Affirming heaven requires new ways of understanding science and reality. Fritjof Capra's explanation of systems theory is a bridge to a more holistic understanding. He writes: “In science, the language of systems theory, and especially the theory of living systems, seems to provide the most appropriate formulation of the new ecological paradigm. Since living systems cover such a wide range of phenomena—individual organisms, social systems, and ecosystems—the theory provides a common framework and language for biology, psychology, medicine, economics, ecology, and many other sciences, a framework in which the so urgently needed ecological perspective is explicitly manifest.
“The conceptual framework of contemporary physics, and especially those aspects (suggesting a new metaphysics is needed), may be seen as a special case of the systems approach, dealing with nonliving systems and exploring the interface between nonliving and living systems. It is important to recognize, I believe, that in the new paradigm physics is no longer the model and source of metaphors for the other sciences. Even though the paradigm shift in physics is still of special interest, since it was the first to occur in modern science, physics has now lost its role as the science providing the most fundamental description of reality.
“I would now like to specify what I mean by the systems approach. To do so, I shall identify five criteria of systems thinking that, I claim, hold for all the sciences—the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. I shall formulate each criterion in terms of the shift from the old to the new paradigm, and I will illustrate the five criteria with examples from contemporary physics. However, since the criteria hold for all the sciences, I could equally well illustrate them with examples from biology, psychology, or economics.
“1. Shift from the part to the whole. In the old paradigm, it is believed that in any complex system the dynamics of the whole can be understood from the properties of the parts. The parts themselves cannot be analyzed any further, except by reducing them to still smaller parts. Indeed, physics has been progressing in that way, and at each step there has been a level of fundamental constituents that could not be analyzed any further.
“In the new paradigm, the relationship between the parts and the whole is reversed. The properties of the parts can be understood only from the dynamics of the whole. In fact, ultimately there are no parts at all. What we call a part is merely a pattern in an inseparable web of relationships. The shift from the part to the whole was the central aspect of the conceptual revolution of quantum physics in the 1920s.
“2. Shift from structure to process. In the old paradigm, there are fundamental structures, and then there are forces and mechanisms through which these interact, thus giving rise to processes. In the new paradigm, every structure is seen as the manifestation of an underlying process. The entire web of relationships is intrinsically dynamic. The shift from structure to process is evident, for example, when we remember that mass in contemporary physics is no longer seen as measuring the fundamental substance but rather as a form of energy, that is, as measuring activity or processes.
“3. Shift from objective to ‘epistemic’ science. In the old paradigm, scientific descriptions are believed to be objective, that is, independent of the human observer and the process of knowing. In the new paradigm, it is believed that epistemology—the understanding of the process of knowledge—has to be included explicitly in the description of natural phenomena. This recognition entered into physics with Heisenberg and is closely related to the view of physical reality as a web of relationships. Whenever we isolate a pattern in this network and define it as a part, or an object, we do so by cutting through some of its connections to the rest of the network, and this may be done in different ways. As Heisenberg put it, ‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’
“4. Shift from ‘building’ to ‘network’ as metaphor of knowledge. The metaphor of knowledge as a building has been used in Western science and philosophy for thousands of years. There are fundamental laws, fundamental principles, basic building blocks, and so on. The edifice of science must be built on firm foundations.
“In the new paradigm, the metaphor of knowledge as a building is being replaced by that of a network. Since we perceive reality as a network of relationships, our descriptions, too, form an interconnected network of concepts and models in which there are no foundations. Things exist by virtue of their mutually consistent relationships, and all of physics has to follow uniquely from the requirement that its components be consistent with one another and with themselves.
“Since there are no foundations in the network, the phenomena described by physics are not any more fundamental than those described, for example, by biology or psychology. They belong to different systems levels, but none of those levels is any more fundamental than the others.
“5. Shift from truth to approximate descriptions. Scientists do not deal with truth in the sense of a precise correspondence between the description and the described phenomena. They deal with limited and approximate descriptions of reality. Heisenberg wrote in Physics and Philosophy, ‘The often discussed lesson that has been learned from modern physics (is) that every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.’
Fritjof Capra, “Systems Theory and the New Paradigm” in Carolyn Merchant, editor, Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory (Humanities Press, 1994), 334-341.
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