On Complexity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences)

I am a 50 year old employee of the New York City Department of Education. As I write this review the Occupy Wall Street Movement is gaining world wide attention. There is a call for a "list of demands". So many are so desperate to find a logical and "ordered" way of having the youth of the world put into words their disillusionment with the ways in which reality is described - particularly by the ruling elite, the wealthy few and all those who cower in silent complicity.My own education, awakening (if you will) has not been easy. It's still going on. Every day I'm discovering the world is far, far different than I thought/think it is. To live in this increasingly complex and ever-changing world I must be able to engage and sustain things that I consider myself - even at half a century years old - a beginner at: dialogue, listening, moving from my position, maintaining an open heart and open mind, having the willingness to let go of my attachment to reality and my aversion to anyone else's - and to do that with a desire to co-create, co-emerge with the other through interaction in order to inhabit a new and evolving world that is firmly rooted in a secular, non-sectarian view of basic goodness, of enlightned society.I had always believed that human thinking was behind so much of the suffering in the world. Fairly obvious, right? That our attachments to our thoughts, our perceptions, was the reason we suffer so. Many of us know this now. But where to look to find a solid, well-reasoned, passionate, inter-disciplinarian explanation that helps us let go even more of harmful ways of thinking and embracing our innate capacities as intellectual, wise and compassionate beings?Where to look to find someone who would take me past Einstein's famous quote when the atom bomb was detonated "the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking" to a place where I might have hope for the capacity for human beings to self-reflect, become aware, to accept and to take action in actually changing the way they, we, I, you, all of us think?That's what I feel is threatening our world today. Far, far more than an atom bomb. Our thinking as a species is has been the "think tank" behind words and actions that are literally killing our planet. Where to look to find someone with a way to reflect on this situation under an illuminating light? A way to approach and live in the increasingly dark ages (education still a mess, greed of the 1%, wars that have no explanation, poverty, etc) in a way that makes it possible to get out of bed in the morning and live for something larger than myself.Thus, Morin's ON COMPLEXITY. Damn, every paragraph I'm reading is lifting me up. When is METHOD going to be translated into ENGLISH? I find it telling that this man is known mostly in other nations and NOT in America.I find it telling that I feel such a connection between what he has written in ON COMPLEXITY and my own passions as an educator, my own struggles as a human being to understand, to find the "life" in life, to love and be loved and to have the full roll coaster ride as a human being on a lonely search for truth and beauty (I've found a lot of it too).This man is a polyglot and a polymath.I highly recommend this book to anyone from any walk of life - and in particular - to all educators and to those who know that there is an interdependent reality to life that requires us to stand on the shoulders of Newton, Clausius and Darwin (Einstein too) and take a breath of fresh air in the brave new world that Morin makes possible for each of us."Peace in the world or the world in pieces". (Vern Partlow - writer of Old Man Atom: The Talking Atomic Blues)"To be or not to be" Shakespeare"Co-existance or no-existance". another Partlow quote from Old Man Atom)Thank you Mr. Morin for your life and your work.

