Human Society as a System

Theorists before me have posited global society as a unified system, and the Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock and Herbert Margulis in the 1970s posited the earth more broadly to include all of man, nature and the planet’s inorganic substrata as a unified living whole. 

And others have written of historical discontinuities in societal development brought about by wars, revolutions and disruptive discoveries and inventions as metamorphic, but I’m not aware of any interpretation of our current transformative period as being driven by inherent forces of adolescence.

Human society interacts with the natural environment and affects that environment which in turn feeds back to affect human society.  James Lovelock in his Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock, 197x), viewed the entire planet as a unified coherent system, embedded in an environment of cosmic forces, including the the sun, moon and other cosmic influences.  Gaia includes all life on earth and also its material substrata of earthly minerals, fresh and salt water and atmosphere.  Viewed in its entirety, Gaia is a living being, from this perspective. 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin imagined a “noosphere” layer of development, emergent above the animal biosphere, a sphere of reflection, invention, consciousness, and reason (Teilhard 1922, 1959).  Kenneth Boulding (1978) draws this distinction in terms of a genosphere, the sphere of planetary genetic material, and the noosphere and posits that each has its own integrity and coherence and evolves independently according to essentially Darwinian principles of natural selection and survival of the fittest.  Where one draws the boundary around a system depends in part on one’s interest of study. Human society, as a system, in my conception, comprises its noosphere, but recognizes its mutual interaction and dependence on Gaia.  

Ulrich Beck (Beck 1986) considers just a subsystem of the sociological dimension of human society’s noosphere, its cultural norms and values, and he finds an emerging coherence and integrity there on a global scale.  He argues that in the late 20th Century this sociological layer unified into a single world system under the pressure of shared and looming environmental threats.  And he argues that this unification is so transformative and widespread that it warrants being termed a metamorphosis.  My view comports with Beck’s but scans more broadly to see the entire noosphere as integrating and unifying globally, and of equal or greater significance, transforming in a fundamentally novel direction of unified development, thereby earning the epithet, metamorphosis.  The integration and transformation extends far beyond the sociological dimension to include all humankind’s material artifacts, its consumer durables, housing, factories and physical infrastructure, and its structural artifacts, its public and private institutions and its network systems of transportation, communications, and shared digital resources, and all its cultural artifacts, including interpersonal attitudes with respect to trust and privacy, tolerance and cooperation, opportunism and generosity, civic responsibility and participation.  While Beck attributes the motivating force to environmental pressures shared globally, I recognize what Beck sees, but as a signature manifestation of the more fundamental and inherent developmental pressures underlying middle-phase progressive maturation in a living system.      

Is an ant colony or beehive alive, and in what sense?  How about a flock of birds or school of fish?  The shadow on Plato’s cave wall?  Is generalized artificial intelligence alive?  If one even entertains that last thought, then certainly aggregations of living beings would be alive, be it a school of fish or human society.  An eddy has a life which eventually ends, as does the flocking behavior of birds, both have life cycles.  Both are responsive to their surroundings, and the flock has subsystems for perception, locomotion, energy consumption and metabolism, and a rhythmic heartbeat.   both have somewhat porous boundaries between inside and outside, pressed upon by centrifugal and centripetal forces.  Do they reproduce and is that an essential characteristic of life?  Eddies and flocks may not reproduce, but they spontaneously emerge and arise, which may be an alternative form of self-perpetuation.    

Cgpt:

Yes, an ant colony is considered a living system. While an individual ant is a living organism, an ant colony is a complex social organization comprising thousands or even millions of individual ants working together as a collective unit. Ant colonies exhibit characteristics of living systems such as organization, growth, reproduction, response to stimuli, and the ability to adapt to their environment.

Ant colonies have a division of labor, with different castes of ants performing specific roles, such as foraging, caring for the brood, defending the colony, or reproducing. They communicate through chemical signals called pheromones, allowing them to coordinate their activities and respond to changes in their environment.

The colony as a whole can grow and reproduce by producing new individuals and expanding its territory. Ant colonies can also respond to external stimuli, such as changes in food availability or threats to the colony’s safety, by adjusting their behavior and resource allocation. They exhibit collective decision-making, self-organization, and the ability to solve complex problems as a group.

Therefore, although an ant colony is not a single organism, it functions as a living system due to the collective behavior and coordinated activities of its individual members.

Yes, a flock of birds can be considered a living system. Living systems are complex organizations of biological entities that exhibit characteristics of life, such as organization, growth, reproduction, adaptation, and response to stimuli. While an individual bird is certainly a living organism, a flock of birds also exhibits characteristics of a living system.

A flock of birds, such as a flock of starlings, displays emergent behavior, where the collective behavior of the group arises from the interactions between individual birds. Flocking behavior involves coordinated movements, such as flying in formation, changing direction, or performing synchronized aerial displays. These coordinated movements are not centrally controlled but emerge from the interactions and responses of individual birds to their neighbors.

The flock as a whole exhibits organization, adaptation, and response to environmental stimuli. Birds within the flock communicate with each other through visual cues, vocalizations, and other forms of signaling. They respond to changes in the environment, such as the presence of predators or changes in food availability, by adjusting their flight patterns or collective behavior. The flock can also adapt its movements and formations based on the behavior of its individual members.

