Self-organization, knowledge, life, and ethics

Physicist Fritjof Capra writes: “The central concept of the new theory is that of self-organization. A living system is defined as a self-organizing system, which means that its order is not imposed by the environment but is established by the system itself. In other words, self-organizing systems exhibit a certain degree of autonomy. This does not mean that living systems are isolated from their environment; on the contrary, they interact with it continually, but this interaction does not determine their organization.

“An important aspect of the theory is the fact that the description of the pattern of self-organization does not use any physical parameters, such as energy or entropy, nor does it use the concepts of space and time. It is an abstract mathematical description of a pattern of relationships. This pattern can be realized in space and time in different physical structures, which are then described in terms of the concepts of physics and chemistry. But such a description alone will fail to capture the biological phenomenon of self-organization. In other words, physics and chemistry are not enough to understand life; we also need to understand the pattern of self-organization, which is independent of physical and chemical parameters.

“The organizing activity of living, self-organizing systems, finally, is cognition, or mental activity. Mental process is defined as the organizing activity of life. This means that all interactions of a living system with its environment are cognitive, or mental interactions. With this new concept of mind, life and cognition become inseparably connected. Mind, or more accurately, mental process is seen as being immanent in matter at all levels of life.

 “A further reason why I find the theory of self-organizing systems so important is that it seems to provide the ideal scientific framework for an ecologically oriented ethics. Such a system of ethics is urgently needed, since most of what scientists are doing today is not life-furthering and life-preserving but life-destroying. With physicists designing nuclear weapons that threaten to wipe out all life on the planet, with chemists contaminating our environment, with biologists releasing new and unknown types of microorganisms into the environment without really knowing what the consequences are, with psychologists and other scientists torturing animals in the name of scientific progress, with all these activities occurring, it seems that it is most urgent to introduce ethical standards into modern science.

“It is generally not recognized in our culture that values are not peripheral to science and technology but constitute their very basis and driving force. During the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, values were separated from facts, and since that time we have tended to believe that scientific facts are independent of what we do and, therefore, independent of our values. In reality, scientific facts emerge out of an entire constellation of human perceptions, values, and actions—in a word, out of a paradigm—from which they cannot be separated. Although much of the detailed research may not depend explicitly on the scientist’s value system, the larger paradigm within which this research is pursued will never be value-free. Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research not only intellectually but also morally.

“One of the most important insights of the new systems theory of life is that life and cognition are inseparable. The process of knowledge is also the process of self-organization, that is, the process of life. The conventional model of knowledge is one of a representation or an image of independently existing facts, which is the model derived from classical physics. From the new systems point of view, knowledge is part of the process of life, of a dialogue between object and subject.

“Knowledge and life then, are inseparable, and, therefore, facts are inseparable from values. Thus, the fundamental split that made it impossible to include ethical consideration in our scientific worldview has now been healed.”

Fritjof Capra, “Systems Theory and the New Paradigm” in Carolyn Merchant, editor, Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory (Humanities Press, 1994), 334-341.

 

For a more recent and developed presentation of this argument for a new paradigm, see Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

The new systems paradigm is applied to jurisprudence in Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2015).