Quotessence
Home / Topics / Systems Theory Quotes

Systems Theory Quotes

Browse 15 quotes about Systems Theory.

Systems Theory Quotes

“Among the most accessible of writers on this subject is the systems theorist Ervin Laszlo. Many of his seminal ideas, articulated with the average reader in mind, come together in his description of the ‘Akashic field’, the interactive realm of quantum fluctuations, culminating in a supercoherent state empowering all structures in creation, whether atoms, organisms, or galaxies. Laszlo goes on to raise a crucial question, central to the deliberations of this book. ‘Could it be that our consciousness is linked with other consciousnesses through an inter-connecting Akashic field, much as galaxies are linked in the cosmos quanta in the microworld, and organisms in the world of the living?’ The link with contemporary brain studies is informatively reviewed by Wallace.”

ConsiousnessSystems TheoryAkashic Records
Book:Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story
Create image

“This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.”

WholeSubstanceInterconnectednessMicrocosmPartHolismSystems TheoryMonadAntireductionism
Book:G. W. Leibniz's Monadology: An Edition for Students
Create image

“GPT surpasses all ... when it comes to conversation, research, and writing. ... creating an algo[rithm] that sells stocks based on a large training set of materials, correlations to past crises, and commonsense heuristics aimed at not being the last one out of a burning barn is trivial. The danger ... is not in the single system but in the resonance of millions of similar systems doing the same thing at the same time. No science fiction is needed.”

EconomicsFinanceAiInformation TechnologyFinancial CrisisMachine LearningFinancial RiskFinancial StabilitySystems Theory
Book:MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy
Create image

“One must keep one's eyes and ears open, one must know how to match up the facts, see similarity where others see total difference, remember that certain events occur at various levels or, to put it another way, many incidents are aspects of the same, single occurrence. And that the world is a great big net, it is a whole, where no single thing exists separately; every scrap of the world, every last tiny piece, is bound up with the rest by a complex Cosmos of correspondences, hard for the ordinary mind to penetrate.”

EventsCosmosWeb Of LifePhenomenaNetSystems TheoryInterconnectionsOccurence
Book:Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Create image

“So the next time you peer into the open window of a Web browser, you might ask yourself: where does "the network" end? Does it cease with the virtual worlds, images, and minds of the Internet, or with the silicon-electronic matrix of computing devices, or with the electrical grid that powers the show with energies extracted from waterflow and toxic atom? Perhaps the network extends further—to the Jacquard looms and American war machines that loosened the historical dynamic that eventually stuck a magic toxic tablet in your hands, to the billionfold packet-switching meshwork of human neurons that shape and submit to information space, to the capital flows that animate the quick hands of young Filipinas who wire up semiconductors for dollars a day. As you contemplate these widening networks, they may alter the granularity and elasticity of the self that senses them, as well as changing the resilience and tenderness of the threads binding that self to the mutant edge of matter and history. I suspect there is no end to such links, and that this immanent infinity, with its impossible ethical call, makes up the real World Wide Web.”

TechnologySystems TheoryPhilosophy Of Technology
Author:Erik Davis
Create image

“In the Germany of the l920s, the Weimar Republic, both orga­nismic biology and Gestalt psychology were part of a larger intellectual trend that saw itself as a protest movement against the increasing fragmentation and alienation of human nature. The entire Weimar culture was characterized by an antimechanistic outlook, a "hunger for wholeness". Organismic biology, Gestalt psychology, ecology, and, later on, general systems theory all grew out of this holistic zeitgeist.”

HumansCulturePsychologySawsHuman NatureMovementTheoryGrewIntellectualHungerGermanyProtestBiologyRepublicTrendsEcologyWholenessOutlookAlienationHolisticZeitgeistFragmentationGestaltSystems TheoryProtest Movements
Author:Fritjof Capra
Create image

“With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics , the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications -- systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on.”

ThinkingLanguageStrongSupportTheoryConceptsAnalysisApplicationEngineeringDynamicsSystems ThinkingMethodologyCyberneticsSystems AnalysisSystems Theory
Book:The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems
Create image

“General Systems Theory is a name which has come into use to describe a level of theoretical model-building which lies somewhere between the highly generalized constructions of pure mathematics and the specific theories of the specialized disciplines. Mathematics attempts to organize highly general relationships into a coherent system, a system however which does not have any necessary connections with the "real" world around us. It studies all thinkable relationships abstracted from any concrete situation or body of empirical knowledge.”

WorldDoeRealUseBodyLyingNamesLevelsSituationStudyBuildingTheoryDisciplinePureModelsConnectionsMathematicsReal WorldConstructionConcreteOrganizeTheoreticalThinkableSystems Theory
Author:Kenneth E. Boulding
Create image

“A second possible approach to general systems theory is through the arrangement of theoretical systems and constructs in a hierarchy of complexity, roughly corresponding to the complexity of the "individuals" of the various empirical fields... leading towards a "system of systems." [...] I suggest below a possible arrangement of "levels" of theoretical discourse...(vi) [...] the "animal" level, characterized by increased mobility, teleological behavior and self-awareness...”

SelfIndividualAnimalLevelsAwarenessFieldsTheoryBehaviorApproachSelf AwarenessVariousComplexityArrangementsDiscourseConstructsHierarchyTheoreticalCorrespondingMobilitySystems Theory
Author:Kenneth E. Boulding
Create image

“General Systems Theory, a related modern concept [to holism], says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything.”

IfsStillsRealityCultureCausesSimpleBrainTakenModernEffectsTheoryConceptsStructureCellsRelatedRatsCause And EffectVariablesHolismSystems Theory
Author:Marilyn Ferguson
Create image