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This book the systems view of life is a dream that I've had for a very long
time. It is a multidisciplinary text book in which my co-author and I, I wrote
it with a friend of mine, a colleague, Pier Luigi Louisi, who is professor of
biology in Rome. And in this book we present a coherent, systemic
framework, which integrate four dimension of life: the biological dimension,
the cognitive dimension, the social and the ecological dimension. We
discussed the phylosofical, social and political implications of this unifying
vision. #00:01:07.4#
Let me start with some of these implications. The great challenge of our
time and one of the main themes of all the causes that you ....
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is to build and nurture sustainable communities. #00:01:27.5#

And what is sustained in sustainable community is not economic growth or
competitive advantage or any of these things that are sometimes
emphasized. What is sustained is the very web of life on which our long
term survival depends. In other words, a sustainable community must be
designed in such a way that its ways of life, its technologies, physical
structures, social institution and so on, do not interfere with nature inherent
ability to sustain life. So this is the critical point, nature has the inherent
ability to sustain life, it has sustained life for billion of years and that we
must not interfere with that. now in order to do that we need of course to
understand first, how does nature sustain life? #00:02:39.8#
And it turns out, that this involves a whole new conception of life and
indeed such a new conception of life has emerged in science in the last 30
years or so. And this is what a Louisi and I called the systems view of life.
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At the fall front (??) of contemporary science, the universe is no longer

seen as a machine consisting of various basic building blocks, but rather is

perceived as a network of inseparable relationship, that was the main
breakthrough in quantum physics in the beginning of the twentieth century,
this perceptual shift (??) from object to relationships. #00:03:37.7#
We've also discovered that the planet as a whole is a living self regulating
system, and I'm sure many of you have heard Stephan Harding speak
about the Gaia Theory. The view of a human body as a machine and of the
mind as a separate entity is now being replace by one that sees not only
the brain but also the immune system, the tissue of the body, and in fact
every single cell as a living cognitive system. #00:04:15.9#
Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence but
rather as a cooperative dance in which creativity and the constant
emergents of novelty are the driving forces. And with the new emphasize
on complexity, networks, pattern of organization, a new science of qualities
is now slowly emerging. So this is just a nutshell what the systems view of
life looks like. And we call this new science, the systems view of life,
because it involves a new kind of thinking, thinking in terms of
relationships, of pattern, of context, and in science this way of thinking is
called systemic thinking or systems thinking. It emerged in the 1920s and
1930s from series of interdisciplinary dialogues involving biologist,
psychologist, and ecologist #00:05:24.6#
and in all these fields, scientist realized that a living system, an organism,
an ecosystem, or social system is an integrated whole who's properties
can not be reduced to the properties of its parts. These systemic
properties, the properties of the whole, that none of its parts have. So
systems thinking involves a shift of perceptions from the part to the whole.
And the early system thinker expressed this in the phrase, "the whole is
more than the sum of its parts" actually in our book we say that the coined
of this phrase, and i learned unfortunately after the book was finished and
published, that this actually goes back to aristotle, where you can find this
phrase that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" in Aristotle. So,

hopefully there'll be a second edition to the book and I will put that in there.
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Now, systems theory also tells us that all living systems share a set of
common properties and principles of organization. And this means that
systems thinking can be applied to integrate academic disciplines that have
become so fragmented, as you well know, and to show similarity between
systems at different level. And this is why we called the systems view of life
a unifying vision. #00:07:08.1#
Now, during the 1970s and 1980s, systems thinking was raised to a new
level, with the development of complexity theory, technically known as nonlinear dynamics. This is the new mathematics that include chaos theory,
fractals, and so on, which allowed scientist for the first time to really model
the complexity of living systems. This new mathematics is a mathematics
of patterns of relationships. So this shows us, the shift from quantities to
qualities. during the last 30 years or so, the strong interest of a nonlinear
phenomena has given rise to a whole series of new and powerful theories
and models that have dramatically increased our understanding of mainly
of the key characteristic of life. And so our synthesize of these theories and
models is what we called the systems view of life. Now, here of course,
tonight, I can only give you a view highlights. One of the most important
insight of the systemic understanding of life is the recognition that network
are the basic pattern of organization of all living system. Ecosystem as you
know, understood as a food webs, that is network of organisms. Organisms
are networks of organs tissues and cells, and cells are networks of
molecules. And then we have social networks that are network of
communication. So wherever we see life, we see networks. A network is a
pattern that is common to all life. And indeed, at the very heart of the
change of paradigms that this now occurring in science and in society. We
find a fundamental change of metaphors of seeing the world as a machine
to understanding it as a network. Now these living networks have been
started very closely over the last 30 years and these studies have shown,
that the key characteristic is that they are self generating. Technically this is

