Coevolving Innovations

Coevolving Innovations

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Anticipatory Systems, Evolution, and Extinction Cascades | Judith Rosen | ST-ON 2023-10-16

November 10, 2023
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Judith Rosen agreed to give an online presentation for the Systems Thinking Ontario meeting in October 2023, after we converted her in-person meeting at OCADU in August into a discussion circle.  Channelling the anticipatory systems approach of her father, mathematical biologist Robert Rosen, Judith has been extended those ideas in her own continuing observation of living systems.

This recording of the session is available on Youtube, as well as on the Internet Archive .

Video H.264 MP4
October 16
(1h53m)		 [20231016_ST-ON_Rosen AnticipatorySystems 925kbps_1760x900.m4v]
(1760×900 925kbps 883MB)
[on the Internet Archive]

An audio has been extracted from the video.

Audio
October 16
(1h53m)		 [20231016_ST-ON Rosen_AnticipatorySystems.mp3]
(110 MB)
[on the Internet Archive]

A copy of the research article is posted on the wiki.st-on.org .  Here’s the original abstract.

When we think about evolution — specifically the entailment underlying the process of change in species of living organisms, over eons of time, which we call “evolution” — and as we seek to increase our scientific understanding of it, one glaring omission is that there is no mention of the fact that living organisms manifest patterns of behavior that are radically different from non-living systems. Life does not just react, the way all non-living systems do; life also Anticipates. Therefore, we need to factor in the Anticipatory nature of all life into our models (both our mental models and scientific models) and see where that leads us in our understanding.… Read more (in a new tab)

Appreciating systems changes via multiparadigm inquiry (SRBS)

November 6, 2023
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An article related to the ISSS plenary talk of July 2022 has now passed the peer review process, and is published in early view for Systems Research and Behavioral Science.  It should shortly be printed in the November issue of SRBS that serves as the General Systems Yearbook.

Update on Nov. 22, 2023: A full-text, read-only version is available via the author on Article Share https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/YEVWGPGURZ5IVE7AWQRM?target=10.1002/sres.2973

Those without institutional access to journals can contact me, and I’ll send you a copy.  The article is otherwise embargoed until September 2025, at which point it can be self-archived with open access on the Coevolving Commons publications website.

The process of review, with a helpful editor, sharpens and shortens the content.  This formally published version is about 5,000 words.  The original manuscript that appears in the 2022 proceedings is about 15,000 words.  Since I cite a lot of published works of others, I prefer to embed long quotations from the original sources, so that I can keep the original meanings clear.  The extra details enable a diligent reader to not have to cross-reference and look up extended research sources, at the risk of being tedious for researchers who are familiar with that territory.

The article concludes with the following acknowledgement;

This research has been guided since 2019 by the core members of the Systems Changes Learning Circle: Zaid Khan, Dan Eng and Kelly Okamura. We have benefitted by the largess offered on the Open Learning Commons and Digital Life Collective by Robert Best.

… Read more (in a new tab)

Sustainable Technology and the Entropy Argument | Mohammed Badrah, Kelly Okamura, David Hawk | Systems Thinking Ontario 2023-09-11

October 22, 2023
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In a return to original Systems Thinking Ontario format, we reviewed an (old) systems thinking paper from 1998. Mohammed Badrah served as reviewer. Kelly Okamura was the discussant. The author, David Hawk, was available during the discussion period for extended knowledge.

As compared to prior Systems Thinking Ontario sessions with the word “entropy” in the title, the discussion was not on the scientific interpretations of the second law of thermodynamics, but instead on behaviours of human beings related to their social environments.

This recording of the session is available on Youtube, as well as on the Internet Archive .

Video H.264 MP4
September 11
(1h34m)		 [20230911_ST-ON SustainableTechEntropyArgument Badrah_Okamura_Hawk 1920×1030.m4v]
(FHD 1920×1080 1162kbps 876MB)
[on the Internet Archive]

A standalone audio was also created during the meeting.

Audio
September 11
(1h34m)		 [20230911_ST-ON SustainableTechEntropyArgument Badrah_Okamura_Hawk.m4a]
(87 MB)
[on the Internet Archive]

Here is the original abstract sent in advance.

