As we seek to better understand the complexity of interactions, such as those explored in Line of Representation, we struggle not to get lost in the myriad of elements and interrelationships.
It is easy to start feeling overwhelmed. And, potentially, to shut down.
These are times to step back. And to reimagine.
When we reimagine, we begin to look for essence and find words that allow for new abstractions where the meaning of that essence can be shared with others.
At its core, lambda calculus created a powerful abstraction of calculus that empowers our thinking. Our thinking in other areas is also empowered by abstraction. See Abstracting Words and Numbers.
We ponder these thoughts as we explore complex system theory in the context of Niklass Luhman's theories of psychic and social systems.
Borrowing from the theories of Maturana and Verela, Luhman talks about these systems as autopoeitic, where the system and the consciousness of the system are self-contained or, in his words, "operationally closed".
But they are interrelated with each other.
And now we have another system dimension, software and hardware systems of computers, that are also autopoietic in nature. Systems that interrelate with individual psychic systems and the social systems we call companies.
We seek to gain clarity about these interrelationships.
We begin to wonder, then, if a further abstraction might be valuable for us to expose the dynamics of these relationships.
Perhaps, then, not to just talk about systems, but about "spheres", where we come to understand spheres to be both the elements of the system and also its emergent dynamics - its consciousness - that creates meaning for and beyond the system itself.
The idea of spheres is borrowed from Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard who looked at our planet and its biological system as a geosphere and biosphere and prophesied an emergent noosphere of human thought.
Perhaps, then, we might reimagine the creative system theories of Takashi Iba as being comprised of thought patterns and meaning-making that happens as individuals (psychic spheres), as companies (social spheres), and as software and hardware systems (computing spheres) within an encompassing noosphere where new meaning is able to manifest.
It is here where Iba points to a fascinating opportunity to use pattern languages to empower meaning-making in this creative Ideaspace. One that may be well worth exploring as we look to leverage each Moment of Creative Potential that unleashes the Creative Genius of our Blue Plane imagination.
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