Learn System Dynamics Concepts from Jay W. Forrester. The founder of the field.The Jay Forrester Seminar Series has been revamped and improved, and is now available as a more accessible, on-demand, online course! The original consists of seminar series conducted by Professor Jay Forrester in the fall of 1999 for his Ph.D. students in System Dynamics at MIT Sloan School of Management.Decades later, the System Dynamics Society has transformed the series into a course, making it more structured and more suitable for evaluation-based learning. This course will be self-led and self-paced without guidance from an instructor.  Enjoy this course as you learn from the founder of the field, Jay Forrester, and some of the brightest minds in the field!

Jay W. Forrester System Dynamics Courses – System Dynamics Society

neuron-like electrical activity in fungi…

Wendy Hasenkamp on Twitter: “@evantthompson @birchlse Related, this preprint claims neuron-like electrical activity in fungi… https://t.co/5kRWCOpTPD” / Twitter

Replying to Evan Thompson:

“My paper, “Could all life be sentient?” is now out in a special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies on “Animal Consciousness” edited by Jonathan Birch”

How can funders drive innovation and impact to address complex challenges such as the climate crisis? 🌍To explore this question, funders in philanthropy, impact investment, and the public sector are invited to join our 5-week ‘Funding in a complex world’ module, starting in June.Learn more: https://lnkd.in/dBsQpARThis online module is the first in a series from Investors in Change, equipping funders with a better understanding about how to work with complexity and uncertainty to impact change. Further modules will be offered later in the year.The Investors in Change program is co-initiated by partners Ashoka, Catalyst 2030, The Lankellychase Foundation, and the School of System Change

https://www.forumforthefuture.org/investors-in-change

Normal Accidents, High Reliability, Wicked Messes (ST-ON 2021-08-09) April 4, 2022 daviding 0 CommentsChoosing topics for a Systems Thinking Ontario session, it seems as though the term “Normal Accidents” was not one familiar to many, particularly those who were not old enough to recall popularization coinciding with the 1979 movie The China Syndrome.  The interest then on High Reliability Organizations would also be news to most of our usual attendees.  Thus, a session based on readings was announced ….Have we learned from brushes with disaster, or have we become complacent about complexities in everyday life

Normal Accidents, High Reliability, Wicked Messes (ST-ON 2021-08-09) – Coevolving Innovations

Help Juanita finish her PhD

Fundraiser by Ellen Lewis : Help Juanita finish her PhD

Shared on behalf of Prof Gerald Midgley, who says:

Juanita Bernal Alvarado is a Colombian PhD student who is doing exceptional systems research to support conflict resolution, mediation and a culture of peace in Colombia after a 50-year civil war. She has capabilities beyond her years, working with leaders from across the political spectrum, as well as mediators and communities in regions of the country where a formal justice system doesn’t exist.

Juanita’s PhD program requires her to spend a semester overseas working with someone who can mentor her in systems thinking. I have volunteered to be that someone, as I have been working with her supervisor in Colombia for over 25 years to support peace-building.

However, Juanita does not come from a wealthy family, and cannot afford the £5,000 that a semester in the UK will cost. Please help me bring her to the UK so we can work together on systems thinking for peace in Colombia, and then she can return to her home country and continue to make a strong contribution after she graduates.

I very rarely ask friends to donate money, but this is a special case that I really need your help for. If 250 people are willing to donate £20 each (which should surely be possible), we will reach our target. I especially want to reach out to my friends in the systems thinking community – please lend your support.

If you want to read Juanita’s own words about what she is doing, click on the link below, and then click again on “read more”.

Really excited to announce that I’m hiring two new roles in my Systems Change team at @collabforimpact. 1. Systems change practitioner https://tinyurl.com/2p9bex7z2. Learning and evaluation associate https://tinyurl.com/25zvzf3x

Luke Craven on Twitter: “Really excited to announce that I’m hiring two new roles in my Systems Change team at @collabforimpact. 1. Systems change practitioner https://t.co/LlOlfVc0i3 2. Learning and evaluation associate https://t.co/rHcQammFjl” / Twitter

Really excited to announce that I’m hiring two new roles in my Systems Change team at

@collabforimpact. 1. Systems change practitioner https://tinyurl.com/2p9bex7z 2. Learning and evaluation associate https://tinyurl.com/25zvzf3x

