposefulness are 'of 'network relationships -- these system properties emerge from the relational 'betwixt and between' of network feedback flows. 

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To facilitate awareness of these conditions for emergence, we need to differentiate them from more familiar deterministic ones. The science of networks provides a basis to conceive most all phenomena as having properties manifesting from networked relationships. If we adopt an attitude of 'network vision,' we can approach things and events as 'the relationships among the parts.'  Examining those relationships from a bi-dynamical perspective, we might be able to specify which are causally deterministic or versus emergent, or both. Directly perceiving deterministic relationships is more accessible to our senses as well as more readily conceived in terms of sequences of proportionally consistent actions and reactions. However, literally seeing the relational fields is of concurrently interacting, recursively interdependent complex system networks is rarely possible. Thus, 'network vision' requires schematic and symbolic representations to render dynamic networks more tangible to our understanding -- it requires imagination.

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The Archetypal Network Characterization of Agentic Systems and Their Self-Asserting Behaviors

Because agentic systems are dynamically unpredictable (or, not mechanistic), it is not possible to know 'what they will do next' with any certainty. How then are we to have insight into their behaviors so we can act adaptively in response to theirs? If we cannot predict future behaviors confidently from past ones, then we can only gather references to form some expectations of how a system might behave relative to its internal and external relationships of origin and interdependencies. Those associations can inform us of  past behaviors and their apparent purposefulness --how systems behaved in the past and for what seeming purposes.

That approach can be understood as 'constellating' networked references to pose the 'archetypal character' of an agentic system self-assertion. We can call this approach to understanding agentic systems as 'archetypal network characterization' of internal and external system relationships.  It is a cognitive effort we all do reflexively, but it must be formally promoted if we are to have a more realistic worldview. Otherwise, we will always revert automatically to a mechanistic mode of interpretating emergent ordering and agentic systems.

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The Cultural Implications of a Network-Centered Perspective
 

The World as it Appears ... Now​

Self, Society, and Culture in an Agentic Worldview

 

Some simplistic sketches of how systems science can be employed to frame general aspects of self, society, and culture are provided below. From this scientific perspective, there is no 'good or bad' in these observations. The point is not to judge or rank system types or behaviors, but to become more realistically aware of how their emergent properties tend to generate their purposeful, agentic behaviors -- so that humans can better perceive these and thus have more capacity to influence them.

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Systems after Systems Science

Fundamental to a network centered worldview is a new definitions of 'systems.' In the mechanistic modernist perspective, systems have generally been regarded as a discreet set of deterministic ​actions and reactions ordered by fixed or consistently arranged processes -- the 'mechanistic model' of parts connected by pre-determining factors that could potentially be controlled.  Complex systems science now discriminates between 'systems of connected parts' whose relationships are thusly deterministic, and systems of interdependently interacting parts that result in unpredictably emergent effects or properties -- such as self-organization and self-directing behaviors. Further, the later type of system relationship can be quantified to show that these result in agentic or agent-like system properties. Viewed from this perspective, self and world appear to be primarily generated by interdependently emergent relationships between system  parts. An assumption that systems in general are composed by deterministic processes or centralized control functions is now factually invalid.

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Purpose after Systems Science

The existence of 'purpose,' (as in action for a future outcome, or teleological action), has often been considered  impossible from a strictly deterministic interpretation of the laws of physics. Systems science has now quantified complex system effects in ways that demonstrate activity selected to promote the systems continued existence, thus a purposeful activity. Purposeful, thus agentic system activity, is actual and not limited to animals or humans. Emergently selective system self-direction is fundemental to the generation and adaptive evolution of the biosphere.

