What constitutes an adapting system?

Conversations typically derive from and continue earlier conversations. Therefore it seems wise to acknowledge some earlier discussions relative to adapting systems.

     Here is the antidote for the encomiums by Waldrop, Lewin, and Gleick. Horgan loves deflating balloons. His character sketches of the heroes of "complexity science" are the opposite the heroic sagas of Lewin et al; Horgan's characterizations can be humorous but they are merciless. Basically Horgan is saying that the the "complexity" emperor has no clothes (he is also somewhat infamous for writing the 1995 article "From Complexity to Perplexity" in the magazine Scientific American, where he was a staff writer, in which he pans the whole "chaos/complexity" movement as empty hype). The present book is really a pastiche of Scientific American interviews, which he has tied together with the thematic question, "What can science do now that we have entered the age of diminishing returns?" Horgan says that Newton and Einstein have come and gone, and now we are kicking over the remains, finding a few small, largely insignificant problems, with the Big Questions having receded into unanswerable metaphisics.

For anyone who was enamored by the uncritical paens of the first popularizers, this is a good contrarian book to balance it with. The writing is not great, the thinking is not particularly inspiring, and the logic has some glaring flaws, but at least the guy had the guts to ask the questions. It probably made him unpopular at Scientific American (He's no longer there; he's teaching at Rutgers). So give the man points for trying, and the book is worth a look based on its lonely, contrarian views.

 10. Stewart, Ian. Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos (1989).

   This book has an intriguing and ambitious title, but inside it's just mostly more of the same: adaptive systems for beginners. I like the title because it's a play on Einstein's famous declaration of bewilderment at the nondeterministic world of quantum mechanics. Linking quantum effects with the macro world is, of course, the penultimate goal of reductive physics & physical science.

   Although Stewart didn't show me God playing dice, which I very much would have liked to have seen, he did give a more grounded view than the Waldrop/Lewin/Gleick troika of introductory tomes, in that Stewart teaches math history, and is clearly in his element in discussing the evolution of mathematical approaches to untangling systemic relations. He spends 65 pages going over Poincare et al, before turning to recent developments, where other writers would usually go right to the latest development, and then briefly mention the history in perhaps 2 or 3 pages. 

11. Stewart, Ian and Poston, Tim. Catastrophe Theory and its Applications (1978, republished 1996).

   How continuous inputs can have discontinuous outputs. I may tell my dog, "Fetch", and if he's happy and healthy and well fed and in an obedient mood, he'll fetch. But if he's ill, or weak, or tired, or just not in the mood he'll look at me: "Why you buggin' me?" With the pool balls of classical physics, action always equals opposite reaction. But with adaptive systems (dogs and other biotic entities being exemplars), action may yield no reaction, until at some point the system "jumps" into action. This "jump" is called a catastrophic response.  

  One problem of the "intro to adaptive systems" books is that the author either foregoes the math because they think that it's too much for the reading public, or they go directly to the deep end of the pool. This is a delightful find, because it starts from basic algebra, and works quickly into the relevant material. Most authors either dismiss the math or get too technical; many kudos to Stewart & Poston for thinking about those of us who are interested but inexpert. Highly recommended.

12. Ruelle, David. Chance and Chaos (1991).

   This is a slim volume in 26 short chapters: it taps out at 195 pages, including 30 pages of notes at the end. A wonderful book, wickedly irreverent and unexpectedly jumping across disciplines, one suspects occasionally just for a whim. But the author is a mathematician and physicist, and offers plenty of grist to grind if you are interested. He offers the math, and the effort to explain what it all means. He also offers many insights, with profound and goofy mixed together, on what it means to do science, from one who's spent his life doing just that. A very enjoyable find, easy to read, even if you're not a mathematician and don't get all the numbers stuff. Recommended.

13. Flake, Gary. The Computational Beauty of Nature (1998).

   Subtitled: "Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation". This is an eye-candy book. Lots of graphs, charts, and computer printouts. Lots of math and computer programming, if you are into that stuff. A nice coffee table book to leave prominently displayed, to impress friends and visitors. Each chapter also starts with some cool quotes, to show that this is not just geeky noodling, but is an arrow aimed at the heart of reality. Whether or not it hits its mark has been debated; computer simulations of reality are not necessarily equivalent to what they model. But it is a commendable try, and worth a look.

