My grandfather Ben Garside was 35 when he saw a car for the first time. He lived long enough to see men walk on the moon.
When my mother was born, astronomers disagreed about whether there were other galaxies besides the Milky Way. When she died they estimated there were hundreds of billions of galaxies.
When I was a teenager, futurist Alvin Toffler predicted that, at the (then) current rate of acceleration of progress, we would eventually experience “future shock”, a state similar to culture shock, in which we experience such constant change and variety that we are progressively disoriented and anxious. I believe we are realizing his prediction now. Today’s big thinkers talk about “VUCA” to describe the state of our global civilization– Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous.
The only way to successfully manage this state of VUCA would be to find patterns of similarities that repeat throughout our world so as to simplify our understanding of this world and avoid future shock. I believe that approach is the systems worldview.
The systems worldview is based on the understanding that the repetition of patterns of feedback loops, or circular causation, create and preserve order. Furthermore, I believe that these self-organizing patterns define intelligence.
Further to that, I believe that these patterns of intelligence stand in contrast to entropy, the tendency for energy to dissipate into disorder. Intelligence is “negentropy” — negative entropy.
In other words, intelligence is the fundamental phenomenon underlying all order.
The legacy linear reductionist scientific worldview has served us well and provided us with the progressive technologies and infrastructures we have today. But knowledge, scientific or otherwise, is never complete. Everything we learn changes the meaning in some small ways, or sometimes big ways, of everything we previously understood. Knowledge doesn’t have to be perfect. It only needs to be practical and sufficient for our purposes.
We, with our collective intelligence based on methodical intelligence (e.g., scientific method), have created massive civil complexity that has outgrown our capacity to manage using our legacy linear reductionist worldview.
Further still, I believe our cosmos is ordered as a fractal that continues to unfold through recursive processes in countless manifestations, combinations and permutations, supported by feedback mechanisms.
Nevertheless, I think, if we see the complex chaotic world through this holistic fractal systems worldview we will be able to successfully manage our civilization. It’s like bio-mimicry writ large. If the cosmos is a fractal system then our intelligence, and the knowledge we produce as a model of reality, should reflect that fractal structure.
“It’s The System”
Randal Adcock 