mould

THEORY: Systems
No quote, ok?

Judging from how tired I am this will probably be a quick spiel. I'm not quite sure when I become obsessed with the idea of systems, which we'll just define as a body of interacting parts. I suspect it had something to do with either my general philosophy class, when we learnt about mind-body dualism and the concept of supervenience, Book 3 of The Baroque Cycle (which I reviewed earlier), or both. Or neither.

Anyway a few basic points.

First, systems are deterministic. The parts interact with interactions leading to outcomes. The causal chains in a system imply that systems theory is vaguely applicable to almost anything in the physical universe, including human institutions. Thinking about it, it's even compatible with some degree of non-determinism - it simply means one more exogenous part of the system. How helpful this is academically is debatable - probably not helpful at all, given that all you'll be saying is this interacted with that to give this, which in turn interacted with that to give this... and so on.

But second, the multiplicity of relations means that systems with a few defined variables and relations can turn out to be very very complex. Ok this is gonna sound really cockly silly but chaos theory is systems theory as well. Ugh. I feel like puking. But I just had to put that down. There are technical definitions to both that I don't know, but this is what I mean when I say that - within a mechanically deterministic system, an apparently chaotic outcome is wholly possible. That's interesting enough on its own, but what I find really cool is that that's what the universe is, exactly. An apparently chaotic outcomes from basic mechanical interactions. And this is why I picked up weiqi and like it as well (though I would like it more if I were better at it): because weiqi captures the essence of that.

For those of you who argue that wholly deterministic frameworks give no room for true choice or whatever, fret not. Third, the idea of instantiation and supervenience says that when one thing is supervened upon another, that is, when the latter changes the former must surely change but not necessarily the other way round, so it's some kind of dependency relationship (think of our body and our mind), they can be ontologically separate. Ok I put the ontologically separate part in myself, but the idea is there - our minds are not wholly defined by our bodies even though they're probably wholly dependent on them. They are separate entities. And from here it's a short (or maybe not so short) step to emergentism, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. So this means a system can give rise to an 'identity' of some sort, or some 'animating essence'. And in this somewhat mystical magical supervened emergent property you can input whatever you want: life, consciousness, God, a nation, whatever, there are the sum of their parts and yet something more. So to me the beauty of systems theory is that they provide that possibility. The very word system already suggests so - why did we not just say the body of objects? Why classify them under this term? So the idea that there is a system gives the possibility that it is more than what it is mechanically defined to be.

Fourth, I think I have this tendency to simplify things as much as possible. Like if I see 4a/2ab x 5bc or something I have to make it 10c. So what a systemic analysis does is pare down a group of objects, their relationships and whatnot down to the barest elements. From there you can isolate changes and their effects, with a powerful enough computer/simulator. But what it does for my feeble mind is allow me to think, right this this and this lead to this, so it's all this's fault, or that's fault. And if I wanna change this I change that and this results. Kinda.

Yep, so those are basic reasons why I have become somewhat obsessed with systems. It feels ike I have more to write, yet that seems to be all for now. I will definitely add more as I think of them - this is the first time I've actually consolidated this, so it's quite nice. Really, writing has superbly good benefits for me. The problem is just externalities.