❄️Systems Thinking: The Web of Life (Quotes)

"Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web." (Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations". cca. 121–180 AD)

"As a net is made up of a series of ties, so everything in this world is connected by a series of ties. If anyone thinks that the mesh of a net is an independent, isolated thing, he is mistaken. It is called a net because it is made up of a series of a interconnected meshes, and each mesh has its place and responsibility in relation to other meshes." (Gautama Buddha)

"Omnia vivunt, omnia inter se conexa" 
"Everything is alive; everything is interconnected." (Cicero)

"It is thus that in the universe everything is connected; it is itself but an immense chain of causes and effects, which flow without ceasing one from the other." (Paul-Henri T d'Holbach [Baron d'Holbach], "The System of Nature, Or, Laws of the Moral and Physical World", 1770)

"Nature, displayed in its full extent, presents us with an immense tableau, in which all the order of beings are each represented by a chain which sustains a continuous series of objects, so close and so similar that their difference would be difficult to define. This chain is not a simple thread which is only extended in length, it is a large web or rather a network, which, from interval to interval, casts branches to the side in order to unite with the networks of another order." (Comte Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, "Les Oiseaux Qui Ne Peuvent Voler", Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux Vol. I, 1770)

"All knowledge is profitable; profitable in its ennobling effect on the character, in the pleasure it imparts in its acquisition, as well as in the power it gives over the operations of mind and of matter. All knowledge is useful; every part of this complex system of nature is connected with every other. Nothing is isolated. The discovery of to-day, which appears unconnected with any useful process, may, in the course of a few years, become the fruitful source of a thousand inventions." (Joseph Henry, "Report of the Secretary" [Sixth Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1851], 1852)

"All Nature is linked together by invisible bonds and every organic creature, however low, however feeble, however dependent, is necessary to the well-being of some other among the myriad forms of life." (George P Marsh, From Man and Nature, 1864)

"Brightness and freshness take possession of the mind when it is crossed by the light of principles, shewing the facts of Nature to be organically connected." (John Tyndall, "Six Lectures on Light Delivered in America in 1872-1873" 3rd Ed., 1901)

"When we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." (John Muir, "My First Summer in the Sierra", 1911)

"The hosts of living organisms are not random creatures, they can be classified in battalions and regiments. Neither are they isolated creatures, for every thread of life is inter-twined with others in a complex web." (John A Thomson, "The System of Animate Nature" Vol. 1, 1920)

"This whole electric universe is a complex maze of similar tensions. Every particle of matter in the universe is separated from its condition of oneness, just as the return ball is separated from the hand, and each is connected with the other one by an electric thread of light which measures the tension of that separateness." (Walter Russell, "The Secret of Light", 1947)

"We shall walk together on this path of life, for all things are a part of the universe, and are connected with each other to form one whole unity." (Maria Montessori, "To Educate the Human Potential", 1947)

"In fact, it is empirically ascertainable that every event is actually produced by a number of factors, or is at least accompanied by numerous other events that are somehow connected with it, so that the singling out involved in the picture of the causal chain is an extreme abstraction. Just as ideal objects cannot be isolated from their proper context, material existents exhibit multiple interconnections; therefore the universe is not a heap of things but a system of interacting systems." (Mario Bunge, "Causality: The place of the casual principles in modern science", 1959)

"We are seeking another basic outlook: the world as an organization.  This would profoundly change the categories of our thinking and influence our practical attitudes.  We must envision the biosphere as a whole with mutually reinforcing or mutually destructive interdependencies." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "Robots, Men and Minds", 1967)

"[...] everything is inter-linked. And therefore everything has numberless causes. The entire universe contributes to the least thing. A thing is as it is because the world is as it is." (Nisargadatta Maharaj, "I am That", 1973)

"We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet." (James Lovelock, "Gaia: A new look at life on Earth", 1981)

"If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex). [...] Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be." (Murray Bookchin, "The Ecology of Freedom", 1982)

"The new paradigm may be called a holistic world view, seeing the world as an integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. It may also be called an ecological view, if the term 'ecological' is used in a much broader and deeper sense than usual. Deep ecological awareness recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical process of nature." (Fritjof Capra & Gunter A. Pauli," Steering business toward sustainability", 1995)

"Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behaviour of the whole." (Murray Gell-Mann, 1997)

"All living organisms must feed on continual flows of matter and energy: from their environment to stay alive, and all living organisms continually produce waste. However, an ecosystem generates no net waste, one species' waste being another species' food. Thus, matter cycles continually through the web of life." (Fritjof Capra, "The Hidden Connections", 2002)

