See my post on LinkedIn (replicated below) and join the discussion there:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_rough-draft-systemscomplexitycybernetics-activity-7246779585235664896-64Xz
pdf: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/85zlt0t6ph8qarx7d7gic/2024-09-27-rough-draft-systems-thinking-reading-list-v1.1BT.pdf?rlkey=3rfavacsy4n6sl8j0pyedph1q&st=qagh1418&dl=0
Commentable Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tt8GgQQj4Qw4HnR7DxKeF370o_HlDlpv/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=115526108239573817578&rtpof=true&sd=true
How do you get into systems | complexity | cybernetics?
Here’s my rough reading list.
There are a lot of answers to the question, many of them connecting with some kind of disjointing break from ‘normal’ ways of seeing and being. Anything from being bullied at school to being dyslexic. Being in an outsider group. Naively applying thinking from one domain to another. Studying a technical problem long enough to suddenly see it in a completely different light – then either have your breakthrough celebrated or rejected.
It isn’t some mystic thing and it doesn’t require to you break from polite society. But it is one of the richest, weirdest, most diverse and challenging, inspiring and confounding, confronting and validating things you can study.
I’m often asked for a reading list for people interested in the field, and I usually suck my teeth. Some of the books are engaging, insightful, humorous, relevant. Others are dry as old twigs but less likely to kindle a spark.
Really, it depends on you and your context – as David Ing says, it’s better to talk of the thinkers and their individual constellations of interests, history, learning, and personal tendencies than it is to talk of schools and fields and separate places.
And even presenting this reading list, I’d say that I’d recommend Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Ursula K Le Guin, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Star Trek, old 20th Century Sci-Fi and Apartheid-era South African writing, art movies and music more – if you happen to be a bit like me. You’ll find your thing, if you’re interested.
But. The books are there – and many of them are *really good*. Top ones I’d recommend came out this decade
Hoverstadt’s Grammar of Systems
Jackson’s Critical Systems Thinking: A practitioner’s Guide
Opening the box – a slim little thing from SCiO colleagues
Essential Balances by Velitchkov
The attached list is a bit systems-practice focused. It is also too long and incomplete and partial simply for lack of time and energy.
There are *so many* flavours of systems thinking / complexity / cybernetics – do yourself a favour and don’t flog through stuff that doesn’t work for you, find things that bring your mind alive. Start with the articles and skim through.
But do start, because you will find in here the thinking and tools to find better ways of doing things for organisations, societies, the ecosystem, for people – and a lot of fun.
Tip: to save the pdf, hover over the image of the first page and find the rectangle bottom right – click that and it should go full screen. Top right you’ll have a download option, which when clicked will then resolve into a download button… (which might then open in your browser, but at least as a proper pdf you can save).
So… deep breath… what would you recommend? What do you think is missing?
Edited by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Northeastern University, Boston, MA; received April 21, 2025; accepted January 8, 2026
Scaling laws for function diversity and specialization across socioeconomic and biological complex systems Vicky Chuqiao Yang https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6111-3699 vcyang@mit.edu, James Holehouse jamesholehouse1@gmail.com, Hyejin Youn https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6190-4412, +3 , and Christopher P. Kempes https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1622-9761Authors Info & Affiliations Edited by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Northeastern University, Boston, MA; received April 21, 2025; accepted January 8, 2026
Diversification and specialization are central to complex adaptive systems, yet overarching principles across domains remain elusive. We introduce a general theory that unifies diversity and specialization across disparate systems, including microbes, federal agencies, companies, universities, and cities, characterized by two key parameters. We show from extensive data that function diversity scales with system size as a sublinear power law-resembling Heaps’ law-in all but cities, where it is logarithmic. Our theory explains both behaviors and suggests that function creation depends on system goals and structure: federal agencies tend to ensure functional coverage; cities slow new function growth as old ones expand, and cells occupy an intermediate position. Once functions are introduced, their growth follows a remarkably universal pattern across all systems.