CIA Document Claims Soviet Union Was Developing Cybernetic TelepathyNewly released CIA documents ask the important question: Is ESP compatible with Marxism?By Matthew Gault28.3.22

CIA Document Claims Soviet Union Was Developing Cybernetic Telepathy

2022 INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM DYNAMICS CONFERENCE

Frankfurt & Online | July 18-22, 2022

Submissions open until March 18, 2022

ISDC2022 registration includes online access from June 15 to September 30, 2022

System Dynamics Conference | System Dynamics Society

The New Cybernetics: Systems Thinking for the 21st CenturyOur director Genevieve Bell spoke with the Coller Venture Review about the new cybernetics.28 Mar 2022

The New Cybernetics: Systems Thinking for the 21st Century | ANU School of Cybernetics

At Any Given Moment in a Process…we have a certain partially evolved state of a structure. This state is described by the wholeness: the system of centers, and their relative nesting and degrees of life.Dorian Taylor

At Any Given Moment in a Process – by Dorian Taylor

Disruptions, systems and individual agents—Exploring the intersectionsJonathon Mackay,Matthew Pepper,Albert MunozFirst published: 03 March 2022

Disruptions, systems and individual agents—Exploring the intersections – Mackay – – Systems Research and Behavioral Science – Wiley Online Library

Addressing the youth unemployment challenge in Bhutan through a systemic portfolio based approachMar 18, 2022

Addressing the youth unemployment challenge in Bhutan through a systemic portfolio approach | UNDP in Bhutan

RSD11 IN 2022: UNIVERSITY OF BRIGHTON

RSD11 in 2022: University of Brighton

From Peter Jones:

Possibilities and Practices of Systemic Design Practice

Relating Systems Thinking and Design 11th  Symposium (Oct 13-16):  Call for Papers is open to May 30, 2022.

As RSD moves into its second decade, it is possible to question systemic design’s emerging shape. What are the strengths and limits of joining systems thinking and design practice, and how do these compare to other frameworks? How can systemic designers learn from their growing bodies of practice? What does systemic design make possible, and what are its blind spots? Is it sufficiently radical? Sufficiently pragmatic? Which conventions does systemic design contest? Which does it leave in place? Does systemic design entail particular assumptions about the world, and what might the consequences of these be? As it becomes a more mainstream endeavour, how will it address issues of power, complicity, and privilege?

As designers look to address systemic challenges, they must wrestle with tensions and conflicting requirements within their own practices as well as in those situations they seek to change. Systemic questions cannot be approached one at a time in isolation, yet it is inevitable that design is partial in its engagements – to address everything is implausible or else uncritical to implicit boundary judgements and the privileges of dominant perspectives. Unpredictable interdependencies require a cautious approach, yet incremental strategies risk entrenching underlying errors and injustices by making the status quo more palatable. Deep, long-term changes are needed, but the urgency of the present also demands immediately achievable actions. Moreover, design brings its own entanglements and faulty assumptions – design has contributed to many aspects of systemic crises, yet there is no way forward that is not design in some sense. Nothing about enacting systemic change implies an easy path. Difficulties such as these are to be expected when working across and between multiple contexts. But how can these and other potential impasses be navigated? To what extent is it possible to treat these challenges as any other set of conflicting design criteria? Are new modes of designing needed and how might these be enacted?

Building on previous RSD symposia, RSD11 looks to further expand systemic design’s modes of working. Systemic design has thus far drawn primarily on methodological and organisational aspects of systems thinking as a way of handling complexity. In what ways might systemic approaches be augmented by other perspectives?

The wider systems field is open to the creative arts, countercultural movements, enactive cognitive science, family therapy, posthumanism, and much more. How might these transdisciplinary connections further enrich and critique systemic design research and practice?

RSD11 invites contributions that extend and challenge the possibilities and practices of systemic design, especially projects and case studies from practice, education, and research; transdisciplinary theory building that extends systemic design’s modes of working and range of reference; and critical enquiries that can prompt new phases of development in systemic design.

A series of RSD11 thematic provocations and focuses will be released shortly.

Key dates

RSD11 Call for Papers and other important dates.

Submission portal opens for full papers and presentation proposals: March 31, 2022. The deadline for submissions is May 27, 2022.

The call for exhibition contributions opens on June 15, 2022. Deadline: August 15, 2022.

