Collaborating through the holistic perspective in the transition to a sustainable world.

This is a collaborative experiment in the preparation of an academic paper to be submitted to a systems conference at Oxford University in September. https://www.systemsforum.org/ukss-international-conference-2023/

The conference challenge is about identifying how the piecemeal efforts at promoting sustainability gives rise to even further problems. The invitation is to explore how the holistic perspective might support systems thinking to give better comprehensibility and meaning to sustainability. We are offering this response:

"From the holistic perspective applying systems thinking in the transition to a sustainable world invites optimising the opportunities identified in the interstitial spaces between ‘edge of chaos', system dynamics, and holistic worldview."

In promoting this holistic perspective we are looking for some collaboration to help unpack this response in comprehensible terms.

This is the conference invitation:

Systems; transition to a sustainable world.

"The need for a transition to a more sustainable world is widely accepted but it cannot be assumed that understanding what sustainability is, is a given. Isolated efforts to tackle what are seen to be key issues do not always yield anticipated outcomes, they may be even be counter-productive... what we have is a set of interconnected problems, described by Ackoff as a system of problems, or ‘messes’. To make sense of these ‘messes’ we need a holistic perspective..."

Proposed paper title:

"From the holistic perspective applying systems thinking in the transition to a sustainable world invites optimising the opportunities identified in the interstitial spaces between ‘edge of chaos', system dynamics, and holistic worldview."

The draft abstract:

"The epistemological role of worldview in employing systems thinking to inform organisational practice in the requisite transition to a sustainable world needs to be fundamentally reconsidered. Leadership’s admission that it struggles to engage effectively with exponential global challenges shows that it is not only ill-prepared to guide organisations in the current ‘meta-crisis’, but lacks fundamental insight in its role in transitioning to a sustainable world. Insights into ‘edge of chaos’ conditions are ... correlated to Ackoff’s ‘system of problems as messes’ to offer leadership a transformative holistic perspective. From the holistic perspective system thinking/dynamics can now be ontologically evaluated for its potential contribution to the transition to a sustainable world. Shifting from the linear mechanistic/reductionist, to the non-linear organismic holistic perspective might well transfer the focus from sustainable design and methodologies to cultivating what D. C. Wahl describes as a 'regenerative culture'.

By employing ‘Complex Reflexive Adaptive Intelligence’ enhanced inherent human capacities can be accessed to engage with complexity and emergence more effectively. To this end a potentially generative nexus is examined in the interstices between ‘edge of chaos’ conditions, systems thinking/dynamics, and the deeper holistic perspective."

If the paper is accepted it will by published in the UK Systems Society Journal. (See the 2019 paper I previously presented at Bournemouth University published here - straight after the keynote:?https://www.systemsforum.org/.../Systemist-Volume-40-1…

What we are up against

Whilst great store is place on the huge AI potential of data processing to address our core human issues, International jurist, James Tunney, warns about the rise of the Empire of Scientism. He describes this as:

"... An automatic, global electronic plantation of tech-totalitarian control as a mass machine of governance of human intelligence by elite-run, corporate-concentrated machine intelligence, ...".

Sensing

In supporting the request for collaboration, see this initiative being prepared for Oxford as an endeavour to reintroduce the deeper and neglected sensing dimensions of being human. We argue that holistic perspective and practice is required in restoring our relationship with the cosmic intelligent manifest through nature.

The potential transition to a sustainable world now includes the focus on potential mass extinction. Rather than formulating systems-based methodologies to address sustainability, cultivating a 'regenerative culture' surely lies at the heart of such a transition.

However, since it is a systems conference taking place at Oxford inquiring more deeply into the holistic perspective, we need a bridging concept. There must be synergies between the epistemological opportunity of system dynamics mapping causal loops and root causes, to the ontological experience of holism. The bridge then could be via Kaufman's generative 'edge of chaos' interpretation of creative emergence. This subtle opportunity informs the conclusion of the draft abstract above of identifying new opportunities of awareness and response in the interstitial spaces (see a Venn diagram) between system dynamics, 'edge of chaos', and holistic perspective and practice.

Ackoff's system of problems as 'messes'

"When a mess, which is a system of problems, is taken apart, it loses its essential properties and so does each of its parts. The behaviour of a mess depends more on how the treatment of its parts interact than how they act independently of each other. A partial solution to a whole system of problems is better than whole solutions of each of its parts taken separately.“ Russell L. Ackoff

Reductionist metaphysics

Illuminating Ackoff's contention of 'messes', Holos-Earth colleague and philosopher, Rhett Gayle, puts his finger on the on-going problem of reductionist metaphysics.