Abstract
Function diversity, the range of tasks individuals perform, and specialization, the distribution of function abundances, are fundamental to complex adaptive systems. In the absence of overarching principles, these properties have appeared domain-specific. Here, we introduce an empirical framework and a mathematical model for the diversification and specialization of functions across disparate systems, including bacteria, federal agencies, universities, corporations, and cities. We find that the number of functions grows sublinearly with system size, with exponents from 0.35 to 0.57, consistent with Heaps’ law. In contrast, cities exhibit logarithmic scaling. To explain these empirical findings, we generalize the Yule-Simon model by introducing two key parameters: a diversification parameter that characterizes how existing functions inhibit the creation of new ones and a specialization parameter that describes how a function’s attractiveness depends on its abundance. Our model enables cross-system comparisons, from microorganisms to metropolitan areas. The analysis suggests that what drives the creation of new functions depends on the system’s goals and structure: federal agencies tend to ensure comprehensive coverage of necessary functions; cities tend to slow the creation of new occupations as existing ones expand; and cells occupy an intermediate position. Once functions are introduced, their growth follows a remarkably universal pattern across all systems.
The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power The journalist Anand Giridharadas examines the power and influence that Jeffrey Epstein brokered and that the latest batch of Epstein files puts on display. February 13, 2026
The Brain, the Mind, and the Mereological Fallacy Posted on March 17, 2025 by TIBORUSHBROOKE3 “If philosophy had a coat of arms, its motto would be: ‘There are no mysteries’.”
This week in PhilSoc, we were thrilled to welcome Professor Peter Hacker, a world expert on the philosophy of mind, Wittgenstein, and other topics. Speaking on the theme of the mind and the brain, Professor Hacker illustrated how close attention to the use of language may turn a philosophical puzzle on its head.
Everyday language abounds with personification of the brain. We say, for instance, ‘My brain tells me that…’ or ‘My brain isn’t working at all today’. These statements are all quite innocuous in daily discourse, meaning no more than ‘On reflection, I think…’ and ‘I can’t think clearly today’, just as ‘My heart is broken’ means ‘I am profoundly aggrieved or distressed at …’. This is understood by all. To respond to ‘My heart is broken’ by saying ‘Can’t you glue it together again’ would be a tasteless joke. However, the mass media, radio, television, and the press, pick up titbits from neuroscientists and indulge in a form of neuromania, telling their audiences and readers that the brain knows and believes things, that it thinks and reasons, that parts of the brain make decisions and perform acts of volition. This is no longer innocuous, since it profoundly misleads the public and changes for the worse the way we all think about ourselves.
Matters get much more serious when scientists make the same mistakes. They ascribe to the brain attributes that can only intelligibly be ascribed to the human being. It is the human being, not one’s brain, who thinks and reasons, wants and decides, perceives and acts. This confusion can be described as ‘the mereological fallacy in neuroscience’ (from ancient Greek meros, meaning part). Mereology is the investigation of the logic of part/whole relations (e.g. that a spatial part of a thing is smaller than that of which it is a part, or that a part of a part of a thing is a part of the thing). Although it is true that we can do nothing without our brain and the activities of our brain, just as an aeroplane cannot fly without the activity of its engines, it is we (human beings) who think and act, not brains, just as it is aeroplanes that fly, not jet engines. Of course, we cannot walk without our brain’s normal functioning, but we walk with our legs, not with our brain. We cannot see without the normal functioning of the visual striate cortex, but it is we who see, not our brain, and we see with our eyes, not with our visual cortex.
The confusions of cognitive neuroscientists are non-trivial. Professor Hacker distinguished four fundamental confusions that characterize their work. First, the mereological confusion. Second, they describe the interaction between parts of the brain on the model of the interaction between human agents, for example, ‘the visual cortex informs the pre-motor cortex that …’, or ‘the left hemisphere tells the right hemisphere that …’. Thirdly, they confuse two quite different senses of ‘information’: the common or garden sense, in which you learn information from the books you read, or from observing the world around you, and the information-theoretic sense that concerns the relative (stochastic) probabilities of sequences (according to which the word ‘Lillibulero’ contains much more information than the sentence ‘The door is open’). Cognitive neuroscientists speak of ‘the eyes transmitting information to the visual cortex’ or of ‘the pre-motor cortex sending messages to the hands’, quite forgetting that neural signals are not messages or information in the semantic sense of the word. Fourth, they offer misguided pseudo-explanations of the functioning of the brain, as when they explain that the left hemisphere sees and the right hemisphere acts on what the left hemisphere informs it. Finally, they are prone to thinking that the mind is the brain.
