Alternative article – https://metamoderna.org/what-is-the-mhc/

Source: Model of hierarchical complexity – Wikipedia

Model of hierarchical complexity

This keeps coming up for me, so here it is.

What are the eight interlocking concepts of Bowen Family Systems Theory?

http://www.vermontcenterforfamilystudies.org/about_vcfs/the_eight_concepts_of_bowen_theory/

Eight concepts (pdf) http://courses.aiu.edu/FUNDAMENTALS%20OF%20FAMILY%20THEORY/SESSION%203/3.pdf

Source: Theory – The Bowen Center

This is a fantastic, simple, necessary, and powerful article.

It also encapsulates quite neatly my thoughts including reservations about the complexity ‘brand’. This is about purely scientific-realist level reductionist done better, at a more appropriate scale, with technical solutions. It’s about analysis which doesn’t recognise hierarchically-interacting effects or emergence. It mentions the microbiome, and differences between humans, which is good, but doesn’t even nod to the real layers of complexity in the system of human health related to food – I can understand not mentioning any of the effects of farming, supply chains, sustainability etc, since they operate at at least one remove – but the health effects of food cannot merely be reduced to interactions of molecules. Context, environment, epigenetics, attitude of mind, exercise are all a completely interacting part of the picture.

Maybe all that just isn’t appropriate for this kind of article, maybe that’s just the way science has to work – and the final long paragraph does suggest it’s not far from the authors minds:

To appreciate the transformative potential of a deeper quantitative understanding of the nutritional dark matter, we must realize that our genetic predispositions to specific phenotypes and pathophenotypes can conceivably be modified by these food-based molecules. Indeed, while we cannot currently change the genetic basis for disease, we regularly modulate the activity of our subcellular networks through the food we eat, diminishing the impact of some mutations and enhancing the role of others. This differential modulation of subcellular networks explains why individuals with strong genetic predispositions to heart disease can lower the chance of developing the disease by up to 70% with proper lifestyle choices⁵⁶, within which dietary changes play a dominant role^56,57. This finding implies that an accurate mapping of our full chemical exposure through our diet could lead to actionable information to improve health. Recent trends in nutrition research, aiming to explore the synergies, competitions and interactions among the entire matrix of what constitutes a food product, increasingly acknowledge the complexity of the problem, and the need for new tools to address it⁵⁸. We must embrace this irreducible complexity to be able to integrate changes in the food supply, the role of the microbiome and personalized dietary patterns, so that we can eventually offer individually tailored food-based therapies and appropriate lifestyle choices for disease prevention and lifespan optimization.

But I can’t help having a ‘so near, and yet so far’ response to this. It’s great, it’s essential, but it isn’t enough, it isn’t systemic enough, and it risks closing eyes to true complexity.

Source: The unmapped chemical complexity of our diet | Nature Food

Published: 09 December 2019

The unmapped chemical complexity of our diet

• Albert-László Barabási,
• Giulia Menichetti &
• Joseph Loscalzo

Nature Food (2019) Cite this article

The Biology behind Design that Delights

Source: The Genetics of Design | The Biology behind Design that Delights

Source: Improvisation Blog: Out of Chaos – A Mathematical Theory of Coherence

Tuesday, 24 December 2019

Out of Chaos – A Mathematical Theory of Coherence

One of my highlights of 2019 was the putting together of a what is beginning to look like a mathematical theory of evolutionary biology, with John Torday of UCLA, Peter Rowlands in Liverpool university, using the work Loet Leydesdorff and Daniel Dubois on anticipatory systems. The downside of 2019 has been that things have seemed to fall apart – “all coherence gone” as John Donne put it at the beginning of the scientific revolution (in “An Anatomy of the world”):

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

The keyword in all of this (and a word which got me into trouble this year because people didn’t understand it) is “Coherence”. Coherence, fundamentally, is a mathematical idea belonging to fractals and self-referential systems. It is through coherence that systems can anticipate future changes to their environment and adapt appropriately, and the fundamental driver for this capacity is the creation of fractal structures, which by definition, are self-similar at different scales.

In work I’ve done on music this year with Leydesdorff, this coherent anticipatory model combines both synchronic (structural) and diachronic (time-based) events into a single pattern. This is in line with the physics of David Bohm, but it also coincides with the physics of Peter Rowlands.

