Living Systems

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Living Systems
PRESENTED BY IVOR BROWNE
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Ancient Greece

• Western thinkers seem to presume the first real
  development of philosophical thought originated
  in ancient Greece
• The sages and mystics in India and China had
  already developed sophisticated philosophical
  insights several thousand years earlier.

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Heraclitus

• Logos - A transcendent principle governing the
  cosmos.
• All things are in constant flux but, at a deeper
  level everything is balanced by its opposite -
  all opposites ultimately constitute a unity
• This is similar to the ancient Taoist concept.

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Plato.

• The universe was ordered by a plurality of
  timeless essences which underlay concrete
  reality giving it form and meaning.
• the fundamentals of existence are the archetypal
  ideas which constitute the intangible substrate
  of all that is tangible. (Tarnas)

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HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

• LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS
• (5TH CENTURY B.C.)
• The physical world is constituted by an
  infinite number of
• indivisible corpuscles moving randomly in an
  infinite void,
• - atoms.

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Historical perspective

• Indian atomism was certainly independent of
  Greek influence, for an atomic theory was taught
  by Pakudha Katyayana, an older contemporary of
  the Buddha, and was therefore earlier than
  Democratus.but the atomic theories of ancient
  India are brilliant imaginative explanations of
  the physical structure of the world. However,
  beyond this, ancient Indian physics developed
  little as their primary interests were directed
  elsewhere. (A.L.Basham)

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Aristotle

• Achieved a partial synthesis of these two deeply
  divergent views. He turned Platos ideas upside
  down - a substance is not simply a unit of matter
  but is an intelligible structure or form embodied
  in matter.
• The form does not exist independently of its
  material embodiment, but it is the form which
  gives to the substance its distinctive essence
• Aristotles four principles, or causes of all
  phenomena i.e. Form, Matter, Process and Meaning.

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HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

• Copernicus Nicolas (1473 - 1543)
• Overthrew geocentric view
• Earth no longer the centre of the universe

• Kepler Johannes (1571 - 1630)
• Scientist and mathematician
• Developed laws of motion of the planets

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THE RENAISSANCE

• Gallileo-
• Scientists should restrict themselves to the
  essential properties of material bodies size,
  shape, number, weight and motion. Only by means
  of an exclusively quantitative analysis could
  science attain certain knowledge of the world.

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R.D.Laing

• Gallileos programme offers us a dead world
  out goes sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell,
  and along with them have since gone aesthetic and
  ethical sensibility, values, quality, soul,
  consciousness, spirit. Experience as such is
  cast out of the realm of scientific discourse.
  Hardly anything has changed our world more during
  the past 400 years than Gallileos audacious
  programme. We had to destroy the world in
  theory before we could destroy it in practice.

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HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

• Bacon Francis (1561 - 1626)
• The goal of science is knowledge that can be
• used to dominate and control nature.
• Nature had to be
• hounded in her wanderings
• bound into service
• made a slave
• Bacon had to
• torture natures secrets
  from her.

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HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

• Descartes Rene (1596 - 1650)
• Analysis - Reductionism
• The Whole is explained by understanding the
  
• parts and material of which it is made.
• Mind and body - Separate
• there is nothing included in the concept of
  body
• that belongs to the mind and nothing in
  that of the
• mind that belongs to the body
• I think, therefore I am (cogito ergo
  sum)
• (I am, therefore I
  think - Chariji)

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Isaac Newton

• Mechanistic view of nature
• The universe is a machine (a giant clockwork)
• Human beings are also machines
• Differential calculus
• Saw time as a separate dimension, which was
  absolute, having no connection with the material
  world.

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Mechanistic view

• . From the second half of the 17th century to
  the end of the 19th century the Newtonian,
  mechanistic model of the universe dominated all
  scientific thought.
• By the 19th century Gods creation of the world
  had dropped out of the picture. It was felt that
  it was only a matter of time until a complete
  scientific understanding of the entire universe
  would be attained.

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Newtonian Physics

• The natural sciences as well as the humanities
  and social sciences all accepted this mechanistic
  view, as the correct description of reality and
  modelled their own theories accordingly.
• To this day whenever psychologists,
  sociologists, or economists want to be scientific
  they always turn to these basic concepts of
  Newtonian physics and base their research on
  them.
• It made possible the extraordinary technological
  achievements which we see all around us in the
  world today.

