#system theory

-- julia

Mitchell M. Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

-- julia

The essay published here is by my highly esteemed colleague in epistemology, Dr. Wolfgang Stegemann, with whom I have had the pleasure of exchanging some very inspiring and insightful discussions in real life and in my comments section. This resulted, for example, in a successful joint venture on the origin of life, evolutionary theories from a structural realist and systems theory perspective. I therefore also share Wolfgang's preference for topics relating to the theory of knowledge and science. However, what also separates us a little are our different approaches and concepts for describing the phenomenon of “consciousness”. In my view, Wolfgang always wants to link consciousness with the special cognitive abilities of the human brain and locate everything there. He therefore rejected my somewhat more basal interpretation of the phenomenon as a simple structural coupling of brains (nervous systems) with their bodies and the environment, which does not require an “inner representation”. For this reason, I was not surprised that Wolfgang now comes up with the “old hat magic trick” of “emergence” (please forgive my flippancy ;-), which he now tries to interpret physiologically. For the above reasons, you can perhaps understand why I am not an outspoken fan of “emergence theories”, as in my opinion they still fail to explain the change in the properties of the state and continue the “#body-#consciousness #dualism” in a new guise. But this is not a “concert of wishes” and since the philosophy and science blog “philosophies” stands for a plurality and liberality of opinions and concepts, I would prefer to leave the evaluation of Wolfgang's essays to the inclined readership. In any case, I am delighted with Wolfgang's very well-researched guest article and also with the numerous comments and discussions on his theses. But for now, he has the floor. More at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2024/09/15/emergenz-des-bewusstseins/

The Systems Theory by Luhmann is just 🤌🏻

Example: A simple systems theory example is baking. Consider all the ingredients that make up a cake. If you were to lay them out on your counter and weren’t familiar with baked goods, it would be difficult to envision how the eggs, flour, sugar, etc., could be combined and heated to create a cake. That’s because no single ingredient or environmental factor—in this case, heat—would produce a baked good such as cake on its own. From the perspective of systems theory, the whole—our dessert in this example—is greater than the sum of its parts.

System theory homework