14.  Kellert, Stephen. In the Wake of Chaos (1993).

   This book takes the "philosophy of science" approach to adaptive systems. The author asks, What is the significance of the science community now turning its collective attention to nonlinear phenomena, which were previously considered "noisy" and largely unsolveable? But instead of the simplistic "now we have computers and can do modeling" arguments of Flake, Pagels, et al, Kellert goes much deeper. Be prepared for a lot of philosophical "what does it all mean" discussions, which are not everybody's forte.

   This book is strongly recommended for two reasons. First, he does the old philosopher's trick of defining his terms, which is occasionally laborious but is worth the effort (his, not mine!). For instance, what does it mean to know something in an largely indeterminate universe? Second, he does a brief overview of the arguments of adapting systems (here labeled "chaos"), and some of his explanations were quite illuminating to me. His explanations of time series and bifurcations, for example, were more understandable than in many others I've read. But be advised: this is not a "popular" book, it is an "academic" book, full of citations and footnotes, and with academic jargon and arguments. It is not meant to be friendly to the average reader. But to someone like myself who has already read a bunch of systems/chaos books and has familiarity but is still trying to increase his knowledge, this book is a great read because the writer really has a way with words. He has a terse, nearly epigrammatic style and can often distill the essence of an idea into one or two well-crafted phrases; simple, neat, compact and elegant. If you want more understanding, or just want some more "mind candy", this is a great little book (155 pp); I got mine for something like $3 online.

15. Coveny, Peter and Highfield, Roger. Frontiers of Complexity (1995).

   Subtitled "The Search for Order in a Chaotic World". This is a large (455 pp w/notes, glossary & bibliography), generously apportioned book, with color plates and many clear black and white diagrams. But I can only recommend this book with qualifications. If you've never read anything on the field of "complexity", the narrative is not compelling, unlike Waldrop & Gleick, who really know how to spin the proverbial yarn. This feels like a collection of loosely stitched-together science stories. Some of the anecdotes are good, and a few quotes are gems, as they catch the scientists at their most imaginative. But the editor at Fawcett Colombine should have been more aggressive, and pared this thing down. It is hard to follow straight through. You'll likely end up paging through it, looking for useful stories. There are some (I liked spin glasses, for instance), but it still seems a little late to the party. The main theme seems to be on networks, because basically the entire second half of the book gets into this in detail. Artificial life, neural nets, pattern recognition, cognition and problem solving, consciousness, etc: it is a good, solid treament but I wish it were more succinct. This would be a good  second or third or fourth book for an interested person newly venturing into the field, who doesn't yet want to get in too deep (i.e. primary source documents). 

16. Peitgen, H.-O. and Richter, P.H. The Beauty of Fractals (1986).

  Subtitled "Images of Complex Dynamical Systems". This was an attempt to display graphic representations of dynamical systems. The centerpiece of the book is the Mandelbrot set: the set of all real numbers corresponding to a values of a nonlinear equation "z equals z squared minus c". What is distinct about this particular set is that at the borderline regions, where the "Black" regions (solutions included in the set) and the "White" outside (non-set) regions meet, is not a clear line but is in fact a "fuzzy" area, which upon magnification, reveals exquisite depth. Fuzzy tendrils wave into infinity, it seems. The "in" and the "out" portions of the set are clear and unequivocal, but the borders of the Mandelbrot set are not so easily defined. The more detail you insist upon, the more the set waves off your attempts.

   Now, how does this correspond to dynamic (adapting) systems? On one level, it gives an example of how a simple informational set, reiterated, can give rise to an organized dynamical structure. Beyond that, their suppositions seem questionable. They give a lot of incomprehensible (for me) math and a lot of swirly pictures. I don't know if they are really beautiful. They're convoluted, and although one could generously attribute to them an original and striking "beauty", they also might induce nausea, as if you were waking up from a night of heavy drinking. You look at one of the images and your temples throb and your stomach starts to rise into the esophagus. "Moonrise on Pluto"...beautiful ... neh.

