Appendix A
Keynote speech
from International Complexity
http://www.csu.edu.au/ci/vol3/ci3.htmlBy Rodger Bradbury, A Keynote Speech
Complexity International
Excerpted fromGrand Challenge or Toy Story
....
But look over there! Those guys look asleep; but where are the TVs? Got it -
it's an AAAS meeting! This looks awfully like the famous 1954 AAAS meeting in
Berkeley. Now they were glory days for science! Korea was over, Vietnam was
still a French war; no sputnik yet to shake our confidence in the stately
progress of Western science; students wore ties - not tie-dyed - on the
campus; and everyone else was asleep in front of the TV. Berkeley was still
just a campus, not a place to "get your shit together".So what are they doing here? Let's listen in. Hey, these guys are reading
their papers to each other and talking about forming a Society for the
Advancement of General Systems Theory. As they said in Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid, "Who are those guys?" I can just recognise a few. There's
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the allometrist, and Kenneth Boulding, the economist.
There's Nick Rashevsky from the Committee on Mathematical Biology at Chicago,
and Anatol Rapoport, the mathematician from Ann Arbor, and folks from Bell
Labs and the London School of Economics and the Zoology Department at
Cambridge. There are chemists and psychologists. This is quite a scene. There
are even a couple of post-modern (in a strictly fifties sense) flaky
liberation biology types hyping the general systems nature of the rights of
man, for chrissake.Have we lucked out or what? These guys are just like us. They could be our
ancestors.And here they are, talking all kinds of neat stuff and forming a society and
all. They've got papers on topology in biology, on closed and open systems,
on entropy and information, on general systems as a new paradigm for science
(but of course they don't use the word "paradigm" - Kuhn is still in
intellectual nappies right now). They are also talking about models and
modelling, adaptive and random systems. No kidding: Anatol Rapoport has a
1951 paper called Connectivity of random nets. Wow!They are even talking about complexity. How about these section headers: The
concept of complexity; Complexity in biological systems; Systems with the
property of evolution; Does learning involve an increase in complexity;
Complexity in time? This is all from the paper by Pringle, the guy from
Cambridge - and he's a behaviourist who quotes Volterra the mathematical
ecologist, Schr(dinger the physicist, Shannon the mathematician, Fisher the
geneticist, and of course von Bertalanffy, who was to become the chair of
this society. So this Pringle, whom I have never heard of, uses all the flash
buzz words, cites widely across the disciplines and knows his grantsmanship.
And this is all lifted from a paper he wrote in 1951. I bet these guys even
gave the rest of science the shits with their smug, superior,
nah-nah-we-know-something-you-don't-know airs, just like we do.So maybe our meeting today should really be the 50th meeting of the Society
for the Advancement of General Systems Theory, and not just the 3rd meeting
of the Complex Systems Society or whatever. But it isn't. There are big
questions here. Like: Did these guys stuff up? Did we? How long till lunch?
-30-
A NOTE TO THE READERThere is nothing that will cure the senses but the soul, and nothing that will cure the soul but the senses.
--Oscar Wilde
It's hard to say exactly when modern science began. Many scholars would date it at roughly 1600, when both Kepler and Galileo started using precision measurement to map the universe. But one thing is certain: starting from whatever date we choose, modern science was, in many important ways and right from the start, deeply antagonistic to established religion.
Most of the early scientists, of course, remained true believers, genuinely embracing the God of the Church; many of them sincerely believed that they were simply discovering God's archetypal laws as revealed in the book of nature. And yet, with the introduction of the scientific method, a universal acid was released that would slowly, inevitably, painfully eat into and corrode the centuriesold steel of religion, dissolving, often beyond recognition, virtually all of its central tenets and dogmas. Within the span of a mere few centuries, intelligent men and women in all walks of life could deeply and profoundly do something that would have utterly astonished previous epochs: deny the very existence of Spirit.
Despite the entreaties of the tenderhearted in both camps, the relation of science and religion in the modern worldthat is, in the last three or four centurieshas changed very little since their introduction to each other in the trial of Galileo, where the scientist agreed to shut his mouth and the Church agreed not to burn him. Many wonderful exceptions aside, the plain historical fact has been that orthodox science and orthodox religion deeply distrust, and often despise, each other.
