The Decentralized Mindset

The archetypical example, ask someone: Who leads a flock of birds? (Resnick, 1994). You will have 99% chance to get the wrong answer. This is becoming a leitmotif on Complexity Science, and, by hence, on one way of thinking: the centralized mindset. It’s a simple question, then, why do everyone answers wrong? From children to adults, from officers to scientists. No matter who you ask, everyone will answer the same: “the first bird“. It’s been known for some years that no bird leads in a flock, the flock itself is a result of the interaction of the birds, it’s self organized (Potts, 1984). For someone belonging to the western culture, the correct answer is unintuitive. There’s a natural trend to look for an answer within the elements, while the next level of description is often omitted. In this case, the correct answer is related to the next level of description, the flock. In this text we are going to find the roots of such kind of thinking and study how it was maintained for such long period of time.

The centralized mindset has not always been the paradigm employed by the human being to explain his world and himself. More than 2500 years ago, even before the great philosophers Aristotle and Plato, the called pre-Socratic group, Heraclitus of Ephesus in particular, tried to find answers employing a systemic paradigm, focused in interrelationships and dynamic processes,  rather than a systematic one, centered in the concepts of classification and static order. In his doctrines of universal flux1 and the unity of opposites2, Heraclitus shows the unicity of opposites in a specific moment, time is the only factor of change.

Despite of pre-Socratics are the first sign of systemic though in the western culture, there are even more antiques examples. As far as 3200 years ago, the I Ching3, one of the chinese classic texts, is probably the oldest example of such kind of thinking. Its title itself “I Ching” means “Classic of Changes” and it’s a reference to its aim to model the dynamics between different elements as a whole4. The resemblances between Heraclitus thesis and I Ching principles show clearly that both cultures, in different moments of history, showed some degree of parallelism (Hammond, 2003).
This monistic understanding of the world can be found in most eastern religions-philosophies5. The collection is seen as a whole and not as the sum of its multiple parts. There is a natural systemic understanding of the world that flows from those philosophical frameworks.
Why two cultures starting from similar points, in terms of though, diverged so much? which was the cause of western culture became more and more dualistic, meanwhile eastern cultures stayed in a more holistic comprehension of the world?
One of the probables causes could be the incredible impact of the works of both Plato and Aristotle had in the western culture. Plato and Aristotle were more or less dualists, in the sense they argued to destroy the pre-Socratic monistic arguments. Unfortunately, in terms of historical success, no comparable figure to Plato and Aristotle existed who defended a systemic approach. That’s probably because all of the works of the pre-Socratics were lost, including Heraclitus6.
Plato is widely recognized to be the first to systemize the mind-body dualism in his Theory of Forms (Plato, Phaedo and other dialogs) in which he separated the perceived objects from their ideas or essences. Aristotle was contrary to the pre-Socratic monism. In Physics, Aristotle discusses against the natural pre-Socratic vision of change, in particular from Parmenides and Heraclitus, arguing that essences persisted through the change and opposites were different, separate thing (Aristotle, Physics, 184 b1).
After the classical period, the arrival and later imposition of the christian doctrine in Europe, constrained any philosophical position contrary to the christian catholic establishment. During this period, society was religion centered and most of the knowledge was controlled by the church, so philosophy were also god centered. In need of a more formal philosophical framework, christian philosophers belonging to the scholastic movement like Thomas Aquinas, incorporated Aristotelian ideas to the christian doctrine (McInerny, 2009), fixing a non-monistic approach in a religion that would rule Europe for 1000 years.
Starting in the seventeenth century, numerous attempts to re-introduce a systemic point of view were done by different scientists and philosophers. We can find monistic approached in authors like Spinoza, Berkley, Leibnitz and Hume. Despite most of them were very successful, in the seventeenth century the systematic approach was strongly rooted in Europe's society. The tremendous success of the systematic approach in science, achieved by Descartes7 and Newton8 among others, didn’t help.

It wasn’t until the twentieth century, when the limitations of the systematic approach became obvious. Scientists from all the areas, beginning from philosophy and social sciences, started to realize that a systemic approach, not only could help to understand, but maybe was the only method to gain knowledge in some disciplines. The centralized mindset, that had lot of success in the past, started to show it’s weaknesses: it was unable to give satisfying answers to important scientific problems9. The result of that need was the Systems Theory, an interdisciplinary framework whose main goal was to investigate all kind of disciplines from a systemic point of view.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the systemic approach was introduced in philosophy, sociology and economics by authors like Pareto, Spencer, Durkheim, Hartmann and others. Most of them explored the twentieth century advances, not from the classical Aristotelian-Platonic-Newtonian point of view, but from a systemic-monistic perspective, where the system gains relevance over the parts that is composed by. Around the 1950s, the tendency was extended to mathematics, physics and biology. Concepts like self-organization, complexity, connectionism, adaptive systems were explored by Wiener, Ashby, Neumann, Foerester, Lyapunov, Pointcare, and others. As the twentieth century advanced,  different flavors appeared: Cybernetics, Catastrophe Theory, Chaos Theory, Context Theory and Complexity Science. All of them were focused in studying what kind of patterns, behaviors and properties the systems show. They focused more and more on systems that showed complex behaviors, that’s behaviors that couldn’t be predicted observing the different elements of the system.

We’ve seen the origins of the centralized mindset are rooted in the more than 3000 years ago, when the western culture born. A bunch of circumstances and the big benefits it has reported to science helped to maintain it over more 2000 years.
The new born Complex Systems Science, seems to be the crystallization of the systemic approach.
Despite nowadays the systems approach is widely respected in many disciplines, the centralized mindset is still much more extended. Sometimes because it’s irrelevant and sometimes by ignorance. 2000 years of history of systematic thinking are not easy to fight with, and in the other side, it’s not an adequate framework to very important problems. Despite the systemic approach had been very successful in many disciplines, a breakthrough comparable to Einstein’s Relativity or Newton’s Laws hasn’t arrived yet. Over the twentieth century the systemic approach had been gaining critical mass, it’s just a matter of time that we will see an critical breakthrough, promoted by systems science.

References:
Graham, W. D. (2007), “Heraclitus, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy” (Winter 2003 Edition). Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
Hammond, D. (2003). “The Science of Synthesis”. University of Colorado Press (ed.). p. 23
Kahn, C (1979). “The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: Fragments with Translation and Commentary”. Cambridge University Press (ed.). pp. 1–23.
McInerny R. (2009), “Saint Thomas Aquinas, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy” (Winter 2003 Edition). Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
McKeon. R. (1941). “Basic Works of Aristotle”. Random House (ed.). pp. 34-56
Plato (390s-347 BC) Platonis Opera, vol. 1, Euthyphro, Apologia Socratis, Crito, Phaedo, Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophistes, Politicus, ed. E.A. Duke, W.F. Hicken, W.S.M. Nicoll, D.B. Robinson and J.C.G. Strachan. Clarendon Press (ed.), 1995.
Potts, W. K. (1984). “The chorus-line hypothesis of coordination in avian flocks”. Nature 24: 344-345.

Resnick, M. (1994). “Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Micro worlds”. MITPress (ed.).