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Systems Thinking

03:23 / 30.09.03

So I'm strapped to this class to fulfill the core requirement of my college and I'm wondering if I could get some Barbe-help as for some reason I can't quite wrap my brain around it (inundated with meaty classes probably has something to do with that).

The book we're reading is Fritjof Capra's WEB OF LIFE and it seems to allude to Prigogine, Maturana and Varela as founders of its particular brand of philosophical/biological/universal perspective.

So what exactly IS systems thinking? Can anybody help a brother out?

05:33 / 30.09.03

Sure, read the book.

Also, Google is your firend.

What, did you think you'd get it for free? I would feel terrible wasting your parents hard-earned college money.

But, in a nutshell (cause systems theory is sooo cool), Capra presents evidence for the interconnectedness of natural processes and suggests that a given system can not be expressed as merely the sum of it's parts, but that systems exhibit emergent properties not specified by the bits but nevertheless present in the communioin of the whole. Systems theory in general is the study of, well, systems, as opposed to studyng the individual componetns of a system. It's the top-down approach rather than bottom-up.

Think "complexity, feedback, cellular automata, self-organization, nonlinear dynamics, iterative processes, population dynamics, etc..." Think "protein folding" - how can a chain of a few thousand amino acids fold into a specific pattern which creates the receptor for serotonin on a neuronal membrane?

14:07 / 30.09.03

Is this some kind of biology-meets-gestalt theory?

17:13 / 30.09.03

It certainly feels like it. Most of my frustration is stemming from its very psychotheraputic jargon and its immense vagueries.

And oh what I would give for it NOT to be on my dime.

08:45 / 01.10.03

That sounds interesting. Is it a book anyone could easily read? can anyone give me some cool examples of his system approach in practice? What do we use it for? What does it explain?

21:52 / 01.10.03

One book Capra may reference, I can't recall, is Why Things Bite Back, on the dangers of unintended consequences, or "revenge effects." In a tightly coupled system, these kinds of things can be really disastrous. Systems thinking, on the simplest level, is just an approach in which you try to do sort of the opposite of what most scientists are trained to do. You try to think of wholes and of interconnections, rather than trying to isolate some central or essential variable, property, cause, or source.

The idea is that if a problem is approached with inclusionary rather than exclusionary analysis, things like revenge effects can be avoided or at least minimized.

Maturana and Varela can get a bit fruity, but they are (or were, Varela died a while back) interesting thinkers.

I'm sure there's more to it than that, but I'm not really certain what you'd like to know about it, and it's been a long time since I read the book.