Conference dates: October 13-16, 2022. Hosted by the University of Brighton, <https://rsdsymposium.org/university-of-brighton-hosts-rsd11-in-2022/> Brighton, UK, in-person and online.

CFP#18 \ CYBERNETICS. SYSTEMS, THEORIES, MODELSPK#18 Marzo 2023Edited by Luca Fabbris and Alberto Giustiniano

CFP#18 \ Cybernetics. Systems, Theories, Models – Philosophy Kitchen

Call for Papers Philosophy Kitchen #18 – March 2023

CYBERNETICS. SYSTEMS, THEORIES, MODELS

Submission deadline (abstract): May 7, 2022                   

Submission deadline (full paper):October 30, 2022

The seminar “Cerebral Inhibition” took place in New York exactly eighty years ago, in May 1942. The seminar, organized by Frank Fremont-Smith, then medical director of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, was participated by many researchers from different fields: along with anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, there were psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie, social scientist Lawrence K. Frank, as well as neurophysiologists Warren McCulloch (co-author, with Walter Pitts, of a pioneering study on  artificial neural networks to be published  in 1943) and Arturo Rosenblueth. In that occasion, Rosenblueth presented the research he was carrying out with Norbert Wiener and Julien Bigelow. The research, which would have eventually led to the article “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” (1943), demonstrated the functional equivalence between living beings’ teleological behavior and the behavior displayed by machines capable of self-regulation by means of feedback loops.

After the Second World War, this group of scholars gave impulse to a series of interdisciplinary biannual lectures (1946-1953), hosted and promoted by the Macy Foundation. At first, the cycle of conferences was called “Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biology and the Social Sciences”; in 1948, with the publication of Wiener’s Cybernetics, or the Control and Communication in the Animal and in the Machine, it was re-named “Cybernetics: Circular Causal, and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems”. Among the participants, there were mathematicians, experimental and Gestalt psychologists, physicians, engineers, sociologists, ecologists, anthropologists, biologists, and linguists.

As Fremont-Smith stated in the course of the sixth meeting, the conferences aimed to build an interdisciplinary environment in which to develop a common scientific vocabulary. Said vocabulary would have helped to bring to the fore the isomorphisms between issues coming from different disciplinary areas, and to tackle them by means of common operating models. In a nutshell, the cyberneticians aimed at unifying the sciences by building on phenomena and processes that cut across the different fields of knowledge. The history of those lectures could be regarded as an ongoing search for mediation. The very notions that gained ground in that context actually functioned as mediators: 1) information, intended as negentropy, promised to mediate between physical, biological, psychical, and social processes; 2) feedback mechanisms, crucial in understanding all those processes in which the interaction between systems or sub-systems produces homeostatic dynamics, promised to mediate between engineering, physiology and sociology; 3) the electronic calculator, then at its embryonic stage, promised to mediate between mental processes (logic reasoning, understanding of universals, etc.) and material processes (the transmission of electric signals in a circuit).

«Ce n’est plus d’une libération universalisante que l’homme a besoin, mais d’une médiation», Gilbert Simondon (1958, 103) would write, concerning the encyclopedic ideal embraced by cybernetics. This encyclopedic inspiration went hand in hand with an explicit desire for renewal of philosophical categories and with the will of overtaking metaphysics’ dichotomies. In the first chapter of Cybernetics, titled “Newtonian and Bergsonian Time”, Wiener argued that thanks to cybernetics «the whole mechanist-vitalist controversy [had] been relegated to the limbo of badly posed questions» (Wiener 20193, 63). McCulloch and Pitts claimed that their neural network represented a solution to the mind-body problem: «[…] both the formal and the final aspects of that activity which we are wont to call mental are rigorously deducible from present neurophysiology […]. “Mind” no longer “goes more ghostly than a ghost”» (McCulloch 1988, 38). William Ross Ashby’s ʻabstract machineʼ, as Mauro Nasti noticed in the foreword to the Italian translation of An Introduction to Cybernetics, subverted «the whole traditional philosophical setting […] based on a radical juxtaposition between the “material”, physical world of machines and the “immaterial” and “free” world of mind» (Nasti 1970, xvii-xviii).

