wolfgang hofkirchner

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.”

EMCSR is the acronym for European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research. Robert Trappl held the biannual conferences 20 times since 1972! he handed over to me the chair of the conference series and thus the post of the key organiser. i feel very honoured to be elected by him and, at the same time, obliged to serve the community. this is in full congruence with the raison d’être of the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science. i want to focus on discussions of underlying assumptions of different system approaches with the aim of clarifying similarities and peculiarities. and i want to focus on the impact on society in order to stress the necessity to contribute to mastering the global challenges! see the new website.

i just launched a call for symposia (tracks) to be self-organised by the community.

and i’m happy that Ervin László and Edgar Morin have already confirmed to hold keynotes.

i’m a defender of the traditional social-democratic principle of unrestricted access to university education. i myself studied when social democrats opened the universities to less well-educated social classes, the working class, farmers, and, last not least, women. in the aftermath of the establishment of the neoliberal regimes worldwide, there is also a rollback in education policies. in austria the social origin again determines whether or not you study (the proportion of children of university graduates among students is about 2,5 times higher than the proportion of university graduates among the population). the overall proportion of university graduates is significantly below (about 20 %) the oecd average (about 36 %). this holds for the proportion of new university entrants among high school grads too (about 37 % vs. about 54 %).

in that situation policymakers consider the introduction of obligatory qualifying exams. the high school grad shall not qualify for the entrance into university any more. the problem we face, however, is rather the allocation of funds than too many prospective students. university education as well as education in general do not obtain priority. thus in many studies the teacher/student ratio has been decreasing. world class quality cannot be achieved. instead of upgrading university education is dismantled, step by step.

the faculty of informatics at the vienna university of technology – which, admittedly, suffers from a very bad teacher/student ratio – seems to lead that way. for the next semester two hurdles are prepared for those who want to start an informatics study. first, beginners will have to write a motivation letter and, second, if that letter is accepted, they have to undergo a 30 min talk with 2 professors, that is, they have to justify their motivation. if and only if they have passed the second hurdle they can expect to get a positive grade in the subsequent course (given the mark for the test which might be a multiple choice test is positive), that is, the motivation letter and the talk are defined as essential parts of the exam of the course in question.

to be clear, what is envisaged is not (only) a match between the students’ expectations and the profile of the study we teachers can present to them. the hidden agenda is to decrease the number of beginners. that’s why letter and talk take the form of exams.

what about the possible results of that measure besides reducing student numbers in informatics?

– i fear that the measure will result in a decrease of the number of university graduates among the austrian population;
– i fear that the result will be another shift at the cost of students coming from less well-educated social classes, because due to our school system (which does not prioritise integrated schools) the task of writing and defending a motivation letter will be more difficult for them than for others;
– i fear that the measure will, in the long run, endanger the position of the teachers themselves, since the argument for more funds will not hold anymore.

this is not to say that i am against qualifying exams at all. if you make an application for a salaried phd position, such an exam is a must. but in the case described above, it’s not a job interview. it’s just the right to start at university with any bachelor study.

recently an austrian tv journalist hit the point. when showing pictures of manifestations against the greek government’s plans he said we are inclinded to take for granted there is a clash between the police and the people. the real clash, however, he said is between politicians, on the one hand, and the so-called financial markets, on the other.

yes, since long a new transnational subject has emerged that is detrimental to the development of what vernadsky called the noosphere (see my recent post), and the subjects representing the noosphere are yet on the point of transnationalising themselves. as long as the latter will stay in their infancy, they will not be able to defy the former.

on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the death of vladimir i. vernadsky, mineralogist, geochemist and historian of science, peter krüger, who was engaged with my vernadsky-edition from 1997, wrote a touching reminiscence of a great spirit. krüger quotes from vernadsky’s diaries, which gives us insight into vernadsky’s life under stalin. (together with édouard le roy and pierre teilhard de chardin, vernadsky coined the notion of the “noosphere”.) i recommend this article to everybody interested in global thinkers. it’s published (in german) in geohistorica 6, 31-41, berlin 2010 (issn 1865-0155). the title is: Wladimir Iwanowitsch Wernadskij – eine würdigung zur 65. wiederkehr seines todestages.

* my translation of the quote: “in that worldwide clash, we are a totalitarian state that is in diametrical opposition to those principles for which our people made the revolution and which were the cause for the assault upon us.” (on 21 january 1941 vernadsky wrote – my translation: “police-communism, actually, eats away the state structure… but in spite of that, something great is going on…” on 30 july 1941 – my translation: “the noosphere we are living in is, in my judgment, the basic regulator of our world.” though he was aware of the decay of the soviet union, vernadsky was convinced that hitlerism was doomed to failure because it was contrary to the development of the noosphere, the cooperation of those who are sensible. – and today? the development of the noosphere is more urgent than ever. but the political class does not seem to set the right priorities. just think of education policy in the age of neoliberalism.)