A new dialogue with our human nature

This passage Fritjof Capra’s 1997 feels book relevant to our time. 

“ A NEW DIALOGUE WITH NATURE

The conceptual shift implied in Prigogine's theory involves several closely interrelated idcas. The description of dissipative structures that exist far from equilibrium requires a nonlinear mathematical formal-ism, capable of modelling multiple interlinked feedback loops. In living organisms, these are catalytic loops (i.c. nonlinear, irreversible chemical processes) which lead to instabilities through repeated self-amplifying feedback. When a dissipative structure reaches such a point of insta bility, called bifurcation point, an element of indeterminacy enters into the theory. At the bifurcation point the system's behaviour is inherently unpredictable. In particular, new structures of higher order and complexity may emerge spontaneously. Thus self-organization, the spontaneous emergence of order, results from the combined effects of non-equilibrium, irreversibility, feedback loops, and instability.

The radical nature of Prigogine's vision is apparent from the fact that these fundamental ideas were rarely addressed in traditional science and were often given negative connotations. This is evident in the very language used to express them. Nonequilibrium, nonlinearity, instability, indeterminacy, etc., are all negative formulations. Prigogine believes that the conceptual shift implied by his theory of dissipative structures is not only crucial for scientists to understand the nature of life but will also help us to integrate ourselves more fully into nature.

Many of the key characteristics of dissipative structures - the sensitivity to small changes in the environment, the relevance of previous history at critical points of choice, the uncertainty and unpredictability of the future - are revolutionary new concepts from the point of view of classical science, but are an integral part of human experience. Since dissipative structures are the basic structures of all living systems, including human beings, this should perhaps not come as a great surprise.

Instead of being a machine, nature at large turns out to be more like human nature - unpredictable, sensitive to the surrounding world, influenced by small fluctuations. Accordingly, the appropriate way of approaching nature to learn about her complexity and beauty is not through domination and control but through respect, cooperation, and dialogue. Indeed, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers gave their popular book, Order out of Chaos, the subtitle 'Man's New Dialogue with Nature'

In the deterministic world of Newton, there is no history and no creativity. In the living world of dissipative structures, history plays an important role, the future is uncertain, and this uncertainty is at the heart of creativity. "Today, Prigogine reflects, "the world we see outside and the world we see within are converging. This convergence of two worlds is perhaps one of the important cultural events of our age.”

And the last page of the book:

“ In ecosystems, the role of diversity is closely connected with the system's network structure. A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself, because other links in the network can at least partially fulfil the function of the destroyed species. In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.

In ecosystems, the complexity of the network is a consequence of its biodiversity, and thus a diverse cological community is a resilient community. In human communities, ethnic and cultural diversity may play the same role. Diversity means many different relationships, many different approaches to the same problem. A diverse community is a resilient community, capable of adapting to changing situations.

However, diversity is a strategic advantage only if there is a truly vibrant community, sustained by a web of relationships. If the community is fragmented into isolated groups and individuals, diversity can easily become a source of prejudice and friction. But if the community is aware of the interdependence of all its members, diversity will enrich all the relationships and thus enrich the community as a whole, as well as each individual member. In such a community information and ideas flow freely through the entire network, and the diversity of interpretations and learning styles - even the diversity of mistakes - will enrich the entire community.

These, then, are some of the basic principles of ecology - interdepen-dence, recycling, partnership, flexibility, diversity, and, as a consequence of all those, sustainability. As our century comes to a close and we go towards the beginning of a new millennium, the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy, on our ability to understand these principles of ecology and live accordingly.”

A path forward for living laboratories

The following ideas are drawn from my rough draft notes for a research white paper I’m writing at the moment based on my articles since 2007. The paper is intended to be a survey and my reflections of some of the emerging ideas and ages old wisdom born from our community of practice over the last 35-50 or so years, and how we can improve the creations and contributions many of us are making to serving and evolution of capital markets, economic development, business systems, ecological management, regenerative agriculture, circular economy, impact investing, restoration and reconciliation, etc. and all the various approaches you can imagine to find better ways forward:

There is an imperative for a new paradigm that goes beyond sustainable development, one that involves a collective vision for redesigning our civilization, drawing inspiration from nature through biomimicry. At the heart of this transformation is working within planetary boundaries and embracing a city to city, citizen to citizen cooperative community of practice within a larger bioregional framework, which takes into account local community efforts and nature's context of each bioregion from which cities operate. For example Mediterranean cities (or leaders within cities residing in Mediterranean climates in one of the four bioregions of that template) can cooperate with each other since they face very similar conditions of climate and the challenges of those unique environments.