— begin abstract —

Humans beings have significant problems in being human. The difficulties are manifest in many ways but generally begin with the way in which humans relate to their environment. The potentials for improvements in these relations are great but so too are the difficulties. This is in part because of serious shortcomings in how the resources essential to human existence are conceptualized and managed. These shortcomings are similar to those raised by General Systems Theorists fifty years ago. Noteworthy successes were limited, therefore the problems continue.… Read more (in a new tab)

Sciencing and Philosophizing on Threads in Systems Thinking | Gary S. Metcalf + David Ing | Systems Thinking Ontario 2023-07-10

August 14, 2023
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Digging into philosophies underlying the systems sciences, pragmatism seems to have been a strong historical foundation for some research streams. In ongoing discussions, Gary Metcalf and I have been approaching pragmatism from two directions. Gary has been tracking from mid-1800s forward, listening to the audiobook The Metaphysical Club, with a history of figures living through the American Civil War, seeking alternative approaches to the British and continental European ideas. I have been working backwards on two streams.  (1) West Churchman and Russell Ackoff were students of Edgar A. Singer Jr., who was a father of a pragmatic school of thought at the University of Pennsylvania, having previously taught with William James at Harvard University.  (2) Eric Trist and Fred Emery, in the development of the Socio-Ecological Systems perspective, track back to Stephen C. Pepper, who studied under Ralph Barton Perry, an associate of William James who is recognized for anthologizing and clarifying James’ writing.

The ISSS Kruger Park 2023 meeting was an opportunity for us to share our work in progress.  Tracing the institutional lineages of some of the key figures of interest shows periods when the philosophers and systems scientists had formal appointments to the same places.

Institutional lineages of key figures in systems sciences and pragmatism

Notable institions include Harvard U., U. Pennsylvania, and the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations.  The many decades give a sense of the time scales (e.g. Pepper arrived at U.C. Berkeley much before Churchman; Trist and Emery were together at Tavistock, and visited Ackoff at U.… Read more (in a new tab)

Nonrelativistic pragmatism and systems thinking

July 9, 2023
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The ties between systems thinking and pragmatism are apparently strong, but the breadth in the philosophy of pragmatism can be confusing.  Within the tradition, one of the threads is called nonrelativistic pragmatism, proposed by systems luminaries C. West Churchman with Russell L. Ackoff, descending from the work of philosopher Edgar A. Singer, Jr.

A concise description of nonrelativistic pragmatism might be as a branch that centers on the entanglement of facts and values, within philosophy of science.  This centering surfaces in an interview of Hilary Putnam, expanded from the two into a “triple entanglement of theory, value, and fact”.

My alma mater was the University of Pennsylvania. The first teacher who really influenced me there was a pragmatist. His is an interesting story. His name was C. West Churchman. (I do not know what his first name was, because he obviously did not like it.) He was a philosopher of science for a while, but then he eventually left the field of philosophy, and became Professor of Operations Research at the University of California. He was a pragmatist, and he was a student – which makes me a “grandstudent” – of a philosopher named E. A. Singer Jr., who was in turn a student of William James. Singer created a pragmatist tradition at the University of Pennsylvania. The other pragmatist at that point – she did not even have tenure, she was just an assistant professor but later she became a full professor – was Elizabeth Flower.

… Read more (in a new tab)

C. West Churchman on the I Ching

July 3, 2023
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A luminary in the systems movement, C. West Churchman, showed some respect for Chinese philosophy, with the I Ching (Yi Jing) in particular.

Deborah Hammond was encouraged by West Churchman into joining and becoming a historian of the systems movement.  In her 2003 book, Hammond wrote of her conversations with Churchman, back into his days with the Society for General Systems Research (SGSR).

— begin excerpt from Hammond (2003) —

Historical Roots of Systems Thinking

C. West Churchman, who first introduced me to the general-systems community, was a longtime member and former president of the SGSR and has written extensively on the topic of systems thinking. His own professional evolution is typical of the intellectual richness of the tradition. He describes himself as an intellectual grandson of William James, having studied philosophy with a student of James’s by the name of E. A. Singer. During World War II, he was actively involved with the development of operations research, going on to spend much of his professional career teaching in the School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. After retirement (and into his early eighties), he continued to work in the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, teaching courses on ethics.[17] [p. 12]

  • [17] See C. West Churchman, The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971), The Systems Approach (1979), and The Systems Approach and Its Enemies (1979). He was the primary author, with Russell Ackoff and Leonard Arnoff, of Introduction to Operations Research (1957), one of the first textbooks in the new field.
… Read more (in a new tab)

