I am unable to find any articles specifically about "Organization Systems Theory"?

As it happens, I'm currently 3 books into studying general systems theory and systems philosophy, therefore interested in the topic.

Maybe because your proposition seems to be substantive, but isn't, as it is open-ended. Either A is true, or not-A is true. But not-A could be B, or C, or D, or E.... Not being the result of intelligent design could actually be any number of interesting things.....

Who knows who is really happy? Some people make it their business just to be nice to others, and when someone is nice to me, that generally makes me feel happy. I suspect the people who make an effort to be nice are the ones who are happiest overall.

It seems self-evident to me that a decision by a Substitute Decision Maker is not literally equivalent in this case. i.e. Authorization by an SDM is "euthanasia" not "suicide". As the thread title reads "suicide" I think the case is misplaced here. Suicide is arguably self-determination.

No, was just referring to the gender-identification itself.

That shouldn't be controversial. While parents make many decisions for their children, we do not allow them to decide to give their child body modifications such as putting horns in their head or tattooing something over their entire skull/face/neck. So there are already some things that people are allowed to decide for themselves, as consenting adults, that we do not allow parents to decide for their children. — Terrapin Station

And yet we do allow parents to saddle a child with gender neutrality at birth....

"Unity through diversity" is one of the core concepts of Systems Philosophy as coined by Laszlo around 1970. It also matches your embedded micro/macro-cosms model.

But I agree that 'domains of discourse' (perspectives) can be useful for the larger picture of philosophy with the proviso that those domains are not mutually exclusive — fresco

Actually that is the main point of SP - the fact that there are structural isomorphisms between systems of different types itself represents a connection between apparently disparate domains.

Systems philosophy proposes a completely different solution, biperspectivism, in which the mechanical (reductionist) perspective is appropriate from the external-scientific viewpoint, but cognitive descriptions are appropriate for the internal/introspective perspective.

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.

Stoicism is about limiting your expectations, not controlling your passions I think.

"Introduction to Systems Philosophy" Ervin Laszlo - just finished
"General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications" Ludwig von Bertalanffy - just started

Well...in general, we comprehend what is outside our perceptual scale via intellectual intuition. Consider the apparent retrograde motion of the planets. If you study a model of the solar system closely (especially a dynamic one), then imagine yourself on earth and looking at Mars, for example, suddenly the retrograde motion becomes evident for what it is, a larger slower orbit around a common gravitational centre. So you could say that knowledge is the lens whereby we see the really small and the really big....

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.

Ethics in the sense in which it is normally used equates with "Normative Ethics" which simply put translates as "what people ought to do."

So if something is unethical, it is unethical with respect to a certain set of rules or norms, either what people actually do do (the domain of descriptive ethics) or some hypothesized universal value (greatest happiness for the greatest number; good in and of itself; etc.)

"I am the eye in the sky, looking at you
I can read your mind"

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....

Kind of a biased selection with a lot of stuff wadded into "Other"....

"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.

Jeremy Bentham, "Panopticon"

Since the self is uniquely available to introspection, introspection is, at minimum, a valid avenue of knowledge about the self. However just the act of introspecting does not constitute knowledge any more than does the act of observing. Additional criteria of knowledge still apply.

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

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

One thing is clear: memories are in the brain. They disappear from injury and disease. So if you're right that consciousness survives death of the body, it has no memories. Since it has no sensory organs, it can't see or hear either. Sounds scary. — Relativist

Maybe not so clear. Consciousness is a feature of a complex system, not just the human brain, or body, but the entire environment within which consciousness operates. This is a theory known as distributed cognition, or embedded cognition. Studies have been done to quantify this. Additionally, physical systems themselves are 'mnemonic' in that they are current presentations of historical events. Michael Leyton's book 'Symmetry, Causality, and Mind' explores this concept in detail.

And the social contract is just the way social relations are conducted, and nation states with various forms of government are one form it can take, and Bitcoin is another — unenlightened

Absolutely. The contract is between individuals. The reason individuals enter into such a contract is that many people collectively are capable of much more than they would be as individuals, so it is in everyone's mutual benefit. That's the nature of a contract: there must be benefit on both sides.

I think it is innate human greed that is the enemy of social progress. Hopefully a new more socially conscious collective awareness is emerging that will defeat this primitive instinct.

I honestly suspect that taking the Social Contract to its logical conclusion will eventually result in something like the end goals of Communism. — thewonder

In principle, that sounds fine. I don't know if it is something we can just sit back and wait to happen though.... :)

Yes, I use the term more as a gloss, as you say, for the actual state of affairs. But I like to think that, at its heart, there must be some sort of mutually beneficial ("contractual") state.

So what does it take to mobilize the collective will? Look at D Trump or R Ford - demagogues don't work. We need to start with better education.

I think your intuitions are accurate in the larger sense - i.e. absolute zero - which would be the absence of all motion - has been proven to be theoretically unreachable fairly recently.

Big Peirce fan. Thanks for the tip!

Yes, we can resist our inclinations and go against them but it's an uphill battle. Moreover this is strong evidence that we didn't choose our preferences at all. — TheMadFool

Then what is doing the resisting? What is resisting what?

Well, offering assistance to someone in need is essentially demonstrating empathy, so, yes I'd have to say it is empathetic. And I think if everyone did just a little, it would amount to a lot! :)

Actually, my philosophy and practise is pretty straightforward. Individuals have different sets of abilities and capabilities based both on innate differences and on situational differences. So there will always be some set of actions that are 'easier' for one person than for another. So when you find yourself in a situation where (relatively speaking) it is easy for you to do something for someone else where it would be relatively much more difficult for that person to do it, then you should invest the time and effort. I think it makes for a pretty good standard of universalizability.

And yes, I do make every effort to be aware when opportunities like these present themselves, and to act on them.

Empathy is a joke, everyone talks but it's rarely a noteworthy counterweight to other human motivations. — Judaka

Just because few people undertake to act empathically doesn't undermine its importance. It has been a conundrum since ancient times, if everyone desires 'the good' (which must be what is most beneficial) then why do so few people do it?

I for one believe firmly in the value of empathy. In fact, I believe that acting to help others wherever it is within your power constitutes the golden rule.

Works for me. Then it becomes more of a social phenomenon. I'm still not clear on the reasoning behind being accountable for the unintended consequences of my actions. Is that because I was acting irresponsibly by engendering some result that I ought to have foreseen?

Not at all. We regularly distinguish between those (held) responsible for their actions and those not, if by means of age, mental capacity, or otherwise. — StreetlightX

A person can have no idea of the consequences of his or her actions but still be "responsible" for those actions in the actual sense of having done something. It seems like what you are talking about is actually "accountability" not responsibility. Those are, I agree, two very different things.

if we were able to master every last consequence of what we said and did, we would not need to be response-able for them: there would be no response required, no ability to be exercised as a result of what we have done. — StreetlightX

Why does responsibility require a response? If A does x, then A is responsible for the consequences of x. Why does this description require further amplification? Whether or not we intended or foresaw all the consequences, the essence of the term responsibility is a causal attribution. Why do we need to go one step further?

For as Butler notes, responsibility is ultimately relational: it is only in relation to another that one is responsible, accountable, for what one has said and done. There would be no ‘problem of responsibility’ without the relation to the other. — StreetlightX

Similarly, responsibility is not a 'problem,' it is a descriptive condition or attribute. A caused x (and all further consequences) ergo A is 'responsible.'

Systems Philosophy is a relatively new discipline which is a convergence of the scientific and, lets call it 'exo-scientific' perspectives. It utilizes the inter-disciplinary perspective of systems theory (cybernetics), which lends itself to successful descriptive models across theoretical domains.

"Systems Philosophy is the philosophical component of Systemology, the transdisciplinary field concerned with the scientific study of all kinds of systems. Systems Philosophy was formally founded in the 1970s as a scientific branch of philosophy, that is, one that respects and incorporates the findings of science, and proceeds in the way science does, i.e. by insisting on rigour, internal consistency, clarity, consistency between theory and observations, and subjecting its theories and models to empirical testing. As a scientific philosophy it embraced moderate forms of Naturalism (the idea that all changes in the concrete world are proportionate to changes elsewhere), Realism (the idea that the world has some objective aspects) and Scientism (the idea that science progressively reveals the truth about the nature of the concrete world). It nevertheless remained philosophical in the sense that its objective is to make sense of the world and our place in it, and it tries to find ways to answer questions of ultimate concern. As a philosophical framework it started out as a systems oriented and moderate version of what is sometimes called "Scientific Realism" or "Scientific Materialism". In its original form it was the philosophical component of what was then called "General Systems Theory in the broad sense", and which has since been more appropriately renamed "General Systemology" (see papers by Pouvreau and Drack in the reading list).

The field of systems studies has expanded greatly in the last half century. As academics from different disciplines increasingly engaged with the systems paradigm the philosophical perspectives within Systemology diversified, and today Systems Philosophy includes not only the naturalistic strand it started as but it also has strands that are unscientific, anti-scientific, heuristic or phenomenological, e.g. grounded in Radical Constructivism, Postmodernism, Idealism, Radical Holism, Discordant Pluralism, and so on. That said, the 'centre of gravity' of Systems Philosophy in terms of attention by academic philosophers still lies with the scientific realist approach of the founders of Systems Philosophy "

http://www.systemsphilosophy.org/

Seems like consciousness always appears as a feature of a system, within which it functions. This theory is known as distributed cognition (I've read the term 'embedded cognition' also). It describes how our minds constantly use information and cues from the environment, thus consciousness is not so localized as we like to think.