wolfgang hofkirchner

in the book series Selbstorganisation sozialer Prozesse a new volume has been published (2012):

Heinz-Dieter Haustein, Zeitenwechsel, Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Geldkapitals in der Geschichte

peter fleissner, retired professor from the vienna university of technology, my former chief, with whom i made the first steps in the second half of the 90s toward a unified theory of information, franz ofner, associate professor at the alpen-adria university of klagenfurt, lecturer at the vienna university of technology, who was collaborator in the project on evolutionary systems after the turn to the new millennium, and me founded a working group at the austrian computer society. its focus: “information studies”. by that we understand research efforts revolving around the information concept used throughout the disciplines. quantum information, bioinformatics and information in systems biology, biosemiotics, cognitive sciences, consciousness studies, communication, media studies, information and communication technologies, technologies for co-operation – all that and more is part of information studies and might partake in a transdisciplinary attempt at contributing to a single integrated science of information, information society and information technology. there is a trend toward leaving behind Shannonian information that is not adequate, and never has been so, to the challenges of our time. we want to be part of that trend. see here.

the Bertalanffy Center held its very first international experts meeting on 10 november 2011 in Vienna.

here you find a report.

symposium “Systems thinking: what’s it for”. on the left Birgit Zehetmayer speaking (photo: Günther Ossimitz)

on 17 November the Leibniz society Berlin held – together with the scientific society of the jewish community Berlin – a seminar on Vernadsky and his contribution to the science of the world.

the co-convenor of the seminar, Heinz Kautzleben, reminded us of Vernadsky’s trend-setting definition of the biosphere, which is distinct from earlier definitions. Süsskind who came up with the concept in the 19th century defined it in terms of space, whereas Teilhard de Chardin at the time of Vernadsky’s defined it as the mass of living beings. Vernadsky made the decisive step to combine both definitions and coined the term as one that fits environmental sciences (the biosphere is made up of living beings and all the matter with which they are in exchange).

from the left: Heinz Kautzleben and Klaus-Dieter Jäger (photo: Valery Tatarskiy, Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft WiGB bei der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin)

the importance of Vernadsky is not only related to his founding of the new discipline of biogeochemistry the origins of which date back to 1917. as Peter Krüger pointed out, already 4 years earlier another idea of Vernadsky’s matured: the idea of humans as geological factor, which finally lead Vernadsky to conceive the noosphere.

in that context, Klaus-Dieter Jäger raised an important question: which geological age is it we do currently live in? in the 60s, researchers in Czechoslovakia defined our geological age as “anthropozoicum”. Jäger’s criticism is that the anthropozoicum would include the whole pleistocene and thus times in which the footprint of humans can not yet be found. another classification agreed upon by geologists characterises our geological age as holocene. if a “noocene” is to be cast – when would holocene close and when would noocene commence?

in my view, evolutionary systems theory can help clarify. a new phase is characterised by a dominating feature. that feature might have been there before that phase but as a feature only that did not yet dominate. as soon as it becomes dominating, it can lend its name to the new phase. Berlin critical psychologist Klaus Holzkamp applied this methodology when writing about anthroposociogenesis. we are witnessing an ever increasing influence of humanity on planet earth. by means of division of labour, human language and reflexion as properties distinct from properties that pertain to living systems on prehuman stages, human social systems emerged that possess an innate tendency toward penetrating and reworking the biosphere. science, which was very important for Vernadsky (and i learned from Rose-Luise Winkler that Vernadsky can be regarded as pioneer of empirical science of science), is just one step in that unfolding of the process of shaping the earth. – the question is which feature can be considered to be the dominating feature for which evolutionary phase? if we want to draw another distinction between ratio as powerful means and reason as reflection upon the ends, then we have to admit that in the course of civilisation a radical change of the surface of our planet has been set in motion due to the powerful means science and technology have provided; however, no success so far can be attributed to attempts to shift the development of social systems onto a sustainable path in order to guarantee a future for all. if we want to reserve the notion of “noos” for the second distinction, the noocene has not yet commenced but it is an idea whose time has come!

