Alan Watts, Impermanence, and Systeming

I struggle when writing about systems. English is a language of things, but systems science is a science of processes, of activities leading to the emergence of all that exists.

I’ve begun to think of networking, interacting, and bounding rather than networks, interactions, and boundaries. Tyler Volk recently reminded me of how Alan Watts described apple trees as “appling” and “treeing.” and the Earth as “peopling.”

I have just begun to think “systeming.” Len Troncale included “System” in his list of systems processes and it annoyed me. Now, I think of systeming as the process of co-operating and emerging into wholes.

A system is a thing in English, but from this worldview, all is systeming. All continually organizes, emerging into what we see as things, as structures. But structures appear only at particular temporal and spatial scales. Helicopter in or out and process is revealed. As the Buddhists point out, “All is impermanent.”

Information is not a thing. It is the process of in-forming from inputs of changes from the environment.

Energy is not a thing. It is the process of energizing from inputs of flows of oscillating particles that provide the forces that drive interacting and co-operating.

A process is not a thing. A process is a series of activities.

Complex biological and social systems are “systeming” and must be energized and informed–and energizing and informing–to exist. They consist of co-operating subsystems, and subsystems of subsystems, that are systeming–cycling, oscillating, flowing, networking, interacting, feedback back, inputting, outputting, opening and closing, and informing.

Questions arise: Why does this shift in languaging and metaphors matter? What difference can it make in our lives? Who cares? I’ll attempt to tackle those questions in the next post!