Furthermore, a flock of birds can exhibit growth and reproduction. Birds within the flock may mate and reproduce, contributing to the growth and sustainability of the population. The size and composition of the flock can change over time as new birds join or leave.

Overall, a flock of birds demonstrates the characteristics of a living system, showcasing organization, adaptation, response to stimuli, growth, and reproduction, even though the individual birds within the flock are also living organisms on their own.

Think of global human society as that abstracted system comprised of all those artifacts existing on earth at a particular time, including material artifacts from household goods to factories buildings and transportation and communications infrastructure, to organizational artifacts from nuclear families to businesses and political and cultural organizations, to cultural artifacts from languages to legal structures to value systems, i.e. all those man-made things which humans use for their individual and collective purposes. 

For our purposes, a systems quality that appears from the lowest physical level to highest level of concrete systems is a helpful place to begin.  All systems have material, structural/informational, and energy/dynamic aspects.  Einstein’s formula of General Relativity, e=Mc2, both distinguishes and ties together material, energy and information (speed of light) as having both distinct existing while being simultaneously interchangeable.  For our purposes it will be useful to distinguish material informational/structural and dynamic aspects of GLS, while recognizing that being holistic all three aspects everywhere coexist. Another essential concept to built upon, for our purpose, is that for systems of level (iv) and above, i.e. open systems, they exist within an environment, in relationship to that environment, and to the extent there’s feedback the environment becomes part of an enlarged and perhaps more closed system that needs be considered when examining the open system it contains.  Gaia theorists view planet earth and all upon it as a unified system, and generally see it as closed insofar as its resources are bounded.  My interest is global human society as a system, and for this purpose I conceive of it, along with its material, institutional and cultural accoutrements, as openly interacting with its environment, which in this case is the natural environment of planet earth.  Comprised as it is of subsystems at all the above levels, global human society exhibits traits and obeys laws that carry through from lower system levels.    

Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock, and lack of metamorphosis element.

ChatGBT: 

Living Systems Theory is a conceptual framework that attempts to explain the behavior and characteristics of living systems, including biological organisms, ecosystems, and social systems. The theory posits that all living systems share fundamental characteristics and can be studied and understood using a common set of principles.

One of the core ideas of Living Systems Theory is that living systems are open, meaning they exchange energy, matter, and information with their environment. This exchange is necessary for a living system to maintain itself and adapt to changes in its environment. Another important concept is that living systems exhibit self-organization, meaning they are capable of creating and maintaining their own structure and function.

Living Systems Theory also emphasizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of living systems. This means that changes in one part of a system can have ripple effects throughout the entire system. Living systems are also characterized by feedback loops, in which information about the system’s state is used to modify its behavior and maintain stability.

Living Systems Theory has implications for a wide range of fields, from biology and ecology to psychology and sociology. By providing a common framework for understanding the behavior of living systems, the theory can help researchers identify similarities and differences between different types of systems and develop more effective strategies for managing and interacting with them.



[1] James Grier Miller, Living Systems, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978) [2] Jeffrey Goldstein defines emergence as “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems’ (Corning 2002) …  ‘The common characteristics are: (1) radical novelty (features not previously observed in systems);  (2) coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time); (3) a global macro ‘level’ (i.e. there is some property of ‘wholeness’); (4) it is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves);  and (5) it is ‘ostensive’ (it can be perceived).  For good measure, Goldstein throws in supervenience – downward causation’ (Corning 2002).” See “Emergence.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 9 July 2011. Web. 21 July 2011. Complexity Theory, another aspect of general systems theory, considers how discontinuities arise in natural phenomena, rending inapplicable social science models built on extrapolated past trends.  Complexity theory distinguishes various types of discontinuity, among them catastrophe, chaos, unstable local equilibria, and emergence.  Phase changes are of the catastrophic type, appearing when critical variables reach threshold levels, like going over a waterfall.  Complexity theory identifies variants of catastrophic discontinuity, depending on the number of simultaneously discontinuous parameters, but the concepts do not enlighten how or why adolescence follows childhood, or the information age follows the industrial age.  Separately, complexity theory has some useful concepts for defining and measuring the complexity of a system, related to its interconnectivity and information content, which might be applicable to tracking structural development and societal restructuring during the information age.

Is Human Society, including people and their artifacts, a unified system, or is society distinct from the genetic humans: See book.  Also, the following, from Harvard Gazette, 12/2/24:

To illustrate the conventional thinking on evolution, Muñoz points to the landmark research of Princeton University scientists Rosemary and Peter Grant in the Galapagos Islands. “They found that, following a drought, finches with very small beaks perish. Those with thicker beaks that can access remaining hard seeds survive. So, the next generation of birds has thicker, broader beaks. It’s a classic example of natural selection acting on an organism through environmental pressure.”

Muñoz’s work adds a new dimension, revealing that organisms are endowed with the capacity to shape not just the types of selection they experience, but also the intensity of that selection through their behavior. “Simply by altering when they’re active, where they’re active, and who they interact with,” Muñoz says, “organisms can often shield themselves from natural selection. Conversely, organisms can also expose themselves to natural selection by interacting with new resources and entering new environments, accelerating evolutionary change. It’s very much a two-way street.”  

Martha Muñoz, PhD ’14, is an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University.

 

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