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TUNNEL VISION

• The mechanistic scientific paradigm realises its
  final arrogant expression in the work of people
  like Stephen Pinker or Richard Dawkins.
• In the latters recent book The God
  Delusion he fails to even mention, and appears
  to be unaware of any of the recent, genuine
  scientific developments which I am attempting to
  describe here. .

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Scientific Paradigms

• Thomas Kuhn defined a scientific Paradigm as
  a constellation of achievements - concepts,
  values, techniques, etc. - shared by a scientific
  community to define legitimate problems and
  solutions
• Science, like the evolution of life tends to move
  by fits and starts - paradigm shifts.
• Far from subjecting the existing paradigm to
  constant testing, scientists avoid contradicting
  it by reinterpreting conflicting data to support
  it, or by neglecting such awkward data
  altogether.

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Paradigm shift

• These innovative developments are chipping away
  at the periphery of the main mechanistic
  scientific model.
• As more and more data accumulates which doesnt
  fit, sooner or later the old model must burst its
  banks and a paradigm shift will occur.
• These are only glimpses of what is to come, seen
• as through a glass darkly (St. Paul).

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Turning Point

• Thermodynamics (1824) The Science of
• Complexity
• First great break with static, reversible
  world and
• classical dynamics.

First Law - Conservation of Energy
Second Law - Any isolated, (closed) physical
system will proceed spontaneously in the
direction of ever-increasing disorder. (Sadi
Carnot -1824).
Entropy - a measure of disorder (Rudolf
Clausius - 1850)
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Turning Point

• Irreversible Thermodynamic Change
• A change towards states of increasing
  probability

In any isolated system the entropy (disorder)
will keep increasing until the system reaches a
state of maximum equilibrium (Boltzmann -
1844-1906)

• Irreversibility
• The Arrow of Time - (Eddington)

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The new physics

• . In 1905 Albert Einstein produced two papers.
  One dealt with the theory of relativity and the
  other with a new way of looking at
  electromagnetic radiation which was to form the
  foundation of quantum theory.
• The material world, which had been viewed as a
  comfortably ticking clockwork mechanism, was now
  transformed into a complex of indeterminate,
  interweaving and interdependent relationships.
• Heisenberg - in Quantum Physics everything is
  interconnected.

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The New Physics

• Max Planck, Heisenberg, Neils Bohr
• (Quantum Physicists)

• Intentionality

• Subjectivity

• Human observer

• Consiousness

• Interrelations - not separate entities

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Three scientific world views

• 1. Matter is primary and energy is secondary to
  this. (Newton)
• 2. Matter and Energy are equivalent and are
  interchangeable. (Einstein)
• 3. Energy is primary and what we call Matter is
  simply organised energy. (Heisenberg)
• 
  (Schwartz's)

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The New Physics

• The material world, according to contemporary
  physics,
• is not a mechanical system made of separate
  objects, but
• rather appears as a complex web of
  relationships. Subatomic
• particles cannot be understood as isolated,
  separate entities,
• but have to be seen as interconnections, or
  correlations, in a
• network of events. The notion of separate objects
  has no
• fundamental validity. All such objects are
  patterns in an
• inseparable cosmic process, and these patterns
  are
• intrinsically dynamic. - Fritjof Capra

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The living world

• Ever since antiquity there was the idea of a
  great chain of being - a static hierarchy with
  God at the top and descending through angels,
  human beings, and animals to ever lower forms of
  life. Nothing had changed since the day of their
  creation.
• It was Lamarck rather than Darwin who first put
  forward a coherent theory of evolution.

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The living world

• Lamarck, probably the greatest biologist in
  history, turned that ladder of explanation upside
  down. He was the man who said it starts with the
  infusoria and that there were changes leading up
  to man. (Gregory Bateson)
• He had the remarkable intuition that all living
  creatures had evolved under environmental
  pressure from simpler forms.

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The living world

• Charles Darwin (1859) the Origin of Species.
  12 years later The Descent of Man.
• He too accepted the idea of acquired
  characteristics, but based his theory mainly on
  the concept of random mutation and natural
  selection.
• This became the corner stone of modern
  evolutionary theory.
• chance alone is at the source of every
  innovation, of all creation in the biosphere.
  (Jacque Monod)

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Epigenetics

• Watson and Crick - established DNA as the
  molecule that holds the secrets of life - The
  Master Molecule.
• The central dogma formulated by Crick in 1957
  DNA makes RNA, RNA makes protein, and proteins
  make us.
• Watson - We used to think that our fate was in
  the stars. Now we know, in large measure, our
  fat is in our genes.

