a squeeze operation

I had originally not joined the systems theory class. I was sick for the first two weeks of term after having partied extremely hard on an ESN trip to Corfu, so I couldn’t go anyway. But I was also undecided on which courses to take. While I was eating my egg fried rice breakfast at something like 3.23pm one day, I was having a discussion with my flatmate Anabel who had just come back from class. For the time that I was sick, Anabel was my eye and ears around college. She would tell me which classes are good and which ones aren’t; which teachers are chill and which teachers are super chill. She would gives me dates and times, deadlines, and also crack a few jokes. Needless to say, Anabel was invaluable to me during those first couple of weeks, not only to reassure me that I wasn’t missing anything serious but also to keep me up to date and keep my spirits up. She never cooked me soup or made me cups of tea but I’ve forgiven her for that. Anyway, she was telling me how the first Systems Theory class went. As I’m sure is the same with most in the class, I had a small  idea what systems theory was, but not really. The title was intriguing but, to be honest, the “social media” part of the title had put me off.

“Systems theory is perfect for you. It’s all about how everything is connected and stuff, you’re gonna love it!” Anabel told me.

Of course I was listening to what Anabel was telling me, but it was only 3.23pm in the morning so I wasn’t paying full attention. I expected that she was soon going to say something important that would wake me up a bit such as “the guy said you have to sign up before today” or “Floriana gave your meal card to a random French guy since you never came to get it.” She didn’t say any of this, but the “everything is connected and stuff” part resonated with me. I hadn’t even swallowed my mouthful of egg fried rice before I realised:

              “Anabel is right, I do love how everything is connected and stuff!”

On an intellectual level, of course I was always somewhat aware that everything was connected and stuff. But as I later came to know, there’s a difference between knowing something, and knowing something. You know? I was 19 years old when I first had what I might call a mystical experience.

I was in Croatia with my friends from school when a kind Englishman gave us each a dose of dried psychedelic mushrooms. For free! It was that fateful morning where my dormant intellectual acceptance of the interconnectedness of all things became an experiential understanding. From that day I was never the same. The notions that had inhabited my mind during that experience were not meaningless stupid hippie ideas, as some people might assume they were. No, they were profound notions. They were inspiring, awakening, motivating, and transcendent, but unfortunately nameless and intangible notions; I didn’t know what it all meant, much less could I put it into words. Nonetheless, everything being connected was a big takeaway and I was keen to put some philosophical structure to this experience that I had had.

So I came to the next class. In fact, that was the first class I attended in Panteion University and what a treat it was. Panteion is not the same as my university at home, it engages you as you walk in. I think the graffiti is something to do with it, people are using the walls to tell you things. On the way up the stairs a piece of graffiti caught my eye, it was so well placed that I just had to stop and type it into google translate; «Οποίος θέλει να πεθάνει για την πατρίδα, να το κάνει γρήγορα». “Whoever wants to die for their country better do it quick” it said. It made me think of an artistic video someone made called “Would you die for Ireland?”, it’s where a man goes around Ireland asking people if they would die for Ireland. He goes to rich parts, poor parts, busy parts, slow parts, very Irish parts, and very British parts. Everyone has a different answer because it turns out no one really knows what ‘Ireland’ is, and what ‘dying’ for it actually means. Graffiti is like an old fashioned form of social media; anyone can say anything, and anyone can reply. The only difference is the ‘upload’ costs are greater. I don’t carry spray paint, and the wall wasn’t big enough for me to write anything about this video about dying for Ireland. Here’s the link to it anyway:

From my first class, the second class of the systems theory course, I was already on the scent of what systems theory was. The class was spend mixing and mingling with the other faces in the course, getting to know each-other, talking about where we are from. This is how systems work, I was thinking, they have to become Integrated. You can’t take a group of students from all over the world and expect them to start cooperating without them having broken the ice a little bit. ‘How does integration between a group of Erasmus students work?’ I wondered. I have learned now. Some faces you see, you eventually meet. Some of the faces you meet, become more than faces, they become people. Some of these people become friends. Some of these friends being more than just friends, they enter a small group of very special people in your life; your ‘loved ones’. So this is how integration works, faces sees faces and either the relationship graduates or does not. There is a process of graduating and not graduating where eventually each person has at least seen every other face, and then has progressively smaller and smaller groups of people who mean progressively  more and more to then. Eventually there is a web of relationships of varying importance. Lines of connection along which certain signals may fire and certain signals may not fire, depending on the nature of the relationship.

