I think that reality as we experience it is a construct. We are experiencing an interevolution of mind and matter. Sometimes loosening the categories can be informative.

I wouldn't do it. I don't even like being 'plugged in' to my phone....

This article may be of interest, hippocampal neurogensis and memory:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.12920

As long as it's the right strain with some coffee it puts my focus through the roof, reading and writing.

Agreed, sounds like stoner talk to me. Thats that thing that people do when they like something and so create a bunch of culture and ritual and bullshit about it. — DingoJones

Mannheim would say that you can't create culture, rather it emerges spontaneously from its milieu.

Not that I believe in any of that bullshit.

When I read especially difficult material (right now I'm working on Dilthey) I prefer just a touch of caffeine and cannabis. It is less like reading and more like being subsumed in the flow of ideas.

That doesn't answer my question about "organization systems theory"?

Yes, I'm pretty well-acquainted with the various applications of systems theory at this point. Just wondering about this OST. I suspect the poster is just referring to the application of systems theory to organizational theory.

I am unable to find any articles specifically about "Organization Systems Theory"?

As it happens, I'm currently 3 books into studying general systems theory and systems philosophy, therefore interested in the topic.

Maybe because your proposition seems to be substantive, but isn't, as it is open-ended. Either A is true, or not-A is true. But not-A could be B, or C, or D, or E.... Not being the result of intelligent design could actually be any number of interesting things.....

Who knows who is really happy? Some people make it their business just to be nice to others, and when someone is nice to me, that generally makes me feel happy. I suspect the people who make an effort to be nice are the ones who are happiest overall.

It seems self-evident to me that a decision by a Substitute Decision Maker is not literally equivalent in this case. i.e. Authorization by an SDM is "euthanasia" not "suicide". As the thread title reads "suicide" I think the case is misplaced here. Suicide is arguably self-determination.

No, was just referring to the gender-identification itself.

That shouldn't be controversial. While parents make many decisions for their children, we do not allow them to decide to give their child body modifications such as putting horns in their head or tattooing something over their entire skull/face/neck. So there are already some things that people are allowed to decide for themselves, as consenting adults, that we do not allow parents to decide for their children. — Terrapin Station

And yet we do allow parents to saddle a child with gender neutrality at birth....

"Unity through diversity" is one of the core concepts of Systems Philosophy as coined by Laszlo around 1970. It also matches your embedded micro/macro-cosms model.

But I agree that 'domains of discourse' (perspectives) can be useful for the larger picture of philosophy with the proviso that those domains are not mutually exclusive — fresco

Actually that is the main point of SP - the fact that there are structural isomorphisms between systems of different types itself represents a connection between apparently disparate domains.

Systems philosophy proposes a completely different solution, biperspectivism, in which the mechanical (reductionist) perspective is appropriate from the external-scientific viewpoint, but cognitive descriptions are appropriate for the internal/introspective perspective.

Yes, I spent much of the early nineties immersed in cybernetics and wrote a fairly long piece (60 pages) on personality cybernetics. I posted an annotation in 2001 annotation on the Principia Cybernetica regarding a systemic model of evolution.

Stoicism is about limiting your expectations, not controlling your passions I think.

"Introduction to Systems Philosophy" Ervin Laszlo - just finished
"General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications" Ludwig von Bertalanffy - just started

Well...in general, we comprehend what is outside our perceptual scale via intellectual intuition. Consider the apparent retrograde motion of the planets. If you study a model of the solar system closely (especially a dynamic one), then imagine yourself on earth and looking at Mars, for example, suddenly the retrograde motion becomes evident for what it is, a larger slower orbit around a common gravitational centre. So you could say that knowledge is the lens whereby we see the really small and the really big....

I'm just finishing Laszlo's "Introduction to Systems Philosophy" which is probably the seminal work in the field. I have to say, it stands the test of time. His reconciliation of mechanistic causation with freedom is only a couple of pages long and it is...impressive.

Ethics in the sense in which it is normally used equates with "Normative Ethics" which simply put translates as "what people ought to do."

