IFSR Proceedings
The 2014 IFSR “Conversation” proceedings are now published. I’ve added the report to the Download page and you can also view it here. In particular we should consider the Team 6 “System Research” section as that ended up containing many ideas Judith and I would like to follow up in ISSS 2016. This relates to the discussion we just had about holism. I think we actually made some progress in our own discussion here, varied as it was. In fact it was Arthur Koestler working with Ludvig von Bertalanffy who proposed transcending the “atomism” (reductionist view) and “holism” (what I think is best called a contextualist view), which define opposites in the older concept of holism (as many pointed out we have gone beyond now, in the systems community). His solution is close to what I called “inclusive holism”, in which these former opposites are seen as complements in a much larger unity that to date we don’t have general language for, even though Koester proposed the term “holon” back in 1970. Some others have attempted to develop holon theory. I’ll place Koestler’s original paper and some more recent ones on the Download page so anyone interested can gauge the status. The IFSR Team 6 framework is based on such a holon concept that is compatible with Rosen’s relational theory, so I’m hoping that may provide a pointer for future development.
Of course these scientific and philosophical issues are not to be settled here, and my views are not meant to prevail beyond identifying focal ideas for discussion at the conference. Perhaps we can use the new IdeaStream (in the main site menu) to vet other focal topics along with organizational ideas. I don’t know how this ‘Web commons’ constructive approach will work, but it seems like a good experiment in collaborative thinking and content building that might support the conference as it develops.