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Consciousness of Trees and Our Need to Move Beyond Simple Systems Thinking

Trees and shall we say plants have much more going on than we’ve assumed. We need to pay attention.

This powerful short video points to how our thinking needs to move beyond mechanistic thinking and even beyond simple systems thinking to a much more complex way of thinking about interrelationships.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iSGPNm3bFmQ

Even though the film depicts some of the relationships with diagrams, these relationships are only a tiny picture of the complexity. There are so many things going on with their roots acting as neural networks with a complete set of neurotransmitters, bacteria and other living things that assist with many communal functions, their mere presence as mini-ecosystems for millions of other creatures, their abilities to affect local and global climate, and the list goes on.

We cannot capture the complexity in diagrams without getting lost in the webs of interconnections, which move and morph anyway. Systems thinking suggests a certain stasis, but in reality the world works in ways that are dynamic and ever-changing in order to meet the ever-changing conditions.

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Meat, Veggies, Water, Sentience, & Perplexities

At certain times in my life, I tried following a vegetarian lifestyle. But, each time, no matter how careful I was, I couldn’t do it. I lost way too much weight the first and I was already very skinny; and I got sick a lot. The second time, I really got sick a lot. A few years ago, I suggested the idea to a naturopath I saw thinking that she would encourage me and have some suggestions for how to do it correctly. But, she said, “Nope. You have to eat meat. Your physiology is different. You’ll get too sick, if you don’t eat meat.” Interesting that I knew this all along. But it’s too bad in many ways. It is ecologically more sensible to eat only vegetables, especially if you grow them yourself or buy locally grown vegetables. You’ll get more energy-bang-for-the-buck.

However, this got me thinking about a number of things that keep getting posted on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet. The general dogma is that meat is bad and vegetables are good, because animals are sentient and plants are not. Well, that dogma seems to be threatened by increasing evidence that plants may have a lot more going on than we previously thought. Here are a few of many links (investigate some on your own):

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-green-mind/201412/are-plants-entering-the-realm-the-sentient

http://goodnature.nathab.com/research-shows-plants-are-sentient-will-we-act-accordingly/

http://letthemeatmeat.com/post/79193241820/what-would-plant-sentience-mean-for-vegan-ethics

So, if plants are able to think and plan; are aware of their surroundings, including other plants and animals; can solve problems, care for others; and so forth; the argument about sentience may no longer hold true. Hmmm… We may need to rethink our positions from a high moral horse. We may have to consider that all living things are here together. We may need to think about how we can eat another sentient being with sensitivity and appreciation for their sacrifice, rather than as some sort of disconnected right. We may have to realize that we are part of a larger set of relationships where no single type of being is better than any other. Oooh, what a crushing blow….

But, I also came across postings from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and all I’ve got to say is BEWARE. They aren’t who you think they are (and neither is the ASPCA). Check out a few of many links:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/lucy-uprichard/the-many-failings-of-peta_b_2945870.html

Home

http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/the-problem-with-peta-20120725-22ouo.html

http://listverse.com/2013/05/30/10-insane-facts-about-peta/

As for me, I’m trying to thank the plants and animals for their sacrifices and I’m trying to spend some time trying to imagine what it would be like to be a plant or some other animal. But, I’m also spending time appreciating my dog and my two cats. They are teaching me a lot about relationships and being present.

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“Oh, Look He’s Wagging His Tail” – A Little Girl’s Exploration of Earthworms and How Current Approaches to Schooling and Systems Thinking Short-Change Students

Many years ago, I was studying how children thought while they worked with earthworms. The approach was pretty much like the approach I preferred to take as a teacher… Put the earthworms in front of the children with minimal instruction, then let them have at it. I then tape recorded each child as they explored and asked questions from time to time.

At one point, one of the 7-year old girls said, “oh, look, he’s wagging his tail.” She went on to other ideas very quickly, but this stuck out to me. In fact, I’ve thought about this statement for years. It’s a kind of flag or marker for hidden treasures.

If we think about this for a minute, we have “tail” – “wagging” – “earthworms.” These three things hold so many possibilities for exploration, inquiry, stories, and more.