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Identity after Systems Science

​Personal identity can no longer be regarded as a uniform, self-consistent, overtly self-aware 'sense of self.' Both the systems of the physical brain and the psychical mind are radically complex adaptive systems. These must therefore be understood as dynamically changing, always partly disorder, inherently conflicted, ultimately mercurial and unpredictable phenomena. 'Sense of self' emerges continually from that underlying internal turbulence which is constantly interacting with external interpersonal relationships and social systems -- then responding variously to those external relational fields. But the 'actual field of self-ing' is so complex it is not possible to 'know' it completely or 'self-consciously.' Any attempt to impose a unitary, consistent, overtly self-aware status of 'identity' upon this complex networking of 'self' is scientifically unrealistic, Consequently, our behaviors are necessarily impelled by aspects of self, and its entanglements in social systems, about which we are not overtly aware.

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Society after Systems Science

​Social systems must now be approached as agentic systems which assert an independent influence upon the human agents engaged in their emergent self-organization. Social groups and more formalized social systems (institutions, governments, corporations, financial networks) are actually self-directing 'entities' which tend to express reflexive impulses that purposefully promote their own continued existence. These systems are 'creaturely' even though they are not discreet biological entities. More hierarchically networked social systems tend to reinforce their hierarchical structures and 'top down' manipulative control over participating agents, while competing with other such systems. It is, therefore, delusional to assume that these systems necessarily function for the purposes which humans created them, or that such systems can actually be directly controlled. Further, the more closely associated individual identity and self-assertion become interdependent with the hierarchical power structures of these systems, the more likely those agents will 'serve the system' rather than their own human or cultural values. In short, social systems are self-asserting entities incapable of empathic or ethical values, thus intrinsically psychopathic. Only human persons have the capacity for such feeling and associated values. There is an inevitable divergence between human values and the reflexive purposefulness of collective social ones.

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Culture after Systems Science

​Notions of culture can now be approached as the relational field of assumptions about reality and various values derived from those which provide purposeful impetus to human adaptive behaviors. Thus, culture is a network of such factors that influence the formation of individual identity and the purposefulness of social systems, which in turn feedback into the formation of cultural references. As a complex adaptive system network of factors, culture references are necessarily inconsistent and conflicted. Further, their interdpendencies with the self-assertion of social systems promotes manipulation of those underlying assumptions and values by social systems. These traits make it virtually impossible to clearly define 'a culture' or for persons immersed in it to be overtly aware of what all its assumptions and values actually are, much less how these are influencing one's personal behaviors. In other words, our behaviors of often manipulated by social systems in ways that do not align with what we think are our culturally derived values and purposes. As cultural references are the 'baseline' of assumptions and values that influence social systems, it is essential for individuals to constantly examine just what those those assumptions actually are, then how these are being or not being expressed by social system behavior -- in terms of whether the long-term adaptive survival of society is actually being promoted.

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Politics after Systems Science

In so far as politics is understood to mean human interactions whose purpose is some form of interpersonal organization and governance or a collective group, then political systems are complex adaptive systems configured around some underlying assumptions and purposes for such 'governance.' In this sense, any organizational or institutional system has a political aspect, through which individuals assert their selves to manipulate flows of influence within a 'political network.' Such networks can be configured in a more cooperative, consensus-oriented mode, or in a more competitive, hierarchical, command and control manner. The latter network configuration appears more likely to generate a 'power seeking' impulse among participating human agents as these become identified with that aspect of the system. Consequently, human behaviors in more hierarchical, competitive political networks will be prone to seeking personal advantage over 'acting in service to' cultural values, while using the latter to promote their own and the political hierarchy's self-assertion.

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Economics after Systems Science

Economic systems of production, commerce, markets, and financialization constitute relatively discreet complex adaptive systems, though these are interdependently interactive with other social systems. As such, economic systems are inherently turbulent, conflicted and unpredictable in their self-organization.  Like other social systems, these are agent-based and animated by the interactions of those agents. The more elaborated economic systems become, the more power over those agents the system accrues, as humans become increasingly dependent upon the system for their survival. Like political systems, economic ones create a context for individuals to gain social and material advantages over each other through their self-assertion. Competition and hierarchical inequities among agents are readily promoted by the resulting feedback between personal and economic system self-assertions.

