Fritjof Capra Systems Thinking

FRITJOF CAPRA'S The Systems View of Life

 

In order to understand Systems Thinking, we need to put it into the context of a larger whole.

It is 'contextual', the opposite of 'analytical, which means taking something apart in order to understand it.

Fritjof Capra, the physicist primarily associated with establishing Systems Thinking theory.

  • emphasises "that advanced systems thinking will be critical in order to solve the major problems of our time, which are systemic ones – all interconnected and interdependent.

We urgently need to put life at the centre of our businesses, economy, technologies, physical structures and social institutions.

 “We will prosper in the pursuit of life, or we will perish in the pursuit of money. The choice is ours.” David Korten

  • To understand and apply the principles of life, we will need to align with the realities of the living world.
  • It makes sense that the first step in this endeavour must be to become ecologically literate – that is, to understand the principles of organisation that ecosystems have evolved to sustain the web of life.
  • Systems thinking will be essential for building ecologically sustainable communities, designed in such a manner that their ways of life do not interfere with Nature’s inherent ability to sustain life.
  • These principles of ecology are grounded in the four principles introduced by Capra, summarised in the new systemic conception of life – life organises itself in networks, and these living networks are inherently regenerative, creative and intelligent.

 

Here are Capra's four principles of life, summarised here in his own words.

Capra's Four Principles Of Life

Principle 1: life organises itself in networks

My first principle is that life organises itself in networks. This actually contains two ideas.

  1. NETWORKS: One is that the network is the basic pattern of organisation of all living systems: wherever we see life, we see networks. This realisation originated in the early 20th century in ecology with the concept of food webs. Subsequently, network models were used at all systems levels, viewing organisms as networks of cells, and cells as networks of molecules, just as ecosystems are understood as networks of individual organisms.A network, as everybody knows, is a certain pattern of nodes and links, of relationships. Therefore, in order to understand networks, we need to learn how to think in terms of relationships and patterns, and this is what systems thinking is all about.
    • Please note also that networks are nonlinear – they go in all directions – and since all living systems are networks, this means that all living systems are nonlinear, or ‘complex’, systems.
    • In recent years, social networks have become a major focus of attention, not only in science but also in society at large and throughout a newly emerging global culture.
    • ndeed, networks are the dominant social feature of our age. The profound change of metaphor from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network lies at the very heart of the systems view of life.

2. THE NETWORK IS CREATED BY THE SYSTEM: The second idea implied in my first principle is that life organises itself: the network pattern is not imposed on a living system by its environment, but is created by the system itself.

    • The concept of self-organisation originated in the 1940s and was used in many different contexts and with different meanings during the subsequent decades. Today, describing living systems as self-organising means that they create structures and processes organised by the internal rules of the system, rather than by external imposing forces.
    • This does not mean that living systems are independent of their environment. On the contrary, they depend for their survival on continual flows of energy and matter, or food, from the environment.
    • In fact, these continual flows, known as metabolism, provide a key distinction between living and nonliving systems. The great microbiologist Lynn Margulis liked to say: “If it metabolises, it’s alive; if it doesn’t metabolise, it’s not alive.

Principle 2: life is inherently regenerative

My second principle is that life is inherently regenerative.

    • Living networks continually regenerate themselves by transforming or replacing their components. In this way they undergo continual structural changes while preserving their web-like patterns of organisation.
    • This coexistence of stability and change is indeed a key characteristic of life.
    • The continual regeneration of life in Nature is, of course, well known. We only have to think of the turn of the seasons with new growth every spring. That’s regeneration. The novel insight in the systems view is that regeneration operates at all levels of life, down to the molecular networks in cells. Regeneration is the very essence of life. When regeneration stops, life stops. In a more philosophical vein, we might even say that regeneration is the purpose, or the meaning, of life.
    • The continual process of regeneration, of transforming and replacing components of the system, is only possible with continual metabolic flows of energy and matter through the living network. Indeed, we all need to breathe, eat and drink to stay alive. In other words, metabolism – that defining characteristic of biological life – is an integral part of regeneration.
    • As I have mentioned, life in the social realm can also be understood in terms of networks, but here we are not dealing with chemical reactions: we are dealing with communications. Social networks, as everybody knows today, are networks of communications. Like biological networks, they are regenerative, but what they generate is mostly nonmaterial. Each communication creates information, ideas and meaning, which give rise to further communications, and thus the entire network continually regenerates itself.As communications continue in a social network, they form multiple feedback loops that eventually produce a shared system of knowledge, values, and rules of conduct – a common context of meaning, known as culture, which is continually sustained by further communications.

Principle 3: life is inherently creative

The fact that an organism’s metabolism involves flows through networks of chemical processes has the important consequence that these metabolic flows include cyclical pathways.

    • These cycles can act as feedback loops.
    • Because of that feedback, living organisms are able to regulate and organise themselves.
    • Feedback loops can be
      • either self-balancing, maintaining the organism in a state of dynamic balance known as homeostasis,
      • or they can be self-amplifying, or ‘runaway’, which may result in the entire system becoming unstable. At this point, the system may either break down, or it may break through to a new form of order.
      • This spontaneous emergence of new order at critical points of instability, often referred to simply as ‘EMERGENCE’, is in my opinion the most important discovery of complexity theory.
      • The process of emergence has been studied in great detail and has been recognised as the dynamic origin of learning, development and evolution.
      • In other words, creativity – the generation of new forms – is a key property of all living systems.
      • This is my third principle of life: life is inherently creative. This means that, as human beings, we are creative not only if we happen to be artists or designers. All of us are creative simply because we are alive, because life itself is inherently creative.