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    • Feb 27, 2025, 04:08 February 27, 2025
      Peer reviewed article on "Rethinking work, with the pandemic disruption: Metatheorizing with world hypotheses and systems changes” with #SusuNousala published in International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, after 2 years in revisions, #RyanArmstrong editor https://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/rethinking-work-with-the-pandemic-disruption/
    • Feb 19, 2025, 12:53 February 19, 2025
      Thinking about #SystemsThinking contribution for March 15, towards October in Toronto.> The intent-to-submit period for papers closes on March 15, 2025. This is a two-stage process: no new submissions will be accepted after March 15, and final submissions are due by 23:59 GMT on April 30. https://rsdsymposium.org/call-for-systemic-design-contributions/
    • Feb 19, 2025, 01:45 February 19, 2025
      Audio recordings + 2 GenAI summaries of Evolving Styles for Learning Systems Thinking at #SystemsThinking Ontario @ocad with #StephenDavies @daviding@daviding.com , moderated by #ZaidKhan https://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/evolving-styles-for-learning-systems-thinking/
    • Feb 16, 2025, 14:10 February 16, 2025
      Types of use of Gen AI cites poster session by IBM Research. > We describe current LLM usages across three categories: creation, information, and advice.Michelle Brachman, Amina El-Ashry, Casey Dugan, and Werner Geyer.2024. How Knowledge Workers Use and Want to Use LLMs in an EnterpriseContext. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors […]
    • Feb 16, 2025, 13:36 February 16, 2025
      Maybe Gen AI is better for those who trust it the least. > Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship. Our insights reveal new design challenges […]

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    • Installing WordPress Studio on Manjaro Linux
      In 2024, WordPress Studio was released, making installation on a local computer simpler. The instructions were modified from MacOS to Ubuntu Linux, by Daniel Kossmann, “How to install WordPress Studio in Ubuntu Linux” | Jun 15, 2024 at https://www.danielkossmann.com/how-to-install-wordpress-studio-ubuntu-linux/ I already had NVM installed, but in Terminal, with the result “command not found”. In the […]
    • Notion of Change in the Yijing | JeeLoo Lin 2017
      The appreciation of change is different in Western philosophy than in classical Chinese philosophy. JeeLoo Lin published a concise contrast on differences. Let me parse the Introduction to the journal article, that is so clearly written. The Chinese theory of time is built into a language that is tenseless. The Yijing (Book of Changes) there […]
    • World Hypotheses (Stephen C. Pepper) as a pluralist philosophy [Rescher, 1994]
      In trying to place the World Hypotheses work of Stephen C. Pepper (with multiple root metaphors), Nicholas Rescher provides a helpful positioning. — begin paste — Philosophical perspectivism maintains that substantive philosophical positions can be maintained only from a “perspective” of some sort. But what sort? Clearly different sorts of perspectives can be conceived of, […]
    • The Nature and Application of the Daodejing | Ames and Hall (2003)
      Ames and Hall (2003) provide some tips for those studyng the DaoDeJing.
    • Diachronic, diachrony
      Finding proper words to express system(s) change(s) can be a challenge. One alternative could be diachrony. The Oxford English dictionary provides two definitions for diachronic, the first one most generally related to time. (The second is linguistic method) diachronic ADJECTIVE Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “diachronic (adj.), sense 1,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3691792233. For completeness, prochronic relates “to […]
    • Introduction, “Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2”, edited by F. E. Emery (1981)
      The selection of readings in the “Introduction” to Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2, Penguin (1981), edited by Fred E. Emery, reflects a turn from 1969 when a general systems theory was more fully entertained, towards an urgency towards changes in the world that were present in 1981. Systems thinking was again emphasized in contrast […]

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    • What to Do When It’s Too Late | David L. Hawk | 2024
      David L. Hawk (American management theorist, architect, and systems scientist) has been hosting a weekly television show broadcast on Bold Brave Tv from the New York area on Wednesdays 6pm ET, remotely from his home in Iowa. Live, callers can join…Read more ›
    • 2021/06/17 Keekok Lee | Philosophy of Chinese Medicine 2
      Following the first day lecture on Philosophy of Chinese Medicine 1 for the Global University for Sustainability, Keekok Lee continued on a second day on some topics: * Anatomy as structure; physiology as function (and process); * Process ontology, and thing ontology; * Qi ju as qi-in-concentrating mode, and qi san as qi-in-dissipsating mode; and […]
    • 2021/06/16 Keekok Lee | Philosophy of Chinese Medicine 1
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