  • What are tails?
  • What do tails do?
  • What makes a tail a tail?
  • What things have tails?
  • What things look like tails, but are not tails?
  • Why do tails wag?
  • Do wagging tails have a function?
  • What does it mean to wag a tail?
  • What other things mean the same thing as wagging tails?
  • In what contexts or situations, do wagging tails mean same or different things?
  • Why do earthworms move the way they do?
  • How do they manage to move?
  • Can we move like an earthworm?
  • What other things move like earthworms?
  • What makes earthworms look like they have tails?
  • Do they really have tails?
  • Can we create a dance about earthworms?
  • Can we write a children’s story about “my pet earthworm”?
  • Can you play music that will make you feel like an earthworm?
  • Where can we find earthworms?
  • Where do earthworms like to live?
  • What do they like to eat?
  • Are earthworms important for anything else?
  • Do they help other things?
  • What would happen if all earthworms disappeared?

These questions point to some of the many directions one can take with children. And, they all arise from a statement like, “oh, look, he’s wagging his tail.” Wagging is rich in function and meaning. Even though technically earthworms don’t have tails, the notion of tail is one of pattern and relationship. And, it is significant and worth exploring. The same is true of wagging. Wagging is pattern and relationship. From such simple statements, children can jump into a rabbit hole that can take them into all kinds of wonderful explorations of patterns and relationships and the stories they weave. As teachers, we cannot plan out these activities. We cannot predict the outcomes. We cannot create rubrics or measure student learning. But, we can provide children with the resources and opportunities to follow their interests and questions.

Traditional systems of schooling and even current approaches to teaching systems thinking fail to provide children with such opportunities. Schooling is stuck in trying to control everything. Keep everything boxed in (in rubrics). As a result, children are never able to stretch and explore the limits of their curiosities and imaginations.

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Beyond Systems 2: Borderless Cognition

As discussed in my last posting, the mere mention of “systems” brings to mind images of mechanistic-like dynamics. But, this sort of association with living “systems” is problematic. In the embedded video of hawks catching prey and flying through various habitats, we can think about the dynamics of what is occurring, but not so much as a system, but as something beyond a system … as complex interactions and complex, non-linear paths of information flow, and all kinds of relationships and the dynamics within these relationships.

EBS Global Documentary: Goshawk, the Soul of the Wind Spot
Posted on Facebook by: Atmaca Alemi / Sparrowhawk World Community

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FbnPxoSANd0

This is a great video to consider in terms of what we might think of as distributed, borderless cognition. If this Goshawk had to think about each maneuver and each object, he or she would not do well at all. In fact, these maneuvers would not be possible. When you look at this video, the hawk is acting as if her thinking is at the tips of her wings and the edges of the tree limbs and at the tips of her talons and the edges of the tree trunks and in her eyes and all the way along in front of her to whatever objects there are. This is what Gregory Bateson talked about as a cybernetics of cognition. The information flows from the wings to the air to the trees and back again; from the legs to the talons to the trees to the talons to the legs; from the brain to the eyes to the scene in front to the eyes to the brain; and so forth.

There is no real separation…. Just what we impose. And, that imposition is just that… “an imposition.” We impose separation. We impose mechanism. We impose parts and wholes, We impose all sorts of labels. But, they are all an imposition to seeing and understanding the reality of our living world.

The same holds true for an athlete. If a basketball player had to think about every move, he or she could not dribble or make a shot, especially in the midst of an intense game. The thinking has to be distributed and borderless.

We also can call this cognition “being present in the moment.”

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Beyond Systems Thinking… Climbing Out of Boxes & Breaking Arrows

For years, I’ve been troubled by my own and others’ representations of systems thinking. I’m a visual thinker. I love diagrams. In fact, I’ve driven my students nuts with complicated diagrams of one thing or another, which make some kind of sense to me, but have usually left my students perplexed at best. Even though I thought these diagrams made some kind of sense to me, they were usually a feeble attempt to represent something that diagrams just couldn’t represent. How do you represent inquiry, systems thinking, pattern thinking, creative thinking, creative thinking, critical thinking, or any kind of thinking, for that matter, with a diagram? In fact, how can you represent any kind of complex set of systems with a diagram? Yes, it is tempting. I have tried. And, I am always left with an uneasiness that just feels dishonest… like I’m lying to myself.

