The
World Is a System
For thousands of years, there
have been various kinds of understandings about the world where we live. The
world may be best presented, however, as a system including cosmology,
geography, society, human beings, thinking mode and so on. Newton’s Law of Universal
Gravitation and Einstein’s Relativity have merely laid a foundation for us to
grasp the essence of the system.
Everything exists in a complex
system consisting of macro-cosmos and micro-cosmos, and there are everlasting
interactions among different systems at various levels. The best realization
comes of a systematic approach.
The intrinsic quality of
substance is ever unvarying; it has neither increased nor reduced. What has
actually been altered is merely its forms: this is the so-called the “law of
conservation of matter”. Matter is bound to be manifested in diversified ways.
Categorization of the world into
academic disciplines have blurred its originality, for no purpose other than
easy understanding. In Ancient Greece, there was no such thing as different
branches of learning except “philosophy”, which was believed to embrace all
human knowledge of the world. Similarly, in China the disciplines did not occur
until “On the Theme of the Six Scholarships” was written by Sima Tan (?—BC.
110) in the Han Dynasty. Knowledge of any kind is, after all, designed and
produced by man, who may fail to reveal the totality of the world. In this way,
scholarship is always vulnerable when confronted with newly revealed truth.
No matter how complicated a human
is as a system, it is a limited one compared with the unlimited world that he
tries to understand. In handling the overwhelming information that human beings
are confronted, highly efficient approaches have thus been developed. In terms
of biological structure and functions, the sensory organs of human beings are
in fact no more developed than other highly evolved creatures, and yet humans
can catch more of the essence of the world, mainly due to their abstract
thinking capacity and their language systems.
What is so-called “prediction” or
“knowing the rest by analogy” is essentially generated by systematic analysis.
Taking chemistry as an example, some gaps in the Periodic Table discovered by
the Russian chemist Mendeleyev predicted several new chemical elements; three
of which were found by other chemists fifteen years later. Similarly, the
theoretical physicist Diac revealed that there were no electronic “bubbles” in
a vacuum during his research into the nature of electrons, and then predicted
that something called positron might exist. In physics, many basic particles
are found by way of repeated experiments based on a symmetrical theory, thus
bridging the gap between the subjective and objective world.
The core of a system is the
structure which determines its nature and functions. Diamond and graphite, for
example, are both solely made of carbons. However, their different arrangements
of carbonaceous atoms result in the hardest and softest substance in the world.
The same principle applies to our perceptual and knowledge systems, where the
same amount of information may cause different effects. In this way, one could
say that learning “parts” sometimes may not be as effective as mastering a
“system” or a “structure”.
A system can be closed or open.
An egg, for instance, could be a closed system when the temperature is even
inside the eggshell. As soon as a hen starts incubating, however, the system is
opening up as her body temperature has been conducted into the egg. The
biological nature of life and its renewal in fact depend on sustainable
exchange of energy between a body and its environment.
Also, there are layers of systems
where a superior one can receive information from an inferior one and vice
versa. “Playing the lute to a cow” (meaning appealing to an unappreciated
audience), for instance, receives no response since the receptive code in a
cow’s nervous system is inferior than the music code in humans, which can
transmit and receive complicated signals with its sophisticated linguistic
system.
Really, the world is not so much
flat, as it is a multilevel, multi-dimensional open system. |
/1 