It has been a tense confrontation, a philosophical Cold War of global reach. On the one hand, modern empirical science has made stunning and colossal discoveriesthe cure of diseases such as typhoid, smallpox, and malaria, which racked the ancient world with untold anguish; the engineering of marvels from the airplane to the Eiffel Tower to the space shuttle; discoveries in the biological sciences that verge on the secrets of life itself; advances in computer sciences that are literally revolutionizing human existence; not to mention plopping a person on the moon. Science can accomplish such feats, its proponents maintain, because it utilizes a solid method for discovering truth, a method that is empirical and experimental and based on evidence, not one that relies on myths and dogmas and unverifiable proclamations. And thus science, it proponents believe, has made discoveries that have relieved more pain, saved more lives, and advanced knowledge incomparably more than any religion and its pieinthesky God. Humanity's only real salvation is a reliance on scientific truth and its advance, not a projection of human potentials onto an illusory Great Other before whom we grovel and beg in the most childish and undignified of fashions.
There is a strange and curious thing about scientific truth. As its own proponents constantly explain, science is basically valuefree. It tells us what is, not what should be or ought to be. An electron isn't good or bad, it just is; the cell's nucleus is not good or bad, it just is; a solar system isn't good or bad, it just is. Consequently science, in elucidating or describing these basic facts about the universe, has virtually nothing to tell us about good and bad, wise and unwise, desirable and undesirable. Science might offer us truth, but how to use that truth wisely: on this science is, and always has been, utterly silent. Rightly so; that is not its job, that is not what it was designed to do, and we certainly should not blame science for this silence. Truth, not wisdom or value or worth, is the province of science.
In the midst of this silence, religion speaks. Humans seem condemned to meaning, condemned to find value, depth, care, concern, worth, significance to their everyday existence. If science will not (and cannot) provide it, then most men and women will look elsewhere. For literally billions of people around the world, religion provides the basic meaning of their lives, the glue of their existence, and offers them a set of guidelines about what is good (e.g., love, care, compassion) and what is not (e.g., lying, cheating, stealing, killing). On the deepest level, religion has even claimed to offer a means of contacting or communing with an ultimate Ground of Being. But by any other name, religion offers what it believes is a genuine wisdom.
Fact and meaning, truth and wisdom, science and religion. It is a strange and grotesque coexistence, with valuefree science and valueladen religion, deeply distrustful of each other, aggressively attempting to colonize the same small planet. It is a clash of Titans, to be sure, yet neither seems strong enough to prevail decisively nor graceful enough to bow out altogether. The trial of Galileo is repeated countless times, moment to moment, around the world, and it is tearing humanity, more or less, in half.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; therefore, the integration of science and religion is the theme of this book. If you are an orthodox religious believer, I would only ask that you relax into the argument and see where it takes you; I do not think you will be dismayed. The primary prerequisite I have placed on this discussion is that both science and religion must find the argument acceptable in their own terms. For this marriage to be genuine, it must have the free consent of both spouses.
If you are an orthodox scientist, I would only suggest that, as you have a thousand times in the past when you were working on a problem, let curiosity and wonder bubble up, but in this case don't focus it on a specific solution. Simply let wonder fill your being until it takes you out of yourself and into the staggering mystery that is the existence of the world, a mystery that facts alone can never begin to fill. If Spirit does exist, it will lie in that direction, the direction of wonder, a direction that intersects the very heart of science itself. And you will find, in this adventure, that the scientific method will never be left behind in the search for an ultimate ground.
And we all know how to wonder, don't we? From the depths of a Kosmos too miraculous to believe, from the heights of a universe too wondrous to worship, from the insides of an astonishment that has no boundaries, an answer begins to suggest itself, and whispers to us lightly. If we listen very carefully, from within this infinite wonder, perhaps we can hear the gentle promise that, in the very heart of the Kosmos itself, both science and religion will be there together to welcome us home.
K. W.
Boulder, Colorado
Summer 1997
Scheduled Publication Date: February, 1998; Random House, Inc.
Copyright 1996, 1997, Shambhala Publications
For More Information Send Email to: editors@shambhala.com
Created and Maintained by Mandala Designs
CALL FOR PAPERS
---------------------------------------------
FROM THE PRIMER PROJECTfor the 42nd Meeting of the
INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE SYSTEMS SCIENCES
(ISSS)
Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
19-24 JULY 1998CALL FOR PAPERS
The Primer Group
-----------------------------The critical need for a synoptic overview of the essentials of systemics is made even more obvious by this statement recently made by Alan McGowen, a computer scientist:
<< <<
The old, EE (electrical-engineering) and communications theory
"cybernetic" "systems science" that came from Weiner, Shannon etc.
has pretty much vanished [except maybe for people designing billion
channel SETI receivers and GPS-based navigation systems :-)]. The
mumbo-jumbo pseudoscience accretions (such as Korzybski) were long
ago supplanted by the Chomsky hierarchy and metamathematical work
such as Godel's and Turing's and never had any influence -- except
on very gullible "wholists" who contribute nothing to knowledge."Systems science" per se is pretty defunct outside EE, though it was
a useful stepping stone toward the science of complexity.>> >>The above comments should be taken as a wake-up call, lest the work of forty years is for naught.
