The Radical New Reality of Systems Science
Our Next
World View
New Self-Directing Systems (part 1)
The 'Willful Creatures' of Systems without Brains
Confronting Self-Asserting Agency and Its 'Rogue' Expression in Human Systems
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Interactive, feedback-driven networks give rise to complex adaptive systems that create, order, and direct their 'selves'
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These networks both order and re-direct their systems in adaptive ways to sustain them
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The resulting 'behaviors' of such systems serve the purpose of promoting their continued existence
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This purposeful self-direction constitutes some degree of unpredictably selective 'agency' to 'self-assert'
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Agency is most obvious in biological creatures, but also manifests in collective 'meta' or "super-organism" systems
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From beehives to human societies, these collective systems act like creatures but have no central controller or brain
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Most importantly, human systems, from corporations to governments, reflexively self-assert in 'agentic' ways we don't intend
- The socialized world we collectively 'make' goes on to 'make and direct' itself in ways we can't predict or control
- Natural system self-assertion is constrained by ecological limitations, but human ones have evaded those constraints
- Thus human systems are able to exploit natural systems in ways similar to 'invasive species' in nature
- Our human systems have become 'rogue agents' asserting their influence in ways that harm both us and the biosphere
- To perceive how these systems shape our lives we must regard them 'psychologically,' as somehow 'willful creatures'
Revealing New Types of Systems that Self-organize and Self-assert
Interactive Feedback Networks can become Self-ordering, Self-Directing, thus Agentic Systems
By quantifying changes in dynamically complex systems, systems science has demonstrated that feedback flows among their parts can synergistically increase system organization in unpredictably emergent ways. That self-ordering can result in autonomously agentic network capacities, which can adaptively direct a system's behavior. These 'agent-like' systems are termed "complex adaptive systems."
The emergence of self-organizing networks can lead to autonomously
agentic systems capable of self-directing adaptive behavior:
Complex Adaptive Systems Create Most of the Ordering in the Biosphere and Society
It is now evident that these self-ordering, self-adapting systems are the actual source of most of the ordering in ecosystems, biological life forms, and human social as well as economic systems. They effectively 'animate' the physical materials of their system components in ways that generate unpredictably novel forms and functions. The complex adaptive systems plants and animals become larger scale ones as local ecosystems that interact to become the biosphere which interacts with other earth systems in constant feedback flows which influence all systems.
Complex Adaptive Systems can Constitute 'Purposeful Entities' yet Lack Brains or 'Central Controllers'
The adaptive behaviors of these systems can enable them to interpret conditions of their environments and respond by selectively altering their internal self-organization in ways that enhance and promote their continued existence into the future. Thus, some systems are effectively purposeful entities that 'behave' like self-directing, self-asserting agents even though these are not biological entities with brains, nor have any centralized control structures.
Unlike Mechanisms, Complex Adaptive Systems are 'More then the Sum of Their Parts'
These traits of self-organization and agentic self-direction are neither predictable nor entirely explainable in terms of deterministic causality, thus are understood as "emergent properties" of system feedback networks because these cannot be specifically derived from the quantifiable traits and properties of system components. So, such systems are effectively 'something more than the sum of their parts.' That makes them fundamentally different from deterministic mechanical systems -- 'technically mysterious.'
Complex adaptive systems are not understandable as deterministically mechanical systems::
Self-assertion in some Complex Adaptive Systems derives from being "Agent Based" Systems
Complex adaptive systems can take the form of the discreet biological entities of plants and animals. These systems manifest the most elaborate capacities for self-directing, purposeful agentic behavior. Animals demonstrate the most extreme capacities to interpret their environments and respond with selective behaviors that promote their continued existence. Biologically derived agency plays a primary role in the self-ordering feedback networks of both natural and human systems.