To fulfill the grand aspirations of regenerative development and economic transformation, it is essential to establish guiding principles for future inquiry and create contexts that are resilient and adaptable. Adopting a localized approach to development and financing allows for improved coordination and tailors solutions to the needs of specific communities. There needs to be a new era of cooperation emerging, benefited from the technosphere, the conscious cultivation of communities across the planet harnessing the relational bonds that can now be formed on the ubiquitous tools of communication, videoconferencing, peer learning, cooperative tools, and of course AI.

Yet to underwrite the evolutionary cooperation, a hallmark of the emerging symbiocene, we need resources. The eight types of capital of which money is one.

We must transcend the logic of the global casino, toward a culture of care, place by place, culture by culture, people to people. This new ethos provides a new responsibility, and role of care for us to steward the collective through the conceptual emergency, as if on boats navigating the treacherous narrows, we require deft leaders, systems leaders, operating from the full responsibility that we must care equally for the future and current generations, based on the science of ecological principles, evolutionary systems thinking, and multidisciplinary ways of developing pathways for resilience. Cooperation is the way we got this far, so we have to partner together and cooperate in new and innovative ways for a win win society. A as we know from the scholarship that has revealed deeper reflections on Darwin's thinking, that cooperative systems to increase survival as organisms learned over the eons working together gets us a lot farther than working apart. From the intergenerational wisdom such as the golden rule, we must also listen to life's principles through biomimicry and symbiosis of self organizing living ecosystems as our guide. These ideas,  tested nearly 4 billion years of life on earth, can be patterns and behaviors of groups of organisms,can help us see new ways to approach civilization design, for example for us to create a curricula for biomimimicry of living systems for human settlements, land use and urban rural landscape regeneration. By integrating scenarios for opportunities emerging from the chaos of this time, we harness our collective intelligence to cocreatively architect and invest in the better futures with new ways to relate and design systems change through creating bioregional regeneration and economic development innovation communities of practice and peer to peer learning living laboratories inspired and grown in cooperation with systems for all ages designed for creating better outcomes which will improve life for communities and the homes for our families and for the future generations in our hometowns, cities states and countries, in all places. To create beauty which inspires and touches the Iives of people and places hundreds of years, if not thousands of years into the future. We must design new ways to steward our heritage, our wealth, as fiduciaries, for the collective inheritance with a full recognition of the incalculable value of the very life support systems here on earth which have enabled this human experiment. 

By reevaluating the notion of value, and risk, and growth, we can develop a new Modern Portfolio Theory, for the entire portfolio of a place, a country, city, bioregion, family, or neighborhood. We must look at the totality of the treasures we carry and cultivate wealth from. This must be crafted for the 21st century, not the 20th, from which most of us learned our now calcified worldview. We must upgrade our thinking, our mental model. There is a new paradigm needed, as I stated at the beginning of this article. And if money makes the world go round, we must at least redesign innovations in the way we see, use and especially manage money to unlock the true wealth in systems all around us. A caterpillar must use all of it's gifts to become the butterfly. In more conventional terms based on the context of today's capital markets, we must start by integrating impact investing with economic development through a shift in approach. 

This new perspective should embody regeneration, nurturing ecosystems and communities, and creating ‘living laboratories’ for testing and applying innovative development frameworks. Fiduciary responsibility should extend far beyond financial capital to encompass all eight types of capital, reflecting a holistic and long-term view of wealth and well-being. Offering these insights and tools as a public utility, instead of for private gain, and empowering sovereign communities for a new type of stewardship of our collective inheritance of the true wealth.

The fusion of new mindsets and cooperation and cross pollination between groups is essential in integrating impact investing with economic development in bioregions, through an approach that is deeply rooted in living systems and listening to the ways that plants and animals have organized communities over eons, and ways that humans have cooperated with nature's processes to work in symbiosis with the web of life from which we are born. 

