Who we are
We systems thinkers believe we are things that exist. And we share many more beliefs than that. What can we reasonably take for granted about ourselves and our descriptions of the world?
The emergence of systems thinking
The systems that systems thinkers observe and envisage today did not exist in the high energy hot plasma at the start of the universe, and will not exist in the low energy heat death at the end. They are transient islands of describably organized behavior in the ever-unfolding process of the universe.
Physicists reckon the universe started around 14 billon years ago. In the first picosecond, the current laws of physics emerged in stages, gravity before other forces. Most matter and antimatter quickly annihilated, leaving a small excess of matter. The process continued to unfold through stages thus:
Natural systems emerge from aim-less evolution. This article suggests what we see today as laws or constants (such as the strength of gravity) varied until they reached the "basin of stability" we live in today. By contrast, designed systems emerge from the purposeful intent of humans to regulate the behavior of some thing(s) to produce some desired effect(s).
The graphic below presents the evolution of systems thinking in the form of a hierarchical taxonomy of ever narrower classes or types.
We are entities in space and time
We exist in space. We have an inside and an outside. We are bound by our skin in the wider space we call the world or the universe. Any space we stand in must have at least three dimensions - up and down, forward and back and side to side.
We exist in time. We have a life history and change state over time. We can remember past things, observe current things and envisage future things. And for us, time moves forwards. If time stopped we would stop remembering, observing and envisaging things. If time ran backwards, we would forget, un-observe and un-envisage things.
We are organisms
We are alive, which means we interact with things outside us, including the air we breathe and the food we eat; and we can reproduce our genes in the next generation.
We are autopoietic (a word introduced by Maturana and Varela). This means that in a circular way, we take in air and food to build and maintain the much more complex organic structures of our body - that we need to take in air and food.
There is no one definitive "human" DNA molecule. There is only DNA alike enough (99.9%) that we can mate successfully. Being sufficiently alike is good enough for reproduction and biological evolution.
We are animals
In other words, before life, there was no knowledge of the universe, just stuff happening, un-described. There was no concept of "food", "planet" or "circle".
Animals are organisms with nervous systems that process information in neural signals and remember past observations. To survive, we must differentiate one thing from another, and recognize when two things have much in common.
We hold information about things “out there”. We compare perceptions of things with inherited structures and memories of things - and so recognize things that we typify verbally as "food", "friend", and "stranger".
Our sensors may encode, in neural signals, only partial and fuzzy descriptions of things, because recognizing that things are like enough is good enough for many purposes. However evolution will tend to favour ever-more precise discrimination, because having found a particular fruit and enjoyed eating it, we do well to remember its features and interact with similar things the same way (which is to learn by conditioning).
The philosopher and empiricist David Hume proposed that every simple or singular concept (color, shape, smell, taste etc) we have in mind is associated with the impression created by a neural signal (you might try to think of a counter example). And the remaining concepts are compounds of simple ones.
We are social animals
We are members of a species that communicate information to each other using symbols, Social animals communicate using smells, gestures, facial expressions and sounds. Honey bees perform a dance to signify the location of a pollen source. Birds sound alarm calls.
The arrows on a concept graph of this kind do not indicate sequence or cause and effect. They connect subject and object concepts in a predicate statement, and show the direction the statement should be read. For example: Birds <make> Alarm calls, rather than vice-versa.
It is unclear whether birds hear an alarm call as a description of danger, a direction to fly away, or both. A more sophisticated language is needed to distinguish directions, descriptions, decisions and other kinds of message.
Animals have been seen to lie, to make a false alarm call to clear their comrades from an area in which they have spotted food. This deception is a tactic that only works because the majority of alarm calls are genuine and helpful. And for communication to give social animals an advantage over solitary ones, true enough, often enough, is good enough. A later article discusses how we assess truth.
The triads in this and later articles are intended only to illuminate the text. Later articles discuss similar concept graphs, known as semiotic triads, and some triads of the philosopher Charles Peirce.
We are human
We are social animals that verbalize. We use verbal languages to abstract descriptions from reality that enable us to move beyond the "true enough" that suffices for other social animals. We have developed ways to describe objects and processes so precisely and accurately we can (for example) put a man on the moon.
We use verbal languages
Our languages, which combine a vocabulary with grammatical rules, seem more learnt than genetic. There is little evidence for Noam Chomsky's belief that there is a universal grammar (genetic in origin) and that variations in grammar reflect cultural norms. Most of us are remarkably careless of grammatical rules.
This short video about an Amazonian tribe with a language that defies linguistic conventions claims the language has no recursion (Chomsky's principle that sentences can be nested and extended forever), no colors, and no past or future tense.
However, in that video, the woman's assertion that the man is a good hunter implies she remembers he succeeded in the past. And the man's predictions that he won't find a fish, and that "My wife will be angry" shows an awareness of possible/probable future states/events/conditions, which steers the man's actions in the present.
Evidently, however limited their verbal constructs, the tribe does use words to describe things observed to have happened in the past, and things envisaged to happen in the future.
Perhaps what shapes human languages begins with our shared understanding of space and time, our basic need to detect persistent objects (such as fish), which we label with nouns, and perform transient processes (such as fishing), which we label with verbs, and our social need to ask questions and convey directions, descriptions and decisions.
Again, being sufficiently accurate is good enough for most verbal communication. We only have to share enough understanding of a description to find it helpful.
We are linguistically autopoietic
We humans are uniquely adept at using verbal languages to communicate. And we are linguistically autopoietic (my term), which means that in a circular way, we use words to define the words we need to communicate using words.
Due to linguistic autopoiesis (or Godel's incompleteness theorem if you prefer) it is impossible to define a vocabulary for a domain of knowledge without a little circularity. We have no option but to trust - from practical experience - that we understand each other well enough to make verbal communication a useful tool.
We are generalizers
A facility that verbalization gives us, far beyond other animals, is the ability to generalize from things (or descriptions of their features) to types (more generic descriptions).
In fact, every coherent description of a thing (be it an observed horse, or an envisaged unicorn) serves as a general type, of which any number of instances may be observed or envisaged.
Again, accurate enough is true enough. Newton's laws of motion typify the movements of physical objects. It turns out they are inaccurate at speeds near the speed of light and at the quantum level. But we live in a world where they are more than true enough to enable us put a man on the moon.
Some of us are systems thinkers
Systems are human phenomena. Social animals process information and share knowledge. Humans communicate using a flexible verbal language. But only some humans generalize variables and systems from observations of behavior.
Systems are abstractions - transient islands of describably organized behavior - that we systems thinkers draw from the ever unfolding process of the universe. The graphic below quotes the view of systems taken in cybernetics by Ross Ashby.
Other views of what system is are discussed in later articles
Related articles
If you want to read this article in the context of a book on the philosophy that underpins how we describe the world, and systems, then watch this space, because this is a draft of the first chapter of a book on that.
The book is not based on linguistics. It is based on the idea that human languages - informal and imperfect - evolved because they enhanced what all social animals do by way of remembering descriptions of things and communicating to each other.
This next article will introduce how we describe things by symbolizing, likening, categorizing and relating them. It sets the scene for articles that explore different ways to describe things, from pairing tokens with type definitions, to large and complex knowledge structures, and systems.