Rose-Luise Winkler communicating with participants (photo: Valery Tatarskiy, Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft WiGB bei der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin)

what we can concede is that the technological infosphere is a precondition for the advent of the noosphere and there are germs of the noosphere like the IPCC, as Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski pointed out. it is up to us to intervene and shape the process. to paraphrase Boris Schapiro, it’s our task to make sense of the point of evolution we have reached.

Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski (photo: Valery Tatarskiy, Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft WiGB bei der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin)

Boris Schapiro (photo: Valery Tatarskiy, Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft WiGB bei der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin)

read more about the meeting in the context of the Vernadsky project (in German). here you find data about Vernadsky’s life (Peter Krüger’s presentation in german).

Pierre Bricage is secretary general of the International Academy of Systems and Cybernetic Sciences (IASCYS). from him i learned about the European Union for Systemics (UES). while preparing the 21st European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR) i felt the necessity to contact UES. due to his intervention Andrée Piecq, the then president and now secretary general of the UES, invited me to take part in the 8ème Congrès International de l’Union Européenne de Systemique in Brussels from 20 to 22 October.

a great event! the thematic orientation of the congress converged to a great extent with what i have in mind for EMCSR 2012!

the bulk of participants revolve around french-speaking system communities. i belonged to a negligible minority needing headsets for simultaneous translation (a shame i can’t speak french!).

as also Matjaz Mulej who is president of IASCYS intended to take the opportunity to have common talks and Gerhard Chroust from the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR) and Raúl Espejo from the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC) (both are secretary general of their respective organisation) happened to be present, Pierre organised 2 meetings.

i attended only the first one. the topic was coordination of conferences. the second one focused on coordination of other activities of the systems movement organisations.

in short, a step was taken into the right direction. concrete measures will yet have to be designed.

the bertalanffy center will hold a symposium this week about the history and future of the systems movement. at this symposium most of those having attended the two meetings in brussels will have the opportunity to resume these talks.

(a report on the meetings can be found here.)

Manfred Drack gets support for a stand-alone project on exactly that question. a 2 days workshop was held as kick-off meeting 27–28 october.

it goes without saying that one focus was on questions of reductionism and holism. i, for my part, was very intrigued with weiss’s dictum that the variance at one level of living systems is much less than the total sum of variances of the components at a lower level. the diagram below gives the formal expression of that at the bottom line. besides it shows an example: in an embryo’s development the location of a single cell, given a certain location at t1, may vary widely at t2, while the shape of the whole organism may not do that (compare the upper part of the picture on the right with the lower part).

from the presentation of Manfred Drack on Paul Weiss’s systems approach (slide 11)

i wonder how agent-based modeling (or cellular automata), for which local rules are given to result in a global pattern, can cope with that. Weiss’s idea is opposite: for him on the higher level there is order and determinacy and on the lower level rather “freedom”.

in that context another issue much debated concerned the concept of cause, in particular, the so-called “downward causation”.

one point of discussion was the concept of mechanism. i insisted on featuring mechanisms not as mechanical (= working strictly deterministically) – in order to avoid falling back in a mechanistic paradigm – but rather as mechanisMic (as Mario Bunge does) and not using the term mechanisTic.

the group of international researchers that were invited comprised: Olaf Wolkenhauer from the University of Rostock and his PhD student Tobias Breidenbacher, Ana Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein from Tufts University, Jan-Hendrik Hofmeyr from the University of Stellenbosch, and Anders Strand from the University of Oslo. from the University of Vienna Gerhard Müller took part.

from the left: me, Strand, Hofmeyr, Soto, Wolkenhauer, Breidenbacher, Müller, Sonnenschein (photo: Manfred Drack)

the project is carried out at the Department of Theoretical Biology (University of Vienna). the Bertalanffy Center is cooperation partner of the project.