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Education after Systems Science

Humans are a species with an unusually extended childhood and adolescence. That aspect of humanness is considered to indicate that 'becoming a fully functional adult' requires extensive learning experience. In archaic cultures, that long period of learning occurred primarily through participation in the everyday activities of human adaptive survival, embedded within a local ecological system. In modern civilization, learning has become an abstract, institutionalized process that is removed from both nature and the fundamental activities of socio-economic systems. At the same time, educational systems are configured to promote the self-assertion of those social systems -- whose actual purposefullness, systems science shows us, is often not what we intend or assume it to be. Consequently, the self-assertion of children and youth becomes oriented to the standards and values of educational and social systems, rather than to natural systems or the capacity to perceive how social systems assert their influence to manipulate individuals for the self-promotion of those systems.

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From a systems science perspective, if education is to promote individual awareness of 'how things happen', and thus 'how the world actually works,' thereby enhancing the autonomy of individual agency, it must firstly foreground the science of both deterministic and emergent / agentic system dynamics. Secondly, it must apply this knowledge to understanding how the complex adaptive systems of humans and social systems actually 'do what they do' -- by self-ordering from internal confilct and disorder -- then engage that view in understanding the often hidden 'whys' of their purposefulness. Education that does not constantly foreground systems science is disastrously unrealistic. Neurologically, educational practices that promote the holistic network perspective of the science must necessarily promote perception and thinking through the inclusive attentional mode of the brain's right hemisphere.

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Most significantly, systems science poses a re-integration of the knowledge fields of reductive sieince and those associated with the term 'the humanities.' This realm of knowledge includes philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, religion, linguistics, literature, and art. C. P. Snow articulated a dissociation of these knowledge fields in the 1950s, in his terms of 'the two cultures.' In that context, science had become about validated facts, while the humanities were viewed as 'unfounded' in any verifiable reality. Complex adaptive systems science now poses a factual basis for many concepts and interpretations of phenomena expressed in these formerly non-scientific knowledge domains -- including that of aesthetics, literature, and art. Further, this science provides new criteria for discerning what in these fields is a more or less appropriate representation of complex systems dynamics and properties. Thus, education must now focus upon elaborating the association of this science and this vast array of technically non-scientific human knowledge.

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Art after Systems Science

The notion of 'artistic expression' suggests a mode of human representation that is not concerned primarily with literalistic description of material forms and normative meanings. Thus, there is a sense that 'art' is about representing aspects of self and world that are not well expressed practical , everyday concepts and language usage. That is, 'art' orients our attention to aspects of phenomena that are ordinarily ignored or even denigrated in importance. Further, art's generally non-literalistic mode of representation suggests it is concerned with something 'hidden' from ordinary perspectives. In so doing, art often prompts experience and a sense of meaning that 'alter' our normal 'sense of the world.' In addition, such experience has been associated by neuroscience as activating the brain's right hemisphere holistic mode of attention. 

 

All these traits can be associated with systems science's revealing of an 'invisible realm' of complex dynamics, network interdependencies, and emergent self-ordering resulting in agentic systems properties. It appears appropriate then to approach artistic expression as a means of facilitating appreciation of the strange dynamics and emergent interdependencies revealed by the science. 'Art' thus becomes an important epistemological method or way of knowing for reorienting our cultural worldview away from its mechanistic obsession and toward a more realistically bi-dynamical perspective. That indicates how essential artistic expression is to any 'realistic education.'

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Spirituality after Systems Science

​The evidence for agentic systems, and the emergent manner in which it manifests, provide a basis for posing a scientifically validated 'naturalistic spirituality.' In one sense, this is a 'reinvention' of the notion of 'spiritual animation.' In another regard, it provides a factually realistic basis for evaluating exiting concepts of a spiritually animated world. There can now be a dialogue between this new scientific version and more traditional ones. That association is important because the more 'imaginal' mode of representing spirituality in cultural traditions can have potent emotional impact of humans that makes the science more tangible.

