The Radical New Reality of Systems Science
Our Next
World View
New/Next Worldview
Reality 'after Complex Systems Science'
The 'Expanded Reality' of a Network Centered Worldview
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Our science now confronts us with a materially based but agency-ordered self and world -- an 'agentic world'
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It is not 'blindly' deterministic causality, but purposefully self-asserting system networks that manifest the biosphere
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Both Nature and human society are created by the agency of purposefully self-organizing system networks
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A scientifically realistic worldview must now represent 'how the world works' in terms of emergent system agency
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Not by nullifying mechanistic knowledge but incorporating it into an expanded scientific understanding of phenomena
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We must now analyze and interpret in terms of deterministic causation and unpredictably emergent ordering
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​Nonetheless, adopting this logically next worldview requires radical subversion of our existing sense of reality
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Making this shift constitutes a 'cognitive revolution' that will transform notions of nature, identity, society, and culture
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It prompts a fundamental re-conception of institutions, corporations, governments, and economies as 'agentic systems'
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Comprehending what our left brain hemisphere biased science now reveals is not possible in its terms alone
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Understanding an emergently self-ordering, agentic world means prioritizing our right-hemisphere mode of attending
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This expansion of our sense of reality through 'network vision' is not only scientifically logical, it is a practical necessity
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Without it we cannot effectively confront the 'meta-crisis' of collapsing climate, ecological, and global economic systems
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Most importantly, it can also profoundly enhance personal experience of meaning and purpose
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a fact-based agentic worldview​ emerging from teleological dynamics and purpose, tension of control/cooperation
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​Realistic aspect of pluralistic sense of self, others, world: bidynamical, diversified, concurrently emergent, etc
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​Constraints from deterministic cause, emergent interdependencies, egoic command/control, or collapse of
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Human behaviors are often driven by the purposeful agency of system networks that are not human
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The self-asserting networks of social and economic systems tend to control us more than we control them
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Our ignorance of this reality has promoted our self-destructive disruption of earth's life-creating networks
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To inhabit this world sustainably we must perceive systems not as 'machinery' but as relational networks
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Prioritizing 'network vision' can transform our understanding of how our selves and our systems actually work
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​But how can we make the leap from our mechanistic worldview to that of systems science and network agency?
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Adopting this new/next worldview requires a radical subversion of our existing sense of reality
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we must somehow percieve and represent to our understanding both causal and emergent phenomena
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that means thinking in ways that are not progressively sequential but recursively interdependent
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reality 'after systems science' is 'mind bending' -- or 'mind looping', relationship not transactional but co-respondent
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But it is a necessity for our survival, particularly in coming to terms with our psychopathic super organism social systems
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Confronted with the ecological and climate systems meta-crisis, we have much to do and little time to do it
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Making this shift requires fundamentally re-configuring the feedback networks of education, society, politics, economies
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To overtly embrace it is a cognitive revolution that would transform society, culture, and identity
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However: we cannot transform our systems if we do not transform our own sense of reality!
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From our existing cultural perspective we must move into a logically paradoxical understanding of how things happen
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​And, that can profoundly enhance our personal experience of meaning and purpose​
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Yet all of this is not a 'technical problem to fix' but a issue of fundamental cultural reorientation
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seeing in two ways at once? or consciously osscilating?
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​​​That means constantly reprocessing left hemisphere mechanistic thinking through relationally holistic right
Confronting Our Ignorance of how Networks Make the World
The New Reality of an Emergently Self-Ordering, Agentic Self and World
Learning to 'See Through the Visible World' to Perceive the Hidden Networks that Make It
To make this profound change in our behavior requires a new way of 'seeing' the world around us--and even our selves and societies. Systems science shows how perceiving the world as separate things and events that occur in mechanistic, linear sequences blinds us to most of what is actually happening. We must learn to 'see through' this obvious 'surface of appearances' to perceive the networks of feedback-driven relationships which drive system behaviors. We must regard human as well as natural systems as purposefully adaptive networks that 'act as if they are alive' -- and interact in ways we cannot directly control. Yet our cultural perspectives are suicidally ignorant about these fundamental aspects of reality.
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Humans Create Systems that Create Unintended, often Disastrous Human Behaviors
Many complex adaptive system networks are composed of individual agents, from ant colonies to human societies. The collective interactions of these agents gives rise to the purposeful agency of the entire network. These have been termed "super organisms" because they behave like creatures -- even though they have not brain. But with human systems, their networks have vastly greater collective intelligence and power -- most importantly technological power. From institutions to governments and corporations, these super organism social networks are not human. They are incapable of empathic feeling or genuine ethical motivation. Thus their self-asserting impetus can work against the very values that humans create them to promote, such as equity, justice, and freedom. Their self-organizing, self-promoting 'drive' can manipulate the humans that compose them into assuming that their systems are synonymous with the purposes for which these were created. Thus, it is to be expected that human systems cannot be fully controlled and inevitably generate unexpected, even disastrous behaviors. From a mythological perspective, such systems are prone to becoming 'monstrous' -- to seek power and influence by exploiting other systems without regard to any consequences. To be realistic about human systems is to "live by the law of unintended consequences" and remain constantly suspicious of our own system's behaviors.