"When we look at the world around us, we find that we are not thrown into chaos and randomness but are part of a great order, a grand symphony of life. Every molecule in our body was once a part of previous bodies-living or nonliving-and will be a part of future bodies. In this sense, our body will not die but will live on, again and again, because life lives on. We share not only life's molecules but also its basic principles of organization with the rest of the living world. Arid since our mind, too, is embodied, our concepts and metaphors are embedded in the web of life together with our bodies and brains. We belong to the universe, we are at home in it, and this experience of belonging can make our lives profoundly meaningful." (Fritjof Capra, "The Hidden Connections", 2002)

"Nothing exists in the universe that is separate from anything else. Everything is intrinsically connected, irrevocably interdependent, interactive, interwoven into the fabric of all of life." (Neale D Walsch, "Conversations With God: An Uncommon Dialogue", 2003)

"In our Gaian world, everything is connected to and influences everything else." (Tim Flannery, "The Weather Makers", 2005)

"We are beginning to see the entire universe as a holographically interlinked network of energy and information, organically whole and self referential at all scales of its existence. We, and all things in the universe, are non-locally connected with each other and with all other things in ways that are unfettered by the hitherto known limitations of space and time." (Ervin László,"Cosmos: A Co-creator's Guide to the Whole-World", 2010)

"I understand that everything is connected, that all roads meet, and that all rivers flow into the same sea." (Paulo Coelho, "Aleph", 2011)

"Deep ecology does not separate humans - or anything else-from the natural environment. It sees the world not as a collection of isolated objects, but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. Deep ecology recognizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and views humans as just one particular strand in the web of life." (Fritjof Capra, "The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision", 2014)

"All living systems are networks of smaller components, and the web of life as a whole is a multilayered structure of living systems nesting within other living systems - networks within networks." (Fritjof Capra, "The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision", 2014)

"In other words, the web of life consists of networks within networks. At each scale, under closer scrutiny, the nodes of the network reveal themselves as smaller networks. We tend to arange these systems, all nesting within larger systems, in a hierarchical scheme by placing the larger systems above the smaller ones in pyramid fashion. But this is a human projection. In nature there is no 'above' or 'below', and there are no hierarchies. There are only networks nesting within other networks." (Fritjof Capra, "The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision", 2014)

🔖Knowledge Representation: Mental Models’ Fallacies (Part I: Professional Defects and Thinking Models)

Mental Models

Professional Defects

I heard of “professional defect” almost 15-20 years back, in a colloquial discussion with an acquaintance. I don’t remember anymore the context entirely, though as I used it then, it became part of my vocabulary. With time “professional defect” meant for me “seeing and judging the world through the knowledge of our profession, and ignoring or misinterpreting thus some (important) aspects of our quotidian life”.  I’m not sure whether the term is actually in use or a similar term is used to reflect this aspect. I met occasionally similar constructs later, some of my German colleagues stressing the fact that sometimes we have to take out our professional glasses in order to see things differently (e.g. take out or put our managerial glasses). A generalization can be met in De Bono’s six thinking hats – the hats representing in De Bono’s perception the distinct six ways in which people think about the world, each of them stressing an import aspect of reality and our thinking patterns.

While in school, preparing for our profession, and especially later when we arrive to practice it, we acquire a knowledge base, the facts about the world, a set of thinking models that provide an approximation of the world in which our profession is anchored, and heuristics, “algorithms” of thinking and decision making that form with time thinking patterns. They help us understand situations and solve problems in our professional life. They add up to our previous personal experience accumulated over the years. 

In fact we’ll more likely attempt at first to use some of the experience we acquired before attempting a profession, some of the knowledge, models and heuristics being validated or invalidated in our professional life. With time we arrive to use some of the models we exclusively acquired and verified in professional life also in our personal life. This translation may seem natural as professional life extends itself sometimes beyond the borders of our profession – some coworkers become our friends, we spend more and more time in communities related to our profession, we meet similar problems in the two areas as of life, etc.

This extension from professional to personal life can have positive as well negative implications. It is true that some models from professional life can help us figure out some aspects from personal life, we arrive maybe to validate and improve our models, reaching somehow a deeper understanding of life. The problem comes when we ignore that we deal with a different type of environment, with its own characteristics, with different groups of people having higher diversity and other characteristics than the ones we meet in professional life. As the premises, the environment and its actors change, some of the models need some tweaking or they become unusable in our personal life. Maybe the number of such cases is incomparable small when we regard other type of thinking fallacies we fall into on a daily basis, though as long they arrive to define us and our choices in one way or another, we need to take a step back and look at them.

