So many times in my diaries about the nature of technology someone claims we can find a fix for anything. Now even the MSM questions such arrogance. In the NYT we have this:Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill A growing number of reductionist trained scientists and engineers are beginning to understand the limits to the Cartesian reductionism that serves as the philosophical basis for their understanding of the real complex world. Physics supplied them with a good model of reality for dealing with machines and mechanisms, but not for most complex systems that make up the real world. The surrogate model we worshipped does not do it. Read on below for more.
Systems theory has been around for a long time but it is generally not a central idea in modern technology. The belief that everything can be treated like a machine and taken apart and put back together is being shown to be but another limited model rather than a recipe for everything. Here's how the NYT times article puts it:
"IF we’ve learned anything so far about the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, it is that it contains surprises. And that means an operator needs depth — depth in terms of resources and expertise — to create the capability to respond to the unexpected. "
The "unexpected" has been given some really interesting names by complexity scientists. They speak of "emergence" and of "unintended consequences". The version of complexity science I have been teaching and practicing for the last 30 years was born in the late 1950s at the University of Chicago. Its creator was the late Robert Rosen who has written a number of really deep books on the subject. They have been largely ignored because they forecasted what we now are facing right up front. The most influential Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (Complexity in Ecological Systems) is like a bible to me. I have read it with care over a dozen times and each time the meaning came across. Am I that slow? No, most people who have read it have missed the point. It is a paradigm shift of major proportions and an entire new epistemology.
My own work changed drastically when Rosen died of the complications of diabetes in 1998. I was asked to fill in for him as keynoter for the International Society for the Study of Systems early the next year. Since then I have been developing a very global systems theory based on his relational ideas.
That brings us back to the topic at hand. Systems have a very important property:
The whole is more than the sum of its parts(and usually different from those parts)
This is now a mantra among complexity scientists but few seem to really understand it. It has the following meanings among others:
- When you tear a complex system apart you have lost its essence.
- What is lost is not material for you still have that.
- There fore there is an ontological reality that is not material.
- This is NOT to be confused with things others call "spiritual".
- (Here's the big one) Complex systems can not be reverse engineered.
The meaning of this fills Rosen's books and my published works so I won't try to get it all across here. What I want to end with is the core idea. Medicine and agriculture and climate science and so many other important areas of science and technology are too often fixated on finding "magic bullets". If a machine breaks, you fix it. Simple enough. No, that's too simple.
We are not going to be able to "fix" our complex world when we misuse it. These systems came into being over long long periods of time and are stable only because of a very special kind of evolution intrinsic to systems. Systems remain stable by getting rid of destabilizing influences and reinforcing stabilizing influences.
Modern technology is also a system with deep ties and interconnections to both science and economics. It is stable because it rejects science that will lessen its stability. It feeds on science that strengthens its stability. Science needs benefactors. Those benefactors are the economic forces that fuel the system. Is that not what we are suffering? Is that not why we go on looking for a tool to fix the system while it grinds on in spite of us? I firmly believe it is.
UPDATE Thanks for the honor. Someone commented that these ideas apply to climate change as well. I have diaries applying this reasoning to the entire earth system.