Published In

International Institute for General Systems Studies

Document Type

Presentation

Publication Date

1-9-1997

Subjects

Systems theory, Complexity theory, Mario Bunge (1919-2020), Metaphysics, Cybernetics

Abstract

I use the label, “complexity theory,” for the research program which studies nonlinear dynamics, “complexity,” “complex adaptive systems,” “artificial life,” etc., and whose intellectual Mecca in the United States is the Santa Fe Institute. I use the label, “systems theory,” for the research program which crystallized after World War II under the names of “general systems theory” and “cybernetics,” and which subsumed such postwar scientific developments as information theory, game theory, feedback control theory, and the beginnings of computer science and artificial intelligence. The central thesis of this paper is that complexity theory is a continuation and revitalization of systems theory. The paper makes extensive use of a characterization of systems theory made by Mario Bunge which applies equally well to complexity theory. Bunge described systems theory as an attempt to construct an “exact and scientific metaphysics.” The attempt to construct such a metaphysics represents a fundamental rejection of the possibility and desirability of a sharp demarcation separating science and metaphysics. At the very least, metaphysics can serve as a heuristic for science, but systems theory holds out a more radical promise: the recovery of metaphysics via its scientific reconstitution. Such a metaphysics would be less abstract than mathematics but more abstract than the theories of specific scientific disciplines. It would be “stuff-free” (materiality-independent) and only “vicariously” testable. It would represent an attempt to develop a “theory of everything” on an altogether different basis than the way such theories are conceived of in theoretical physics. A systems theoretic TOE, were one available, would genuinely unify the sciences, and not merely offer the illusory unity of a cascade of promised inter-theoretic reductions all the way down to elementary particle physics. Of course, a systems theoretic TOE is not currently available, but ample materials for constructing one are already at hand.

Description

Presented at the International Institute for General Systems Studies, Second Workshop, Jan. 9-11, 1997, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.

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