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Epigenetics (cont.)

• Every molecular biologist now knows, the secrets
  of life have proven to be vastly more complex,
  and more confusing, than they had seemed in the
  1960s and 70s, (Keller)
• The notion of an isolatable, constant gene that
  can be patented as an invention for all the
  marvellous things it can do is the greatest
  reductionist myth ever perpetrated ...There is no
  simple, linear, one-directional instruction
  proceeding from the gene to RNA to
  protein.(Mae-Wan Ho)
• .

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Epigenetics (cont.)

• Research work in isolated areas in Northern
  Sweden suggests that genes have a memory. That
  the lives of our grandparents can directly affect
  one decades later. Epigenetics proposes a
  control system of switches that turn genes on
  and off and suggests that things people
  experience, like nutrition and stress, can
  control these switches and cause heritable
  effects in humans.
• Cell heredity, both nuclear and cytoplasmic,
  always must be considered for the entire cell,
  the entire organism. (Margulis)

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Epigenetics (cont.)

• Lamarcks theory - is of transformation arising
  from the organisms own activities and experience
  of its environment. This requires a conception
  of the organism as an active, autonomous being,
  which is open to the environment. It would seem
  now that biological form and behaviour are
  emergent properties of the epigenetic network.
  (Mae-Wan Ho)

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The Living World

• Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955)
• On the one hand we have in physics a matter
  which
• slides irresistibly, following the line of least
  resistance,
• in the direction of the most probable forms of
  distribution.
• And on the other hand, we have in biology the
  same
• matter drifting (no less irresistibly, but in
  this case in a
• sort of greater effort for survival) towards
  ever more
• improbable, because ever more complex, forms of
• arrangement

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The Living World

• Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955)

• Reverse the values

• Two different energies

• Linked together in arrangement

• Operating at different levels

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The Living World

• Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955)

• Increasing complexity

• Rise of consciousness

Human beings pressing up against one another
cover the planet with a web of ideas - Noopshere
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Systems Causality
Reductionist
WHOLE
PART
Systemic
WHOLE
PART
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Conventional science

• Believe Systems-
• Reductionism - the whole explained by the
  parts.
• Determinism - The doctrine that all events
  including human actions and choices are fully
  determined by preceding events, so that freedom
  of choice is illusory.
• No Purpose - Chance alone is at the source of
  every innovation, of all creation in the
  biosphere.
• 
  (Jacque Monod)

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Conventional science (cont.)

• Heart - is simply there to pump the blood around
  the body.
• The Brain - There are a fixed number of neurons
  in the brain, when they die not replaced.
• The DNA - this is a completely closed system not
  affected by environment.

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Recent scientific developments

• Whole - new emergent reality - greater than
  the sum of its parts.
• Genetic system open - can be affected by the
  environment.
• The plastic brain - brain changes related to
  meditation.
• Memory and information storage in fields
  (feed-back loops) outside the brain - Brain
  mainly an antenna receiver.

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More new developments

• Heart-lung transplants - recipient can have
  dreams, memories experiences of the donor.
• The After life experiments - controlled studies
  with mediums
• Near-Death experiences - consciousness can exist
  outside the brain
• Past Life Therapy - Through Time into Healing.

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Living Systems Theory

• Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) - General Systems
• 
  Theory

• Organisms open systems
• Quasi steady state
• Entering and leaving the outside environment

(Alexander Bogdanov - Tektology, 1912 - 1917)

• Time
• Universe expanding and running down - (Big Bang)
• Evolution - simple to complex

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Living Systems Theory

• Ilya Prigogine (1917 - )

• Self-organising systems

• Dissipative structures - irreversible,
  non-linear
• transformations under conditions far from
  equilibrium.

• Continuous fluctuation

• Energy increases - turbulence

• Bifurcation Point

Our vision of nature is undergoing a radical
change toward the multiple, the temporal and the
complex
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Living Systems Theory
New Pattern
Disintegration
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Living Systems Definition
OPEN SYSTEM

• Contains a number of elements

• Dynamic process

• Boundary - regulates what goes in and out

• Maintains and renews itself

• Locus of control within itself (self-organising)

• Reproduces itself

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Key Criteria of a Living System

• Pattern of organisation
• The configuration of relationships that
  determines the
• systems essential characteristics

• Structure
• The physical embodiment of the systems
  pattern of
• organisation

• Life Process
• The activity involved in the continual
  embodiment of the
• systems pattern of organisation