Such systems should embrace complexity, foster connectivity, promote diversity, cultivate resilience, be grounded in place, regenerative in nature, community-led, and holistic in approach. This is seamlessly linked to the new paradigm of living systems for capital markets, which posits that economic development and traditional finance must evolve synergistically, with principles from living systems integrated into finance to bolster a resilient and sustainable future. 

Were we to allow finance to simply evolve to serve the 21st century needs for what I feel are the 5 R's relationship, resilience, regeneration, reconciliation, and reverence, in partnership with the community of all life. This would turn finance into a better tool in service to our humanity, to meet the needs of current and future generations at the same time, by simply waking up out of our dream of separation from life into seeing our belonging, each of us in community with the whole of humanity and our massive inheritance of the bounty of earth.

The bioregional economic, capital markets and financial systems being developed by many groups across the world hold promise to create flourishing new and innovative ways to play well together for our economies, our families,  our communities, and our ecosystem of plant and animal neighbors across the planet. This reorientation of mindset is necessary for us to vision the future in ways that help us manifest the future by expanding our imaginal capacity for better futures. And those of us seeing new and better ways can get more done together by symbiotic cooperation to accelerate the adoption of the solutions, helping every city and share the gists of our success through building on the term “the future is already here, just not widely distributed” - so we help distribute better ways for people to gather and create new ways forward for improving quality of life.

Since we are in the midst of a crisis of perception in this tenuous time, we can see we are in some form of a conceptual emergency. Since our institutions based on old thinking have reached their limit of functionality, and imaginal capabilities,  we must transmute the body of our bureaucracy born of obsolete thinking, into the new mutually beneficial way forward in the process of transmutation, like making lemonade out of lemons. Or in a similar manner that a caterpillar recreates herself into the butterfly, through transmutation, shapeshifting.

Since there is nothing in our cultural history that has adequately prepared us for the evolutionary challenges we now face. We must realize that for institutional transformation the solution calls on all of us to find new and innovative ways of developing clear and coherent thinking together in our cultures, we must shift our perspective to find the way to achieve getting out of the box, if the instructions for how to get out of the box are written outside the box. Simply we must contemplate new ways to adapt our mindset, literally rewire our worldview to see what is and how to get to next. The wisdom traditions and personal development schools of practice over generations have created the tools of self cultivation for moving from survival to thrival, and peace of mind with our relationships with the community all around us.

This transformation for new placemaking and and systems design for technological and cultural evolution and requires creating design systems for developing and tracking the emerging successes, and deploying them to communities across the network of networks in the bioregions across the world, and help diffuse the innovations in the living laboratories in cities across the world. We did a talk at SOCAP in 2016 called building an economic ecosystem like 3D Chess, local regional and systemic, coordinating a network of networks, decentralization of a network of nodes in thousands of cities all open sourcing their best ideas and projects into manifestations, and thus fueling the evolution, local regional and systemic simultaneous transformations, where many-to-many relationships and market design are nurtured through collective intelligence and co-creation, resulting  in an omnicentric landscape that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all elements and all living beings. 

This essay is a synthesis of what we learned in our efforts over the last 15 years, and in particular the project I led with the City of San Francisco in 2013-2014 expressed in this May 2014 article "Communities Co-Evolving Toward Reslience" 

And if you have gotten this far the following is the version edited by AI from the above language comparing both in conversations would be really interesting :

A new paradigm is imperative—one that transcends sustainable development and envisions the redesign of our civilization through biomimicry, drawing inspiration from nature’s intelligence. At the core of this transformation lies an approach that respects planetary boundaries, fostering a cooperative network of cities and citizens within a bioregional framework. This model acknowledges the local context and ecological nuances of each bioregion, enabling cities within similar climates—such as Mediterranean urban centers—to collaborate in addressing shared environmental and social challenges.

To realize the ambitious vision of regenerative development and economic transformation, we must establish guiding principles that encourage resilience and adaptability. A localized approach to development and finance strengthens coordination and allows for tailored solutions that meet specific community needs. We are entering a new era of cooperation, one that leverages the technosphere—the interconnected digital realm—to cultivate communities of practice across the planet. Through ubiquitous tools such as communication networks, videoconferencing, peer learning platforms, cooperative systems, and AI, we can strengthen these relational bonds and accelerate collective progress.

