Outlining my New Year’s resolutions of sorts.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013
Through the year, I’ve looked to study and understand the complexity of social organizations and the concept of culture from a systems evolutionary perspective, which is something other than the dichotomous, dimensional construct that had been grounded in academic literature since the early 1960s. The basic assumption comes from the context of nonlinear dynamics and complexity theory, where as noted by Engels (1982), that the more complex generic type includes but cannot be reduced to an aggregation of the simpler types.
My interest in nonlinear dynamics and the theory of complexity has led me to the writings of authors with a similar perspective on the workings of life, where the common thread behind their argument is the philosophy that life’s material (physical), biological, cognitive and social dimensions all belong to a coherent, integrated system. To this extent, the key challenge for the future in research, and the agenda for the upcoming scientific paradigm is to put forth a conceptual framework that acknowledges this integrated system of phenomena.
The value of a systemic and integrated perspective on phenomena would be its contribution towards understanding the building of an autopoietic system. The term refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. The term was introduced in 1972 by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells. Since then the concept has been also applied to the fields of systems theory and sociology as a conceptual variation of the thermodynamic concept of self-organization.