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Religion after Systems Science

​If religion is regarded as the formalized, culturally affirmed mode of spirituality, then it can be approached as a networked system of references for how to experience and interpret 'spiritual animation' of self and world. When a references become the basis for discreet social institutions, such as 'a church' or priestly hierarchy, that are granted 'authority' over spiritual concepts and practices, spirituality becomes the 'domain' of a self-asserting social system. That system is then likely to promote its authority and dominance through the forms of its interpretations of spirituality. Such institutionalized religious systems are prone to literalizing those interpretations as explicitly, even historically, factual. In so doing, the metaphorically symbolic character of 'spiritual imaginations' is often reduced to mechanistic and deterministic terms, thereby eliminating their modeling of complex dynamics, emergence, and agentic system properties. 

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From a systems science perspective, it is not realistic to define the emergent dynamics of agentic systems in such a manner, as these are ultimately inexplicable and thus fundamentally mysterious -- from a mechanistic perspective. Thus, any scientifically valid religious formalization of spirituality would have to maintain the symbolic character of its interpretations and representations of spirituality. -- as imaginal models of a fundamental, world-creating dynamical mystery. In that view, religion is not inherently delusional but potentially important as an emotionally compelling cultural element that promotes appreciation of a 'naturalistic spirituality' based in systems science.

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Sustainable Human Behaviors after Systems Science
Framing a realistic understanding of what long-term sustainable human behaviors will promote both human vitality and adaptive survival requires systems science-based worldview assumptions about 'how things happen,' thus 'how the world actually works.' The most basic concept here is that the natural systems upon which human health and survival depend are agentically self-ordering, self-maintaining systems, from the biosphere to local ecosystems and individual species of plants and animals. Sustainable human survival thus depends upon human behaviors serving to preserve and promote the capacity of those systems to self-sustain. That basis for human culture and social systems prompts a radical reorientation of existing human systems and behaviors.

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Human Empathy and Ethical Responsibility after Systems Science

As intensely social creatures, humans express an exceptional capacity for empathic sensitivity to others. ​The word empathy derives from the Greek empatheia, a compound of 'in' and 'pathos,' meaning emotional 'feeling.' Its contemporary usage is understood to mean an ability to share the feelings of another. The Greek pathos is also given the meaning of suffering. So there is an implication that empathy is in particular a sensitivity to discomfort, pain, sorrow, and disability.

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This sensitivity to the 'feelings' of others can be posed as the underlying motive for forming ethically moral cultural values for human behaviors. In this sense, the admonition 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' might be understood most basically as 'avoid causing harm as you would prefer not to me harmed.' Ethical morality is not simply a culturall based, socially imposed 'code of conduct.' It is rather a fundamental appeal to act 'out of' one's activated capacity to 'feel the feelings of others.' In an evolutionary perspective, human capacity for profound empathy appears to have been selected for as an essential trait for long-term human adaptive survival.

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​Civilization after Systems Science

If civilization is understood to be the formation of human societies around the domestication of plants and animals, or farming and herding, on a scale that supports the close quarters of urban living, at population sizes well above what hunter/gatherer life styles could support, then it is a very distinct category of human adaptive survival techniques. Among animals, humans literally evolved to survive by exceptional techniques for manipulating their environments. These are physical and mental capacities that create 'technologies' for altering the forms and orderings of phenomena. Those technologies range from simple stone tools and methods for using them, to the computational systems of "artificial intelligence." 