   The best I can say is that it's mind-expanding. In my case, it inspired a mental exercise of looking at mathematical sets on paper, as represented by physical area on a grid. Let us say, for example, you have two rectangles on a sheet of paper, sharing one common edge. You look at it and think that you are seeing two separate planar surfaces, connected by a straight line. However, you might actually be looking, edgewise, at two three-dimensional cubes, with a two dimensional plane in between them. You are only looking at the edge of the plane, so it appears to be a straight line.

   Then, suppose you "zoom" in on the line, and find it really contains depth. The "line" is really the edge of a plane, so it has depth away from you; and on closer inspection it is not a clear line, but a fuzzy region, even containing worlds within worlds. This is what the "border" region of the Mandelbrot set contains. It has depths of detail beyond your capacity to exhaust. So you end up with 3 sets, really. One set within the Mandelbrot boundaries, one set outside of them, and another set in between. The set in between is neither black nor white, nor grey, but "depth". So if you want to find another dimension in a two-dimensional sheet of paper, draw a Mandelbrot set, and you'll find one there, lurking just outside.

   I did also find some interesting and informative essays at the end of the book: there is Benoit Mandelbrot on the discovery of the set that bears his name; the mathematician Adrien Douady on the relationship between mathematics and information; the physicist Gert Eilenberger on the relations between graphical representations and informational content ("Why should the world of objects subjugate itself at all to a therory, a mathematical structure?...[actually] it isn't our sensory and perceptual activity that forces nature into into a strait-jacket of mathematics, [but] it is Nature, which, in the process of our evolutionary development, has impressed mathematics into our reason as a real, existing structure, inherent to herself."); and there is Herbert Franke, a computer scientist, on the development of computer-generated graphical imagery to "compress data". Very nice essays, and recommended.

   I myself have long since seen as flimsy and easily discardable the barriers between "art" and "science", and between "man" and "nature", so the ruminations of these scientists didn't seem revelatory to me, but rather the reverberations of some kindred spirits.

17. Goodwin, Brian. How the Leopard Changed its Spots (1994).

   Subtitled "The Evolution of Complexity". I must confess I came up with Goodwin's conclusion independently. Goodwin concludes that evolution as promulgated by  Darwin and many others since is not the end-all and be-all of theories. Darwinistic evolution is a small class of experiences hinting at some larger process. Evolution is the result of the morphogenic field, the desire of energy to express itself in particular ways through specific arrangements of matter.

   Now, I had come to this conclusion myself, some years ago, but since I am not a professionally trained theoretical biologist like Goodwin I can't express this as adequately as he's done. So I am happy to see his argument, and am mostly in agreement with it, as much as I can understand.

   I have long had problems with the theory of evolution. So we are descendants of an ape-like creature, which was descended from an early mammal such as  a shrew, which itself was derived from a single celled organism of some type. So what? I found this narrative less than enthralling. And likewise the idea that we're all struggling to survive, but most of us fail to pass on anything worthwhile in so doing. This idea says that a lucky few get to transmit something, either genetic or cultural (poetry or sculpture or music or whatnot) before slipping back into the void. It seemed to me to be an awful fuss over very, very little.

   Goodwin uses biology, primarily, but also physics and mathematics and chemistry anthropology (culture) to show patterns of organization which pervade not only the biosphere but the nonliving media as well. He explains how this process of matter organizing itself is foundational to the process we call "life", with all its myriads of forms and activities. Goodwin doesn't so much dismiss Darwin & Co as put them in perspective. I think this argument is good and necessary; we want to get to the bottom of things, and not stop at "the struggle to survive" in which everyone is doomed to fail. Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet find the Darwinian metaphor to be all-encompassing and thus satisfying; I do not. Goodwin comes a lot closer to my liking. I know that I as an organism have a fleeting and ephemeral arrangement, and it comforts me greatly to know that I am part of something bigger and more enduring. Evolution is simply too small of a vision, ultimately.

   Two specific points Goodwin raises that were excellent, and new to me: the first is that higher animals at "play" introduce randomness and novelty into the search of state space, and the second is that identical environments with identical speciation will develop entirely different ecological "cultures", due to the aforementioned randomness inserted into behaviors, becoming "frozen accidents" that shape all subsequent history.