As Nora Bateson* has been discussing recently, the entire concept of “systems” is problematic. Part of the problem is the cumbersome quality of our language and the baggage certain words carry despite the meaning one might attribute to a word. So, while I might have a specific meaning for “system,” no matter what I say or do, the meanings that are commonly associated with this word are going to pop into people’s heads despite what I or anyone else has to say. So, when we think of “systems,” we typically think of mechanical systems, such as a bicycle, or some other system that has been represented as an isolated, mechanical system. Ever since Rene Descartes, we have formalized our relationship to the world around us as that of a mechanical system. The human body was seen as a mechanical system. The biological—ecological world was seen as a mechanical system. This view of the world was very convenient and very powerful. However, this view has brought us to the precipice of environmental collapse, in part because this mechanical systems approach has some rather severe limitations. One of these limitations is that the systems are stuck within themselves and that even though they may operate in cycles, they operate in linear sequences with predictable sets of feedback loops and sets of consequences. Such a “mechanistic” view is very neat and tidy, and incredibly comforting. Everything is predictable, until, of course, it isn’t.

It’s what we call “complex systems” that are characteristic of living systems, there are no neat and tidy sequences of predictable outcomes. At best, there may be a probabilistic set of outcomes, say if you take an antibiotic for a particular infection, but there is no guarantee. And, there are all kinds of other things that can occur of which we have no immediate awareness, such as bacteria encoding their genome against the antibiotic or against a similar antibiotic in anticipation of one as yet to be developed.

As much as we’ve tried to represent ecosystems with boxes and arrows, we’ve never been able to represent the complexity of these systems, which in part is due to the fact that they do not have clear boundaries. In fact, the boundaries are not just the physical boundaries of where the lake ecosystem ends and the forest ecosystem begins (not just because they are integrally interconnected), but also the boundaries with the economy, societies, cultures, industries, agriculture, educational institutions, and all kinds of other human activities. We can’t isolate what we call “systems” into sets of boxes and arrows. Such boxes and arrows cannot capture the complex sets of relationships and their ever-changing dynamics. Such attempts are throw-backs to mechanistic systems.

When I’ve poke around looking at what schools are doing with “systems thinking,” all I find is pages of rubrics and pages of boxes and arrows. At the same time, all of the content is based on very simplistic approaches to “systems thinking” based on closed circuits that are cut off from other relevant “systems.” Our attempts to unclutter and simplify only serve to “stupidify” the whole approach for our children. They deserve better. I think that we as adults assume children cannot handle the complexity, so we try to simplify everything, even under the guise of a more “rigorous systems thinking approach.” But, children can and do think in more complex ways. We just perpetuate the cycle of dumbing down with boxes and arrows. We really need to move “beyond systems thinking” to get at the dynamics of the interactions and relationships that make up our living world.

As Nora and Gregory Bateson have suggested, maybe the arts are keys to ways to represent systems, rather than the mathematical and engineering approaches of boxes and arrows. Maybe we need children to translate their understandings of systems in to plays, poetry, paintings, dance, music, video, photography, sculpture, and so forth. Maybe there are other ways of communicating that can capture the dynamics and uncertainties of the ways living things interact. And, maybe children are the ones who can devise just such ways of communicating.

* Nora Bateson discusses this problem with systems thinking and the representation of systems thinking in two recent papers:

  • Bateson, N. (submitted). Symmathesy: Proposing a new word that refers to living systems.
  • Bateson, N. (2015, August). Living systems are learning systems. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, Berlin.
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Linear Thinking… a Lament

Every time I listen to radio news, read news stories, communicate with people, I am saddened by the intensity of linear (or as Gregory Bateson referred to it, “lineal”) thinking. When I can discuss issues and try to present more complex, non-linear or recursive ways of thinking about problems, I almost always encounter a knee-jerk resistance. I don’t even think most people realize they are doing it. But, it’s as if I’m talking some foreign language that doesn’t even register.

We are living in times during which we are facing huge problems that threaten the future of humanity. We need to think about the issues facing us from multiple perspectives. We can’t just see some problem and think that there is a simple causal factor. The problems are not that simple. They don’t work like mechanical systems. There are complex webs of interactions that contribute to multiple causes and effects. To address these issues in ways that may help create a reasonable future for humanity, we have to be open to all perspectives and we have to do our best to wrestle with the complexities.