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In the context of hunter/gatherer societies, the purposefulness of these techniques of manipulation can be seen as serving human survival by participating within the co-evolved, mutually facilitating feedback networks of local ecological systems. We might term this 'adaptive survival by eco-logical participation.' However, in the context of civilized societies, survival becomes more detached from natural systems. Civilization's 'tamed zone of domestication' is more a realm of human control over plants, animals, materials, and even humans -- on that is intrinsically threatened by the 'wild' realm of nature. The purposefulness of civilized social systems is necessarily more preoccupied with manipulative control of phenomena and technologies that promote that control.

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In our modern context, those technologies have become so elaborated that our lives are 'insulated' from fundamental participation in the eco-logical system relationships of natural systems.  Our purposefulness as individuals is to promote the self-assertion of our techno-logical super organism economies. Consequently, that nascent impulse of early civilizations to 'carve out' a 'tame domain' apart from nature, has become a biosphere-disrupting globalized monstrosity of manipulative control. It is a 'monstrosity' because it is unresponsive to the self-ordering, self-sustaining activites of agentic natural systems upon which our survival depends. Its networks are 'detached' from the self-regulating inter-system feedback loops of the biosphere. As we consider how to avert existential catastrophe, we must confront this intrinsic impulse of civilization. 

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​​Certainty after Systems Science

It could be said that Western civilization is partly 'driven' by a quest for the 'absolute truth,' or certainty about 'how things happen,' thus how phenomena can be controlled. Modern science has been seen as the ultimate phase of this yearning to define, explain, and potentially manipulate all that exists. As it turns out, the same reductive methodology of science assumed to accomplish that triumph of certainty has now undercut it. Systems science now confronts us with a factually uncertain, unpredictable, causally mysterious reality. If we are to incorporate this knowledge into our cultural worldview, we must engage assumptions that guide our purposefullness toward 'living as and in' fundamental ambiguity.

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Mind after Systems Science

The question, 'what is mind?' suggests 'it' is a 'thing,' a discreet 'object' of some kind. Systems science indicates that the cognitive intelligence of animals and humans is but a more complexly elaborated version of emergent self-organization in general. If self-organization in systems is an unpredictably emergent property of interdependencies in system feedback networks that is 'something more than' the properties of the parts of the system, then it is some kind of 'dynamical phenomena,' rather than a physical 'thing.' That indicates we must regard 'mind' as 'an activity' that is 'something more than' the physical body and brain. ​Hence, it might be more appropriate to speak of 'mind-ing.' As to what kind of activity, it has been suggested that mind-ing is an emergent phenomena of semiosis, of 'making meaning' from raw data. As such, it can be detected in even the simplest single cell life forms which interpret their environments to facilitate their adaptive self-asserting system behaviors.

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Language after Systems Science

Language now appears as a complex adaptive dynamical, semiotic (meaning-making) system of 'significations' that enable us to represent and 'articulate' the complexity of phenomena conceptually 'in/as mind-ing.' As such, it is composed by the 'thingless things' of signs, symbols, and thoughts. Its meaningfulness is not 'of' its significations but rather of our mental systems associative interpretations. A book of printed pages has no meaning unless its signifiers of letters, words, grammar, and images are interpreted by mind-ing. Thus language and meaning are fundamentally ethereal properties of the 'betwixt and between' of feedback networks 'in minding.' None of which can be definitively reduced to the physiological properties of brain cells and neural networks.

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A systems science perspective indicates how important our ways of employing language are to a realistic awareness and understanding. There is a more reductive, literalistic manner of signifying, in which we assume our words and concepts are equivalent to or definitive of what these re-present in mind-ing. Then there is a more overtly symbolic usage in which we are  consciously modeling, suggesting, or symbolizing, qualities of phenomena, while knowing these re-presentations are not 'the things in and of themselves.' This latter mode is essential to seeking understanding of the realm of emergent and agentic phenomena.

