THE WORLD AS A SOCIAL SYSTEM. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann said that from the time of Aristotle to about 1800 the concept of society was almost identical with what we call social system, the encompassing system was called the political society. This conception lost its significance with the modern industrialized state. It has never been replaced with an adequate theoretical framework. Attempts to replace politics with economy or culture use a part of social reality to replace the wúhole. He suggests using systems analysis to "disclose the structure and processes which characterize the social system--the most important of all social systems which includes all others. " Social systems are self-referential systems based on meaningful communication.
They use communication to constitute and interconnect the events (actions) which build up the systems. Early societies evolved from different regional societies and developed territorial differences. Modern society is a world society. Evolution can never be planned. Niklas Luhmann- Contingency, risk, trust and reflection. Web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Papers/path.pdf. NetLogo Home Page. NetLogo is a multi-agent programmable modeling environment. It is used by many hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and researchers worldwide.
It also powers HubNet participatory simulations. It is authored by Uri Wilensky and developed at the CCL. You can download it free of charge. You can also try it online through NetLogo Web. What can you do with NetLogo? Read more here. Join mailing lists here. Download NetLogo Go to NetLogo Web NetLogo comes with a large library of sample models. A step in the right direction. By Greg Fisher On Thursday we co-hosted an event with the RSA called “21st Century Policy Development” (21CPD).
This blog is a sort of follow-up to that event, arising out of a number of the questions asked during Q&A. What I want to do is to illustrate quite how intractable social systems and the biosphere (and in fact the whole universe) are; and to contextualise what value I believe networks and complex systems add to our understanding (and, by implication, our ability to make good decisions). There were some questions at 21CPD which hinted that perhaps complexity scientists were seeking to achieve some nirvana of understanding with the right model and right data.
Ironically, the same approach tells us such perfection is impossible – the world is inherently intractable, uncertain, and it is constantly evolving; and human cognition is limited. So how intractable are things around us? Let’s start off with the agent in our social systems, the human being. Share this Article: