A year ago I would have been glued to my screen as he spoke. This year I did not listen. Heard some snippets on NPR as we drove to Richmond and back for minor surgery on my toe. I have peripheral neuropathy so the sedation that put me to sleep seemed a repeat of what I had heard on NPR. I like Obama very much. I am sympathetic with his plight. I also have a strong belief about politics. It has a few basic ideas I can express to give you an idea:
* elections don't matter much if at all
* system stability is an under rated force in all that happens
* evolution theory is a mere subset of system's theory
* no matter how hard you try you will never explain a complex system with direct causality - you need to develop a complex causal explanation
* Adam Smith's ideas are merely a subset of systems theory
If you are foolish enough to read on after that I'll try to explain where this comes from below.
So how do I come up with such stuff. I have to give you a little background first. I am going to be 74 in March. I spent most of my life teaching medical doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, biomedical engineers and physiology graduate students. I have been touted as one of the handful of experts on Network Thermodynamics in the world and actually wrote a book on it. The last few decades I got deeper and deeper into the new complexity science but a very special version of it. I now hold the title of Senior Fellow in the Center for the Study of Complex Biological Systems at Virginia Commonwealth University. I think I had more than a minor role in its creation.
I am a holistic thinker and really have never been confined by my credentials. I read, learn and think I absorb new ideas faster as each year goes on. For that reason my study of complex systems led me to a new systems theory. I call it "Relational Systems Theory" after the Relational Biology created by Rashevsky and developed in detail by Rosen.
The central difference between relational theory and classical reductionist science is in how we go about assigning "cause" to events in the real world. George Lakoff's writing parallels our ideas on this. Here's where politics enters the stage. Lakoff attributes the right wing world view to assigning a direct cause to everything. What does this mean? Direct cause is all too common and is the core of reductionist science. It works like
causal agent====cause===> Effect
Simple enough. The human mind seems to like this form of explanation. Boil down the most convoluted explanations you know and they can be put in this form
By contrast, I maintain that the real, complex world never is that way. Complex reality is replete with closed loops of causality that will take some time to explain. I leave that for another time, if ever. For the purposes of this essay, suffice it to say that relationships between things like micro and macro economics are involved in this reality. In both spheres, direct cause is invoked yet never can anyone predict the outcome of their models very well. Yes, I know that this is going to be taken out of context, but leave that for the comments.
This is a very inadequate summary of why the assertions in the opening were made. Want to talk about it?