RESTRICTED COMPLEXITY, GENERAL COMPLEXITY*

Perché la nozione di complessità si sta diffondendo così lentamente in ambito accademico?

RESTRICTED COMPLEXITY, GENERAL COMPLEXITY*
EDGAR MORIN
CNRS Emeritus Director
Centre d’Etudes Transdisciplinaires. Sociologie, Anthropologie, Histoire
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

Why has the problematic of complexity appeared so late? And why would it be justified?

1. The three principles of the rejection of complexity by ‘classical science’

Classical science rejected complexity in virtue of three fundamental explanatory principles:

• The principle of universal determinism, illustrated by Laplace’s Daemon, capable, thanks to his intelligence and extremely developed senses, of not only knowing all past events, but also of predicting all events in the future.

• The principle of reduction, that consists in knowing any composite from only the knowledge of its basic constituting elements.

• The principle of disjunction, that consists in isolating and separating cognitive difficulties from one another, leading to the separation  between disciplines, which have become hermetic from each other.

continua... 

http://www.worldscibooks.com/etextbook/6372/6372_chap01.pdf

Dancing with Systems

Dopo la lettera di Elia sulla decrescita ed i commenti, mi sono reso conto che forse è importante (re)imparare a confrontarsi con la complessità. Perciò questo contributo

Un tredecalogo (si dice così?) di Donella Meadows, una guida per rapportasi con la complessità del reale.

preso da www.art-ecology-education.org

Dancing With Systems

The Dance

by Donella Meadows 

1. Get the beat.
2. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
3. Expose your mental models to the open air.
4. Stay humble, stay a learner.
5. Honor and protect information.
6. Locate responsibility in the system.
7. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
8. Pay attention to what is important, not just to what is quantifiable.
9. Go for the good of the whole.
10. Expand time horizons.
11 .Expand thought horizons.
12. Celebrate complexity.
13. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.

...Let’s face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behaviour on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, that’s what makes it beautiful, and that’s what makes it work.

version of the whole text  [una versione più bella ndr]

found in: 'Ecological Literacy, Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World', Michael K. Stone, Zenobia Barlow, Fritjof Capra

also: Versions of this piece have been published in Whole Earth, winter 2001 and The Systems Thinker, Vol. 13, No. 2 (March 2002).