18. Gell-Mann, Murray. The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (1994).

   This is a "me-too" book, which every fad is full of. As soon as one popular title in an oevre comes out, all the publishers want to try it. So in the "popular science" section, every publisher wanted a "complexity" best-seller to put on the shelves. This is the entry of Freeman & Co., and if I remember my biography of Gell-Man (Strange Beauty, by George Johnson), they gave him a big chunk of ducats as an advance and he diddled and dawdled forever and finally this came out and it sank like a proverbial rock.

   However, I like it. It is sprawling, messy, self-indulgent, full of irrelevant asides and personal anecdotes from inside the ivory towers (Caltech, Berkely, Los Alamos, etc), but it is also charming and interesting in its own idiosyncratic way. There is little new or original here, but nothing that I disagree with or am dismayed by, so why not? 

   This book is not about Jaguars anymore than Goodwin's book is about Leopards. They're used as metaphors, as illustrative props. It's interesting  to see the overlap: these predatory cats slink about in the bush (so I assume; I have never seen one in action, nor has either Goodwin nor Gell-Mann), all dappled coat and bright attention and fast-twitch muscle, looking for some small fat herbivore. Jaguars and leopards (and lions and tigers and bears) represent the middle-region between the subatomic particle and the vast starry beyond; they both  point downward toward the small and predictable (muons and gluons and quarks and such) and upward to the vastly big (planetary orbits and comets and black holes and quasars and nebulae). The very small and very big are largely accessed through the intermediatory priesthood of scientists such as Einstein and Hawking and Feynman. The jungle cats on the prowl occupy our middle ground, along with starlings and redwood trees and so forth, and therefore should be more accessible to fellow terrestrials. Goodwin does a better job of grabbing his prime metaphor (he's a biologist, whereas Gell-Mann a particle physicist), but The Quark and the Jaguar does have its own ideosyncratic appeal. My paperback has "Sixth printing, 2000" on the inside cover, so I guess this book has found its place.

19. Mitchell, Melanie. Complexity: A Guided Tour (2009)

   This is a careful tour through the "sciences of complexity"; but even thoughI find the prose uninspiring, I still recommend it because it covers the basics pretty well. Mitchell shows Szilard solving Maxwell's "demon", and introducing information vis-a-vis entropy, and has a section on the power-law phenomenon, in which the contretemps with Cosma Shalizi, Per Bak & George Zipf et al gets somewhat elucidated. Another informative section is her chapter on "Information processing in living systems". Adaptive (living) systems want both continuity (exploitation) and randomness (exploration), and they have evolved clever search strategies able to do both.

  I do have two faults with the book. First, she is an uninspiring writer -- her work is earnest and genuine and good, but not very lively. It is placating; it is unthreatening. Contrast this to Steven Kellert's book, which crackles with vitality. Second, Mitchell is looking back, at the ground covered. She is too careful to look forward, which I find frustrating. All truly interesting books look forward. A little dangerous speculation is, to me, irresistable, and she seems to be able to refrain. I suppose she and the Oxford Press folks wanted to be safe, and careful, but the book tails off too meekly in my view. In particular, she says there is not any "Grand Unified Theory" in the offing. I completely and vehemently disagree. I am with Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" school. I think you have so many people working on an interesting problem, then some of them are bound to make headway, perhaps even astonishing headway.

   The trick is, I think, not to come up with the "Final Theory" of everything, but to come closer and closer. It is like perfection: even though it is practically unattainable, we can always become less error-riven than we currently are. Therefore I would argue the Final Theory is staring us in the face. Even though we cannot grasp it today, and it is statistically improbable that we will grasp it tomorrow or the next, it still looms larger and larger on our horizon. That surely occurred with me: I was a drone in a hospital, studying organizational management in the local university, and one day I came across a paper on "Complex Adaptive Systems" as a way to approach organizational management (thank you Mr. Paul Plsek), and the next day I was reading hierarchical theory (holons) in Koestler's Ghost in the Machine, Smuts' 'Fields of force', then Elsasser and Pattee and Salthe and Bohr and Prigogine and so on. I could strongly sense the clarion call of the Final Theory.