I know we are capable of thinking in this way. We have to put aside our own agendas (greed, selfishness, self-absorption, or just nose-to-the-grindstone) and engage in conversations that expose the messiness and complexity of the issues we’re facing. We need to reconnect with one another, with our ecological context, and our biological and social contexts. It’s our only hope…

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Trap of Emotions

We are trapped by our emotions at all levels, from an individual to a nation or multiple nations and cultures. When we respond to events based on our immediate emotional reactions, we have lost all control. Not only have we lost control of ourselves, but we’ve guaranteed cascading sets of events that can spiral out of control. When someone says something nasty to us and we lash out in response, we fuel aggression. When police react to people of color with immediate aggression, they’ve lost control. When a group of people publish a video of a beheading and we respond with violence, we only create further violence, confusion, and suffering.

This cycle of violence isn’t new. We’ve been doing it for as long as we’ve existed. But, we haven’t learned anything from these patterns of violence. When will we learn? Is it already too late? Have we created a world that is spinning out of control?

Responding with aggression is intensely and emotionally seductive. We want so much to get revenge or dominate those who act in ways we don’t like. But, such reactions only show our weakness and inability to act with wisdom and skillfulness.

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Double Binds and Residing in Our Own Traps

I always find thinking about double bind interesting and disturbing. We seem to live in a world of double binds. The more I think about them, the more I find them.

In working with double binds, I find that they bring many assumptions to the surface. We often assume there are certain ways of making sense of and reacting to situations. But, these ways of making sense and reacting are deeply immersed in the assumptions of a wide range of contexts. In order to come up with real, viable solutions to double binds, we have to step up a level where creative solutions are possible. This “stepping up a level” requires that we step away from the assumptions and typical patterns of response and examine critically the assumptions that trap us in these double binds. Unless we are willing to question these assumptions, we’re destined be subjects of our own (and our culture’s) assumptions.

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What If We Valued Questions More Than Answers?

This morning, during my almost daily visit to the local dog park, I was chatting with a homeless guy and his friend, a previously by-choice-homeless guy, who is a house painter, poet, and actor. We usually get into to some fairly deep philosophical discussions as our dogs play or ignore one another. And, today was no different. When I walked into the dog park, I was greeted with, “Hi, Jeff. How are you doing? I need some answers.” My immediate response was that I had no answers, but tons of questions. Well, that was the beginning of a discussion about questions and answers. Our discussion prompted a day of pondering the ideas of questions and answers….

What would our world be like if we valued questions more than answers?

In many circles, people say that questions are important. They are the basis of the social and natural sciences. However, we only value questions in terms of finding the answers. We want answers… one “right” answer for each question. We want a neatly packaged world with answers to all of our questions. Having questions with no answers can be frightening. What happens when we die? Why do we die? Why are we born? What is life? How did everything begin? How can we feel happy? How can we avoid getting sick? These are some of the more pressing questions, but the list of questions is endless. The sciences, philosophy, and most religions have tried to address many of these questions. Those questions that cannot be answered by science are avoided or dismissed and relegated to philosophers, poets, or religions. But, in all cases, we want to construct answers that present a solidified, predictable, and comfortable view of our lives and our worlds. Unfortunately, “things” beyond simple physical systems (interactions of billiard balls without the element of human psychology, planetary motions, etc.) are not solid, predictable, or particularly comfortable.

Valuing questions within a sense of continuous inquisitiveness and uncertainty is more consistent with the nature of our living world. So, what would it be like if all of us valued such a view, where questions and uncertainty were central to the way we lived and interacted?

Would we become less controlled by our basic fears of uncertainty and death?
Would we thrive on curiosity?
Would we become more open to varying experiences, cultures, and individuals?
Would we appreciate diversity and difference?
Would we appreciate the uncertainty and spontaneity of the biological and social worlds in which we live?
Would we be more respectful of our fellow living organisms?
Would we develop our intellectual and emotional abilities unfettered by our desires to solidify what can’t be solidified?
Would our lives be energized by uncertainty and all of the possibilities that such uncertainty provides?
Would our lives become works of art and poetry?
Would science become a way of understanding the uncertainty and lack of predictability of multiple interacting systems?

What are some questions that can continue to stimulate our continued intrigue with our lives, our relationships, our worlds?