Consider these words of Murray Gell-Mann, co-founder of the science of complexity at Sante Fe Institute.
"Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavoir of the whole."
or
the last paragraph of the book
COMPLEXification
John Casti
Sante Fe Institute"SO we come to the perhaps not so surprising conclusion that the creation of
a science of complex systems is really a subtask of the more general and much
more ambitious program of creating a theory of models. Complexity--as a
science--is merely one of the many rungs on this endless ladder."Finally:
John Brockman The Third Culture; Beyond the Scientific Revolution. 1995,
Simon & Schuster New York p 11 (Table of contents)Murray Gell-Mann
"Plectics"To refer to the subject on which some of us now work as "complexity" seems to
me to distort the nature of what we do., because the simplicity of the
underlying rules is a critical feature of the whole enterprse. Therefore what
I like to say is that the subject consists of the study of simplicity,
complexity of various kinds, and complex adaptive systems, with some
consideration of complex nonadaptive systems as well ... which I call
"Plectics."-----------------
Historically, the notions of systemic wholeness (systems) have appeared throughout recorded history in the systems of early Chinese thought (Yin/Yang), and early Western thought. (Empedocles "Earth")And then, in the modern era, the pendulum swung the other way, toward scientific analysis and reductionistic separations throughout the scientific era until as recently as the early 1920's, when the notion of wholeness and organism was talked about again by Weiss, Whitehead and Smuts. By 1933, Holism, the whole greater than the sum of the parts, was entered into the Encyclopedia. At that time too, Schroedingers quantum mechanics, of which he states, "form, not substance..." was developed to deal with relationships rather than absolute entities at the elementary particle level.
A biologist working by the name of Ludwig von Bertalanffy was working in his lab when he noticed particularily that there were certain isomorphic structures in the diverse collection of lab models stored on the shelfs of his lab. . This lead to his notion of his theory of general systems which he first wrote about after WW11. He would later publish his book "General Systems Theory" which created a science of general systems.
He writes
Yet there is a third reason for the isomorphism of laws in different
realms which is important for the present purpose. In our consideration we
started with a general definition of "system"; defined as "a set of elements
in interaction" and expresses by the system of equation. No special
hypothesis or statements were made about the nature of the system, of its
elements or the relations between them. Nevertheless from this purely formal
definition of "system" many properties follow which in part are expressed in
as well known in various fields of science, and, in part concern concepts
previously
regarded as anthropomorphic, vitalistic or metaphysical. The parallelism of
general conceptions or even special laws in different fields therefore is a
consequence of the fact that these are concerned with "systems" and that
certain general principles apply to systems irrespective of their nature.
Hence principles such as those of wholeness and sum, mechanization, hierarchic
order, approached to steady states, equifinality, etc., may appear in quite
different disciplines. The isomorphism found in different realms is based of
the existence of general system principles, of a more or less well-developed
"general system theory."(pp.84 GST)That was then, and this is now, best exemplified by Charles Francois, editor of the International Encyclopedia of Systemics and Cybernetics.
"Many systems related models and concepts have appeared during the last
50 years. But this occured in a casual and even random way. Some arose
in specific disciplines and their general value did not become
immediately obvious. Some others were shaped by globally oriented minds,
but their usefulness in a transdiciplinarian sense was not perceived by
specialists in widely separated fields.
It is now time to search everywhere for these scattered bits of
systemic knowledge. They should be gathered, related, ordered and
explained in a global perspective.
We should moreover try to discover which special sets of specific
connected tools could be used to understand, explain and better manage
complex issues. This is an urgent need if we want to avoid future
disasters at gigantic scale. It is altogether the only way to give
systemics its real dimension and importance for the future of mankind.
This is what the members of the Primer project are trying to achieve."
The Primer has a twofold purpose. In one sense it is a primer of systemic principles, a handbook on what is out there. On the other hand, the Primer induces action, primes the pump, so to speak, serving as a resource for systemic action for the professional as well as a casual observer.The Primer as a elementary primer is unique in that it is a collective effort of primarily ISSS members therby presenting a rather unique multi-perspectual viewpoint.
We are compiling information on three levels - a single sentence glossory definition; a single page explanation; and a multi-page overview. These then will be combined and hyper linked in various ways.
========================================================
Appendix A
Keynote speech
from International Complexity
http://www.csu.edu.au/ci/vol3/ci3.htmlBy Rodger Bradbury, A Keynote Speech
Complexity International
Excerpted fromGrand Challenge or Toy Story
....