(here is my presentation.)

due to funding, the Bertalanffy Center is now in the position to hold its very first face-to-face experts’ meeting. it’s a symposium to be held on the outskirts of vienna, a place which provides shelter but room enough so as to leave behind the plains of everyday life and let a bigger picture emerge. the place is also famous for good vines and a cuisine with traditional austrian roots. about a dozen international guests have confirmed their participation. the Bertalanffy Center, set up for facilitating reflection upon the development a variety of systems schools have taken, organises that event on the occasion of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s 110th birthday.

another event is a talk given by the author of Bertalanffy’s ultimate biography on how the General System Theory was constructed.

for both events click here.

– distinguished academics joined recently the scientific council of the Bertalanffy Center: Mario Augusto Bunge, the most important representative of “emergentist systemism” (so Poe Yu-Ze Wan in his “reframing the social”, ashgate 2011);

Mario Bunge (photo: McGillReporter 40, 06)

Klaus Kornwachs, a systems philosopher who is famous for his pragmatic information concept;

Klaus Kornwachs (photo: Jürgen Bauer)

Gerald Midgley, well-known author of a 4 volumes anthology of systems thinking, now in hull;

Gerald Midgley (photo: Gerald Midgley)

and Rainer E. Zimmermann, the most prominent representative of onto-epistemology working in the field of evolutionary systems.

Rainer E. Zimmermann (photo: Rainer E. Zimmermann)

an interdisciplinary workshop on information and technology, open university, milton keynes, 7-9 september 2011, organised by Society and Information Research Group (SIRG) in the Communication & Systems Department (Faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology), in particular by Magnus Ramage and David Chapman who recently produced the edited book Perspectives on Information with Routledge.

Magnus Ramage and David Chapman (from left; photo: DTMD 2011)

a touching movie was presented in the first evening, directed by Nora Bateson: “An Ecology of Mind – A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson”.

snapshot of the trailer (photo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6Gjl6zFfDE)

me giving a talk on the relation between Bateson’s famous idea of what the unit of information is and a possible Unified Theory of Information (photo: DTMD 2011)

on 9 september 2011, in budapest the Giordano Bruno GlobalShift University was inaugurated. its ambition is to become the first worldwide online university. even more important, it will aim at reaching out to those parts of the world population that suffer from exclusion to higher education. however, the most important idea is the following: students recruited are to become agents of transformation. (see this newsletter.)

what the world needs now is agents of transformation – agents that are knowledgable and determined to bring about the global shift toward a sustainable civilisation on earth.

hope can be drawn from the fact that there are people that are willing to fund that project.

recently, the New York Times had Neal Gabler reason that we all “have become information narcissists”. we are enamoured of drowning in data but lost our capability to think big.

he writes, “It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world. Even though there are sites and blogs dedicated to ideas, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, etc., the most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas. It is largely useless except insofar as it makes the possessor of the information feel, well, informed. Of course, one could argue that these sites are no different than conversation was for previous generations, and that conversation seldom generated big ideas either, and one would be right.

BUT the analogy isn’t perfect. For one thing, social networking sites are the primary form of communication among young people, and they are supplanting print, which is where ideas have typically gestated. For another, social networking sites engender habits of mind that are inimical to the kind of deliberate discourse that gives rise to ideas. Instead of theories, hypotheses and grand arguments, we get instant 140-character tweets about eating a sandwich or watching a TV show. While social networking may enlarge one’s circle and even introduce one to strangers, this is not the same thing as enlarging one’s intellectual universe. Indeed, the gab of social networking tends to shrink one’s universe to oneself and one’s friends, while thoughts organized in words, whether online or on the page, enlarge one’s focus.

To paraphrase the famous dictum, often attributed to Yogi Berra, that you can’t think and hit at the same time, you can’t think and tweet at the same time either, not because it is impossible to multitask but because tweeting, which is largely a burst of either brief, unsupported opinions or brief descriptions of your own prosaic activities, is a form of distraction or anti-thinking.”