So if something is unethical, it is unethical with respect to a certain set of rules or norms, either what people actually do do (the domain of descriptive ethics) or some hypothesized universal value (greatest happiness for the greatest number; good in and of itself; etc.)

"I am the eye in the sky, looking at you
I can read your mind"

Yes, when I studied programming a few years back, I began suddenly to incorporate programming concepts (interfaces, classes, etc) into both my real-world activities and my philosophical undertakings. For me this demonstrates pretty conclusively that we have to apply ourselves seriously to working in a conceptual framework in order to be able to think and perceive in those terms.

Take the human sciences. It's pretty clear that psycho-social entities have a real ontological status, and that they don't reduce merely to brain functions. 'Mind' is a real set of phenomena. It makes no more sense to reduce mind to brain than it does to try to analyze organic chemistry using classical physics, it's an emergent class.

Moreover, if you do do a lot of reading in psychology and sociology, then you begin to build up a conceptual vocabulary and then the reality of the mental-phenomena begins to take shape. If you just try to ignore the whole mental landscape with a reductionist gloss, then you never get to see it....

Kind of a biased selection with a lot of stuff wadded into "Other"....

"It is the beauty of systems theory that it is psychophysically
neutral , that is, its concepts and models can be applied to both
material and nonmaterial phenomena." von Bertalanffy, Robots, Men and Minds

This is what I particularly like about the systems approach. It avoids the mind/matter problem.

Jeremy Bentham, "Panopticon"

Since the self is uniquely available to introspection, introspection is, at minimum, a valid avenue of knowledge about the self. However just the act of introspecting does not constitute knowledge any more than does the act of observing. Additional criteria of knowledge still apply.

Yes, it is about seeing the universe as a conglomeration of systems, basically.

Cybernetics is a good practical introduction. Systems philosophy is like a generalized theory of cybernesis.

One thing is clear: memories are in the brain. They disappear from injury and disease. So if you're right that consciousness survives death of the body, it has no memories. Since it has no sensory organs, it can't see or hear either. Sounds scary. — Relativist

Maybe not so clear. Consciousness is a feature of a complex system, not just the human brain, or body, but the entire environment within which consciousness operates. This is a theory known as distributed cognition, or embedded cognition. Studies have been done to quantify this. Additionally, physical systems themselves are 'mnemonic' in that they are current presentations of historical events. Michael Leyton's book 'Symmetry, Causality, and Mind' explores this concept in detail.

And the social contract is just the way social relations are conducted, and nation states with various forms of government are one form it can take, and Bitcoin is another — unenlightened

Absolutely. The contract is between individuals. The reason individuals enter into such a contract is that many people collectively are capable of much more than they would be as individuals, so it is in everyone's mutual benefit. That's the nature of a contract: there must be benefit on both sides.

I think it is innate human greed that is the enemy of social progress. Hopefully a new more socially conscious collective awareness is emerging that will defeat this primitive instinct.

I honestly suspect that taking the Social Contract to its logical conclusion will eventually result in something like the end goals of Communism. — thewonder

In principle, that sounds fine. I don't know if it is something we can just sit back and wait to happen though.... :)

Yes, I use the term more as a gloss, as you say, for the actual state of affairs. But I like to think that, at its heart, there must be some sort of mutually beneficial ("contractual") state.

So what does it take to mobilize the collective will? Look at D Trump or R Ford - demagogues don't work. We need to start with better education.

I think your intuitions are accurate in the larger sense - i.e. absolute zero - which would be the absence of all motion - has been proven to be theoretically unreachable fairly recently.

Big Peirce fan. Thanks for the tip!

Yes, we can resist our inclinations and go against them but it's an uphill battle. Moreover this is strong evidence that we didn't choose our preferences at all. — TheMadFool

Then what is doing the resisting? What is resisting what?

Well, offering assistance to someone in need is essentially demonstrating empathy, so, yes I'd have to say it is empathetic. And I think if everyone did just a little, it would amount to a lot! :)