Reciprocally Un-Constrained Human Systems are Crippling the Self-Organizing Agency of Natural Ones
Modern industrialized civilization tends to create control-oriented, technologically leveraged systems that operate to exploit natural systems. These systems have evaded the mutually beneficial constraints of that ecological systems impose upon each other. The systems of industrial economies are not compelled by natural systems to 'give as much as they take' -- at least not in the short term. Consequently, our behaviors disrupt the capacity of the biosphere's component system networks that sustain their operations through their interdependent, mutually beneficial self-regulation. In other words, human systems do not act reciprocally with natural ones. Our system networks can 'ignore' feedback from natural ones about how their networks are being disrupted. The results include deforestation, desertification, soil infertility, habit destruction, species extinction, pollution, generating ecological collapse and chaotic climate system disruption. Our inherently psychopathic "super organism" human systems compete for advantage without regard for the effects upon the biospheric diversity and interdependency upon which we ourselves depend. 'They' can't do otherwise. Only we, potentially empathic, human individuals can resist their biocidal behaviors.
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Confronting the 'Monstrosity' of our Super Organism Social Systems
Over the last 50 years, ecological and climate systems science has confronted us with ever more potent evidence that our modern social and economic super organism systems are devastating the biosphere upon which both humans and non-human species depend. Yet, despite this factually compelling knowledge, and its confirmation in rapid rise of species extinctions (termed the "sixth great extinction event"), along with increasing "climate chaos," the behaviors of our systems only become more destructive. We have achieved what some term "ecological overshoot." In effect, our technologically enhanced capacities to promote our collective self-assertion have 'backfired' on us. Humans have 'succeeded all too well' at exploiting our natural environments.
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​In the view that agent-based super organism social systems employ human intelligence in their self-assertion but, lacking human empathy per se, are intrinsically 'psychopathic,' it seems inappropriate to 'blame' our systems for their rogue ecological behaviors. Similarly, since the individual persons who 'hold positions of hierarchical power' in those systems are entangled in feedback networks manipulated by the relentless self-assertion of those systems, it seems inaccurate to assume that those individuals are simply 'at fault,' or the primary cause of the 'rogue system behaviors.' Rather, systems science indicates that the underlying origins of this catastrophe derives from traits of the collective human agents from whose behaviors the super organism systems emerge. They can't 'do what they do' without our participation. The network configuration of our super organism systems is an expression of our individual or personal 'purposefulness.' If we want to change our system behaviors, we would have to re-orient the primary purposes for which we, as individuals, express our self-assertion.
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To do so is not as simple as it might seem. Firstly, our personal existence is now dependent upon our participation in our systems. Secondly, our individual behaviors are profoundly manipulated by the super organisms of capitalistic corporations, hierarchical governments, and political organizations within which we work and socialize. We are 'creatures of our systems' as much as our systems are emergent expressions of our personal purposefulness. For the systems to change, we must dramatically alter how we as individuals 'live our lives' But that would mean 'living for purposes' that fundamentally threaten the self-assertion of our existing systems, in ways that 'they', as configured, simply cannot tolerate. 'They,' in their psychopathic autonomy, would react with authoritarian vehemence. In fact, 'they' do this constantly by either repressing or cleverly diverting social movements that promote ecological responsibility or even genuine human empathy. They are 'our creation' but they are not 'under our control.'
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The monstrosity of our systems emerges from a monstorsity in our selves: our mechanistic worldview dissociaed from nature and our mutualistic competitive individualism, that is then amplified by feedback from our systems, creating a 'vicious cycle' that is debilitiating to both yet relentlessly purposeful in its pursuit of such self-assertion. .
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We are, in effect, in the position of the character Victor Frankenstein, in Mary Shelly's prophetic novel. The super organism 'creatures' we created to promote our control over the world have become our 'nemesis.' Subverting their dominance over our personal lives, as the 'outsized monstrosities' they have become, is not possible by 'overpowering' them. Rather, we must dis-empower these systems by a radical shift in why, thus how, we our assert our individual agency. That, it turns out, is a genuinely 'mythological challenge'
Inhabiting a World of Autonomously Self-Organizing Systems Beyond Our Control
In light of network science, we can no longer assume that our control-oriented behavior serves our own best interests. It has proved to be a disaster for the natural systems upon which we depend. The independent agency of natural systems cannot be controlled. And when we manipulate them in ways that disrupt their capacity to self-organize, they will eventually collapse, as is now happening. Thus we must now learn how to configure our systems so that these operate reciprocally with the networks of the biosphere, facilitating rather than exploiting these--from local forest ecologies to large scale ones such as the oceans and the global climate. We must impose mutually beneficial constraints upon the systems that emerge from our collective individual interactions.
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Imposing mutually beneficial constraints on our systems is what we have attempted to do politically for ourselves, with the creation of democratic institutions. But we behave in competitive ways that obstruct our own communal values of equality and liberty. That competitive bias and its hierarchical social network consequences act 'in service' to the inherently pathological self-assertion of our super organism governments, corporations, and economies. To effectively constrain these 'monsters' we must minimize their heirarchical structures and diminish their concentrated power over us. That means restructuring our system networks in a more horizontally interconnected manner with more localized nodes of operation which serve the reciprocal integration of human behaviors with local ecologies.
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WE DON'T NEED 'MORE INFORMATION'. WE NEED A NEW WORLDVIEW
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Incorporating the Neuroscience of Our Two Brain Hemispheres in Cultural Practices
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Living the Paradox of Individuality in/against Super Organism Society
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Founding Education upon Systems Science as a Transdisciplinary Lens
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Configuring a 'Naturalistic Spirituality' that Orients Us to how System Agency 'Makes the World'
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BUT- how do so without turning some notion of mutualistic inter-system relationship into yet another literalistic dogma that generatres and justifies yet another hierarchically confgured control obsessed super org?