unprompted/Notes/systems.md

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

Rough Notes

• Reichenbach

"The greatest empiricist of the 20th century!"

• Boulding? - 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