Only a tiny amount, in response to your post. It looks interesting, but too focussed on maths for my tastes. It has the appearance of something Objectivists might jump on, to promote their strange and hypothetical fantasies. There are already too many such opportunities. :wink:

Cybernetics is a good practical introduction. Systems philosophy is like a generalized theory of cybernesis.

I was intrigued by this:

"Systems philosophy", which is concerned with "the new philosophy of nature" which regards the world as a great organization that is "organismic" rather than "mechanistic" in nature. — Wikipedia

[My emphasis.]

I've nothing against cybernetics, but I'm more of a tree-hugger than a roboticist. :wink: An "organismic" approach is always going to take my fancy. :smile:

Yes, it is about seeing the universe as a conglomeration of systems, basically.

"It is the beauty of systems theory that it is psychophysically
neutral , that is, its concepts and models can be applied to both
material and nonmaterial phenomena." von Bertalanffy, Robots, Men and Minds

This is what I particularly like about the systems approach. It avoids the mind/matter problem.

Yes, it is about seeing the universe as a conglomeration of systems, basically. — Pantagruel

Many programmers come upon the realisation that 'everything is a network', which is more or less the case. But because everything is a network, it means less than it might if the description only applied to a few things. :smile: This looks to me like a similar observation? :chin: Interesting, though.

Yes, when I studied programming a few years back, I began suddenly to incorporate programming concepts (interfaces, classes, etc) into both my real-world activities and my philosophical undertakings. For me this demonstrates pretty conclusively that we have to apply ourselves seriously to working in a conceptual framework in order to be able to think and perceive in those terms.

Take the human sciences. It's pretty clear that psycho-social entities have a real ontological status, and that they don't reduce merely to brain functions. 'Mind' is a real set of phenomena. It makes no more sense to reduce mind to brain than it does to try to analyze organic chemistry using classical physics, it's an emergent class.

Moreover, if you do do a lot of reading in psychology and sociology, then you begin to build up a conceptual vocabulary and then the reality of the mental-phenomena begins to take shape. If you just try to ignore the whole mental landscape with a reductionist gloss, then you never get to see it....

Some things - like human beings - are more more, and some other things - inert ones - are less more. Exclusion of the excluded middle (an interest of Brouwer reputedly) is very often so faint as to be negligible, but in the spectrum or continuum of existence "analogy" or "proportionality" of existence applies (which according to my secondary sources, Duns, Leibniz and Kant missed because they didn't understand time).

Sourpusses like Ryle, and Sam Harris, say everything and everybody is less and less, and if it isn’t they demand to know why not!

This is why Rickert and Windelband pointed out that in human sciences, a different kind of approach is needed from what "positivists" usually called "positivism".

In science books I’ve been reading, six of the first 10 dimensions (out of at least 26 so I’m told!) are “envisaged” or “imagined” as curling up into cones, having a zero-dimensional point sometimes and a flat circle or egg shape section sometimes, which we are so used to including in our space that we don’t take any notice. (They arrived at these by 200 years of calculations – since Faraday - as well as a wealth of observations.) (The "curling up" event could have "happened" a split instant after what might be seeable as "creation" due to the action of light! Scientists are realising how little they know about light.)

To my mind, not only space, but also time, is curved. The psychology is part of the picture but is VERY FAR FROM inventing the reality. Probably time is a reason why humans have personality. Realistic philosophy is modular to the extent that it fits all kinds of theism and atheism, without being exclusively “materialistic” in the narrower sense.

Perhaps "systems philosophy" is a sly way of getting back to - Philosophy! I’ve always seen metaphysics as a branch of logic but then that’s just me!

These factors might be why our world picture is so often a couple of sliced eggs short of a picnic

Robotics is merely control systems – levers that work remotely through numbers.

I'm just finishing Laszlo's "Introduction to Systems Philosophy" which is probably the seminal work in the field. I have to say, it stands the test of time. His reconciliation of mechanistic causation with freedom is only a couple of pages long and it is...impressive.

I was curious if anyone on the forum has done any reading in Systems Philosophy? — Pantagruel

I have read some books on Systems theory, but for philosophical purposes, the most useful source for me has been the Principia Cybernetica website. It began in the 1990s, in the early days of internet communication, and I'm not sure how active it is 30 years later. But I occasionally refer to its articles for help in my own philosophizing. I used some of its concepts in developing my own personal worldview. Here's an introduction :

This is the website of the Principia Cybernetica Project (PCP), an international organization. The Project aims to develop a complete philosophy or "world-view", based on the principles of evolutionary cybernetics, and supported by collaborative computer technologies. To get started, there is an introduction with background and motivation, and an overview, summarizing the project as a whole.
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/

Yes, I spent much of the early nineties immersed in cybernetics and wrote a fairly long piece (60 pages) on personality cybernetics. I posted an annotation in 2001 annotation on the Principia Cybernetica regarding a systemic model of evolution.

personality cybernetics — Pantagruel

Interesting concept. How does it work?

a systemic model of evolution. — Pantagruel

Do you have a brief synopsis of this model?

I have a lot of research done on Systems Theory, started at a sociological level (chrono, macro, exo, ect.) in understanding privilege, social workings ect. and then turned into something of my own personal meta philosophy-everything in life is a network of systems; random, chaotic, interlocking, what have you-possibly "Complimentary" (Bohr) in a lot of ways. I can't elaborate right now as I should be studying, but I am happy to continue the discussion or look at various literature.

Sorry, I missed some of the replies! Since posting this I've read 3 books, the seminal texts by Laszlo and von Bertalannfy, and a recent survey/synopsis by Capra. I'm pretty comfortable with the conceptual role of non-linear dynamics, although the book I just started "Chaos and Complexity in Psychology: The Theory of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems" is pretty technical I have to admit.

So, I worked on a model of personality cybernetics in the 90's, basically assuming that
1. We are actively engaged in a project of evolving self-creation
2. This is enacted as cybernetic feedback loop wherein we modify/correct our cognitive functions based on experimental interactions with our environment
3. The ego tends to become an impediment to cognitive growth (and knowledge) at a certain point

Joseph Sirgy's self-congruity theory has a lot to say about personality cybernetics, with respect to assumption three.

I've pretty much put a pin in that, but it was my initial attempt at generalizing a systems approach.

For example, take this excerpt:

"Preamble - What am I?
First and foremost, I am a conscious, thinking thing. Not the states of my body, not my possessions, not any of the circumstances of my material environment, none of these things is important to me, except insofar it contributes to my conscious experience. As a thinking being, the most obvious and important factor in my self-recognition is the extent of the conscious control which I exert over my own thoughts. Different factors, material circumstances, body-states, etc., may recommend themselves to me as being "worthy of attention now" - perhaps even strongly recommend themselves - but the simple fact of the matter is that I possess a theoretically absolute discretion over what I shall choose to attend to at any moment."


Now from a more mature systems perspective, I no longer embrace this clearly dualistic approach. What I think is actually going on is that
1. Much of our cognitive processing is "pre-formatted"
2. However we can and do actively re-structure the elements involved in this formatting

From the humanistic perspective you could describe this as a "soft-determinism" or a "confined voluntarism," but the key for me is that it is a systemic perspective that synthesizes the material-mind dimensions, what systems theorists call "biperspectivism".

I'm also currently reading Dilthey. His project involves understanding "objectifications of spirit" and the extraction of "spiritual content from the various manifestations of life." Interesting that this fits exactly into a systems theory approach in which mind is embedded in matter. Hallmark of a good perspective I guess.

FB systems theory group I belong to just posted a link to what looks like a fascinating short article on self-organizing systems.
"I shall now prove the non-existence of self-organizing systems by reductio ad absurdum of the assumption that there is such a thing as a self-organizing system"

Nineteen pages, looks like a fun read. Sharing if anyone else is interested.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2384/d37ee804cfed6b56cc286d407ffec3bcc3b3.pdf?_ga=2.225389854.548608583.1579960117-2042921225.1568038417