Some Examples

There could be found multiple examples in which the thinking patterns and models about the world we “learned” in our profession are used outside the professional life. Sometimes they look at the world by generalizing the characteristics of the individuals, focusing typically on a single aspect of the human nature, making totally or partially abstraction of the whole.  It’s also a sequel of the analytic way of thinking about the world we’ve been exposed from the early years of school. A more appropriate way of studying, understanding and modeling the human nature is by following the systemic thinking view in which the human being is more than the components that builds it – the body, the psychological, the language, the character, the behavior ranging from simple movements to complex forms of expression, the creativity, the ways of thinking transposed in decision making and the philosophy about life, that include the religious and the spiritual, the experience, the community the person belongs to, and so on. Some of these aspects are interrelated and mold together, and as the human they are a part of the complex web of life we belong to.

Unfortunately, our models about the world are quite simplistic and inflexible, as long we keep them so and as long we can’t discover and build more complex models. Before jumping to further aspects about models let’s look at a few examples. They might not be representative, they might be a little brought to extreme, though they are met in life and affect us in one form or another.

For example, a mathematician or somebody with strong mathematical background arrives to think of the world around him in terms of probability for an event to happen. On one side this can prove as a powerful tool to quantify and predict such events, though might make the person ignore the area of impossible, expressed maybe in opportunities with small chances to happen, opportunities that when considered could have a huge impact on his live. It’s a trivial example of the attempt to quantify and simplify the world to a degree that makes it understandable and predictable, mathematician’s luggage of models being more complex than that. Judging the words of wisdom of some mathematicians, they seemed to arrive to a deeper understanding of life - spirituality, philosophy, literature and wit melting in mathematician's life. Still anyone can be entrapped in the fallacies of the cold mathematical thinking about life in which everything is reduced to a representational model.

Not far from the previous example, a philosopher builds in his mind a world of ideas, and sooner or later arrives to evaluate the world around and his personal interactions with the world based on the philosophical currents he adheres to. No matter how complete and well-established a philosophy is, it’s a human based system of beliefs and models, with its loops and wholes. Sooner or later the philosopher will find himself trapped in the threads of his own philosophy as long he applies it too deep und unaware into his personal life. From this perspective it will be hard for a philosopher to be happy and content with his life.

A psychologist or somebody with a similar background may arrive to judge the people outside his praxis based on the traits they reveal. A chemist or biologist may see human’s constitution governed by a chain of chemical reactions, reducing thus feelings and behavior to them. A doctor may start to see in people the predispositions to or existence of a given disease, arriving maybe to judge people based on certain predispositions. A dentist might start evaluate people based on the denture they have. A sales person might start to acquire new friends (exclusively) based on the predisposition of buying a product. Accountants and the other financial professionals might see the world around them through financial models and wealth. An artist may treat as inferior people those who don’t exhibit any artistic skills. A priest may see the people around him as sinners.

There are many other examples, each profession comes with own type of similar fallacies. Think about your profession or the professional environment you belong to! More likely you’ll discover similar examples. How deep have they penetrated in the human society? How much have they influenced or still influence you? How could you escape them?

A Jump to Thinking Models Fallacies

Models are a good way to represent and approximate the world around us and predict behavior, though paraphrasing George Box, all models are to some degree wrong. Sometimes is enough if a model is right once in a while, other times we need to have reliable models. In general acceptance the success of a particular model is tied to its ability to cope capture the behavior of the real world, while its reliability is proportional to the number of cases it does so. When dealing with people often we need reliable models. It’s a question of ethics, but primordially of chances we lose to meet new interesting people, new experiences, and why not in overcoming our current condition.

Relying too much on a model make us vulnerable to a range of events that are not addressed by our models. Some of the presumptions on which such models are built upon, same as the limitations of our thinking models can get easily forgotten in our decision making process. We become then the prisoners of a set of (thinking) patterns from which will be impossible to exit unless we realize their traps. This actually applies to all type of models we built along the years. Some of them are rooted deeply in our beliefs on how the world (environment) around us works or is supposed to work.

Not only the beliefs we have, but also the models we acquired and use make us filter the signals, events or information from our environment. What we consider in a model is as important as what we leave out. The components removed by reducing the world to a model can be quintessential in what concerns the understanding and why not the living of life as a whole – the religious, the spiritual, the favorable chance, the free will, the tipping point, the random, the potential of people or groups to raise above some condition(s). No matter how well established some models, there will always be exceptions. We should expect for such exceptions to happen. They should make us challenge and enhance our models.

Going beyond the limitations of our models can prove to be a considerable challenge. We need to challenge our models on a daily basis, their visible and hidden premises, recognize their advantages, disadvantages and area of applicability. We need to detach ourselves from the models we’ve built, adapt them or learn new similar models that complement or counterbalance the existing models. Each model offers in the end a glimpse of truth, though we’ll mistake if we consider it the ultimate truth.

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