5/28: The Web of Life

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Fritjof Capra discusses The Web of Life

Fritjof Capra

The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems

Frijof Capra came to the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in 1997 to discuss his book The Web of Life. During the past several years, scientists have challenged conventional views of evolution and the organization of living systems, developing new theories with revolutionary philosophical and social implications. Fritjof Capra has been at the forefront of this revolution. Here, Capra takes yet another giant step, setting forth a new scientific language to describe the interrelationships and interdependencies of psychological, biological, physical, social and cultural phenomena -- the "web of life."

 

“Mind is not a thing; it is a process, the process of cognition which is the process of life. And the brain is one particular structure through which this process takes place.”—Frijof Capra

The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems by Fritjof Capra

This book is about the new scientific understanding of life at all levels of living systems - organisms, social systems, and ecosystems. There is a new, revolutionary perception of reality that has profound implications, not only for science and philosophy, but also for business, politics, health care, education and everyday life. For some time now, molecular biologists have understood the fundamental building blocks of life, but this has not helped them understand the vital integrative actions of living organisms. During the past twenty-five years, some major scientific breakthroughs have taken place. Fortunately for lay readers, Fritjof Capra (best known for his The Tao of Physics) is an eloquent spokesperson for the complex world of science, and here he lucidly explains the latest finds emerging at the frontiers of scientific, social and philosophical thought. Bringing together the key concepts associated with the theory of complexity, Gaia theory, chaos theory, and the like, Capra deftly describes the interrelationships and interdependencies of psychological, biological, physical, social and cultural phenomena - the "web of life." -- CD

 tao of physics fritjof capra

The following is an edited version of Frijof Capra’s Bodhi Tree Bookstore presentation.

 

Frijof Capra: What I am offering in this book, and what I would like to present to you in a very short form, is a new conceptual framework for the scientific understanding of life. During the past 25 years or so, a new language for understanding the complexity of living systems has been developed at the forefront of science. When I say "living systems," I mean not only living organisms, but also ecosystems, social systems, parts of organisms, communities of organisms, and so on.

 

I am sure many of you have heard about some of the key concepts of this new framework, such as chaos, attractors, fractals, dissipative structures, and self-organization. In the early 80's, I conceived of a synthesis, a way of putting these discoveries and concepts together into an integrating framework. I discussed this idea for synthesis for ten years. I taught seminars and courses, and visited some of the leading scientists who had provided the concepts on which my research is based. So now I feel very confident about this synthesis and have published it in the Web of Life.

 

The whole framework of these ideas falls within the important intellectual tradition known as systems thinking. These models and theories of living systems, which were developed in the early part of this century, provide the historical and conceptual roots for my synthesis, which can be seen as the outline of an emerging theory of living systems. This is a theory that, for the first time, succeeds in overcoming the Cartesian division between mind and matter, as it unifies mind and matter in one coherent framework. I think this will have many important implications and consequences since, as you know, our industrial society has been dominated by the split between mind and matter and the ensuing mechanistic view of the world. This mechanistic understanding sees the world, and the human body as machines, and also results in the management of organizations from the top down, as if they were engineering projects. All of that changes quite radically when you stop perceiving "machines" and begin to see "living systems." The way we relate to each other, to our natural environment, to health, education, and many of our society's institutions will be changed by this new understanding of life. In particular, it will help us build ecologically sustainable communities, which I see as the great challenge of our time.

 

In order to build and nurture communities, we can learn a great deal from nature, because the communities of plants, animals and microorganisms have evolved over billions of years so as to be ecologically sustainable. We need to become what I call "ecologically literate," by understanding the language of nature. The new framework that I present in my book shows that these ecological principles are also the basic principles of organization of all living systems. So this is a unifying framework, which, I believe, provides a solid basis for ecological thought and practice.

 

To outline this framework, let me start with a historical perspective on the tradition of systems thinking, which emerged during the 1920's, simultaneously, in several disciplines: In biology as "organismic biology," in psychology as "gestalt psychology," and in ecology, which first emerged as a science during that decade. In all these fields, scientists were discovering that living systems are integrated wholes that cannot be understood by taking them to pieces and learning about them through the properties of their parts. They realized that the nature of the whole is different from--and more than--the sum of its parts.