known as the theory of autopoiesis which was developed in the 1970s and
1980s by two Chileans scientists, Umberto Maturana and Francisco
Borella. Auto of course means self, and poiesis is derived from the Greek
word point(??) which means to make, so autopoiesis means self making.
In the cell for example all the biological structure like proteins, membrane,
DNA, all this so called macromolecule are generated, are produced and
are regenerated constantly by the cellular network. Similarly at the level of
multicellular organisms, an organism's cells are continually recycled and
regenerated by the organism's metabolic network. So living network
continually create or recreate themselves by transforming or replacing their
components. And in this way, they undergo a continual structural changes
while at the same time preserving their web-like pattern of organization.
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And indeed the coexistence of stability and change has long been
observed as one of the key characteristics of life. #00:11:31.2#
Now let me now come to one the most important philosophical implications
of the systems view of life and that is a nobel concept of mind and
consciousness which finally overcomes the cartesian division between
mind and matter that has haunted philosopher and scientist for centuries. If
you remember, De Cartes, divided the world into two separate realms in a
fundamental division between the mind, which he called ...., the thinking
thing, and matter, which he called the extended thing.. the ... extensor. And
following De Cartes, scientist and philosophers for centuries continue to
think of the mind as a thing and they were wondering how this intangible
entity was related to that other thing, the body. #00:12:39.4#
The decisive (??) advance of the system view of life has been to
abandoned this Cartesian view of mind as a thing and to realize that mind
and consciousness are not thing but processes. This novel conception was
developed during the 1960s by Gregory Bateson and independently by
Umberto Maturana and Fransisco Barella, both working at the University of
Chile in Santiago, and it is known today as the Santiago theory of

cognition. Cognition being the process of knowledge. So instead of

speaking of mind, it is more accurate to speak of the process of cognition.
And during the past three decades, the study of mind and consciousness
from this perspective has developed into very rich field, a multidisciplinary
field, known as cognitive science which transcends the traditional
framework of biology, neuroscience, psychology, epistemology, and so on.
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Now, the central insight of the Santiago Theory is the identification of

cognition, the process of knowing, with the process of life. Cognition
according to Maturana and Barella is the activity involved in the cell
generation and cell perpetuation of living networks. So, the process of self
organization which is the very process of life, is seen as a cognitive
process. And correspondingly, the interaction of a living organism, plant,
animal or human with its environment is a cognitive interactions.
#00:14:39.4# And in this way life and cognition are inseparably
connected, mind or more correctly mental activity is immanent in matter in
all level of life. Now this is a radical expansion of the concept of cognition,
and implicitly the concept of mind. And if you hear this for the first time, I
don't expect you to absorb it, accept it and understand it right away. This is
a real novelty. Today at our class at Schuma college, we spend an hour
and a half discussing this, and so this a really very new concept.
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In this view, cognition involve the entire process of life including perception,
emotions, behavior, and does not even necessarily require a brain and a
nervous system. So cognition, the process of knowledge is present at all
level of life. #00:15:43.3#
Now, of course to have such a new concept, could just be a change of
language, and you have to see wether it actually helps you to understand
things, and an easy way to see it is to look at the age old problem of the
relationship between mind and brain. Scientist and philosophers have
known at least, since the 19th century that mental process are closely

linked to neuro-physiological processes, but they were still puzzled about

the exact relationship between mind and brain. #00:16:35.2#
In the Santiago theory, this relationship is simple and very clear. The
Cartesian characterization of mind as a thing is abandoned, mind is a
process, the process of cognition, which is identified with the process of
life. And the brain is a specific structure, through which this process
operates. So the relationship between mind and brain is one between
process and structure. Furthermore, the brain is not the only structure,
through which the process of cognition operates. The entire structure of the
organism participate.