Principle 4: life is inherently intelligent

hands of godMy fourth and final principle is that life is inherently intelligent.

    • This is based on a new conception of the nature of mind, which is one of the most radical philosophical implications of the systems view of life, since it finally overcomes the Cartesian division between mind and matter that has haunted philosophers and scientists for centuries. In the 17th century, René Descartes based his view of Nature on the fundamental division between two independent and separate realms – that of mind, which he called the “thinking thing”, and that of matter, the “extended thing”. Following Descartes, scientists and philosophers continued to think of the mind as some intangible entity and were unable to imagine how this “thinking thing” related to the body.
      • The decisive advance of the systemic understanding of life has been to abandon the Cartesian view and to realise that mind is not a thing but a process, known as COGNITION (the process of knowing).
      • In the systems view of life, cognition denotes a particular way in which a living organism interacts with its environment. The organism responds to environmental influences with structural changes, and it does so autonomously, specifying which influences to notice and how to respond according to its nature and previous experience. Continual cognitive interactions with the environment are an essential part of an organism’s metabolism, and thus life and cognition are inseparably linked: life is inherently intelligent.
      • This is a radical expansion of the concept of cognition and, implicitly, the concept of mind. In the systems view, cognition manifests at all levels of life, whether or not an organism has a brain and a nervous system. Plants, for example, and even bacteria, neither of which have nervous systems, are constantly engaged in cognitive activities involving their sensory apparatus and various self-organising processes.
      • Another way of describing this situation is to emphasise that all living organisms interact with their environment through sensory organs.
      • To use an old philosophical term, living beings are sentient beings. In the systems view, their sentient interactions are identified as cognitive interactions. As the structures of the sensory organs become more and more complex in evolution, so do the corresponding cognitive processes. Eventually we have the evolution of brains, nervous systems and human consciousness, involving self-awareness, language and conceptual thought.
      • The ability to form abstract concepts, symbols and mental images is a key feature of our consciousness, and human intelligence today includes the abstractions we associate with mathematics and with computers – algorithms, mathematical models and the like. However, from the systemic perspective of life at large, these mathematical abstractions are peripheral to the intelligence inherent in all living organisms. Living intelligence is tacit and embodied. Its key quality is the ability to be in the world, to move around in it, and to survive in it.

[NOTE: These principles are further explained in his course, and in a number of interviews and papers.]

These principles are embodied in all forms of life, on all levels of scale: from the smallest to the largest, from cells to celestial bodies.

 

About

Milano, 18-09-2007
CAPRA Fritjof, writer
photo: © BASSO CANNARSA

The master of systems thinking, FRITJOF CAPRA, is a physicist, systems theorist and deep ecologist. He is the author of a number of other books, including the now famous book The Tao of Physics (1975), The Turning Point (1982), Uncommon Wisdom (1988), The Web of Life (1996), He also co-authored with Pier Luigi Luisi of the multidisciplinary textbook The Systems View of Life, on which his online course is based. www.capracourse.net This book and the course represent the synthesis of over forty years of research, integrating research.

Born in Vienna, Austria, Capra attended the University of Vienna, where he earned his PhD in theoretical physics in 1966. He conducted research in particle physics and systems theory at the University of Paris (1966–1968), the University of California, Santa Cruz (1968–1970), the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (1970), Imperial College, London (1971–1974) and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (1975–1988). He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy located in Berkeley, California, which promotes ecology and systems thinking in primary and secondary education. He is on the faculty of Schumacher College.

Capra focuses on systemic information generated by the relationships among all parts as a significant additional factor in understanding the character of the whole, emphasizing the web-like structure of all systems and the interconnectedness of all parts. Critiquing the reductionistic Cartesian view that everything can be studied in parts to understand the whole, he encourages a holistic approach. Capra advocates that Western culture abandon conventional linear thought and the mechanistic views of Descartes.

It is truly a privilege to learn on the knees of the master.

If this is of interest to you, enrol in the THE SYSTEMS VIEW OF LIFE,which is run once every 6 months. Study groups and video gatherings with Capra create an international multi-cultural learning community.

Where From Here?

How do I apply this new paradigm?

  1. Read Why Should You Care About Systems Thinking?
  2. Regenerative Economics - Why Should You Care About Regenerative Economics?
  3. Regenerative Agriculture -  Why Should You Care About Regenerative Agriculture?
  4. Nate Hagens is an excellent source for information about finance. After ten years in finance, Nate left Wall Street to study the interrelationships between energy, ecology, and economics—and the implications for human futures. Nate holds a master’s degree in finance with honors from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in natural resources from the University of Vermont. His podcasts are excellent - The Great Simplification,  - where he has conversations with experts in energy, ecology, government, technology, and the economy to provide a systemic view of the world around us.
  5. Refresh your memory on state of the earth with a snapshot of where we are at globally. Also check out the KNOWLEDGE BASE, where you will find all references for this section. This is an evolving website, and there is no difference in the reference section - it will grow over time.
  6.  Connect with Green Money Journal, which has been covering sustainable business, impact investing, energy & climate change, food and farming, which has been published  since 1992 by Cliff Feigenbaum. It has an excellent article on Biomimicry

 

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