The last conference (held in 1953), far from leading to the end of cybernetics, established in fact its wider circulation. Cybernetic ideas break into every field of knowledge, where they were greeted sometimes with enthusiasm, sometimes with skepticism, sometimes with explicit criticism. From philosophy (Ruyer 1954, Jonas 1953) to economics (Lange 1963); from physics (de Broglie 1951) to ecology (Odum 1963); from politology (Deutsch 1963) to biology  (Monod 1970, Atlan 1972); from cosmology (Ducrocq 1964) to business management (Beer 1964); from literature (Calvino 1967) to law (Knapp 1963); from architecture (Alexander 1964) to ethology (Hassenstein 1966), cybernetics was able to transform the vocabulary of the fields of knowledge it entered, thus contributing to the birth of brand-new fields of research. In the context of cognitive sciences, in 1968 Marvin Minsky stated that cybernetics had branched in three different, now autonomous research programs: 1) the theory of self-organized systems, based on the simulation of evolutionary and adaptive processes; 2) human behavior’s simulation through computational models; 3) Artificial Intelligence as such, i.e., the design of intelligent machines not aiming at simulating biological or cognitive processes.

While the second and third program were to be regarded as autonomous researches, fully detached from their cybernetic past, the first one never stopped to rely on its historical roots, that found in the Biological Computer Laboratory (University of Illinois, under the direction of Heinz von Foerster) a fertile ground in which to thrive. This context gave rise to a cybernetic epistemology – i.e., second order cybernetics, or cybernetics of observing systems – which fostered the development of the theory of autopoietic systems (Maturana & Varela 1980), of neurophenomenology (Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1991), of the general theory of society (Luhmann 1984), of many-valued logics and trans-classic ontologies (Günther 1962), of the pragmatics of communication (Watzlawick, Bavelas, Jackson 1967), of radical constructivism (Glasersfeld 1974), and so forth.

When the Biological Computer Laboratory was shut down, in 1974, cybernetics entered a diasporic phase, that continues to this day. It is a diaspora that, in contrast with the fruitfulness of the first dissemination, has now taken the form of a progressive fading of cybernetics. Cybernetics appears today as a ghostly entity that haunts a great number of debates; its traces can be detected pretty much everywhere, most times not considered to be such.

Nevertheless, in spite of – or thanks to – such ghostly features, the last two decades have witnessed a growth in historiographic interest in cybernetics, resulting in works that reconstruct its history as it has developed in the United States (Kline 2015), Great Britain (Husbands & Holland 2008), France (Le Roux 2018), Italy (Cordeschi & Numerico 2013), Soviet Union (Gerovicht 2002), and China (Liu 2019).

Alongside the growing interest in the history of cybernetics, there has been an increasing fascination with its theoretical and political implications – proving that we have not ceased to think along with its specter. Such a fascination concerns, among other topics, investigations on the relationships between cybernetics and ontology (Pickering 2010), metaphysics (Hui 2019), political philosophy (Guilhot 2020; Bates 2020), philosophical ecology (Hörl 2013), media studies (Hansen & Mitchell 2010), posthumanism and transhumanism (Malapi-Nelson 2017), French theory (Lafontaine 2007; Geoghegan 2020), and so on. It is such a ghostly and disseminated character, such a way of insisting within the interstices of encyclopedic knowledge, that leads us to devote the 18th issue of Philosophy Kitchen to cybernetics. The aim is to map out the places of knowledge in which it is possible to spot the traces left by cybernetics, in order to follow its tracks, reconstruct its threads, let its ways of being emerge, and question its legacy and current relevance.

In particular, we welcome contributions that investigate:

– Cybernetics in history of ideas and in history of science

– History of the historiographical reconstruction of cybernetics

– Epistemology and ontology of cybernetics

– General theory of machines

– Cybernetics and complex systems science

– Cybernetics in life and social sciences

– Cybernetics and cognitive science

– Cybernetics in contemporary philosophy

– Cybernetics and governmentality

– Cybernetics, planning theories and theories of design

– Critique of cybernetic rationality

Accepted languages: Italian, English, French and German.

To apply, please send an abstract of no more than 6000 characters to redazione@philosophykitchen.comby April 30, 2022. Abstracts should include a title, the argumentative structure of the paper, an essential bibliography and a short biography of the author. Proposals will be evaluated by the editors and editorial board; the authors will be notified by email by May 7, 2022. Selected papers have to be sent by October 30, 2022 for double-blind peer review. The issue is scheduled for publication in March 2023