The Radical New Reality of Systems Science
Our Next
World View
The New 'Way that Things Happen'
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Science has Revealed a New 'Way that Things Happen'
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Disorderly interactions can coalesce into self-ordering feedback networks in unpredictable ways
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These networks can become self-sustaining systems that act adaptively to promote their existence
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Such system behavior constitutes some form of purposefully self-directing 'network agency'
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From cells to creatures, ecologies to economies, such complex adaptive systems create and maintain their 'selves'
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Self-ordering and network agency arising from disorder pose a profoundly new 'way that things happen'
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It emerges in ways that cannot be fully analyzed or explained in mechanically deterministic terms
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It results in systems with adaptive network agency which we cannot control but which we can severely disable
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It is the synergistic basis of self-creation and adaptive continuation in both human societies and the biosphere
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The agency of human minds has counterparts in both natural and social systems that 'have no brain'
Animals and Humans are not the only Purposeful Actors in The World
Feedback Relationships among System Parts can Create Purposefully Self-Ordering Actions
The actions of different parts of a "complex adaptive system" feed back into each other. This collective inter-action produces an overall system network of interdependent relationships. A shoal of fish is a system composed of many individual fish -- the system's parts. The individual fish react to each other in ways that organize the entire system. This network of many interdependent interactions among the fish has no central controller. It is not being directed or pre-determined, thus is not predictable. It emerges from the interdependent interactions of simultaneous feedback flows among the fish. Thus the self-organizing effects of the network emerges from moment to moment, "from the bottom up," not in a "top down" process of "command and control." This is typical of how natural systems emerge as 'interdependent wholes' that are 'more than the sum of their parts,' and which can act purposefully to promote their continued existence. The same dynamics give rise to human systems and consciousness.
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The network of a fish shoal is an "emergent property" of its parts, the fish, interacting with each other and their environment:
Feedback Networks can Make Systems 'Think for Themselves'
Over recent decades, scientific study of complex systems, ranging from single living cells to societies, has revealed that these systems are much more than "the sum of their parts." Feedback driven relationships between the parts of these systems produce interactions that form their 'operational networks.' These networks can actually process information about their system and its environment in ways that enable the system to adapt itself in ways that promote its continued existence. In effect, many such systems have a form of selective agency that purposefully promotes their exsitence. They can effectively process information about conditions within them and in their environments to adapt their forms and behaviors accordingly, as if they "think and act for themselves."
Self-Organizing System Networks Create the Order of The World
From the systems of individual cells to those of forests and cities, interdependent feedback networks regulate and adapt their respective systems. They enable their systems function by behaving like living, intentional creatures. The biosphere itself is a synergistically symbiotic, reciprocally interdependent meta version of such a network. It is composed of interacting feedback relationships among the countless other system networks that are its parts. Each responds to feedback from other networks, acting reciprocally to generate the collective self-organization of the meta-system. This self-creating, self-regulating, networked world is radically interdependent. By adapting to each other, interacting networks impose constraints upon each other, resulting in mutual benefits that make it possible for each individual network to persist. Human systems do this as well as natural ones. Competition between systems, as in species, is actually a subset of the biosphere's mutualistic cooperation, as the self-assertion of each system imposes constraints on others.
The networks of individual trees interact to generate the self-organizing meta-network of a forest ecology
The World is a Continually Emerging Interplay of Networks that Feed Back into Each Other
From ecosystems to climate, societies, economies, marriages, and human minds, we exist in and are the creations of mutually modifying feedback-driven networks. The world is an on-going, disproportionally emergent, often purposeful becoming. Its order and disorder are continually changing despite seeming continuities. Most profoundly, much of the order arises from the disorderly aspects of these massively complex feedback relationships. Underlying disorder is fundamental to the emergence of more complex self-organization. Deterministic causation is fundamental to all this, but emergent self-organization is not fully explainable in such terms.
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Climate systems, ecologies, personal relationships, and societies are all complex systems
whose networks 'make their selves,' and whose interdependent interactions collectively 'make the world":
However -- The World seen as Self-Organizing Networks is a Realm of Autonomous Systems Beyond Our Control
The ways in which system networks self-organize and become self-directing to the point of manifesting selective agency (for the purpose of their own adaptive sustainability) confront our familiar sense of cause and effect with a new 'way that things happen.' Most importantly, the dynamics of this unpredictably emergent self-ordering are inherently beyond our direct manipulative control.
Human Manipulations of Systems can Disable Their Self-Sustaining Network Agency
Our efforts to manipulate and control both natural and human systems can disrupt their self-regulating, adaptive network agency. That can result in sudden changes in these systems and even their collapse, from the extinction of animal species to civil wars. Such effects are typical of human systems with hierarchically structured, command and control structure. Because these systems too manifest network agency, their impulse to sustain and adapt their systems produces behavior and effects we do not expect or intend. The very networks we create can become powerful agents in and of themselves, acting for their own purposes and control us more than we control them. When the self-asserting agency or human systems is radically amplified by industrial technology, it easily overwhelms the constraints natural systems impose upon each other. Our techno-powered modern civilization has be come a 'rogue' system rampaging through the mutualistic reciprocity of the biosphere.
Now 'Two Ways Things Happen': Predictably Mechanistic and Unpredictably Emergent Events
Self-organizing networks and adaptive system agency clearly involve the predictably deterministic, proportionally consistent causality of physics. But measurements of changes in complex systems shows that such mechanistic determinism cannot fully explain how these systems initiate, then selectively adapt, their forms and behaviors through the self-ordering interactivity of their feedback-driven networks. Those properties of complex adaptive systems are termed "emergent" because they cannot be fully analyzed and explained in terms of predictably deterministic sequences of cause and effect. The details of systems science confront us with two paradoxically contrasting 'ways that things happen.' This evidence poses a profound challenge to our modern sense of 'how the world actually works.'
To Think Realistically We must now Learn to Perceive Hidden Networks Everywhere
To understand how the order around us is actually created and sustained, we must learn to perceive the activities and agency of self-directing networks. However, the self-organizing effects of their feedback driven relationships arise from concurrently interacting events, in which numerous actions influence each other simultaneously. Thus their activity is not fully identifiable as the separate parts and actions of their systems. It is not a predictable sequence of events but a continually changing constellation of interactions that become interdependent. That means we must now learn to think very differently about 'how the world actually works.' Through our mechanistic modern worldview, we reflexively think in terms of sequences of linear actions with predictable effects. Now we must also think in terms of constellations of simultaneous interactions--from which emerge unpredictable network agency and its purposeful behaviors. That will require a new/next worldview.
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Thinking events as sequences versus as concurrently interacting constellations of network feedback effects:
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