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You Can’t Beat the System

General Systems theory was developed by biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy in 1936. (L. von Bertalanffy, 1968), and furthered by Ross Ashby (Ashby, 1956). Von Bertalanffy was both reacting against reductionism and attempting to revive the unity of science. Rather than reducing an entity, a human for instance, to the properties of its parts or elements, systems theory focuses on the arrangement of and relations between the parts that connect them into a whole.

Systems modelling is independent of the concrete substance of the elements (e.g. particles, cells, transistors, people, etc). A systems model takes note of the elements but tends to focus on the energy and information flows between these elements. Thus, the same concepts and principles of organization can be applied to different disciplines (physics, biology, technology, sociology, etc.), providing a basis for their unification.

More than 50 years later, the work in understanding systems has evolved to the point that we incorporate many of the concepts into our everyday language. We speak of a health care system, a family system, body systems, information systems, banking systems, political systems, etc. 

Von Bertalanffy emphasized that most systems are open to, and interact with, their environments, the environment being a bigger system of which they can be viewed as a subsystem. Thus a colony of ants, which is clearly a system in itself composed of millions of ants, may exist inside a rainforest, a larger ecological system. We are using the terms ‘Higher’ System, and ‘Lower’ System to denote these relationships.

A system can be either open or closed. Many closed systems are just basic mechanical devices, and are pretty boring. Open systems can acquire qualitatively new properties by interacting with their environment, resulting in continual evolution. This counteracts entropy.

The following point will be made several times in this document because of it’s importance:

When an open system interacts with its environment, it does so by taking in energy and/or information from that environment and responding accordingly.

Any system that is not open will malfunction or simply run down and stop no matter how perfect it's internal structure. Cancer cells are typical cells that do not respond to signals from their environment. In a healthy organism millions of cells a day malfunction and become potentially cancerous, but they are recognised by the immune system and sent a chemical message to self destruct (apotosis). Cancer cells mutate to ignore these messages and become a system unto themselves. These cells now reproduce unchecked and eventually disrupt the system of which they are a part, causing the death of the whole.

So we see now that our model of human awareness is not simply seven blobs with words attached they are seven dynamic systems which interact with each other inside a bigger system composed of all the seven systems which are now also subsystems of the whole.

Steady State Principle

Another axiom of cybernetics is the steady state principle. This states ‘For a system to be in equilibrium, all its parts (subsystems) must be in equilibrium’. If a system is in equilibrium, then its parts are in equilibrium. In our model of human awareness each information processing system must be in equilibrium within itself for the whole system, a human, to be in equilibrium.

If we are in emotional distress, it will not be appreciated if someone says ‘But your head’s O,K. Isn’t it? And your arms are O.K, and your kidneys? So what’s the problem?’ Emotional distress constitues a disequilibriumIn the emotional centre. According to the steady state principle the whole human must be considered out of balance.

Later we will discuss why the human system is rarely in equilibrium because one or other of its subsystems is always unbalanced. We shall then see why equilibrium is crucial to being wholly human