Understanding Living Systems
added by Phil Nguyen · updated 2mo ago
Understanding Living Systems
- Life emerges from the realm of the non-living as a new kind of organization of matter . Life is not distinguished by what it is made of, but by how it is put together, and how it behaves.
from Understanding Living Systems
Phil Nguyen added 3mo ago
- There are three distinct ways in which a system can react to perturbations (stress, shocks, noise, volatility, faults, attacks, or failures): it can be
1. fragile , unable to withstand even small perturbations,
2. robust , keeping its structure intact even under large perturbations, or
3. antifragile , improving its behavior under (certain kinds/amoun... See morefrom Understanding Living Systems
Phil Nguyen added 3mo ago
- Interconnectedness is one of the basic principles of life. Transience is another. They both go together to form a multileveled dynamic web of connections between living processes. What results is an emergent and persistent higher-level order from constantly changing lower-level interactions. The singers change, but the song remains the same.
from Understanding Living Systems
Phil Nguyen added 3mo ago
- Living systems are anticipatory . Agents have internal models (forward projections) of what is likely to happen next in their arena. This enables them to choose actions with beneficial expected outcomes in many situations, to build strategies towards achieving their goals. Non-living systems are purely reactive, their behavior determined by their e... See more
from Understanding Living Systems
Phil Nguyen added 3mo ago
- “[y]ou never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
from Understanding Living Systems
Phil Nguyen added 3mo ago
- Cycles at higher levels of organization tend to proceed more slowly than those at lower levels. This gives the multilevel system its resilience . Rapid low-level turnover enables innovation for adaptation (flexibility), while longer-term dynamics at the higher levels provide the capacity for innovations to accumulate (stability) before more global ... See more
from Understanding Living Systems
Phil Nguyen added 3mo ago
- 8. How can principles learned from living systems inform our approach to solving contemporary societal crises, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and lack of sustainability?
Two aspects are central to our move from dominion to stewardship :
1. We must pay close attention to the rates of change in our social-ecological system.
2. We must shift... See morefrom Understanding Living Systems
Phil Nguyen added 3mo ago
- Living organisms are truly complex and antifragile (3) in a way our technological systems are not.
from Understanding Living Systems
Phil Nguyen added 3mo ago
This is Darwinian evolution in a nutshell: adaptation through natural selection in populations of individuals across many generations.
But this is not the only way organisms can improve through challenges: they can also adapt their physiology, growth, or behavior to their arena (environment) as individuals within a single life span because they are autonomous agents. As the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin put it: “the organism is both the subject and the object of evolution.” - As Fritjof Capra says: a machine can be controlled, a living system can only be disturbed. At best, we will find ways of carefully nudging a living system. According to Donella Meadows, we must find its leverage points, those pivots that allow us to influence system behavior. Most importantly: after each cautious inter- vention, we must patiently o... See more
from Understanding Living Systems
Phil Nguyen added 3mo ago