After integration, emergence was the next concept to be introduced to us. Now we were totally in the realm of my mushroom flavoured mystical experience; the idea of things being more and meaning more just through their convergence. This is what artists have always been good at,showing us the more. Letting the bare contents sit back and let the emergent properties come forth. Painting a tree is one thing. Painting a tree, amongst other trees, with a backdrop, and detailed sky is another. Doing this in a way where the components themselves, sky, trees, birds etc. are somehow less obvious once the light, life, movement, and interconnection of the painting take over. Concepts such are emergence are gifts that keep on giving; once you get it, you see it everywhere, and its beautiful.

Now that the semester is coming to an end, I will have to make sure I keep these concepts with me, and allow them to change and influence the way I see and interact with the world. I want to let them enhance my experience of life, and allow me to enhance the experience of others. The web of Erasmus students that we formed over these months will now be stretched out across the globe. Some links may break and some may be stretched but still hold. Some, I hope, will grow stronger with time. The stories and ideas behind  these faces will remain a part of my story, and just like that the story of humanity, the world of living things, and the whole universe of almighty interconnected reality will go on.

Thank you Prof. Brailas and classmates, its been a joy!

Most of all, thank you Anabel, you were right; systems theory was perfect for me, it was all about how everything was connected and stuff. And I loved it!

I sense that a lot of people didn’t fully understand entropy. At least, how to connect it to psychology or their lives seemed to elude them. I felt differently because I have been exposed to the idea before and have come to grasp how important of an idea it is; life isn’t a free ride unless you want it to be a descent into a chaos.

That means, if you like freedom; make freedom, If you like love; spread love. Because everything you have, and probably don’t cherish enough, is falling to pieces by the decree of natural law; that’s entropy. Only the actions of you and others can maintain the systems and institutions which protect you and allow you to be the beautiful thing that you are becoming. If you ever felt like you needed a purpose to exist, it is to help keep things in order for a little bit until we crash into the sun.

Entropy means time is precious. It means that everything that has been created and maintained matters, even if you think it doesn’t. The people who preserved and studied the texts of the ancient Greeks combated the entropy that could have turned these ideas to dust. The same for those that have studied the Bible, or the Qur’an, or the diary of Anne Frank. The people that made lives out of holding meanings, stories, and messages together were not stupid people, or evil people; they were people like you and me.

Beautiful, complex, layered and colourful; ebbing and flowing through time; meanings gracefully morphing and dancing, reflecting and responding to one another; each each idea, each plan, each joke, each law; security, excitement, unpredictability and play; we uphold it all against entropy. Discover what you have, cherish it, and then fight for it’s preservation so that others can be as lucky as you.

The Panopticon is an interesting idea because we simultaneously ascribe omniscience (the ability to see everything) to God or godlike figures; it is the trait of an incredibly powerful entity. Yet, it is difficult to say exactly what it is, if at all, that is the problem with being watched.

When Edward Snowden unveiled to the world the extent to which the NSA was observing the private telecommunications of people all over the planet, a debate arose about whether this was a problem. A main argument being “if you have nothing to hide, then what’s the problem?”; it’s a decent point.

However, it seems the issue does not truly lie with whether any given individual can be seen or not, but rather with how much power can be harnessed by those doing the seeing. Ultimately, personal data is power. To have behavioural data on one individual is one thing; to have data on an entire population means there is potential to significantly control the thought and behaviour of entire nations.

This type of power grows the scope for harm that can be committed against any population, and broadens the scope of potential perpetrators; now not only governments but also tech companies and lobby groups.

It’s easy to say “no” to big data; the challenge for us is that we find ways of overcoming, and protecting ourselves from it. EU GDPR was a breakthrough that I believe should not be underestimated; hopefully we will never have to find out what this kind of regulation could save us from. If we take power that we have as a collective for granted, then we are as good as giving it away to the bad guys.

In this lesson we enjoyed the concept of rhizomes. Again, another example of how we can learn new ways of seeing how to organise ourselves, our actions and ideas from nature.

