Round Table on Bertalanffian Thinking (STIQE 2002)

Dear colleagues,

Let me express first that I thank Prof. Matjaz Mulej and Prof. Miroslav
Rebernik the invitation to participate in a Round Table on Bertalanffian
Thinking (STIQE 2002).

Secondly, just in case some of you have not been informed properly, let me
mention that last November 1 - 4, 2001, culminated the celebration of the
100th Anniversary of Ludwig von Bertalanffy's Birthday. This event was
only a modest contribution towards the proper recognition of the work
carried out by the Father of the General Systems Theory , which I could
discover only recently when I had the opportunity to read "Uncommon Sense.
The life and thought of Luwig von Bertalanffy" though Mark Davidson wrote
this biography since 1983.

After all it is important to notice that Mark accepted the challenge to
write his biography when he:

"(... discovered) that Bertalanffy has espoused a single standard of
morality which is a viewpoint I find irresistibly appealing because it is
extremely rare and (to my mind) absolutely necessary if humanity is to
survive."..."As a single-standard-bearer in general, he was a scientist who
repudiated the arrogance of scientism, a biologist who rejected the
heredity-is-everything dogma of biologism, a laboratory researcher who
questioned the absolute value of empiricism, an agnostic who denounce
materialism, and a systems science pionner who warned that systems science
could be used for totalitarism"

BAC 2001 took place with the presentation of several papers that were
dealing with systems needed for coping with problems seen through
biological, social, philosophical, technological, methodological and
mathematical interpretations. The participants could start only to
recognize the humanitarian concern that motivated Bertalanffy to declare:

the overall fate of the world depends on the adoption by humanity of a new
set of values, based on a general systems Weltanschauung (worldview). "We
are seeking another basic outlook: the world as organization. This
[outlook] would profoundly change the categories of our thinking and
influence our practical attitudes. We must envision the biosphere as a
whole ... with mutually reinforcing or mutually destructive
interdependencies. [We need] a global system of mutually symbiotic
societies, mapping new conditions into a flexible institutional structure
and dealing with change through constructive reorganization."

a new global morality: "an ethos which does not center on individual good
and individual value alone, but on the adaptation of mankind as a global
system, to its new environment." The need for this new morality, he said,
was imperative: "We are dealing with emergent realities; no longer with
isolated groups of men, but with a systematically interdependent global
community. It is this level of [reality] which we must keep before our eyes
if we are able to inspire large-scale action designed to assure our
collective and hence our individual survival"

to envision the biosphere as a whole, because everyone can perceive and
comprehend gradually the dynamic features of some aspects of the
terrestrial surroundings when it is necessary to focus on "the still higher
systems of animal and plant communities, ecosystems in which the disruption
of a part jeopardizes the whole"

"We know and control physical forces only too well, biological forces
tolerably well, and social forces not at all. If, therefore, we could have
a well-developed science of social systems, it would be the way out of the
chaos and impending destruction of the present world."

However what is very important in these statements is the fact that they
were derived from the concept of open system which could be considered the
main conceptual contribution of Bertalanffy searching to comprehend how
living beings and social organizations should organize their individual
survival

Open systems are maintained by "the continuous flow of matter"..."Living
beings are not in being, they are happening. They are the exprssion of a
perpetual stream of matter and energy which passes through the organism and
at the same time constitutes it

"the organism is not a passive automaton reacting to stimuli but rather is
an autonomously active system",

"In open systems we have not only production of entropy due to irreversible
processes, but also import of negative entropy. This is the case in the
living organism which imports [consumes nutrients with] complex molecules
that are high in free energy. Thus living systems maintaining themselves in
a steady state, can avoid the increase of entropy, and may even develop
towards states of increased order and organization."

In addition Bertalanffy put forward the need of creating a "new image of
man" emphasizing the decisive role our species can play in shaping its own
destiny. He based his new image of humanity on evidence that Homo sapiens
creates and environment of its own out of symbols, and thus humans have the
ability to direct their own evolution on ethical levels, through the
cultivation of those symbols we call human values.