   I had never given a fig about evolutionary theory nor subatomic quarks and strings, but suddenly the plan of the universe was unveiled to me, and everything suddenly made sense. Why was there a Herman's Hermits, or Monkees, or Rolling Stones? Because the Beatles discovered a fat niche, and suddenly being the second-best rock-and-roll band in the world becomes an alluring prospect...teen-agers everywhere suddenly start banging on Rickenbacker and Gretsch and Sears Silvertone guitars. Suddenly human culture made more sense to me.

   And when I really want the wow factor to kick in, I remember that the universe has assembled itself in such a way that in addition to everything else, it contains astronomers peering into the inky void, wondering what it is all about. The Cosmic Background Explorer satellite supposedly unveiled the "face of God" in the microwave radiation; I suspect we are really seeing part of ourselves. If the Final Theory is merely us gazing at the heavens in wonder, then looking down and blinking, wide-eyed, at each other, that may suffice. "E equals MC squared" and "F equals MA" and are just approximations, ever closer, to the meaning of it all. So the Feigenbaum Constant may not be the end of the journey, but for one brief happy moment it is a footstep on the journey. The singularity is near, indeed.

   Other than those two mild disappointments, I liked the book very much and highly recommend it.

20. Kelso, J. A. Scott, and Engstrom, David. The Complementary Nature (2008).

   I think that if there is a Final Theory in the offing it would include the aspect of complementarity in hierarchical systems. Koestler pointed out that all adapting systems are both wholes which tend toward autonomy and independence, and also parts of other, larger wholes, which are tending toward integration and dependence. This is an intrinsic part of nature's expression. Do we use our right or left leg to walk? Answer, both, sequentially. Another functional example, breathing, consists of contraction of the diaphragm (inhalation) followed by relaxation (exhalation). The heart similarly expresses duality in function. This complementary aspect is widespread.

   I read this book after Koestler's "Ghost in the Machine", so I was already versed in the idea, and Salthe and Pattee seem to have used it as well. The presentation of this idea in Kelso's book, though somewhat self-evident, and therefore tautological, is worth considering.

   What makes complementarity so invaluable as a research tool in the social sciences, is that we can see in the various "flip-flops" of our human agents the continuity of character, and drive. Consider someone who is getting older, and is anxious because a mate has not yet appeared. They are aware that as they age they become less desirable to other potential partners, and the "biological clock" is ticking, to boot. So they negotiate with a potential partner and get themselves married. Then, maybe six or  seven years later, they become restless and want out of the marriage. Either a more desirable partner shows up or they just get sick of seeing the same face every day. So they get divorced.

   With complementarity lens we can see the same force drives both the seemingly opposite events of union and dis-union. The agent is restless as a single person, and he/she looks for marital satisfactions to give meaning and purpose to life. Then, eventually, (s)he can't tolerate the spouse and wants freedom. The same force (dissatisfaction, restlessness) drives both the marriage and its demise. Before complementarity I might have been puzzled by the seeming change in behavior; the "flip-flop". Actually, their behavior didn't change at all. They were unhappy with the status quo, and in both cases sought change by changing the environment ( first by getting into a relationship, then by getting out).

   What I find so intriguing about complementarity is that it is binary: it is the simplest possible system. You have only two states, and the agent/system vaccilates between the two. This vacillation between states ("on" and "off", if you will) may be responsible for all the vast variety of the known universe. So as I said, we approach the Final Theory.

21. Csermely, Peter. Weak Links (2006).

  Subtitled "Stabilizers of complex systems from proteins to social systems". I think systems and networks both refer to the same things. They are collections of similar objects, and the relations between the objects. Relations may involve transfers of energy, material, or information, or some combination of the above. Csermely's point is that weak links stabilize the system, not strong links. He gives examples from many fields.

  I have barely looked at this book, actually, on "Google Books", but I put a note up here because this is a great example of the practical things one may find while perusing the subject of adapting systems. This book opened me up to the idea of creating many weak links, versus a few strong links. A multifarious weak-linked system seems potentially more robust than a small, tightly linked system. On the face of it, it seems counter-intuative, but upon further reflection you really see the genius of the idea.

