The Systems View of Life

The first thing that bring in mind, to most of us, the name of Fritjof Capra is his first seminal work, the book entitled "The Tao of Physics". It was published in 1975 and I still remember the sheer excitement the title brought to us, young physicists at the time, and the trepidation it brought to our teachers. Then it came "The Turning Point", the "Belonging to the Universe" and the "Science of Leonardo" among many other titles authored by him. A prolific writer, Fritjof Capra joins forces with another eminent scientist, the biologist Pier Luigi Luisi, and together they bring a new book on system science and complexity. Pier Luigi Luisi is also well known for his involvement with the Mind and Life Institute as it is narrated in his book "Mind and Life: Discussions with the Dalai Lama on the Nature of Reality". Both authors are well versed in the "pairing the oldest wisdom traditions with cutting-edge scientific research". They are also pioneers along with Francisco Varela and Huberto Maturana of systems thinking in biology and ecology with their work and ideas touching on the social and economic problems that humanity faces in our times. Their recent book could not but talk about these issues. In this hefty volume on the systems view of life the authors outline the horizon of modern systems thinking aiming at an audience of undergraduate students interested in understanding and getting to grips with the tenets of systems theory and its applications. Nevertheless, the book can serve as a great guide for the restless graduate student and the seasoned but still open and alert scholars who want to familiarise themselves with the fast growing science of complexity especially related with issues of the living. The book deals with living systems at all scales, from molecular aspects to social and societal ones passing from animal, ecological and cognitive systems. The overarching framework or paradigm, of course, being the systemic approach. The book is also of interest for the non-specialist who wants to understand what this "system thinking" can bring to contemporary thought. The book succeeds in its task as its organisation and choice of paradigms are wisely arranged to lead the reader in encountering the daunting problems of today's state of the world from the perspective of systems science. Indeed it touches almost all of these problems - depletion of resources, climate change, ecological breakdown, the destruction of the fabric of social relations, health and healthcare shortcomings, spread of epidemics, globalisation and the degradation of economies to ruthless profit counting machines to name but a few... The first chapters set the frame by an account of the history of science as conventionally taught but with some knowledgeable excursions to less discussed topics. The case of Leonardo da Vinci, herald of the Renaissance, is a good example of how biomimetics or biomimicry [from the Greek: βίος (bios), life, and μίμησις (mimesis), imitation] found their way to modern science. The same attitude, that is furnishing inspiration from nature, is one of the main strategies for the solution of complex problems. Da Vinci also developed the view of the Earth as living being, like the scientists of the Renaissance and Romantic eras. A far fetching and fertile idea that recently has resurfaced in system science as the Gaia hypothesis. As is common, the book fails to mention the debt of da Vinci and modern science to the heritage of the Hellenistic era. It remains a forgotten topic but nowadays this is also resurfacing (see for example "The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn" by Lucio Russo). We know now that Hellenistic science and mathematics found their way, via da Vinci, to the founding fathers of the scientific revolution such as Leibniz and Newton; and the scientific method resurrected from Alexandria, alas without the resurrection of the world soul that was immolated along with Giordano Bruno and ended the Renaissance for good. The advent of Cartesian worldview led to the triumph of reductionist, mechanistic and mechanical thinking. A whole was considered to be explained by the motion of its parts. Systems science overcomes this Cartesian fallacy. The whole being more and different than its parts has become the spearheading banner of systems science and systems thinking. An old mentor and teacher,of mine and of early system science, Ilya Prigogine used to say that "...One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilisation is dissection: the split-up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again." Indeed putting things back together to a coherent whole is the task of systems science. A task of immense complexity and this is the point where complexity science meets systems thinking. The nonlinear interconnections and the richness of the emerging dynamics cannot be ignored any more. Most of the problems in understanding, monitoring and predicting complex systems rest on this immense richness and complexity. That's where systemic thinking furnishes a novel understanding for hierarchies of wholeness. Moreover, this kind of thinking affords a renewal of the idea of entelechy or the formative cause so much ignored in the mechanistic approach. As Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who is considered one of the founding fathers of general system theory puts it as early as 1929, "What in the whole denotes a causal equilibrium process, appears for the part as a teleological event.". Early work and a lot of references to the origins of system science are nicely represented in the book. Moreover, an impressive, informative and inspiring collection of authoritative scholarly opinion in the form of "guest essays" presented by boxed insets within the book make it a valuable source of detailed information in a wide array of topics relevant to the subject. They are numerous and one cannot mention all of them, There is an essay by Patrick Bateson, for example, entitled "The rise and rise of epigenetics" another one entitled "On the primary nature of consciousness" by Michel Bithol also the ones with the titles "Placebo and nocebo responces" by Fabrizio Benedetti and "Integrative practice in healthcare and healing" by Helmut Milz; or the essay by Marjorie Kelly "Living enterprise as the foundation of a generative economy" and "Seeds of life" by Vandana Shiva, all these and the ones I failed to mention due to space requirements but equally important pieces constitute an extra stimulus of high quality for the special interests of the reader.