"mechanistic attitudes had seeped into virtually every area of social
behavior, encouraging doctors to view pacients as cases, employers to
regard workers as units, advertisers to regard consumers as
stimulus-response robots, and television programmers to reduce the public
to a set of demographic numbers".

"Man is not only a political creature; he is above all an individual".

humanity faces a clear and present danger of being dehumanized, even
destroyed, by debasing self-images, ...a self-image portraying the human
being as just another animal would tend to make us indifferent to social
inequalities and to make us fatalistic about the recurrence of war,
..human being as merely a physico-chemical machine would tend to justify
Big Brother techniques of behavior control. "What is badly needed is a
timely image of man. Since the previous proud image derived from religion
and philosophy does not serve modern needs efficiently, a new image should
be synthesized....I would contend that this is a very important business
indeed---to find out what is actually human"

humans create their own reality, not because objective reality doesn't
exist but because human knowledge depends on what humans are able and
willing to perceive

"No world view, general systems theory included, is ultimately truth or
ultimately reality. Each is a perspective or an aspect, with all-too-human
limitations owing to man's natural and cultural bondage. We cannot jump
over our own shadow. General Systems Theory is perspectivistic, not a
"nothing-but" philosophy but a view that is tolerant of other philosophies
and experiences"

The statements and arguments shown above have been taken from the book
written by Mark Davidson, whom I thank a lot his endeavor which has allowed
many systems people (including myself) to realize the greatness of
Bertalanffy's work.

Supported by these statements while trying to be aware of time and space
circumstances I dare to suggest that the Round Table on Bertalanffian
Thinking (STIQE 2002) might be concerned with

New Image of Man and Woman
supported by a new General Anthropology:

The main question that humans need to examine is to find out what kind of
women and men are needed in the 21st century for making possible to
reconceive how every human individually may develop his/her personality
taking into account that:

1) Other 6 billion individuals must and will as well organize their
individualities;

2) The biodiversity that made possible the emergence of the homo
sapiens sapiens should be maintained and improved (not at all for making
profitable business, efficient trade or lucrative financial transactions)
in order to increase the survival chances of humans on the Earth while
learning to fairly share the terrestrial environments with all the other
animals, plants, fungi...;

3) The features of the whole planet that made possible the emergence
of life in this miniscule point of the Universe are not granted forever,
neither can be preserved whatever humans may imagine they could locally,
regionally and globally do through their disrupted minds, conditioned by
selfish ambitions.

...bearing in mind that there are human minds that have succeeded in
increasing the danger of dehumanizing humans (through robotomorphism and
zoomorphism) as Bertalanffy denounced since the 1960s. The trend of actions
"scientifically" organized in order to design the behavioral engineering
(Skinner) based on an assumed science of behavior control (Watson) derived
from the knowledge acquired of conditioned reflexes in rats (Pavlov) has
been maintained until today with the aim of genetically creating super
humans who will be served by the society conceived by Skinner "The problem
is to design a world which will be liked not by people as they are now but
by those who will live in it" Behaviorism implicitly leads towards
totalitarianism (either a benevolent one, as in Huxley's Brave New World,
or a malevolent one, as in Orwell's 1984) that aims at increasing the
control of people.

...searching consequently reliable ways for building the interdisciplinary
enterprise (comprising human biology, psychology, psychiatry, sociology,
linguistics, economics, the arts,...) that may help to create societal
circumstances needed for allowing the individual emergence during the life
of every person searching on his/her own to consciously develop his/her
peculiar personality, while learning to exert humanely his/her intrinsic
spontaneity when unavoidably being confronted to diverse cultural, economic
and social conditions determined peculiarly by the performance of all the
other humans that constitute every human society,...

Bertalanffy aware of this danger considered necessary to find out a "new
science of man" or general anthropology "The image of man is not only a
theoretical question,... it is a question of the preservation of man as
human"
Received on Thu Jun 20 19:24:43 2002