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?
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 science has evolved significantly from the early 20th Century. There have been three waves of systems methodologies since then, offering different practice approaches. Are we about to witness a new wave? Systems thinking enables practitioners to recognise patterns and connections and identify leverage points to deal with some of the world’s most wicked problems. However, despite its promise and a recent upsurge of interest, its adoption has not been as transformative as it could be. Some feel that systems science (the science behind systems thinking) relies excessively on abstract conceptual thinking and esoteric language, and thus remains apart from the mainstream. While the application of systems thinking is better in this respect, a lot of systems practice shows inadequate awareness of people’s inherent partialities. These affect how we perceive the world and seek to intervene even when we use a systems approach. Our current global political, economic and ecological crises beg the question: is there something missing? How is it that war, exploitation and climate change are feasible and profitable? Could the lack of weaving in the inner development goals be a key factor leading to failure to achieve the SDGs by 2030? Can either systems thinking or critical self-reflection in isolation bring about a thriving humanity and planet? In this webinar, Shakti Saran, Shaktify Founder, will be in conversation with Emeritus Professor Gerald Midgley, University of Hull, and Dr Rachel Lilley, faculty, University of Birmingham. Together, they will revisit how systems thinking inter-connects with self-reflection and sense-making and they will identify what’s missing in systems practice. They will shed light on advancements in neuroscience and sciences of mind and perception and discuss the role of introspective praxes such as Mindfulness, Meditation and Somatic Inquiry. In summary, they will explore what it takes to make systems thinking reach its full potential
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Speakers
Gerald MidgleyEmeritus Professor of Systems Thinking in the Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull, UKGerald Midgley is an Emeritus Professor of Systems Thinking in the Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull, UK and holds visiting professorships at the University of Birmingham (UK), the Australian National University and Linnaeus University (Sweden). Gerald’s transdisciplinary research on the theory and practice of systems thinking and systemic leadership is centred around developing generic theory and methodology applicable in a wide range of policy and management contexts. For almost forty years, he has moved between academia, government research and consultancy working on projects across public health, social service design, natural resource management, community development, public sector management and technology foresight. Gerald has previously served as the President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences and is a prolific author having written or edited over 400 papers and books on systems thinking. Gerald and Rachel Lilley from the Birmingham Leadership Institute have recently teamed up to take on the challenge of bringing systems thinking to the emerging field of systemic leadership. In collaboration they have been researching the implications of contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology (particularly how cognition, emotion and action combine to form a single anticipatory system in the body) for systemic leadership and systems thinking. This research is at the cutting edge of a ‘new wave’ of systemic inquiry that marries together the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ work required to address some of the most challenging local-to-global issues of our time. See More
Rachel LilleyAssociate Professor in the Birmingham Leadership Institute at the University of BirminghamRachel Lilley is a practitioner/academic who has spent over 30 years working at the intersection of social and environmental change, supporting individuals, organisations and communities to engage with complex challenges. Her work brings together systems thinking, behaviour change, neuroscience and contemplative inquiry. She is an Associate Professor in the Birmingham Leadership Institute at the University of Birmingham, where she has developed and now directs an innovative Masters in Systems Thinking and Leadership. The programme integrates systems thinking and leadership with reflective practice and embodied approaches to support practitioners to work skilfully with complexity and to facilitate systemic change. Alongside her academic work, Rachel is a yoga and mindfulness teacher with over 20 years’ of experience and has a longstanding commitment to inquiry and contemplative practice. Her teaching creates space for inner inquiry to be fundamentally important to action and change making. This supports more grounded and effective engagement with the world. Rachel and Gerald Midgley from the Centre of Systems Studies, University of Hull, have recently teamed up to take on the challenge of bringing systems thinking to the emerging field of systemic leadership. In collaboration they have been researching the implications of contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology (particularly how cognition, emotion and action combine to form a single anticipatory system in the body) for systemic leadership and systems thinking. This research is at the cutting edge of a ‘new wave’ of systemic inquiry that marries together the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ work required to address some of the most challenging local-to-global issues of our time. See More