(Fritjof Capra)
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Two Types of Systems
Living Auto-Poeisis (Self-making)
Non-Living Allo-Poeisis (Other making)
(Maturana and Varela) Chilian Biologists
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Cybernetics Movement

• Macy Conferences (1946)
• Mathematicians, engineers and neuroscientists
• Humanities
• Feedback and Cybernetics

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Feedback Loop
Circular arrangement of causally connected
elements, so that each element has an effect on
the next, until the last feeds back the effect
into the first element of the cycle. Thus the
first link (input) is affected by the
last (output), which results in self-regulation
of the entire system.
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Feedback Loop
C
BALANCE
A
Two Forms of Feedback
B
Circular causality of a feedback loop
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Two Forms of Feedback
Negative feedback is a self-balancing circular
form, maintaining a steady state.
This underlies Canons concept of
Homeostasis in living creatures.
Positive feedback is what has been known in
common parlance as a vicious circle, a
self-reinforcing, runaway loop.
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A network

• Candace Pert has described what this means
• A network is different from a hierarchical
  structure that has a ruling station at the top
  and a descending series of positions that play
  increasingly subsidiary roles. In a network,
  theoretically, you can enter at any point and
  quickly get to any other point all locations are
  equal as far as the potential to rule or direct
  the flow of information.

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Peptides

• The group of macromolecules comprising 60 to 70
  molecular messengers (information substances),
  form a psychosomatic network extending throughout
  our human physiology.
• Because they were studied separately by different
  disciplines (Neuroscience, endocrinology, and
  immunology) this fact was not realised.

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Mind Definition

• What the mind is , is the flow of information as
  it moves among the cells, organs and systems of
  the body.
• The mind as we experience it is immaterial, yet
  it has a physical substrate, which is both the
  body and the brain.
• Thus we might refer to the whole system as a
  psychosomatic information network, linking
  psyche,.such as mind, emotion, and soul, to
  soma, which is the material world of
  molecules,.Mind and body, psyche and soma.

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Orders of Living Systems

• 1st Order - Cell

• 2nd Order - Multi-cellular

• 3rd Order - Grouped multi-cellular

• 4th Order - Grouped species

• 5th Order - Bio-sphere (Gaia Hypothesis)

• A living system is modified once it becomes
• incorporated in a higher order system.
• There is no correlation between the complexity of
  
• the higher order system and its lower order
  system
• parts.

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Each new level of living system is a new beginning

• Although each new order of living system, once it
  has fully come into being, now has a controlling
  influence over its parts, it does not mean that
  it is more developed, or complex than the lower
  systems of which it is formed. the highly complex
  interactions between the millions of cells
  internally in a dog or cat bear no relation to
  the quite simple behaviours of these animals as
  living creatures.

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The Social Insects

• This disparity becomes much clearer when we turn
  to the social insects. Many of the insect
  societies are very ancient compared to mammals or
  humans termites reach back over 400 million
  years and even the honeybee has been in existence
  for over 40 million years.
• They could, in a sense, be considered as adults,
  while we (that is the mammalian group), are, by
  comparison, children.

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A paradox

• Our highly sophisticated technology has been
  developed over the past four hundred years, from
  Gallileo onwards, through the mechanistic
  scientific model.
• This is now becoming lighter, increasingly
  non-material - spiritualised.
• This is enabling open-minded scientists to
  examine complex questions, which was impossible
  before, such as - Consciousness, brain function,
  complex physiology, memory and information
  storage outside the brain, etc.

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The Paradox

• The human individual as a multicellular organism
  is far more developed and complex than a bee,
  ant, or termite. But the third-order groups of
  human beings are, in evolutionary terms, far more
  recent than those of the social insects, and have
  therefore, as living systems, not yet developed
  the sophistication or complex organization of the
  latter.

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The plastic brain

• Richard Davidsons lab at Univ. of Wisconsin
  utilises-
• Supercharged EEGs - can pinpoint activity at
  locations deep within the brain.
• The functional MRI- a video rendition which can
  track changes the brain goes through during a
  given activity.
• The PET scan - this allows researchers to measure
  which of the brains several hundred
  neurochemicals are involved in a given mental
  activity.

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The plastic brain (cont.)