 

The science of ecology enriched this systems view of life by introducing a very important new concept, called the network. When ecology began as a science, the first things ecologists studied were feeding relations. They realized that an ecosystem is a community of living beings or species that are linked together because they eat one another. This led to the concept of the food chain, still used today, which describes how the big animals eat the smaller creatures who eat the smaller ones who eat the plants, and so on. And soon afterwards they discovered that these are not really linear chains, because the big animals are eventually eaten (when they die) by insects and bacteria, the so-called decomposer organisms. So, instead of linear chains, we have food cycles, and these cycles are interconnected, rather than isolated. Finally, ecologists came up with the concept of the food web, which is a network of feeding relationships.

 

Once they had the concept of the food web, and once they pictured an ecosystem as a network of organisms, they soon began to use this network concept to picture cells within a single organism. They saw the nervous system as a network of neurons, and the genetic make-up of every organism in the chromosomes as a network of genes, and so on. This network model was then applied at various systems levels, and it became apparent that the network is really <I>the<I> characteristic pattern of life. We can say today that wherever we see life, we see networks.

 

And then in the 1940's, we began to have for the first time systems theories, or in other words, the formulation of more comprehensive conceptual frameworks that allowed scientist to describe the various principles of organization of living systems. These theories, which I call the "classical systems theories" include cybernetics and general systems theory.

 

There is, however, a decisive difference--a conceptual watershed--between these classical systems theories and the more recent theories that have developed during the last 20 or 25 years, and this is perhaps the most important point of this historical survey. This key difference is that the new theories have a new mathematical language that was not available to systems theorists in the 1940's, and this language allows us, for the first time, to handle the enormous complexity of living systems mathematically. Even the simplest living system, a bacterial cell, involves literally thousands of interlinked chemical reactions that occur simultaneously, and this is the process of metabolism that occurs in every cell and in every living system. There was just no way, until recently, to describe these thousands of processes with a mathematical model; it was just far too complex. But in the 1960's, high speed computers became available, and as these were improved during the 1970's, they allowed mathematicians to solve these complex equations and construct these mathematical models.

 

The crucial characteristic of the new mathematics is that it is nonlinear. As an example, consider the smooth flow of water in a river. This can be described by a linear equation, since the water particles flow along calmly in straight lines. But if you put a rock into that river, the water starts to swirl around in eddies and vortices and all kinds of shapes. The turbulence that forms seems quite chaotic, but it can be described by nonlinear equations. Now we have a whole language and a whole set of mathematical concepts that can be applied to solving these seemingly complex phenomena.

 

Chaos theory is an important part of this new mathematics, as is fractal geometry. And when mathematicians developed this new language, something surprising and shocking happened: They discovered an underlying order beneath these seemingly chaotic phenomena. So chaos theory is really a theory of order, since what appeared to be chaos is not at all chaotic in the common sense of the word. It is an order, even if that's not apparent to the naked eye. But through the use of mathematical graphs, these ordered forms can be pictured, and as you can see in my book, these pictures are quite beautiful. They show fractals and attractors as the patterns of order in "chaotic" systems.

 

During the 1970's, a whole series of models and theories were developed to describe nonlinear phenomena and various aspects of living systems (since living systems are networks and networks are nonlinear structures.) These models and theories are the elements out of which I constructed my synthesis, which I will now briefly describe.

 

I've come to believe that the key to a comprehensive theory of living system lies in the synthesis of two very different approaches. These approaches have been in competition throughout the history of our science and philosophy, at least in the West. One approach is the study of pattern, or in other words, the study of form, order, or quality. The other approach is the study of structure, or in other words, the study of substance, constituents, and building blocks; of matter and quantity. The structure approach begins its inquiry with the question: What is something made of? What are its fundamental constituents? But the other approach begins by asking: What is it's pattern? The approach that studies one aspect -- order and form -- does not study the other; content, or constituents. There has been a tension throughout the history of science and philosophy between those two approaches.