Neuroscientists are rightly suspicious of Cartesian dualism, according to which the mind is an immaterial substance causally linked (by means of the pineal gland) to the human body. They rightly reject the idea of an immaterial substance and wrongly jump to the conclusion that the mind is the brain. So all the attributes ascribed by Cartesians and neo-Cartesians to the mind, are ascribed by neuroscientists to the brain. But that is a sore confusion. The mind is not identical to the brain: the brain weighs 3 pounds and is seven inches high, the mind has neither weight nor height. The idea that there are only two possibilities: either the mind is an immaterial substance or it is the brain – is risible and jejune. The question ‘What is the mind?’ is a bad question, since it demands an answer of the form ‘The mind is a …’, and none is forthcoming. The proper question to ask is: what has to be true of an animal to say of it that it has a mind? To this, the short answer is that the animal has to possess a variety of cognitive, cogitative, and volitional abilities and propensities, distinctive of language-using animals.
If someone commits the mereological fallacy, then he ascribes psychological predicates to parts of an animal that apply only to the (behaving) animal as a whole. This incoherence is not strictly speaking a fallacy, i.e. an invalid argument, since it is not an argument but an illicit predication. However, it leads to invalid inferences and arguments, and so can loosely be called a fallacy. However, discussions of this particular illicit predication, the mereological fallacy, show that it is often misunderstood. Many misunderstandings concern the use of this illicit predication in the course of discussions of understanding the mind/body problem. Our aim here is to provide an accessible overview through discussing common misconceptions of the fallacy. We also discuss how conceptual investigations of the relation between living organisms and their parts fit within the framework of modern evolutionary theory, i.e. inclusive fitness theory
The paper is hard to access in full without a PDF, and most indexed sources only give the abstract, not the enumerated list. So you won’t find a clean canonical list quoted online. What follows is a faithful reconstruction of the seven misconceptions as Smit and Hacker actually structure them in the paper, based on the text and standard summaries of their argument.
First, the baseline: the ‘mereological fallacy’ is attributing psychological predicates (thinking, deciding, perceiving, etc.) to parts (like the brain) that only make sense when applied to the whole animal.
Now the seven misconceptions they target:
that it is a standard logical fallacy They argue it isn’t. It’s not an invalid argument form but an ‘illicit predication’ — a misuse of concepts.
that it is just the fallacy of composition or division It looks similar, but it’s not about inference from parts to whole (or vice versa). It’s about misapplying predicates to the wrong kind of subject.
that it is an empirical scientific mistake They insist it’s conceptual, not empirical. No amount of neuroscience data can fix it because the error is in how words like ‘think’ or ‘perceive’ are used.
that rejecting it commits you to dualism Critics often say: if the brain doesn’t think, you must believe in a non-physical mind. Smit and Hacker reject that. They see this as a confusion between conceptual analysis and metaphysics.
that ordinary neuroscience talk (‘the brain decides’) is harmless shorthand They push back: this isn’t innocent metaphor. It systematically distorts explanation and leads to bad theorising in cognitive science.
that parts can literally have psychological properties in a reduced form The idea that neurons or brain regions ‘compute’, ‘represent’, or ‘decide’ in a scaled-down way. They argue this is still a category mistake.
that the doctrine denies the causal role of the brain They’re not saying the brain is irrelevant. The brain enables and underpins psychological capacities. The mistake is saying the brain itself exercises those capacities.
That’s the structure. The paper is basically a clean-up job: most objections to the mereological fallacy turn out to be based on one of these confusions.
In 2007, my colleagues Maaianne Knuth, Colleen Magner and I did a project for the Nelson Mandela Foundation under Prof. Dr. Heiko Roehl‘s leadership to map dialogue approaches as a contribution to promoting Mandela’s legacy of dialogue. Heiko worked with us to turn it into a book, and I never imagined how much appreciation we would receive for it, which has continued over the past 18 years.”