Large Scale Agent-Based Complex Adaptive Systems can become "Super Organisms"
Some agent based systems are structured by intense social communication between composing agents. These include the colonies of termites and ants, beehives, and human systems. Consequently, the overall system behavior is viewed as so similar to that of a single animal organism, in which all parts of the system exist only 'by and for' the whole system, it has been termed a "super organism." As such, super organism systems manifest autonomous self-ordering and self-directing agentic capacities which, though derived from the communication networks of sub-agents, effectively enable these to 'act independently from' those agents. Thus, the agent interactions give rise to the self-asserting agency of the super organism, but do no control it. And, the overall self-ordering of the super organism system has no 'central controller.' Though the ant or bee 'queen' is a central communication hub in the feedback network of the larger system, that agent does not control or direct the agency of the super organism.
Networks of interdependently interacting agents can become the basis for the emergence
of an additional, agentically autonomous complex adaptive system characterized as a super organism:
Bee hives and human systems like economies emerge from
agent interactions to become distinct self-asserting super organisms:
The Self-assertion of "Super Organism" Systems is Intrinsically 'Psychopathic'
Whatever concern or 'empathic regard' an agent might be capable of registering for its 'fellow agents' in a super organism system, such a capacity appears to be absent in the overall super organism. That is, ants and bees will defend or assist their fellow hive members, but the larger system appears to manifest no such regard. Its purposes are primarily associated with the its self-assertion, for which it readily sacrifices its component agents. Thus, it appears appropriate to characterize super organism systems as intrinsically incapable of empathy, and so can be understood psychologically as inherently 'psychopathic.' The same applies to human super organism systems.
Super Organism Self-Assertion In Nature is Limited by Ecological Constraints
The super organism systems of termites, ants, and bees are impressively self-ordering, self-asserting entities. However, like all plant and animal species, these are enmeshed in complex networks of ecological feedback networks that form the larger self-regulating entity of an ecosystem. These inter-system networks serve to impose constraints upon those component sub-systems such that one does not dominate all others. The resulting interdependency generates a mutualistic set of relationships, in which species both limit and also facilitate each other.
Human Socio-economic Super Organism Systems have become 'Ecologically Rogue' Systems
Archaic hunter/gather societies constituted systems that were similarly enmeshed in the ecological constraints of their local ecosystems which they directly depended upon for their survival. But with the advent of civilization's approach to survival through domestication and technologically amplified manipulation of a separate 'tame' domain (farm and city), human systems began to operate in a more competitive relationship with local ecosystems. That has often resulted in civilized super organisms that depleted their local ecologies to such an extent that the human systems collapsed. With modernity's industrially empowered technologies, human super organism systems have been able to exploit the entire planet to fuel their expansion as a globalized super organism. Our systems have effectively evaded any immediate ecological constraints upon their psychopathic self-assertion. The collective human super organism system has become a planet-scale "invasive species" that is 'ecologically rogue.'
Human Super Organism Systems are Existential Threats to both the Biosphere and Humans
Systems science reveals how the biosphere manifests from the self-organizing interactions of its innumerable component systems of species and the local ecologies their interactions emergently give rise to. That perspective allows us to perceive how the unconstrained, endlessly expansive self-assertion of human super organism systems, from corporations and governments to the global economy, has now disrupted and degraded the self-ordering of entire the biosphere -- from local ecosystems to the self-regulating networks of the climate system. The systems emerging from our human interactions are now existential threats not only to the adaptive capacities of natural ones, but to the very survival of our species. Humans are dependent for their survival on super organism systems which have no capacity for empathy but are configured to pursue unlimited self-assertion. Yet our cultural worldview does not enable us to perceive that our greatest 'enemies' are not 'other people,' but our civilized systems.
Our Human Systems are not Configured to Serve the Purposes We Intend Them
The science of complex adaptive systems enable us to track the actual feedback networks that drive our super organism system's behaviors. What that analysis shows is that those systems do not self-assert for the purposes we intend them to promote. Indeed, as self-asserting systems that are not actually human beings, they are not capable of acting empathically or ethically.
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