But look over there! Those guys look asleep; but where are the TVs? Got it -
it's an AAAS meeting! This looks awfully like the famous 1954 AAAS meeting in
Berkeley. Now they were glory days for science! Korea was over, Vietnam was
still a French war; no sputnik yet to shake our confidence in the stately
progress of Western science; students wore ties - not tie-dyed - on the
campus; and everyone else was asleep in front of the TV. Berkeley was still
just a campus, not a place to "get your shit together".So what are they doing here? Let's listen in. Hey, these guys are reading
their papers to each other and talking about forming a Society for the
Advancement of General Systems Theory. As they said in Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid, "Who are those guys?" I can just recognise a few. There's
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the allometrist, and Kenneth Boulding, the economist.
There's Nick Rashevsky from the Committee on Mathematical Biology at Chicago,
and Anatol Rapoport, the mathematician from Ann Arbor, and folks from Bell
Labs and the London School of Economics and the Zoology Department at
Cambridge. There are chemists and psychologists. This is quite a scene. There
are even a couple of post-modern (in a strictly fifties sense) flaky
liberation biology types hyping the general systems nature of the rights of
man, for chrissake.Have we lucked out or what? These guys are just like us. They could be our
ancestors.And here they are, talking all kinds of neat stuff and forming a society and
all. They've got papers on topology in biology, on closed and open systems,
on entropy and information, on general systems as a new paradigm for science
(but of course they don't use the word "paradigm" - Kuhn is still in
intellectual nappies right now). They are also talking about models and
modelling, adaptive and random systems. No kidding: Anatol Rapoport has a
1951 paper called Connectivity of random nets. Wow!They are even talking about complexity. How about these section headers: The
concept of complexity; Complexity in biological systems; Systems with the
property of evolution; Does learning involve an increase in complexity;
Complexity in time? This is all from the paper by Pringle, the guy from
Cambridge - and he's a behaviourist who quotes Volterra the mathematical
ecologist, Schr(dinger the physicist, Shannon the mathematician, Fisher the
geneticist, and of course von Bertalanffy, who was to become the chair of
this society. So this Pringle, whom I have never heard of, uses all the flash
buzz words, cites widely across the disciplines and knows his grantsmanship.
And this is all lifted from a paper he wrote in 1951. I bet these guys even
gave the rest of science the shits with their smug, superior,
nah-nah-we-know-something-you-don't-know airs, just like we do.So maybe our meeting today should really be the 50th meeting of the Society
for the Advancement of General Systems Theory, and not just the 3rd meeting
of the Complex Systems Society or whatever. But it isn't. There are big
questions here. Like: Did these guys stuff up? Did we? How long till lunch?
-30-
You'll have to go to the website if you want to hear how Rodger paints the
ending,These are good questions,
But there's another side of the story, told by Bela,
Excerpted from
Foundations for Research in Educational Communitions and Technology.
Systems Inquiry and its Application in EducationGENESIS
OF GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY
Written by Bela Banathy
Excerpted by Tom Mandel"Somewhere between the specific that has no meaning
and the general that has no content there must be,
for each purpose and at each level of abstraction,
an optimum degree of generality. K. Boulding "The objectives of GST. then. can be set out with varying degrees of ambition and confidence, At a low level of amibition, but with a high degree of confidence, it aims to point out similarities in the theoretical constructions of different disciplines , where these exist, and to develop theoretical models having applicability to different fields of study. At a higher level of ambition, but perhaps with a lower level of confidence, it hopes to develop something like a "spectrum" of theories, a system of systems that may perform a "gestalt" in theoretical constructions.
It is the main objective of GST says Boulding, to develop "generalized ears" that overcome the "specializcd deafness" of the specific disciplines. meaning that someone who ought to know something that someone else knows isn't able to f ind it out for lack of generalized ears. Developing a framework of a general theory will enable the specialist to catch relevant coumniunication from others. In (the closing section of this paper, Boulding referred to the subtitle of his paper. GST as "the skeleton of science"
It is a skeleton in the sense- he says, that "It aims to provide a framework or structure of systems on which to hang the flesh and blood of particular disciplines and particular subject matters in an orderly and coherant corpus of knowledge. It is, also. however, something of a "skeleton in a cupboard" The cupboard in this case being the unwillingness of science to admit the tendency to shut the door on problems and subject matters which do not fit easily into simple mechanical schemes.
Science, for all its success still has a very long way to So. GST may at times be an embarrassement in pointing out how very far we still have to go, and in deflating excessive philosophical claim for overly simple systems. It also may be helpful, however, in pointing out to some extent where we have to go. The skeleton must come out of the cupboard before its dry bones can live.
