mental shift is quite consequential

[Cevat Serkan Balek]

Dear group,

I want to share a very interesting interview with Fritjof Capra on his brilliant book, Web Of Life:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLiRXM2oZ_U&noredirect=1

Although his perspective is based on science and in particular on life sciences, the paradigm shift is almost exactly the same. Capra says that, the mental shift is quite consequential:

• a shift from seeing the world as made of objects to understanding the world as a process

• also a shift from objects to relationships

• we now see the things in a fragmented way and unable to focus on the relationships of things

• ecology is the science of relationships

He talks about the origin of systems thinking back in 1920's. Systems thinking was born as a reaction to the fight between mechanist and vitalist ideas. They have resolved the dilemma in a creative way:

Systems Thinker: The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Materialist Asks: OK, what do we need to add to the parts as the extra to have more from them?

Vitalist Answers: The extra is the the vital force which is obviously outside the material world.

Systems Thinker: We need to add only the understanding of relationships between matter :)

Systems thinker adds that, there is no magic here, this is still science. The key idea here is the emergence of novelties as the complexity of the matter exceed a certain threshold. This is explained very clearly in complexity theories. There are two approaches taken to study a phenomenon:

Approach 1: What is it made of? (dominant approach throughout the centuries and even today)

• You take things to pieces, you study the basic building blocks, components, elements, and so on

• You study matter, you study quantities, structures, and so on

Approach 2: What is the pattern? (slowly emerging -missing- approach)

• You study relationships, you study qualities, you study organization

To understand life, we need both approaches, and the dimension of process to synthesize these aspects.

1. Structure

2. Pattern

3. Process

Obviously, this cannot be perceived in a narrowed form either as the materialistic or as the vitalist view.

What Capra says about human organizations also holds for software architecture due to Conway's Law.

“The creativity and adaptability of life expresses itself through the spontaneous emergence of novelty at critical points of instability. Every human organization contains both designed and emergent structures. The challenge is to find the right balance between the creativity of emergence and the stability of design.”

This is the same kind of paradigm shift which is happening in software right now, especially with DCI.

Best regards,

Cevat Balek