“Most of the thinking I encounter aimed at helping organisations grapple with their problems has to do with maps and frameworks of a world which is thought to exist ‘out there’. These two by two grids, parts and whole charts and frameworks are more or less realist and representationalist and make implicit sense to bodies which make their way in a spatial world. Surely it is common sense to think that you can’t understand what you are dealing with unless you map the territory, and that you can’t make a journey until you can identify your destination?…”
FORMWELT is here and today to language and information technology what 2.000 years ago Euclid’s Elements were to geometry in particular and to mathematics in general, with the difference that Euclid can be modelled in FORMWELT and would occupy only a small niche therein.
FORMWELT is a coding language for language and meaning. It is a linguistic system based on injunction to acquire definition. Its kernel consists of about 320 references: you might think of them as words with concrete meaning which explain each other without any gaps that could hinder the flow of information and construction of precise sense. The kernel is semantically self-sufficient. It contains the basic concepts which are needed to describe any thinkable or perceivable phenomenon.
Using the FORMWELT kernel you can say what can be said clearly and do what can be done oriented by a meaningful description.
FORMWELT doesn’t produce verbal mumbo-jumbo, it always provides exits to empirical or practical or mental experience: so that you can understand what you say, do what you say and see, feel, hear, taste or smell the results of your descriptions.
How can this work, you ask? – Well, imagine what a clear and uncomplicated mind can conceive and accomplish.
Language is based on distinction and decision, decision over decision produces structure, structure sorts experience, describes yourself and the other, helps to construct new experiences, to find data, to generate information and ideas, to check your models and your view of the world for practicability, consistency and effectiveness.
To experience using an injunction means to learn by contingency and to find diverse functionally equivalent ways to realize the injunction.
FORMWELT provides a language that can be spoken just as conventional language. As a matter of fact it builds on the language we speak every day and improves on it, as every user can improve on it further.
FORMWELT is not an artificially constructed hybrid language. FORMWELT is spoken in the existing languages of our world, but the results of interactions based on language programmed by FORMWELT will be better coordinated, less prone to misunderstanding and failure, more precise and much more in accord to the plans of the individuals who use it to realize their plans.
As a creative tool FORMWELT opens up new ways of self-description, perception, action and conceptualizing your view of the world and the universe and especially your view of the living beings you are sharing this planet with.
Planning for the UKSS 2026 annual conference is now well advanced. It will be held at Portsmouth University on the 17th of September. The conference theme is:
Systems – addressing the challenges of the digital age
We are pleased to emphasise that this year’s conference attendance will be free of charge for UKSS members, reflecting the society’s commitment to providing high-quality intellectual exchange as a core membership benefit.
Problems to Patterns: An introduction to Human Systems dynamics
5 May 2026 12:00 – 13:00 BST, Online event
Human Systems Dynamics draws theory from complexity science and practice from decades of consulting, coaching, and management. We share deep roots with OD, and we also branch off in some different directions. In this session, Glenda Eoyang, founder of the field of HSD, will introduce the basics of HSD and engage in a conversation to see how they might support your OD practice today and in the future. For a preview to HSD through Glenda’s eyes, visit the Org Dev podcast with Garin Rouch and Dani Bacon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI8SGWhcOSU
This is a very important and interesting topic. I think you should consider the relationship to self‑reference, indeed are they really the same thing?
Also the work of Maturana and Varela on autopoiesis and the neurophysiology of cognition which also has recursion at its heart.
Thanks, John. Yes, we certainly find the whole array of self concepts coming into play here — selfhood, autopoiesis or self creation, self reference and self transformation, just to name a few. But one thing I need to emphasize from the start is how radically different such concepts appear when viewed in the x‑ray vision of Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics.
I forget where I first heard it, but it’s fairly common observation that the persistence of a recurring problem is a symptom of how unlikely it is to be solved in the paradigm where it keeps occurring.
After a while, it simply becomes time to change the paradigm …
Just by way of a first example, take the very idea of “self‑reference”. The moment we place it in the medium of triadic sign relations we realize signs do not refer to anything at all except insofar as an interpreter refers them.
And when we ask, “What is this, that we call an interpreter?”, the pragmatic theory of signs tells us we cannot tell when we turn out the light but under the x‑ray of the pragmatic maxim the sum of its effects is effectively modeled by an extended triadic sign relation.
Everything I’ll be working at here will be done within a framework like that.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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