From my own study of spatial planning, we are taught how to allow planning processes to be open-ended; to be able to morph and evolve. A good planner will not attempt to prevent a process from developing new connections or taking unexpected directions; rather, it is their job to ensure that this process is facilitated in a way which is practicable within the time and financial budget of the project. This is to say that planners who are committed to certain fixed ideas when initiating their process, will condemn the process to be determined according to the interests of those with power in the decision hierarchy, therefore maintaining a distance between the intentions of the project and the embedded meanings of the relevant location. Rhizomatic thought is therefore helpful; we should consider a spatial planning project as a centreless process of becoming, the only fixed point being the geographical location in question. Any nearby stakeholder; resident, business, passer-by, expert, government official, should be allowed to engage with the project and attempt to create a meaningful intention within the project. With effective communication and imagination;  the project will shed meaningless and useless connections and intentions, and will maintain meaningful and useful ones.

Artificial intelligence and the ability of a person who is doing a great work ethic is always good and very proud of you all you have a great time with your family.

Did that make any sense? That’s Artificial Intelligence. I wrote “artificial” into my phone and then allowed it to guess the rest. So you can see there is probably a long way to go until whatever disaster situation you might have imagined will come to fruition.

It is not an AI related disaster situation that I think we should be worried about, but rather the gradual decrease in real life that any one of us might experience as we take more and more technology for granted. If we see technology as a way of enhancing our cognition by outsourcing certain processes into digital systems; then how do we feel about this? I’m not asking how you feel about any potential outcomes of this reliance on technology, but to what degree are you comfortable with your experience of the world always being passed through a computer before you can consider yourself to have grasped it?

For example, if it made getting around much easier, would you prefer to live inside google maps for all of your transport needs? Where all your walking journeys are passed along a sequence of blue dots, within a bland and monotonous urban fabric of blue labels, and grey and yellow shapes. No friendly dogs or cats. No random human happenstances. No tripping on an uneven pavement and, for a split second, your whole reality is up in the air and could land in any arrangement possible; upside down, back to front.

So to some degree we must appreciate energy inefficient, irrational, and often faulty cognition that we have within our biological systems. There are ways that we benefit from it which don”t necessarily make sense in terms of getting things done, but they sustain us in a way; they make life worth living.

Sure, it can be useful, but each time you distribute your cognition into technology, you are depriving yourself of a genuine and unadulterated experience of real life (for all its flaws and beauties). If we end up committing almost all of our cognition of the world into technology, maybe we can wield more power, but then it’s not the robots taking over that we should fear, but the fact of ourselves turning into robots.

It seems from the DDT example that ad hoc solutions are not sustainable. This could be true. Speaking for myself, the most sustainable way to deal with life is to accept the ups and downs without responding to them from moment to moment.

Perhaps the habit of constantly trying to find ad hoc solutions to new problems (putting out fires as we might call it) brings stress and anxiety to the mind. Unexpected situations are guaranteed to arise; this is the universe by default. If we are primed to consider these situations as “problems” because they disturb the peace of a predictable life, this puts us in a position of constant vulnerability and fear.

I think the problem with ad hoc solutions in their essence is not that they “don’t work” per se, but that by design they exist as a means of stopping inevitable change from being felt. It is therefore  a pathological reluctance to accept the realities of life. In this way, ad hoc solutions are designed out of fear, anxiety, and denial of certain facts. This is why they often manifest as somewhat destructive.

Conversely, if we can connect to a state of acceptance about the way things change, we can eventually respond to the broader situation with solutions that have been devised out of accepting, creative, intuitive, passionate, and engaged interaction with the world. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to practice finding a sense of comfort within moments of difficulty and change.

Relationships are the crucial focus when studying ecosystems, rather than the objects themselves. This perspective helps with systems thinking; no thing is a thing in itself, only a thing relative and in relation to other things. What something is, is how it relates to something else; who you are is how you relate to others.

In the end, we are all looking in the wrong place when we see the “problems” and “solutions” that we concern ourselves with from day to day. It is not the having or not having that should be of concern, but the receiving and giving; not the knowing or not knowing that is the matter, but the learning and sharing; not the being or not being, but the simultaneous becoming and decaying which makes this life so valuable.

