antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 12:11 pm on September 15, 2019

Do systems exist?

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 12:14 pm on September 15, 2019

For example:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/liam-mahon-b893b6127_a-system-does-not-condition-behaviour-people-activity-6576835215099072512-0m6d/

1/2 A system does not condition behaviour. People are the system. A system is not some sort of machine which governs how people behave. Take a look at Checkland and the concept of purposeful human activity systems. All organisations are purposeful human activity systems as..

— Mahoo (@SystemsNinja) September 9, 2019
- antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 3:49 pm on September 17, 2019
  
  I found this very interesting and relevant, unsurprisingly perhaps because David Chapman is my ontological-epistemological hero: https://twitter.com/meaningness/status/1174055633013788672?s=21
  
  There were discussions about this on twitter: https://twitter.com/antlerboy/status/1173312528782417920?s=21
  
  And Facebook:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2391509563/permalink/10157309180069564?sfns=mo
  
  In the latter of which, Judith Rose reminded me of her father (Gregory Bateson)’s definition: “A system is a collection of percepts that seem, to us, to go together in some way.”
  
  Which, henceforth, I’m going to adopt as my official definition.
ComplexWales 12:58 am on September 23, 2019

That would mean – in a tree falling in the forest kind of way – that if there’s nobody there to perceive it as such, then it’s not a system, whether or not it actually exists. So I’d add “…as to afford it a proper noun.”
- antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 12:44 pm on November 25, 2019
  
  Thank you for the serendipity! Was just looking for the Bateson definition to add to the Twitter discussion 😀
- antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 3:00 pm on November 25, 2019
  
  I’m quite bullish on this – I think there’s no meaning outside of there being a meaning-maker.
  Your theoretical tree falls in the theoretical forest because you call it into being, but otherwise… no.
antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:32 pm on November 30, 2020

see https://www.facebook.com/groups/ecologyofsystemsthinking/permalink/3533226210089831/?comment_id=3534934473252338

“There are no systems out there.” Words of the late systems pioneer Bela H. Banathy that I re-read today. His point was that “systems” are about a way of understanding things. I reflected on this today because I’m in the midst of writing a primer about the “systems perspective” for a general audience. This activity has prompted me to sharpen my own understanding after 25 years of immersion in and use of systems thinking.
I had just earlier written in my draft that “every thing is a system,” as in, everything is made up of relationships. However, Banathy’s note made me re-think this, and I realized that every thing is just a thing. It is when we examine its inner and outer relationships that we see view in systems terms. And it is not until we put “things” in context that we see “wholes”
So I sort of re-discovered that “things”, “systems”, and “wholes” are not synonymous, and have their own contexts based on angle of view of the observer. Let me know if this resonates with you.
Here is the context of Banathy’s quote: “Flood and Jackson (1991) suggest that the concept of ‘system’ does not refer to things in the real world but to a particular way of organizing our thoughts about the world. I always shock incoming students at the orientation [Banathy taught systems at Saybrook Graduate School] when I say that there is no such thing as a system out there. Systems exist as mental pictures in our minds. Saying this another way, systems thinking structures thinking about whatever entity or phenomenon we become aware of and assign meaning to.”

my comments

Excellent. And Liam Mahon and Harish Jose just put it well as well:
The system is the observation, not that which is being observerd. It is not a denial of the complexity and interconnectivity of reality, it is the explicit description of thinking in systems as a sense making process. (Mahon)
There is no system without an observer. The observer is the “artist” who draws the boundaries and prescribes a narrative for the system (Jose)
Also
We exist in language using language for our explanations- Humberto Maturana
The environment as we perceive it is our invention. – Heinz von Foerster
I could go on, but it’s Wittgenstein and David Chapman and Nagarjuna up next!

we seem to be so hard-wired for dualism that I fear these statements are inevitably going to be misunderstood and misinterpreted, however

(William charlton: Dualism and the time wasting brother False Dichotomy)#

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Do systems exist?