Synthesising Whole Systems

Quoted from the excellent article Complexity Theory: Actions for a Better World by Chris Lucas, CALRESCO (The Complexity & Artificial Life Research Concept for Self-Organizing Systems)

This action section of our website will list practical suggestions for using the ideas of complexity science and related areas to counter the ignorance, hate and violence that are so destroying our heritage, our societies and our planet. And note that these problems are all mental ones, they are problems of 'thought' and not of 'things', the result of inadequacies in our collective mental states, of our approach to life, our lack of wisdom, not of the inherent inadequacy of our material possessions. Our approach will be to look at 'whole systems', but this will require a far more wide ranging perspective than those we normally label as 'science', taking into account also philosophy and spirit. Any whole system comprises an holarchy, i.e. many nested and overlapping sub-systems, these are all important components of the totality that we wish to improve, so that it is essential that all these aspects are included, we will have no 'blinkered' perspectives here, no reductions to one dimension out of the many that concurrently exist, no divorce of psychology from sociology, of economics from ecology, not even of philosophy from science, or science from religion ! From physicist David Bohm:

"The essential new quality implied by the quantum theory is... that a system cannot be analyzed into parts. This leads to the radically new notion of unbroken wholeness of the entire universe. You cannot take it apart. For if you do, what you end up with is not contained within the original whole. It is created by the act of analysis."
Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1983), Whole Systems

This suggests that if we wish to understand the whole then we must take into account how all these analyses interrelate, how our abstract slices fit together to create the overall result and how that can change dynamically, and this is just the form of synthesis undertaken by the systems sciences. But to understand the implications of this wider viewpoint, we must start with thought itself.

Some relevant quotes from elsewhere:

"There is this hope, I cannot promise you whether or when it will be realized - that the mechanistic paradigm, with all its implications in science as well as in society and our own private life, will be replaced by an organismic or systems paradigm that will offer new pathways for our presently schizophrenic and self-destructive civilization." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy) [FR]

"Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes." (David Bohm) [FR]

"In contrast to the mechanistic Cartesian view of the world, the world-view emerging from modern physics can be characterized by words like organic, holistic, and ecological. It might also be called a systems view, in the sense of general systems theory. The universe is no longer seen as a machine, made up of a multitude of objects, but has to be pictured as one indivisible dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and can be understood only as patterns of a cosmic process." (Fritjof Capra) [FR]