Between one lover and another, from spat-out seed to lemon tree, nestled in the smallest space, some meaning lives without a trace. One day we’ll make this Holocene a place that’s safe, and fair, and clean. Away from ego, part, and pride; together we’re the space between!

Emergent properties themselves are curious enough. Where does such a property come from if it is not observed in the individual parts that are making up the whole?

Perhaps it is my lack of scientific understanding, but is emergence simply the act of nature demonstrating how 1 + 1 can equal 3? Is this fair to say? And should we take this as mere scientific discovery and make nothing more of it? The emergent properties emerge and that’s just the way it is. The same way the emergence of time, the universe, and all things simply began out of nothing, for no reason. Sure, I buy that (sarcasm).

To me, emergent properties present as the direct product of an underlying intention that exists within nature. Indeed, the emergent properties are interesting, but what’s more, the parts which come together to produce them seem to be motivated somehow, to come together.

In humans, emergent properties and the motivation underlying their production are less rationalised. On one hand, the emergent properties are taken for granted, because of course we are greater than the sum of us as parts; we’re humans! Where on the other hand, we have a broad foggy term for the underlying motivation to come together. We refer to this force; the animating force behind all creative human connection, as love.

We say we know about love because we feel it, but it’s clearly there anyway, you don’t need to feel it. It makes us create each other, it makes us sacrifice to let others grow through us, it makes others sacrifice to let us grow through them; we see love acting in the world. Why slime moulds come back together when separated, why they sacrifice themselves for the survival and success of the greater body, and how they could even manifest this kind of intelligent behaviour as single celled organisms; do we really have no idea?

Until the white coats come running over the hill with the great new discovery, I will be lying in the grass, basking in my own ignorance, believing that love is the motivating agent behind all creative connection, and that it can be seen in every single system.  If they never come, I’ll know I was right.

I found our group most collectively engaged during the section of the class where we had to separate a list of “things” into either collections or systems. I find it particularly enlightening to find a definition through such a process of exclusion; one can only know what something is, when they know what it is not. This process informs us of our world in a way that spans much further than that “thing” itself. Indeed “definition” has two meanings; the second being the outline of something as distinct from its surrounding or background. Therefore our agreement on what a system is not, does not only give us a better idea of what a system is, it also gives us a picture of how these two things relate; how systems and mere collections exist together in one another’s context. We are then better placed to understand our whole world.

It seemed as though some sort of purpose was a key element in a system. This may be why one can feel so awe-inspired when witnessing such great systems as nature and the cosmos. When we observe the functioning of these things, we see the same characteristics as in smaller systems which we find easier to comprehend; automobiles, digestive systems etc. However, their sheer size and complexity makes a “purpose” less easy to identify. Nevertheless, I am inclined to believe there still are purposes behind these majestic webs of interaction. I would consider it hubris to observe a mighty system and, while observing its similarity which much simpler systems whose purpose my tiny mind can comprehend, claim there is no purpose because I cannot clearly see one.

The hierarchy of systems, from the minute to the infinite, from the mundane to the sublime, with their respective purposes throughout, are enough proof for me that this life is teeming with meaning to be reveled in.

This class was an exercise in opening up and integrating.

I walked to class alone, and for the time I did this, my thoughts were my only company; before I have properly woken up, the space that is my thinking mind is a mostly closed system. Things are bouncing around and sorting themselves out, but not much is coming in or out. I’m sure this is the case for a lot of people, a lot of the time. A process is required for them to be drawn out of themselves.

I recognise how this class was structured in order to form a system out of mere individuals. We each began by sitting down, probably with someone familiar, being allowed to talk for a while; taking one safe step out of oneself. Next, we were instructed to talk to someone unfamiliar. Then, adding two new strangers to the mix, and then finally meeting the whole class at once. The individual is thereby opened up and linked to others, so the class forms an integrated whole.

While the content of the class did not seem much related to systems theory, it was the process behind the seemingly trivial exchange of content which was the lesson in systems theory. If a class is supposed to be a system for knowledge sharing, then the system must encourage each unit to produce its most open, communicative, and practicable side.

This class was an exercise in turning the inside out; eliciting one’s extra-version, so that it may serve (and benefit from) the system. Without this, we may have spent weeks together (alone), only learning what we can within our own closed systems.