---
title: systems
date: 2026-04-06
layout: column.njk
tags: column
permalink: /columns/2026/systems/
---

## Rough Notes
- [Reichenbach](https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2025/entries/reichenbach/)
> "The greatest empiricist of the 20th century!"
- [Boulding?](asdf) - Spaceship Earth, General Systems Theory
- Meta-laws, generalizations, that leap from one discipline to another.
- We group a body of knowledge together under an umbrella of a domain, and in that box, the roots of connection may grow, but we miss the cross-cutting relationships that may have been realized, had we not kept knowledge as a house plant, bundled in a box.
- Teaching the truth vs. teaching a model. Do we confuse the latter for the former, or is it misrepresented from the get-go?


## Questions
- Have we kneecapped ourselves through rigid classification, and artificial specialization?
- Are these contradictions? Discuss:
    - The Composition Law:
        > The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
    - The Decomposition Law:
        > The part is more than a fraction of the whole
    - Are they? If the "part" were less than the fraction of the whole, how could the whole possibly be more than the sum of its parts?
    - But then, all the parts together must be greater than the whole
    - But the whole is greater than the sum of all parts...
    - I say it's flawed to distinguish whole and part. The arithmetic doesn't work out because they're necessarily interconnected.


## Quotes
> The power of reason must be sought \
> not in the rules that reason dictates to our imagination, \
> but in the ability to free ourselves \
> from any kind of rules to which we have been conditioned \
> through experience and tradition
- Reichenbach

## ToDo
- Max Planck Scientific Autobiography