Professional Documents
Culture Documents
0#
This book the systems view of life is a dream that I've had for a very long
time. It is a multidisciplinary text book in which my co-author and I, I wrote
it with a friend of mine, a colleague, Pier Luigi Louisi, who is professor of
biology in Rome. And in this book we present a coherent, systemic
framework, which integrate four dimension of life: the biological dimension,
the cognitive dimension, the social and the ecological dimension. We
discussed the phylosofical, social and political implications of this unifying
vision. #00:01:07.4#
Let me start with some of these implications. The great challenge of our
time and one of the main themes of all the causes that you ....
#00:01:20.4#
hopefully there'll be a second edition to the book and I will put that in there.
#00:06:32.1#
Now, systems theory also tells us that all living systems share a set of
common properties and principles of organization. And this means that
systems thinking can be applied to integrate academic disciplines that have
become so fragmented, as you well know, and to show similarity between
systems at different level. And this is why we called the systems view of life
a unifying vision. #00:07:08.1#
Now, during the 1970s and 1980s, systems thinking was raised to a new
level, with the development of complexity theory, technically known as nonlinear dynamics. This is the new mathematics that include chaos theory,
fractals, and so on, which allowed scientist for the first time to really model
the complexity of living systems. This new mathematics is a mathematics
of patterns of relationships. So this shows us, the shift from quantities to
qualities. during the last 30 years or so, the strong interest of a nonlinear
phenomena has given rise to a whole series of new and powerful theories
and models that have dramatically increased our understanding of mainly
of the key characteristic of life. And so our synthesize of these theories and
models is what we called the systems view of life. Now, here of course,
tonight, I can only give you a view highlights. One of the most important
insight of the systemic understanding of life is the recognition that network
are the basic pattern of organization of all living system. Ecosystem as you
know, understood as a food webs, that is network of organisms. Organisms
are networks of organs tissues and cells, and cells are networks of
molecules. And then we have social networks that are network of
communication. So wherever we see life, we see networks. A network is a
pattern that is common to all life. And indeed, at the very heart of the
change of paradigms that this now occurring in science and in society. We
find a fundamental change of metaphors of seeing the world as a machine
to understanding it as a network. Now these living networks have been
started very closely over the last 30 years and these studies have shown,
that the key characteristic is that they are self generating. Technically this is
known as the theory of autopoiesis which was developed in the 1970s and
1980s by two Chileans scientists, Umberto Maturana and Francisco
Borella. Auto of course means self, and poiesis is derived from the Greek
word point(??) which means to make, so autopoiesis means self making.
In the cell for example all the biological structure like proteins, membrane,
DNA, all this so called macromolecule are generated, are produced and
are regenerated constantly by the cellular network. Similarly at the level of
multicellular organisms, an organism's cells are continually recycled and
regenerated by the organism's metabolic network. So living network
continually create or recreate themselves by transforming or replacing their
components. And in this way, they undergo a continual structural changes
while at the same time preserving their web-like pattern of organization.
#00:11:18.1#
And indeed the coexistence of stability and change has long been
observed as one of the key characteristics of life. #00:11:31.2#
Now let me now come to one the most important philosophical implications
of the systems view of life and that is a nobel concept of mind and
consciousness which finally overcomes the cartesian division between
mind and matter that has haunted philosopher and scientist for centuries. If
you remember, De Cartes, divided the world into two separate realms in a
fundamental division between the mind, which he called ...., the thinking
thing, and matter, which he called the extended thing.. the ... extensor. And
following De Cartes, scientist and philosophers for centuries continue to
think of the mind as a thing and they were wondering how this intangible
entity was related to that other thing, the body. #00:12:39.4#
The decisive (??) advance of the system view of life has been to
abandoned this Cartesian view of mind as a thing and to realize that mind
and consciousness are not thing but processes. This novel conception was
developed during the 1960s by Gregory Bateson and independently by
Umberto Maturana and Fransisco Barella, both working at the University of
Chile in Santiago, and it is known today as the Santiago theory of
In this view, cognition involve the entire process of life including perception,
emotions, behavior, and does not even necessarily require a brain and a
nervous system. So cognition, the process of knowledge is present at all
level of life. #00:15:43.3#
Now, of course to have such a new concept, could just be a change of
language, and you have to see wether it actually helps you to understand
things, and an easy way to see it is to look at the age old problem of the
relationship between mind and brain. Scientist and philosophers have
known at least, since the 19th century that mental process are closely