Lewes 1875: ‘The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference.’
Smuts 1890 – 1926: ‘the tendency in nature to form wholes, that are greater than the sum of its parts, through creative evolution’
‘One of the two most important ideas for the next millennium’ – Einstein
Bertalanffy developed the concepts of open systems in 1934
Ashby’s Self Organising Principle: ‘Complex systems organise themselves’
Beer: ‘the output of a complex probabilistic system (such as a society) is a function of a self regulating, self organizing organization …in which regulatory power is not vested in a ‘controller’ but in the structure of that organization itself.’
Socio-technical systems is the study of how social groups self-organise
Autopoiesis is self-organisation
The viable systems model works with autopoietic & self-organising systems
Meadows: ‘self-organizing, nonlinear feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable.’
Ashby’s 1st Circular Causality Principle: ‘Given positive feedback, radically different end states are possible from the same initial conditions’ Skyttner, 2001
Darkness Principle: ‘No system can be known completely’ Clemson, 1984 (ie ‘compressability’)
Stafford Beer: ‘It is terribly important to appreciate that some things remain obscure to the bitter end.’
Stafford Beer ‘Instead of trying to specify it in full detail, you specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go.’
Smuts: ‘A whole, which is more than the sum of its parts, has something internal, some inwardness of structure and function…some internality of nature that constitutes that ‘more”
Ashby: ‘the characteristic structural and behavioural patterns in a complex system are primarily a result of the interactions amongst the system parts.’
Beer: ‘Relation is the stuff of system’
Ackoff : ‘Never improve any portion of the system unless is also improves the whole.’
Iberal: ‘System stability is possible only if the system’s relaxation time is shorter than the mean time between disturbances.’
Beer: ‘If we cannot adapt, we cannot evolve. Then the instability threatens to be like the wave’s instability – catastrophic’
4th Principle of organization: ‘The operation of the first three principles must be cyclically maintained through time without hiatus or lags.’
Canon: ‘A system survives only so long as all essential variables are maintained within their physiological limits.’
Ashby: ‘The upper limit on the amount of regulation achievable is given by the variety of the regulatory system divided by the variety of the regulated system’
Varela: what is the meaning of ‘wholeness?’ This relates to two key processes. One is the process of recognizing the stable properties of wholes, by interacting with them. The other is the recognition that the stability we see arises from the self-referential, mutual, reciprocal interactions that constitute the system. Thus, the three notions I mentioned are distinction, stability and closure, and are really one and the same.
Systems Community of Inquiry 