He warns of the pitfalls in applying the conventional perspective using the systems thinking perspective as a cognitive technology for decision making focused on the long term success of humans and the biosphere. Since the system is merely a aggregation mechanism for fundamentally independent entities, it will inevitably lead to a piecemeal approach to thinking and action. From the conventional perspective he warns:

"All the causal power exists in the basic parts of the system and interventions must target those parts to have a real effect. A holistic approach recognises that wholes have downward casual effects on the parts, a fact our epistemology and strategic intuitions should reflect."

Complex adaptive systems, he reminds, have their own intelligence and cannot be well understood as a system of parts. Problems with CAS cannot be solved as if they are engineering problems. He then asserts:

"They require strategies focused on coevolution."

Gayle continues that reductionist thinking leads to intuitions that are well suited to systems that are cleanly decomposable into parts. However thinking holistically leads to intuitions that are suitable for systems where there are multiple levels of entanglement and causal feedback loops.

"Shifting our thinking (and ontology) toward holism will change the way we interact with the world and each other in a way that will contribute greatly to the future thriving of the biosphere and humanity."

A deeper dimension of knowing

The essence of the case being explored for this paper points to the need to access deeper dimensions of 'knowing'. By adopting the process-orientated meta-systemic worldview and practice advocated in an approach, 'Complex Reflexive Adaptive Intelligence', we might transform the meaning of sustainability. Instead the of focusing on a methodology of sustainability we focus on cultivating a regenerative culture - as a way of seeing and responding.

Interstitial spaces

The key specific interstice areas of exploration (think Venn diagram) are these:

* By exploring the interstitial space between ‘edge of chaos’ and 'system dynamics' we might further empower ‘agency’ as our capacity to engage with the notion of coevolution. In this regard see Aristotle’s 'entelechy' as the 'set of condition in which a potentiality can become an actuality'.

* By exploring the interstitial space between 'system dynamics' and 'holism' we could enable a more generative relationship between epistemology and ontology. In this regard see closing the disjunct between Korzybski’s ‘map and territory'.

* By exploring the interstitial space between 'edge of chaos' and 'holism' we should be able to better access nature’s deeper fields of intelligence. Here see Sheldrake's fields of morphic resonance and our human response capacity.

Radix causa

The primary case argued then is that our predominant epistemology, Tunney's 'Empire of Scientism', is the root cause of our non-conformance with natural evolutionary process that has brought us to the apposite crisis of sustainability. A definition of radix causa (Latin is this):

"The root cause is the core issue—the highest-level cause—that sets in motion the entire cause-and-effect reaction that ultimately leads to the problem(s).”

Our mechanistic and reductionistic societal paradigm is no doubt the 'radix causa' of our non-conformance with nature's regenerative processes. This is what is being addressed by cultivating an approach: 'complex reflexive adaptive intelligence.

Holism

The core critique against holism is the so-called focus on boundaries of parts, wholes, and accompanying hierarchies. This is an insufficient interpretation of Smuts' view of holism. For him it was nature's tendency to creative evolutionary emergence, through time, in the synthetic weave of patterns. A great analogy is a musical symphony.

Systems thinking

Especially system dynamics seeks to identify root causes and causal loops mathematically so that huge amounts of data can be mapped and the territory modelled. Then variables as generative touch-points, that can be influenced are isolated. Gayle's cautionary above applies. This is why it could be so generative that holism's focus on emergent process can be added to sophisticated computer simulations.

Edge of chaos

Contrary to mechanistic systems characterised by fixed relationships, living systems are in a constant state of balance between chaos and order. It is this dynamical nature of flux that sufficient wiggle-room enables adaptation to contextual changes - and in turn accounts for 'emergence'. Consequently it is argued that in exploring the 'interstices' between those three fields of awareness, we could find improved intuited responses and 'holistically formulated opportunities to support the transition to a more sustainable world. The term, regenerative culture, applies.

Jan Smuts' holistic prescience

In the preface to the second edition of 'Holism and Evolution' (1926) he warned:

"We are passing through one of the great transition epochs of history; we are threatened with reaction on the one hand and with disintegration on the other ... the torch of new ideas has to be kindled for our guidance ... In the last resort a civilisation depends on its general ideas; it is nothing but a spiritual structure of the dominant ideas expressing themselves in institutions and the subtle atmosphere of culture.

If the soul of our civilisation is to be saved we shall have to find new and fuller expression for the great saving unities—the unity of reality in all its range, the unity of life in all its forms, the unity of ideas throughout human civilisation, and the unity of man's spirit with the mystery of the Cosmos in religious faith and aspiration. Holism is in its own way a groping towards the new light and to new points of view.”

On sustainability - world boundary limits:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/06/safe-limits-earth-systems-scientists?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social_scheduler&utm_term=Climate+Change&utm_content=07%2F06%2F2023+00%3A00

https://www.systemsforum.org/ukss-international-conference-2023/