22. Gershenson, Carlos (ed.) Complexity: 5 Questions (2008).

   This is an interview-format book, in which the respondents answer 5 questions. How did they become involved in complexity research, how do they define complexity, what are the advantages/problems associated with this field of research, and how do they see the future? There is a lot of variety in the answers, with some perfunctory and some detailed, and the typesetting and proofreading seems to have been somewhat sloppy. So overall the book has a slapdash appearance. But I enjoyed it immensely.

   The reason why is because the 24 authors are all pretty interesting. From Peter Allen, Philip W. Anderson, Jim Crutchfield, Hermann Haken, Francis Heylighen, and Stuart Kauffman, to Melanie Mitchell, Gregoire Nicolis and Steven Wolfram, the respondents to these questions are all "heavy hitters" in the field. And the names I was not familiar with are worth becoming acquainted with. And the answers, which illuminate aspects of what I call "adaptive systems", and what they call "complexity", shed light not only on the subject matter but also the collective pursuit of knowledge by its practitioners.

   Here is a sample, from Gottfried Mayer-Kress, who was involved in the Santa Fe Institute in its early days: "Maybe the most important future application of complexity involves a self-referential process, where complexity research organizations apply concepts of complexity to their own mode of working. I was always surprised to see organizations such as the Santa Fe Institute and the New England Complex Systems Institute organized and managed in a very traditional way without much application of what we have learned from complexity theory."
   Thus far, that has been my observation as well, and it was heartening to see it confirmed by someone who is more of an insider than I (I could only be considered an interested layperson).

23. Francois, Charles (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics. K.G. Saur (1997, 2004).

   First off, this book is very hard to get a hold of. On Amazon they want 500 dollars for it, which is just slightly out of my price range. And at that price, few libraries own copies either. Which is a shame, because the 1997 printing, which I finally got a copy of (thank you St Olaf College in Minnesota) has literally thousands of definitions of the terms, words, ideas, etc associated with the field. Everything massively cross-linked. So if you want to know what George Klir or Ludwig Bertallanffy or Norbert Weiner said about something, just look it up. What could be finer?

   The field needs such work. What is the difference between "emergence" and "spontaneous self-organization" and "autopoesis"? Look here for a discussion. When you have people not looking at the material world (i.e. doing science) but rather looking at the conversation of others who are talking and writing about science, you can get pretty far removed from reality. And words get invented and ideas get re-invented with new terminology. So you get "systems" and "chaos" and "complexity" and someone like me really can't sort it all out.

   Mr. Francois has made an excellent start at sorting it all out. I only wish there were some evolving, "emergent" on-line version of this, and not merely an expensive book hidden away on a library shelf in Minnesota.

   Later I found a copy of the second edition, published in 2004 in two volumes. A great improvement on the first edition. So now I am aware of three copies of this work: the one at St. Olaf's in Minnesota, one in storage (!!) at MIT (a 1st edition), and a 2nd edition at Temple University in Philadelphia. Why is this work so rare?

   In the information age it is surely ironic that such a repository of information pertaining to such a useful field (problem-solving) is so buried away. How can we change this?

24. Klir, George. Facets of Systems Science. Kluwer, 2001 (2nd ed).

   This book consists of an extensive introduction to the field of systems science, followed by a number of articles compiled by the author to supplement the points made in the book. A couple of points: first, this is an 'upper level' book, intended for advanced undergraduate or post-graduate study. But it is so well written that someone like myself who is at this point an 'advanced amateur' can navigate its pages quite easily, and, I hasten to add, quite enjoyably. Klir writes logically, but you never lose the first-person narrative 'voice'. He is always quick to point out that something is his view; but it is the view of someone who has been studying complex systems for decades. So the part I like, the subjective narrative, is always bouncing over the surface like a porpoise playing in the waves, but he draws on such a wealth of input that it is very 'objective science' for someone like myself.