Have you ever wondered why we’ve passed the millennium with huge scientific advances and sophisticated technology at our disposal, still unable to solve many of the most pressing human crises? Why are we still plagued by similar patterns of societal trauma; racism, sexism, extremism, fundamentalism? Why do humans continue to pollute their environment even though we understand the dire consequences of our actions? French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin describes our greatest human stumbling block as paradigmatic in nature—the tendency toward what he calls “reductive and disjunctive” thinking. The first is our Cartesian reductionism; thinking that the world is equal to the sum of its parts, and Cartesian subject-object split; the thinking mind (ego cogitans) is separate from the objective world (res extensa). Until we radically shift our thinking, and our thinking about thinking, humanity will continue to replay similar patterns with a sense of nonplussed déjà vu. How did we get here? Haven’t we been here before? Or, why do we continue to walk toward a precipice knowing that the abyss looms? Much like walking in a circle through complex topography, we cannot take another path until we can get a bird’s eye view, what Morin calls the “meta-view point.” The “meta-paradigmatic” perspective can help us humans contextualize ourselves in the landscape of our history, better understand our present position, and strategically engage in creating our potential futures.Morin warns that the “paradigm of simplification” cannot help humanity navigate the “hyper-complex” world—what he calls the “Unitas Multiplex,” (p. 4-6) or a Morin invites the reader to re-vise previously held beliefs by incorporating the important lessons of systems and complexity theory into their worldview. He points out that any paradigmatic thinking that does not account for uncertainty and ambiguity will have a huge margin of error in a universe full of open systems far from equilibrium. In other words, life is uncertain by its very nature, and we have to consider that any action is a “wager” with many unforeseen potential outcomes. He says “The word strategy stands in opposition to the word program.” (p. 55) In other words, if every action is a gamble, we do well as a species to investigate possible outcomes, rather than simply shaping a program to fit our desired outcome. In the epistemology of complexity, Morin discusses our human passions and how easily we become disjunctive in our thinking, craving certainty and clinging to oppositional positions (either/or), even if it means becoming blind to the dimensionality of a hypercomplex world.I am not a Morin convert or disciple, as that would be the antithesis to his concept of the meta-paradigmatic position. Morin challenges us to inquire continuously, rather than hang our hats on a fixed ideology. To worship his work as an ideology would indeed do an injustice to his powerful intended message: the call to develop “complex thought.” So I will resist the human tendency to idealize and worship his mind-blowing vision, but simply say that he uniquely pushes beyond the reaches of many scholars because of his refusal to give in to our tendency to distort knowledge. His gift of complex thought is a vital antidote to the perilous ism, the pernicious either/or, and the pathological need for certainty.

I have never had the chance to read Morin's work, even though at college is a well-known philosopher. Now that I've been reading a lot of books concerning Education, much of the writters, philosophers, educators, sociologists, refer to Morin so I bought, for starters, this book. The complex paradox explained by Morin is simply stunning and I just couldn't stop reading the book. For people who is curious to understand the complexity of the human beings, and in life itself, has to read this. My intention is to keep reading Morin.

Put honestly: Morin's book on Complexity is not about doing complexity science. It is more a meta-post-modern view of someone's impossible dream for doing complexity science. Morin uses familiar post modern phrases, assumptions, misunderstandings about thermodynamics, and so on. . .I was not confused by this book at all. Just disappointed that it did not have any practical value or application.It merely said things and was finished in post modern fashion.It critiqued "reductionism", "science" in a negative but impotent fashion. It gave no alternatives as to how anyone could conduct practical complexity research and application in everyday life.

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Great explanation on complexity concepts.

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Morin is revered by an insider set who know of his genius, and the elegant precise way in which he outlines the nature, significance and meaning of the science of complexity. While he sometimes seems to travel close to the reductionist outlook, he never falls into that trap. In many ways I think that complexity is the wrong word for what is being described in that far from the world being complex, it is merely richly patterned and we who do not know how to read those patterns. Morin has some keys.To explain: science turned the world into a myriad of parts (like atoms, molecules, cells) and then try to assemble these parts into wholes in the way that you would assemble a bicycle. Mechanical things can indeed be assembled in this way but virtually everything on our planet is actually alive – the soil, the air, the mountains, societies, at all levels of detail. We live in a planetary ecology of ecologies. Now when you try and make sense of that by connecting the dots, it all breaks down because there are just too many dots (never mind the fact that you've created those dots as mental abstractions in the first place – for example there is no atom 'thing', it's really a dynamic activity). The combinatorial explosion of interactions between all these suppose of parts is so utterly mindbogglingly huge that the world is unfathomably complex. But of course when you walk up to the newsagent, handsome money across and walk away with a newspaper, the world really seems rather different. We're in a world of much simpler patterns in which we can recognise each other's faces and know which city we are in. And these simpler patterns are also qualitatively rich. The same science that created the crazy mechanistic view of nature also throughout the whole quality of experience as merely subjective (and therefore fundamentally untruthful and unreliable). But how can we ever create a society that is "good for human beings on the planet" if the qualitative experience is marginalised as illusive fiction?So we need to develop a science and practice capability that reflects the realities of everyday life and this is what Edgar Morin calls complex thinking. In spare brilliant prose, Morin explains this and also shows how the autonomy of the individual is not merely supported by but essential to understanding this world. It's a science that gives back the individual as a reality. It's a science that gives back the experience of quality as a foundation of science and it's an outline of a way of thinking that can be cultivated that will be utterly essential to solving the problems of the 21st-century.

For anyone interested in complexity - this is a key book - a MUST READ.

Edgar Morin - La pensée complexe. Ouvrage de référence en anglais.