• The dogma in neuroscience was that the brain
  contained all of its neurons at birth and it was
  unchanged ny lifes experiences
• Neuroplasticity- We now know from this work and
  elsewhere, that the brain continually changes as
  result of our experience - Whether through fresh
  connections or through the generation of utterly
  new neurons.
• The frontal lobes, the amygdala, and the
  hyppocampus, change in response to experience.

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Heart-lung transplants

• Memories of the donor - Reports of heart-lung
  transplant patients having experiences, dreams,
  likes and dislikes of the donor are being
  reported with increasing frequency across the
  world.
• This may be happening through information stored
  in a non-material form in feed-back loops or
  electromagnetic fields outside of us.

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Near-death experiences

• These can occur in any of the following-
• Cardiac arrest
• Shock after loss of blood
• Coma following traumatic brain injury or
  intra-cerebral hemorrhage
• Near drowning - especially in children
• Etc.

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N. D. E. (cont.)

• Prospective studies carried out-
• Dutch, English, American,
• Consciousness outside the brain- Patients being
  resuscitated show cardiac arrest, no brain
  activity, yet able to report in detail what is
  happening at the time.
• 18 to 20 of NDE patients can recall these
  experiences

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Back to the heart

• The atrium of the heart produces hormone - ANF
  that interacts with other hormones and affects
  every organ in the body, including the brain.
• Recent work is revealing that there are networks
  of neurons in the heart showing evidence of
  mind, and that the heart is the real centre of
  our emotions reflecting back on the brain.

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Three major heart-centred stages of life

• The development of a heart-mind synchrony, needed
  for physical life,
• A later post-adolescent development which
  synchronizes the developed physical self and the
  creative process.
• A final highest heart which moves us beyond all
  physical emotional systems.
• This non-localised intelligence governing the
  heart in turn maintains synchrony with the
  universal consciousness at large.

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Past Life Therapy

• Through Time into Healing - sheds new light on
  the extraordinary healing potential of past life
  therapy.
• Brian Weiss shows how he uses regression to past
  lifetimes to provide the necessary breakthrough
  to healing mind, body and soul.
• This can help us to realise that death is not the
  final word and that the doorways to healing and
  wholeness are inside each of us.

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The primary social unit - A group of families

• This has taken various forms at different times
  the tribal settlement, the extended family, the
  hamlet, the village, the small market town with
  its hinterland. This was true also of the
  cluster of neighbourhoods making up great cities
  of the past,

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The Nuclear Family

• It is not until we come to modern society and
  the,
• much-lauded, phenomenon of globalization,
• we find the isolated nuclear family as it exists
• today.
• These natural human settlements, even the
  cities of the past, developed in relation to
  natural resources, primarily to be.

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Demise of the age-old forms of Human community

• The villages and the small towns have largely
  disappeared, in the West at least, or have
  altered their character totally, as part of the
  giant urban conurbations that now exist. The
  extended family too has largely gone and even the
  nuclear family is now under threat. Giant
  corporations and organizations of all kinds have
  taken their place these are primarily
  task-oriented enterprises, concerned with doing.

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Pseudo-living systems

• A third order system of this kind because it is
  of recent origin is essentially a new beginning.
• These insatiable blind monsters, even though
  they have entangled thousands of sensitive,
  complex human beings within them, are,
  themselves, only capable of quite primitive
  behaviors, similar to the ancient dinosaurs.
• They can manifest fight or flight behaviour,
  take over another corporation or be taken over.

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Corporate personhood

• When Cain beat out his brother Abels brains,
  His maker laid great cities in his soul
• (Robert Lowell)

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Physiology - Human Nature

• Essential Human Needs
• Relationship to natural environment
• Relationship to each other as persons
• Relate to an understandable holistic world

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Human Needs and Wants
Wealth can be measured by the greatness of what
we have or the smallness of what we want

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Human Needs and Wants

• Human needs which we require to live a full and
  fruitful life are relatively few.
• Society has filled us with wants which we do
  not need
• Insatiable wants through advertising
• With technology needs could be met with a
  fraction of current output

Satisfying wants will not give us contentment
or happiness
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Interconnections
Individual
Bio-sphere
Cell
Society
Eco-system
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Teilhard de Chardin

• Either the entire construction of the world
  presented here is an empty theory. Or else
  somewhere around us, in one form or other, we
  should be able to detect some excess of personal,
  and extra human energy that reveals the great
  presence, if we look carefully.

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Teilhard de Chardin

• The day will come when we shall harness for God
  the energies of love. And, on that day, for the
  second time in the history of the world, human
  beings will have discovered fire