Sunday, 10 June 2012 08:29
By Michael A Peters, Truthout | News Analysis
I was convinced from the outset that the global system based on commodity production could not perpetuate itself indefinitely. Since the end of Fordism and the beginning of the information revolution, the system has been working with growing effectiveness towards the destruction of the foundations of its survival.
-Andre Gorz, 1983, "The Roads to Paradise"
What this age demands more than ever is an understanding not simply of systems in natural, social and geopolitical environments and their interrelations, but also the logic of large-scale system-events, their emergence and collapse, and their impacts for humanity. In the economic and political realm, as social scientists, we need to know more about the logic of large-scale events governing system failures, such as the collapse of the Soviet system in 1989 and the collapse of the neoliberal global financial system in 2008. The social sciences have not been good at predicting or analyzing these kinds of events, which demand a better interface between social and natural sciences and their mediation and understanding through new mathematical and computational theories of complex systems, of complexity and chaos, and of the difficulties with formal mathematical modeling and simulation. Complexity theory is a broad term used for a research approach to problems in diverse disciplines (physics, chemistry, molecular biology, meteorology, economics, sociology, psychology and neuroscience) based on nonlinear, nondeterministic systems evolution. Cybernetic, catastrophe, chaos and complexity are forms of thinking that historically have attempted to theorize these phenomena.
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