Shakti SaranFounder of ShaktifyShakti Saran is the founder of Shaktify, an organisation that aims to empower changemakers. He holds an MBA degree from Boston University and worked in the corporate sector for over three decades, with the latter half spent at IBM. It was during his time at IBM, that employees were encouraged to volunteer which kindled the social sector interest in him. On retiring from IBM, he joined the Leadership program at India Leaders for Social Sector (ILSS), deepening his commitment to environmental sustainability, inclusive economics and social justice. He transitioned and worked as a Senior Fellow with the India chapter of Pyxera Global, a D.C.-based non-profit organization. Furthering his expertise through the Radical Transformation Leadership (RTL) program and certifications in systems thinking from eCornell and Fritjof Capra’s Systems View of Life course, he established Shaktify, a think-tank to empower changemakers. Shakti’s pursuit for advanced systems thinking under Fritjof Capra happened simultaneously whilst seeking enrolment in a Vipassana meditation program, in the tradition of Mr S.N.Goenka. He has been a regular practitioner of Vipassana meditation from which he has benefited considerably. His Vipassana meditation experience has been a journey of self- discovery and the pursuit of equanimity. In his experience this disposition is a leverage point in the application of systems thinking and bringing about meaningful social and environmental change. Shaktify promotes social and environmental change through webinars, storytelling, masterclasses, pro-bono resources, and mentoring services. See More
Transforming Systems Thinking Through Self-Reflection and Sciences of Mind and Perception
[I’m so sorry to hear that Marie Davidová passed away on April 10, 2026. She seemed really inspiring and a fantastic thinker, doer, and collaborator. I heard her talk in person on her wood project, whihc was inspiring, and have valued her constant engagement and support of the systems and systemic design communities. RIP]
A feature of special note in the recursion diagram is the function traversing the square from one triadic node to the other. It preserves an image of the object all the while its precedent is being retrieved and processed — thus it injects a measure of parallel process and a modicum of extra memory over and above that afforded by the serial composition of functions.
A paper by Mossio, Bich and Moreno (https://t.co/iZPapik4cp; for pdf https://t.co/kxTPu2lRpE), talking about part-whole relations in the context of emergence, some issues with some forms of top-down causation, and arguing for organizational closure as an emergent causal regime. pic.twitter.com/Xw612Yfq1g
Original Article | Published: 31 July 2013 Volume 78, pages 153–178, (2013) Cite this article
Matteo Mossio, Leonardo Bich & Alvaro Moreno
Abstract
In this paper, we advocate the idea that an adequate explanation of biological systems requires appealing to organizational closure as an emergent causal regime. We first develop a theoretical justification of emergence in terms of relatedness, by arguing that configurations, because of the relatedness among their constituents, possess ontologically irreducible properties, providing them with distinctive causal powers. We then focus on those emergent causal powers exerted as constraints, and we claim that biological systems crucially differ from other natural systems in that they realize a closure of constraints, i.e. a second-order emergent regime of causation such that the constituents, each of them acting as a constraint, realize a mutual dependence among them, and are collectively able to self-maintain. Lastly, we claim that closure can be justifiably taken as an emergent regime of causation, without admitting that it inherently involves whole-parts causation, which would require to commit to stronger ontological and epistemological assumptions.
Upcoming event from Systems Change Educators United. Daniela Papi-Thornton on LinkedIn:
“Have you read “Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows? Or have you had it on your shelf for years and always wanted to read it? Now is your chance to read, or reread this formative book.
Marta Ceroni who runs the Donella Meadows Institute and the Academy for Systems Change will host the book debrief on May 13th… so read up! This call is open to all! See you there!”
all the while its precedent 
is being retrieved and processed — thus it injects a measure of parallel process and a modicum of extra memory over and above that afforded by the serial composition of functions.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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