Living Systems

 A few years back, I was in Graduate School in a program that went by the title,  "Cosmology and Consciousness."  It dealt with the ways in which science, be that interstellar physics or quantum mechanics, interacted with, gave evidence of, or otherwise intersected with versions of the term "consciousness."

Earlier today I went through all my notes from my graduate school classes, just revisiting what I'd studied and came across something brief I wrote about living systems.  I'm offering it here as an example, really, of the academic mindset and how opaque, arcane, and cryptic that can be.  This is the academic voice, laden with jargon.  I decided this wasn't the kind of writing that I wanted to do and the reasons are probably obvious and self-evident.  I'd rather involve my heart when I write and not just my head.  Here's "the head" part:

"A living system is a non-summitive whole whose properties cannot be predicted by the qualities of its constituent parts.  At a higher level of organization, new properties emerge which seem to be beyond the capacity of the individual component parts and were not present at lower levels of organization.  For instance, when hydrogen and oxygen combine to produce the unpredictable uniqueness of water.  Because of this, living systems cannot be understood by reductive analysis.

"A living system is a description of the relational quality of existence.  Organizational form is evidence of the functioning links and connections between systemic elements.  Living systems are adaptive; they are open to their environment and admit matter, energy, and information into their processes, metabolizing these for the sake of continued or evolving existence.

"Living systems are holonic; they are embedded or nested within larger systems.  They represent a shift from an object ontology – the idea that objects are separate, stand alone, and are unique in themselves – to a relational mode or process whereby patterns intersect and interact, creating relational vortices and vortexes.

"Closed systems, on the other hand, are in theory isolated from their environment, cannot renew or maintain themselves indefinitely and inevitably suffer entropy, the continued and continuing loss of energy, order, and organization.  The idea of closed systems is predicated upon the Cartesian, mechanistic model of existence and the universe, and is presumably subject to the second law of thermodynamics and its concomitant loss of order, energy and form.

"It can be argued that closed systems don’t really exist within nature and are simply an example of a model, idea, or paradigm whose reality is no longer supported by the present understanding of physics.  At one time, there was a distinction drawn between the fields of biological science and hard physics but the gradual acceptance of the evolutionary scheme over the course of the past 150 years has erased that distinction and apparently proven it false.  All physical form is subject to some manner of evolutionary process, it’s just that biological evolution is incredibly accelerated in comparison to, say, geological processes.  In this case, it’s interesting to note that the information from the field of living biological science was applied “backwards” to the hard, or physical, sciences.

"The fact that living systems respond to environmental changes or stresses promotes the idea that they are self-transforming and self-transcending. Paradoxically, one could also say that the whole is less than the parts, in the sense that the constituent parts have potentialities which are not always in evidence, or called forth, by the holon in which they are presently functioning.

"The understanding of living systems can also be applied to the realm of human culture and is useful in describing the internal functioning of a living cultural milieu.  Paradigms are living systems, as are the various holons which comprise the many aspects of culture and civilization. In effect, systems theory seems able to describe many different and varying levels of existence, or “reality.”  It is most likely a basic building block of the nascent, new paradigm struggling to take root in the soil of the older forms."