I’ve just finished reading Fitjof Capra’s “Hidden Connections” – it’s just a bit too earnest on the “eco-warrior” front. Too anti-global-business and anti-global-capital-markets, too doom and gloom for me. Call me a wimp, but for me “revolution” is an unfortunate consequence when someone’s misguided command and control management or government model omits “evolution” or backs it into an impossible corner.
Let’s encourage evolution, not incite revolution I say.
That said, he does collect together many sources (outside his own spehere of Tao Physics) demonstrating that, everywhere from the way DNA communicates within the biosystem of cell structures, to the players in the globally communicating capital markets, or the society participating in the global comms village, what matters is the interconnected system nature of things rather than the “cogs” themselves. So much is emergent from this complexity / chaotic systems theory view of the whole, rather than being in any way causally related to any of the activities of particular cogs or nodes in the system.
Genes have had their ephemeral 15 minutes of fame. They alone explain very little, whatever the early hype of the success of the human genome project.
This is exactly, and I mean exactly, the same TBL / Dan Brickley point in the previous post, about characterising the arcs (connections), and merely identification of the nodes (objects / players), in the semantic web model.