   Secondly, the essays. There are a lot of them. This is a big, fat academic book. I got to re-acquaint myself with old friends like Ashby and Rosen (the admiration for them I experience increases exponentially on each exposure), as well as new finds such as the 'radical constructivism' of Ernst von Glasersfeld, and a view (finally!!) of the fabled spiderwebs of Lofti Zadeh (fuzzy thinking, they call it: decistionmaking under uncertainty).

25. Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline. Doubleday, 1990.

     Unfortunately I cannot review this book, because I have tried to read it a couple of times and give up. When in 2005 I was discovering the systems thinking universe, I mentioned this to one of the professors of management at my university. "You need to read Senge's book", he replied. I still have not been able to get through it, after several attempts. The best I can say for it is that he thinks organizations need to 'learn', which is like me saying that they need to adapt.

   I mention the book however, for several reasons. Number one, is that it was a best-seller and thus is often mentioned, as was done to me. But my critique (from afar, at this point) is that if it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, where is the result? Here is a quote from an Amazon.com review:

"I have wanted to read this book [The Fifth Discipline] for almost ten years. It was first pointed out to me by a remarkable business leader in mainland China, Zhang Ruimin, the founder of the Haier Group, as a seminal text for him. He said that he had built a learning organization in accordance with Senge's prescriptions, and after so many years, I see that indeed he did."

So I have not given up hope. But I also want to contrast this book with my next review (Michael C. Jackson), which was much more accessible. Two other points: one is that Margaret Wheatley also wrote a book on systemic principles of management (Leadership and the New Science, 1992,2006) which seems similar to this; and the second is that Robert L. Flood wrote a book de-coding Senge ("Rethinking the Fifth Discipline, Routledge 1999), which may help.

26.Jackson, Michael C. Systems Approaches to Management. Kluwer Academic, 2000.

   This book is packed with information, from the roots and bases of systems thinking, through its development into the social sciences (Talcott Parsons, et al), the Operational Research and other approaches to managing human organizations. What impresses me about this book is that the author continually draws upon the primary sources, with extensive quotes and case studies, but also brings his considerable experience to bear, so that you get a "guided tour" from an expert, in the best sense of the term. I the novice am led into a room and introduced to Checkland's "Soft Systems", Beer's "Viable Systems Model", Senge's application of Forrester's "System Dynamics", Miller's "Living Systems", Ackoff, Churchman, and on and on. It seems that everything is right here in one handy volume. Plus you get structural versus functional arguments, with Derrida and Habermas and Piaget, and all the other ideas percolating through society and affecting the discourse. Yet I never feel lost at sea. It is like being in Walt Disney World, with an all access pass, with Uncle Walt standing by to provide commentary or to point out directions. What a thrill to go through this book, and what a contrast (for me) with Senge's work.

   I mean no disrespect to Senge nor his book, but Jackson's work has (for me) a much broader scope, and firmer foundation, yet is completely accessible to a casual reader. If you are a manager, and want to know what systems science can do for you, I definitely recommend this.

27a. Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge Reissue, 2002.

27b. Bohm, David. Thought as a system. Routledge Reprint, 1994.

    Bohm is one of the most intriguing thinkers I have found. His style is very plain, his writing simple. Yet his ability to deconstruct human thought the way that physicists deconstructs matter is almost mind-altering. Bohm says that our thoughts are subjective impressions, and not the same as what they imagine, but the images we create within our consciousnesses are somehow of the same process which created the external world. Bohm posits that we can know something quite profound about the arrangement of the universe by examining the arrangement of human thought.

   In "Thought as a system", Bohm posits that our thoughts are really a kind of residual vibration of previous experiences, largely mediated by the social mileiu in which we find meaning. So our ability to objectively suss out the "real" universe around us is a chimera. We see what we want to see, and tell ourselves that it is real. But somehow this process of subjective delusion masquerading as objective reality still can point to reality itself. I guess.

  In "Wholeness and the implicate order", Bohm says that the phenomena we do observe seem to be static and discrete(cars, clouds, trees, numbers, television programs) but really are aspects of a unified whole. By examining the "wholeness" of the universal arrangement we can see cars and television programs for what they are. I guess.

   I am still working on Mr. Bohm, but I do find his thinking to be fascinating.

                                                                                                                                                                           Last modified 11/21/11