Systems Theory and the Sciences of Complexity

Wilber's View

Wilber treats the 20th-century emergence of systems/complexity theory — General System Theory, cybernetics, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, cellular automata theory, catastrophe theory, autopoietic system theory, dynamic systems theory, chaos theory — as the scientific breakthrough that closes the gap between matter and life that modern science itself had opened (see great-chain-of-being). The key discovery, in his telling, is that under the right conditions matter itself "winds up" into higher order rather than only running down — a whirlpool forming spontaneously in draining water is his illustrative example of "order out of chaos." That gives holism ("everything is connected to everything else") a basis in hard science rather than only in tradition or intuition.

Update: the critique flagged below as missing is now written up — see flatland for Wilber's full argument that systems theory, however genuinely holistic in its positive claims, still describes only exteriors (the Right-Hand quadrants) and commits "subtle reductionism" the moment it's treated as a complete account of reality, since it has no way to register interiority, meaning, or consciousness as such.

What this page doesn't yet cover in its own excerpts: the source notes behind this page stop at Wilber's positive case for systems theory — what it gets right, and why it matters for reuniting the physiosphere and biosphere. The critique itself (that it can still describe only exteriors and risks a subtler version of "flatland") is now covered on the flatland page instead of here; this page hasn't yet been rewritten to excerpt that critique directly from the chapters where Wilber makes it.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

"Under certain circumstances matter will 'wind itself up' into states of higher order…"

The closing of the gap between the physiosphere and the biosphere came precisely in the rather recent discovery of those subtler and originally hidden aspects of the material realm that, under certain circumstances, propel themselves into states of higher order, higher complexity, and higher organization. In other words, under certain circumstances matter will "wind itself up" into states of higher order, as when the water running down a drain suddenly ceases to be chaotic and forms a perfect funnel or whirlpool. Whenever material processes become very chaotic and "far from equilibrium," they tend under their own power to escape chaos by transforming it into a higher and more structured order—commonly called "order out of chaos."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Book 1: The Web of Life

"The sciences of complexity — including General System Theory, cybernetics, nonequilibrium thermodynamics…"

The new sciences dealing with these "self-winding" or "self-organizing" systems are known collectively as the sciences of complexity—including General System Theory (Bertalanffy, Weiss), cybernetics (Wiener), nonequilibrium thermodynamics (Prigogine), cellular automata theory (von Neumann), catastrophe theory (Thom), autopoietic system theory (Maturana and Varela), dynamic systems theory (Shaw, Abraham), and chaos theories, among others. I do not mean to minimize the very real differences between these various sciences, or the great advances that the more recent sciences of complexity… have made over their predecessors. But since my aim is very general, I will refer to them collectively as systems theory, dynamic systems theory, or evolutionary systems theory.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Book 1: The Web of Life

"Everything is connected to everything else"

They claim, in other words, that "everything is connected to everything else"—the web of life as a scientific and not just religious conclusion.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Book 1: The Web of Life

See Also

• great-chain-of-being — the older, traditional picture this modern science is presented as vindicating
• holons / holarchy — the units and structure systems theory is describing
• flatland — Wilber's critique of systems theory's limits, once it's mistaken for a complete account of reality
• four-quadrants — the Right-Hand/Left-Hand distinction behind that critique