When people talk of a “mathematical theory” we tend to think of something deterministic, or calculative. But this is not at all why maths is important (indeed it is a misunderstanding). Maths is important because it is a richly generative product of human consciousness which provides consciousness with tangible natural phenomena upon which its presuppositions can be explored and developed. It is a search for abstract principles which are generative not only of biological or social phenomena, but of our narrative capacities for accounting for them and our empirical faculties for testing them. Consciousness is entangled with evolutionary biology, and logical abstraction is the purest product of consciousness we can conceive. In its most abstract form, an evolutionary biology or a theory of learning must be mathematical, generative and predictive. In other words, we can use maths to explore the fundamental circularity existing between mind and nature, and this circularity extends beyond biology, to phenomena of education, institutional organisation and human relations.

When human organisations, human relations, learning conversations, artworks, stories or architectural spaces “work”, they exhibit coherence between their structural and temporal relations with an observer. “Not working” is the label we give to something which manifests itself as incoherent. This coherence is at a deep level: it is fractal in the sense that the pattern expressed by these things are recapitulations of deeper patterns that exist in cells and in atoms.

These fractal patterns exist between the “dancing” variables involved in multiple perceptions – what Alfred Schutz called a “spectrum of vividness” of perception. The dancing of observed variables may have a similar structure to deeper patterns within biology or physics, and data processing can allow some glimpse into what these patterns might look like.

Fractal structures can immediately be seen to exhibit coherence or disorder. Different variables may be tried within the structure to see which displays the deepest coherence. When we look for the “sense” or “meaning” of things, it is a search for those variables, and those models which produce a sense of coherence. It is as true for spiritual practice as it is for practical things like learning (and indeed those things are related).

2019 has been a deeply incoherent year – both for me personally, and for the world. Incoherence is a spur to finding a deeper coherence. I doubt that we will find it by doing more of the same stuff. What is required is a new level of pattern-making, which recapitulates the deeper patterns of existence that will gradually bring things back into order.

Posted by Mark Johnson at 15:56 

Source: Improvisation Blog: Out of Chaos – A Mathematical Theory of Coherence

Thanks to a tweet from @pezeshkicharles (also https://empathy.guru/) for reminding me of this piece, via posting the ‘Big Think’ article at https://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mit-physicist-proposes-new-meaning-of-life (I don’t recommend you click on this, loads of adware etc and a promised video which I can’t get).

Source: A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life | Quanta Magazine

This is well worth a read – I don’t claim to have any real scientific understanding, but what I said in response to the tweet was:

“This is really intriguing to me – reminds me of this narrative of developing complexity – https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/11/06/adaptiveness-in-human-social-organisation-michael-church-1990s/… and the message which didn’t quite get into this systems change write-up – https://forumforthefuture.org/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=f1a1c008-ac99-4a73-87ec-ba18d2cacdeb… – that the purpose of ‘systems change’ is ultimately to support the development of the universe’s unfolding complexity.

“This is (a) Alan Watts’ ‘ah yes, the rock in space is peopling’ (like a tree ‘fruits’), and (b) I *think* it’s the piece I’ve been trying to re-find for some time which essentially makes the point that negentropy / complexity is actually a mechanism of longer-term entropy.

“(And we must remember that the unfolding complexity is essentially ‘hierarchical’ as well as networked in nature)”

While the statement ‘everything that develops in nature is necessarily in the nature of nature’ might seem a truism of the ‘Eureka! You’ve discovered water’ type, it’s the kind of thing I get excited about.

Source: A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life | Quanta Magazine

Content I took from the BigThink piece when I originally posted this at https://model.report/s/4eliay/mit_physicist_proposes_new_meaning_of_life_big_think

MIT Physicist Proposes New “Meaning of Life”

MIT physicist Jeremy England claims that life may not be so mysterious after all, despite the fact it is apparently derived from non-living matter. In a new paper, England explains how simple physical laws make complex life more likely than not. In other words, it would be more surprising to find no life in the universe than a buzzing place like planet Earth.

What does all matter—rocks, plants, animals, and humans—have in common? We all absorb and dissipate energy. While a rock absorbs a small amount of energy before releasing what it doesn’t use back into the universe, life takes in more energy and releases less. This makes life better at redistributing energy, and the process of converting and dissipating energy is simply a fundamental characteristic of the universe.

[S]imple physical laws make complex life more likely than not.

According to England, the second law of thermodynamics gives life its meaning. The law states that entropy, i.e. decay, will continuously increase. Imagine a hot cup of coffee sitting at room temperature. Eventually, the cup of coffee will reach room temperature and stay there: its energy will have dissipated. Now imagine molecules swimming in a warm primordial ocean. England claims that matter will slowly but inevitably reorganize itself into forms that better dissipate the warm oceanic energy.

[T]he second law of thermodynamics gives life its meaning.

The strength of England’s theory is that it provides an underlying physical basis for Darwin’s theory of evolution and helps explain some evolutionary tendencies that evolution cannot. Adaptations that don’t clearly benefit a species in terms of survivability can be explained thusly: “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve.”

PROLOGUE: A SHORT HISTORY OF CYBERNETICS (2017)

Louis H. Kauffman, Stuart A. Umpleby

Prepared for the book, New Horizons for Second Order Cybernetics Edited by Alexander Riegler and Karl H. Mueller World Scientific, 2017]

https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.gwu.edu/dist/d/257/files/2016/11/2017-Preface-for-World-Scientific-book-8-w-title-p-1a6cyu0-2-zntkap.pdf

Also

https://www.academia.edu/35684594/PROLOGUE_A_SHORT_HISTORY_OF_CYBERNETICS

Epilogue: Possible Futures for Cybernetics

Karl H. Müller, Stuart A. Umpleby & Alexander Riegler

https://blogs.gwu.edu/umpleby/files/2016/11/Epilogue-final-draft-5-q6vpef.doc

also

https://www.academia.edu/35684598/Epilogue_Possible_Futures_for_Cybernetics

>I wrote this message for participants in the RedQuadrant Way tool shed, and thought I might share it more widely<

Hello all

This is a little thought from the toolshed by way of season's greetings, as I have a chance of some reflective time. I think that an important part of understanding this practice we call consultancy, or change, or systems change, or whatever… is to understand the roots, and the history, and to listen to the elders. You'll find a lot of that in the toolshed, one way or another.

For years, I've been trying to find a piece I wanted from Marv Weisbord, which I thought was a reflection at the end of his long consulting career – which encompassed work in Bethlehem Steel, where FW Taylor undertook his famous experiments – and from which I vividly remember two quotes – one was 'let sleeping dogs lie' – don't discuss the undiscussable, and the other was a piece about a senior executive who was always disclosing his desire to retire. This was greeted positively by his team, and the consultants helped them work through implications and possibilities. Then they came back a year later – and there he was, still working, still talking about his plan to retire… soon.

I always thought this piece was 'Techniques to Match Our Values' – until I actually read it again 🙂

Thanks to my twitter network, I now know that I was really thinking of 'Let People Be Responsible'. Both pieces, and another one headlined 'Requiem for Bethlehem' are attached.

Techniques to match our values – https://www.dropbox.com/s/lrsrpmfeby6f2vi/Techniques%20to%20Match%20Values.pdf?dl=0

Requiem for Bethlehem – https://www.dropbox.com/s/z2oweb9lavmu506/Requiem%20for%20Bethlehem.pdf?dl=0

Let people be responsible – https://www.dropbox.com/s/mu60prut2q7zxo8/let%20people%20be%20responsible.pdf?dl=0

What I find fascinating is that 'let people be responsible' ​​is the piece I wanted, but isn’t quite the piece I ​​remembered. What I really want is a mashup of the history in Techniques to Match Values/Requiem for Bethlehem… and the ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ (not actually quoted in here – I was sure it was!) of this piece 😀

​It does contain some of the essence of that, though (and, btw, is co-written by Weisbord’s partner in business and life, Sandra Janoff). The quote I’m looking at is:

“Let People Hide Their “Hidden Agendas.”

“We never ask people what they are not saying. We see this as a form of subtle coercion that undermines a group’s willingness to accept responsibility. If people wish to conceal their “real” feelings or “real” data that is a choice they must live with. Their choice is, for us, the real data. In our philosophy, people have a right to hold back.”

You’ll hear a similar thing if you listen to these two reflective consultants, perhaps in their twilight years: Peter Block (episode 41) and Ed Schein (episode 49) on the Amiel Handelsman show – https://amielhandelsman.com/the-amiel-show/

​

​So, the Christmas message I have for you is this. Yes, there are many crises out there and in here, several of them existential. Yes, we can be forgiven a sense of urgency. And sometimes we need pace and drive and bravery and determination and even self-sacrifice. And, sometimes, an alternative is to let people live with their choices. To turn to our communities, to gifts, to ourselves, to care and gentleness. To let sleeping dogs lie. Allow yourself that that is a possibility.

​cheers

Benjamin​

​PS oh yes – and one of the original triggers for this is that Marvin Weisbord did retire. And he went back to one of his other careers, as a pianist – I got the below this month from the Future Search Network mailing list 🙂

​

​

EDIT 2022-12-20 (since I can’t reply, not sure why)
Updated links for those two podcasts:

Episode 41: Peter Block On Ambition, Authenticity, And Community [The Amiel Show]

Episode 49: Ed Schein On Humble Consulting [The Amiel Show]

—–
EDIT 2024-03-10 since this post mysteriously cannot be ‘replied to’

Link to a piece by Chris Mowles which shares many of these same features (which I believe is in tune with his core beliefs and practices)

“I can only guess at the significance of what goes on in the group, what is being negotiated, part-revealed or expressed diplomatically.”