The only baffling part of the book, for me, is the position of the authors with regard to consciousness studies and living systems. Although there is a good coverage of quantum biology and its recent advances and although there is an even more extensive discussion on cognition, awareness and neurophysiology, the authors declare their conviction that consciousness is an epiphenomenon. In other words that life comes first and then consciousness arises as an emergent phenomenon due to the complexity of the cognitive system. This is an honest and conventionally accepted view. But it is no more or less scientific than the other less accepted but more interesting point of view. Namely that life is a manifestation of consciousness. The view that consciousness is fundamental and that matter emanates as a derivative from it came back to existence in science with the birth of modern physics. Early workers in quantum physics like Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, Ervin Schrödinger and Eugene Wigner, among others, expressed their conviction of a larger reality underlying the world of phenomena. One cannot fail to recognise the founder of quantum mechanics in its famous quote: "All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter." (Max Planck ). For me it remains an enigma how the authors, both adepts in Buddhist philosophy and in perennial wisdom cannot read the message of quantum physics. Sir Roger Penrose and his ideas and work referring to the aboriginal nature of consciousness are duly referenced in the book, nevertheless they mention it only to declare it out of scientific bounds. Anyway, the fundamental basis of both complexity and quantum mechanics rests in the notion of possibilities rather than fixed object-like entities. These days a deeper understanding of systemic probability reaches out and meets quantum probability. But let us leave it there, as esoteric - but not obscure - as it might sound, and let us hope it will be treated in their next book, hopefully soon. Stephen Hawking, on January 23, 2000, said in San Jose Mercury News: "I think the next century will be the century of complexity" and Stephen Hawking is manifestly optimistic. But from where can we draw optimism in the face of the complex issues that surround us? How can we make decisions when presented with an uncertain, complex evolution unfolding in front of us? In systems theory there is a theorem that says that to optimise something in the long term one has to optimise every next small step. That requires global information and local action. "Think globally, act locally" i.e. expand our awareness to a greater whole and focus on our part. The whole book is intended among other things to be a call to assume our personal and collective responsibilities for the future. No matter how small or irrelevant the situation makes us think we are, it is the gravest of mistakes to think that doing something little changes nothing. Every little fluctuation, for any system at criticality, may result in determining its evolution at larger scales, larger than we can imagine or predict. Correlations ripple across the whole of the system when we are facing the onset of a bifurcation. So, I would like to end this review exactly as the authors close their book, where they discuss the potential fate of our era as it fast approaches one of its major bifurcation points. They remark that the transition to a sustainable future will not be easy or given. This point of transition, characterised by systemic instability can lead to "breakthroughs or breakdowns", as very pointedly put it. "So what we can hope for the future of humanity?" They ask, and they quote the great Czech playwright and statesman Václav Havel, who "turned the same question to a meditation on hope itself":

"The kind of hope that I often think about … I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or an estimate of the situation … [Hope] is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out"