Thursday, January 15, 2009
Systems Philosophy
Today's class (1/15/09) was heavily focused on the relationship of humans and nature. We covered a few topics. These topics included what constituted as nature, human influence on nature, and what the future holds for nature. Many interesting points were brought up as well, including how our human influence has negatively effected the environment. Many if not all of the concepts we discussed today could be summed up in "systems philosophy". This form of philosophy is the study of the development of systems. In a sense its a philosophy that covers the root and cause of all things. I am posting this topic because systems philosophy is so relevant with our class. If anyone is interested in systems philosophy or already knows something about it please respond to this post. If you are interested, I highly recommend looking into Ervin Laszlo. He is one of the heads of the Global Shift Movement and considered one of the founders of systems philosophy.
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Mason,
ReplyDeleteNice post! I'll have to see what systems philosophy can do for me. Do you have any links to accessible descriptions of systems philosophy?
The Wikipedia page on Systems Philosophy mentioned that systems are produced by humans for their own purposes and do not occur in nature. Perhaps Pollan would add that bees and flowers can have purposes and perhaps even construct systems, but that the account we, humans, produce to explain those purposes and systems is yet a third system: you have the original human system, then there's the plant/animal system, and finally, you have another human system that tries to explain the plant/animal system.
I also found another link to something called systems ecology which turns out to be associated with Deep Ecology.
Here are the links mentioned in my first reply:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_philosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_ecology
By the way, does anyone know how to embed links directly into the comments so you don't have to write out the whole address?
I have only begun to learn about systems philosophy. I was first introduced to the conceptual aspect of it under a different name and from a different source; within the Principia Discordia:
ReplyDelete“We look at the world through a window on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is in the GRID (Hill 49-50).”
“System” is a better term to use than “chaos” because the latter is often given a negative connotation. System is a more impartial term to indicate the underlying reality in question. In class, I used the word “random” in describing the natural process of evolution. I read on the Wikipedia page for systems philosophy that “arbitrary” is used instead of “random” also on account of the negative connotation of randomness indicating meaninglessness. “Arbitrary systems” leave room for personal meaning to be developed as well as hope for proper interaction with these systems.
Besides semantics, systems philosophy itself seems to be very useful and applicable to many different fields of study. Not only can it be used to help us understand the earth system, but also individual biological units as well. Its application to daily life can help us in better understanding ourselves and our place in the natural world. Systems philosophy has given me a lot to think about and I’m excited to learn more about it in the future. I’ll have to try to apply it to my daily life and see how useful it can be.
Work cited:
Hill, Greg. Principia Discordia. 4th ed. United Kingdom: Diggory Press, 2007.