View at Medium.com

A nice example of a really juicy and interesting podcast – many more at https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/science-technology/systems-and-cybernetics/

Source: Karl H. Muller et al., “New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics” (World Scientific, 2017) | New Books Network

In their volume, New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics (World Scientific, 2017), editors Alexander Riegler, Karl H. Muller and Stuart A. Umpelby have assembled almost 60 articles, including their own analyses, in order to test what they have dubbed the Klein-Martin-Hypothesis that: “As a research program, second-order cybernetics was a) insufficiently developed, b) has had no sustainable consequences for other scientific disciplines in the past, and c) will remain mostly irrelevant in the future.” Surveying the expansive terrain covered by the contributing authors, from scientific domains such as mathematics, psychology and consciousness research, and non-scientific ones such as design theory and theatre studies, they conclude that, while the first two claims of the Klein-Martin-Hypothesis must be confirmed, the third, regarding its future prospects, can be confidently rejected. By recreating, for the first time, second-order cybernetics “in a systematic way as a comprehensive and trans-disciplinary research program” and introducing the notion of endo-research, or research from within a domain of study, this volume positions the field to amplify its potential for facilitating increasing degrees of reflexivity across all fields of inquiry and endeavor in the twenty-first century. In my conversation with editor, and master story-teller, Karl Muller, we revisit the two separate, and often confused, foundation moments of second-order cybernetics, tangle with grumpy students of Ross Ashby, celebrate Heinz von Foerster’s eightieth birthday in a crowd of over a thousand at Vienna’s city hall, and celebrate the virtues of being a “slow learner.” I hope you find your time with Karl as entertaining and stimulating as I always do.

Source: Karl H. Muller et al., “New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics” (World Scientific, 2017) | New Books Network

 

Source: Kybernetes The beginning of a new epistemology: in memoriam, Gregory Bateson (1904-1980 | Mohammed Mijinyawa – Academia.edu

From Anneloes’ post on facebook https://www.facebook.com/anneloes.smitsman/posts/10157357271563591?__xts__[0]=68.ARDnEpeoqAqOhb3nCQ-sWCO-W6nEvpSLZVY2yAx_brxFbdnJbyU574hxvw-8mNpr7ZQof6vJZLR80IsoFek3ftDJK2_2PDk0xjaO9lMN9qpX_NsraLHhUQ2ocGg7CKSnKH3E4cupMbriIKAEpQ_Q2Z4ZlADEZOZ107L2FUhp-UaUMMkRZlWSqfQKbxEsz3MDsYFBfksEFs54JdxHCA&__tn__=-R

Finally!! Today was the oral defence for the receiving of the degree of Doctor at the ICIS Maastricht University. With deep thanks to my supervisors Prof Pim Martens and Prof Alexander Laszlo for supporting me to “think outside the box” and write from the heart of systems science, and to my family and children and all the incredible people in my life who have supported me all those years and have contributed to the stories and insights of “Into the Heart of Systems Change” (you are all mentioned by name in the dissertation acknowledgement), and the oral defence committee for the “tough questions” and great feedback today.

• E-book version of the PhD dissertation – https://bit.ly/2rTwl2Z
• PDF download version of the dissertation – https://bit.ly/2DnbHuP
• Oral defence presentation – https://www.dropbox.com/s/8m1619yy333g9je/Into%20the%20Heart%20of%20Systems%20Change%20-%20PhD%20Dissertation%20by%20Anneloes%20Smitsman%20(PhD%20dissertation%202019).pdf?dl=0&fbclid=IwAR3Vre03hioJsO7g-J6QyF0YwJEteJ5iQzqgPthCXRSDWWfLtPO8DrtAMOQ

Source: Into the Heart of Systems Change

Source: Systems Practice, Abridged – In Too Deep

Systems Practice, Abridged

Alex Vipond

Nov 8

When you’re making a system map in Kumu, it’s important to have skill and familiarity with the tool itself, but it’s equally important to have an understanding of the concepts of systems thinking.

You can learn these concepts and learn Kumu at the same time if you follow the Systems Practice methodology developed by The Omidyar Group. When we’re mapping systems ourselves, teaching systems skills, or simply brushing up on our own skills, this methodology is one of our all-time favorites.

Continues in source: Systems Practice, Abridged – In Too Deep