 

When I studied the various models of living systems, I realized that some used the structure approach and others used the pattern approach. No scientist ever integrated them because they were following two different lines of investigation.

 

To show how you can integrate them, let me define these two terms, pattern and structure, more precisely. The term "pattern" refers to the pattern of organization of a system. This can be either a living or non-living system, since the definition of pattern holds for both. And by pattern of organization, I mean the configuration of relationships among the system's components, which determines the system's essential characteristics or properties. Certain relationships need to be present to call something a chair or a bicycle (to speak of non-living systems), or to call something a tree, a cat, or a human being. You don't need to know exactly what things are made of; you don't need to know physics or chemistry to recognize something as a table or chair, nor do you need to know biology to recognize something as a tree. You know there is a trunk, along with branches and leaves in a certain relationship, and this is how trees look. So that's the pattern of organization of the system.

 

The structure is the physical embodiment of that pattern, or what it is made of, which can be described in terms of physics and chemistry: the matter content, or physical embodiment. So, we have a pattern of organization, an abstract set or configuration of relationships, and then this is embodied in a physical reality, or a structure.

 

Now, with a chair or a bicycle, this is all very simple. When you build a bicycle, you have a pattern in mind that can be drawn on a piece of paper. When you impose that pattern on the materials, such as various kinds of steel or iron, you construct a bicycle. With a living system, it is very different, because a living system is never static. There are thousands of metabolic processes happening all the time, so there is a continuous building up and breaking down of structures, and a continuous recycling of components; there is development, growth, and evolution. Things change all the time in living systems. So there is another dimension, the dimension of process, that is critical to an understanding of life.

 

This suggests using process as third criterion for understanding living systems; I define the life process as the process of embodiment of the pattern of organization. So the pattern of organization is embodied in the structure in a continual process as the physical structure maintains itself. The living organism grows and develops, and these processes are part of the continual embodiment of the pattern of organization.

 

Now this process that connects the structure and the pattern of living systems is the most radical, or revolutionary part of this whole theory. It implies a new concept of mind or a new concept of cognition, and this is why I can say the theory unifies mind and matter. The central insight is the identification of cognition, or the process of knowing, with the process of life, which means that cognition is the activity involved in the self-generation and self-maintenance of a living network. Cognitive activities -- knowing -- and the process of living are one and the same thing.

 

Obviously, we are now talking about a radical expansion of cognition, and implicitly, the concept of mind. In this new view, since cognition involves the entire process of life, it includes much more that just the rational thoughts of a human being. It includes perception, emotion, and behavior, and it is present at all levels of life. Even a simple bacterium perceives the environment and responds to this perception with some kind of behavior. So cognition is the process of life at all levels of life.

 

It has taken me literally years to really absorb, integrate, and understand this, and you will find, I think, that it becomes more rewarding as you go into it more deeply. Of course, when you have a new concept, you have to make sure that it is not just a change of words. "They say that cognition is the process of life--so what?" You have to show that this concept or new way of thinking leads to new insights and understanding. I do this in my book with a number of examples, especially from neuroscience and immunology, where this new framework leads to genuinely new insights.

 

I believe that this is the first scientific theory that really overcomes the division between mind and matter, because it offers a very clear way of talking about the relationship <I>between<I> mind and matter. As an example, take the old puzzle of the mind and the brain. Neuroscientists today know an enormous amount about the brain, but even the most recent textbooks on neuroscience will not say definitively what the mind is. Is it part of the brain, or is it separate? If it is separate, how do they interact? I believe the main stumbling block goes straight back to Descartes: thinking of mind as a thing. Mind is not a thing; it is a process, the process of cognition which is the process of life. And the brain is one particular structure through which this process takes place.

 

Therefore, the relationship between mind and brain is a relationship between process and structure. If you carry this further and apply it, matter is the structure, mind is the process, and the pattern of life--the network pattern connects the two. And if you carry this even further, you find that it leads to radically new insights.

 

So, let me stop here. What I have said just gives you the flavor of what the book is about. You are supposed to read it, so I can't give it all away! Thank you very much.