DAY2: Gaian and System Thinking (the inspiration)

"One clue lies in the nature of the world and in what I call “Gaian” thinking.

I use Gaia as an adjective to refer to an awareness of systems and wholes, just as the planet itself is a whole. The word comes from the name for the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia, and was used by the scientist James Lovelock in his book The Gaia Hypothesis to refer to the earth as a living organism. To perceive and to think like Gaia is to think in terms of relationships and interconnectedness and what the cyberneticist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson called “the patterns that connect.”

A system is a complex whole acting as a single unit but made up of interconnected parts that mutually influence each other in dynamic ways. Our body is a system made up of organs, tissues, cells and the like. Often, as our body, the parts that make up a system are themselves systems. Common social systems in everyday life are families, businesses, schools and governments. The environment is an ecological system.

The key to systems thinking is to realize that a component of a system acts differently when part of the system than when it's separated and observed in isolation. Taking systems apart to study their parts can give us important knowledge but can never tell us how the system as a whole functions. You can see this in a business. You can interview each employer or manager in the privacy of their own home but you still won't have a sense of how the business as a whole operates unless you see them in the context of working together. A person who is a perfect gentleman at home may act as an unthinking tyrant in the workplace, for example.

Systems thinking – what I call “Gaian” thinking – takes into account these complex interactions and dynamics and considers whatever system it's examining as a whole. It is the opposite of reductive or analytical thinking that pulls things apart to consider only the individual components separate from everything else in their environment."

David Spangler

In the diagram I have created a simple system of elements and components. This is to illustrate the idea proposed in Spangler's writing. There are three levels:

Level 1 is the singular part of a component. These parts by themselves outside of the system are wholes, wholes that only consist of one instance – the line.

Level 2, when these elements combine together they create a component that also can be observed as a whole, composed of elemental instances – the lines. It can also be observed as a part – separate from the system.

Level 3, but when the elements are combined they interconnect as another part and can be observed as a whole.

These levels can continue forever becoming more complex and interconnected. I believe this is how the world works. What we call synchronicity and coincidence I believe is actually parts that are connecting above our conscious understanding, almost like clockwork.

This is a part of my research because in analysing texts (chunking down the levels of the textual structure) the semantic connections and word syntax play a big roll in it's meaning and communication. To be able to represent the text's meaning and communication I must first understand it's levels of elements and components in the system.