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Control after Systems Science

If control is action that produces a predictable effect, then it is only possible through deterministic causation. Humans have become staggeringly adept at such action in regards to manipulating matter and energy -- or, the 'material world.' From a systems science perspective, such manipulation that has predictable effects is not possible when engaging emergent ordering and agentic systems. While it is possible to influence the feedback networks from which such order and agency emerge, it is not possible to predictably determine what will then happen, 'how it will form and behave.' Complex adaptive systems do not have a hierarchical command and control system. So, there is no 'control mechanism' for us to predictably manipulate. 

 

Most importantly, manipulation of complex systems can have unexpected and unintended consequences. Efforts to control such systems might impel their self-organizing self-assertion to transform unpredictably, or even enter into a cascading collapse. That is what self-asserting human actions have done to the self-generating, self-maintaining systems of the biosphere. Our relentless extension of our manipulative control over the physical world has devastated those systems. Such effects are characterized by the term 'blow back,' often applied to how social and political system manipulations 'back fire' on those attempting to control these. In short, to assert predictable control over how complex adaptive systems behave not possible, and event to manipulate them is to risk disabling their self-sustaining self-ordering.

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'And So On and So On'

The list of how systems science re-frames our understanding of self, world, and life goes on and on. That is how profound its implications are for forming a 'logically next worldview.' Some of the above topics are explored further on this website under the "Further Info" menu tab.

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​The Constraints on Holistic and Network Thinking Imposed by Our Shared Worldview Conditioning

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As often reiterated on this website, one of the most surprising aspects of systems science is that it has emerged from the mechanistic, materialistically reductive mentality of our modern worldview. Our quest for absolute truths and 'final knowledge' about nature has confronted us with inherently unpredictable emergent ordering, agentic systems, and fundamental dynamical mystery. Logically, it would seem that as a supposedly science-based culture, we would now willingly incorporate this new, verifiable knowledge into a more holistic, complex network centered worldview. Alas, that is a naive expectation. As systems science demonstrates, the history of complex adaptive system feedback network formation tends to persist as an influence in a systems event when it undergoes significant disruption. To 'change how we mind the world,' we must struggle with the persisance of our past patterns of mind-ing. Additionally, our existing socio-economic systems have become configured in relation to our modernist mentality. Thus, those systems will reflexively resist human attempts to reconfigure both how we think and how feedback flows through our systems. The super organism will 'fight back' in its attempts to purposefully promote its continued existence. 

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One need only consider the history of social and political "revolutions." The abusive inequities of authoritarian Czarist Russian provoked decades of revoultionary unrest seeking greater freedom and equity. That socio-political system reacted violently to this pressure from its human agents. Yet it did grant some minor concessions. These were insufficient to stem the turmoil and in 1917 the old system collapsed. Though the eventual outcome was the establishment of a new socio-economic system based on concepts of communality and equity, it became an even more abusive, top-down, totalitarian system that amplified the control-obsessed patterns of its Czarist predecessor. 'Breaking the spell' of modernity's mechanistic mentality on the purposefulness of our thinking and the self-assertion of our human systems will be a 'Titanic' struggle.

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Confronting this New Scientific Reality is a Necessity in Our Time of 'Metacrisis'

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​Ecosystem collapse, a sixth mass extinction of species occurring at record speed, and radical disruption of global climate systems resulting in devastating weather, have all been factually attributed to human behaviors. These concerns are at the core of what has been termed the "polycrisis" or "metacrisis" of our time. Systems science provides stunning new insights into how we have changed the very biosphere and planet. In doing so, it also reveals that those human behaviors derive from the feedback networks of our agentic super organism social and economic systems. Thus, this 'poly-crisis' of multiple existential threats to future prosperity, perhaps even human survival, is actually a crisis of civilization. It is about the way our human system feedback networks are configured to self-assert in ways that devastate natural ones, thus ultimately humans.  We cannot alter these trajectories without seriously confronting what this new science can tell us about their origins and our potential responses to them. That means we must overtly acknowledge 'the end of the world -- as we have known it.'

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Our logically next worldview will not emerge if we cannot relinquish our ​obsession with control:

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