The (two) papers introduced above set forth the "vision" of the systems movement. That vision still guides us today. At this point it seems to be appropriate to tell the story that marks the genisis of the systems movement. Kenneth Boulding told this story at the occasion when I was privileged to present to him the distinguished scholarship award of the Society of General Systems Research at our 1983 Annual Meeting, the year was 1954. At the Center for Behavioral Sciences ,at Stanford UWversity, four Center fellows - Bertalanffy (biology), Boulding (economics), Gerard (psychology), and Rapaport (mathematics) -- had a discussion in a meeting room. Another Center fellow walked in and asked: "What going on here" Ken answered, "We are angered about the state of the human condition and ask:" What can we do -- what can science -- do about improving the human condition?" "Oh!" their visitor said, "That is not my field. . . .'
At that meeting the four scientists felt that in the statement of their visitor the heard the statement of the fragmented disciplines that have little concern for doing anything practical about the fate of humanity. So, they asked themselves, "What would happen if science would be redefined by crossing disciplinary boundaries and forge a general theory that would bring us together in the service of humanity?"
Later they went to Berkeley, to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and established the society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory. Throughout the years, many of us in the systems movement have continued to ask the question: "How can systems science serve humanity?"
Bela Banathy
------------------------------------------------------
Perspectives on 4 GENERAL SYSTEM THEORY
by Ludwig von Bertalanffy
A collection of essays gathered together and published two years
after his death in 1972.
Edited by Edgar Taschdjian
with forwards by Maria von Bertalanffy and Ervin Laszlo
George Braziller, New York
Of particular interest...
Forward by Ervin Laszlo
...In the late twenties, von Bertalanffy (himself in his twenties) spoke of the new perspective as a method, and called it "organismic biology." He spoke of it as an attempt at explanation, calling it "The system theory of the organism." Later (1947) he recognized that "there exist mdels, principles and laws that apply to generalized systems or their suclasses irrespective of their particulatr kind, the nature of the component elements, and the relations or "forces' between them. We postulate a new discipline called General System Theory/"
The use of this term in English has wroght a certain amount of havoc. mainly through misunderstanding. It was criticized as pseudoscience and said to be nothing more than an admonishment to attend to things in a holistic way. Such criticisms would have lost their point had it been recognized that von Bertalanffy's general system theory is a perspective or paradigm, and that such basic conceptual frameworks play a key role in the development of exact scientific theory.
The original concept of general system theory was Allgemeine Systemtheorie (or Lehre). Now "Theorie" (or Lehre) just as Wissenschaft, has a much broader meaning in German than the closest English words "theory" and "science." A Wiss enschaft is any organized body of knowledge, including the Geisteswissenschaften, which would not be considered true sciences in English usage. And Theorie applies to any systematically presented set of concepts, whether they are empirical, axiomatic, or philosophical. (Lehre comes into the same category, but cannot be properly translated; its closest equivalent, "teaching" sounds dogmatic and off the mark.)
Thus when von Bertalanffy spoke of Allgemeine Systemtheorie it was consistent with his view that he was proposing a new perspective, a new way of doing science. It was not directly consistent With an interpretation often put on "general system theory," to wit, that it is a (scientific) "theory of general systems." To criticize it as such is to shoot at straw men. Von Bertalanffy opened up something much broader and of much greater significance than a single theory (which, as we now know, can always be falsified and has usually an ephemeral existence): he created a new paradigm for the development of theories.
These theories are and will be system-theories, for they deal with systemic phenomena--organisms, populations, ecologies, groups, societies, and the like. An Allgemeine Theorle that can integrate these in-themselves different phenomena with the rigor associated with the English concept of "scientific theory" does not exist.
We have basic concepts, a number of principles, some rigorous enough to be considered "laws," and, a general framework for theory construction. If this be considered not enough, the reader would do well to remember that a true general theory of all such varieties of -systems would constitute a master science that would make Einstein's attempt at a unified field theory pale by comparison.
Von Bertalanfy gave us a new paradigm for transdisciplinary synthesis. Given the fact that many of our intellectual and almost all our practical problems have to do with systemic phenomena (system'. design, system management, system development, and so on.) we should look upon general system theory as a fruitful new research program. (Lakatos), an essential component in the growth of scientific knowledge, and not as another finished theory. to be verified or falsified, and fitted either into the spectrum of valid scientific data or placed on the shelves of the history of science to gather dust.
-30
Geometrical ladder of Emergence Describing everything this same way North American Indian Four Directions
