Understanding Living Systems

Living systems are anticipatory . Agents have internal models (forward projections) of what is likely to happen next in their arena. This enables them to choose actions with beneficial expected outcomes in many situations, to build strategies towards achieving their goals. Non-living systems are purely reactive, their behavior determined by their e... See more

As Fritjof Capra says: a machine can be controlled, a living system can only be disturbed. At best, we will find ways of carefully nudging a living system. According to Donella Meadows, we must find its leverage points, those pivots that allow us to influence system behavior. Most importantly: after each cautious inter- vention, we must patiently o... See more

One of the major lessons we learn from the unique complexity of life is the following: the only thing we can always expect when manipulating the living world is that there will be unexpected consequences. By definition, those consequences are rarely aligned with the initial goal of our intervention. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and our curren... See more

8. How can principles learned from living systems inform our approach to solving contemporary societal crises, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and lack of sustainability?

Two aspects are central to our move from dominion to stewardship :

1. We must pay close attention to the rates of change in our social-ecological system.

2. We must shift... See more

“[y]ou never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Cycles at higher levels of organization tend to proceed more slowly than those at lower levels. This gives the multilevel system its resilience . Rapid low-level turnover enables innovation for adaptation (flexibility), while longer-term dynamics at the higher levels provide the capacity for innovations to accumulate (stability) before more global ... See more

Sustainable living and regeneration can only be understood in this wider context. Not only is the persistence of an individual rooted in its own constant regeneration, but the entire eco- system depends on the antifragile absorption and adaptation that results from the constant and rapid turnover of its components.

Interconnectedness is one of the basic principles of life. Transience is another. They both go together to form a multileveled dynamic web of connections between living processes. What results is an emergent and persistent higher-level order from constantly changing lower-level interactions. The singers change, but the song remains the same.

There are three distinct ways in which a system can react to perturbations (stress, shocks, noise, volatility, faults, attacks, or failures): it can be

1. fragile , unable to withstand even small perturbations,

2. robust , keeping its structure intact even under large perturbations, or

3. antifragile , improving its behavior under (certain kinds/amoun... See more