Yet, to support this evolutionary cooperation—the hallmark of the emerging Symbiocene—we must harness diverse forms of capital, of which money is only one. We must move beyond the logic of the global casino toward a culture of care, one that is place-based, people-centered, and deeply interwoven with the fabric of nature. This shift requires us to embrace a new ethos of responsibility and stewardship, recognizing that our collective navigation through this conceptual emergency demands deft leadership. Like sailors traversing treacherous waters, we need systemic thinkers who can operate with a full sense of responsibility—ensuring the well-being of both current and future generations. This must be grounded in ecological principles, evolutionary systems thinking, and interdisciplinary approaches to resilience.

Cooperation has been humanity’s most enduring survival strategy. Emerging scholarship on Darwin’s work reveals that collaboration, not competition, has been the driver of thriving ecosystems and successful civilizations. The intergenerational wisdom embedded in principles like the Golden Rule must be coupled with insights from biomimicry—learning from self-organizing ecosystems to guide our economic and social structures. Nature’s four-billion-year legacy of adaptation provides us with profound lessons in systems design, inspiring new models for human settlements, land use, and urban-rural landscape regeneration.

By embracing the opportunities hidden within today’s chaos, we can harness collective intelligence to co-create regenerative bioregional economies. Investing in living laboratories and innovation hubs enables us to develop and refine systemic solutions in partnership with communities of all ages. These ecosystems of practice can drive sustainable economic development, enhance local livelihoods, and ensure that our cities and homelands remain viable for generations to come. Our responsibility is not only to design functional societies but to cultivate beauty that inspires and enriches lives for centuries—if not millennia—into the future.

To steward our shared inheritance, we must reevaluate our understanding of value, risk, and growth. The traditional portfolio management mindset must evolve into a new Modern Portfolio Theory—one that encompasses the full wealth of a place, whether a city, bioregion, family, or neighborhood. Our current economic models are relics of the 20th century; we must upgrade our mental frameworks to meet the demands of the 21st. If money is the engine that drives our global systems, then we must fundamentally redesign its management to unlock the deeper, more enduring wealth embedded in living systems.

Just as a caterpillar must leverage all its inherent resources to become a butterfly, so too must we integrate impact investing with economic development through a paradigm shift. This shift must embrace regeneration, not mere sustainability—nurturing ecosystems, strengthening communities, and fostering innovation through living laboratories that experiment with new development frameworks. Fiduciary responsibility must extend beyond financial capital to recognize all eight types of capital, reflecting a more holistic, long-term perspective on wealth and well-being.

Rather than hoarding insights for private gain, these tools and frameworks should be shared as a public utility, empowering sovereign communities to steward their collective inheritance. The fusion of new mindsets with cooperative, cross-disciplinary engagement is crucial for integrating impact investing with bioregional economic development. By observing how plants, animals, and indigenous cultures have harmonized with nature over millennia, we can design financial and social systems that align with the principles of living systems.

Such an approach must embrace complexity, foster connectivity, promote diversity, and cultivate resilience. It should be grounded in place, community-led, and regenerative by nature. This aligns seamlessly with the emerging paradigm of living-systems finance—where economic development and capital markets evolve in harmony, incorporating principles of ecological resilience into financial models to ensure a thriving, sustainable future.

If finance is to serve the needs of both current and future generations, we must reorient it around what I call the Five R’s: Relationship, Resilience, Regeneration, Reconciliation, and Reverence. This shift requires waking up from the illusion of separation—seeing ourselves as part of an interconnected web of life rather than as isolated economic agents. We must recognize our belonging, both to humanity and to the Earth’s abundant ecosystems.

Bioregional capital markets, already in development by forward-thinking groups around the world, hold the promise of creating flourishing, cooperative economies that support both human and ecological well-being. This transformation begins with a shift in perception. By expanding our collective imagination, we can manifest more regenerative futures—distributing innovative solutions across cities and bioregions, accelerating the adoption of best practices, and ensuring that no community is left behind.

As we stand at the precipice of a conceptual emergency, we must recognize that many of our institutions—built on outdated paradigms—have reached the limits of their functionality. Our bureaucratic structures, born of obsolete thinking, must be transmuted into systems that foster cooperation, resilience, and shared prosperity. Just as a caterpillar undergoes metamorphosis to become a butterfly, our societal institutions must evolve through transformative adaptation.

History has not adequately prepared us for the evolutionary challenges we now face. Institutional transformation requires not just new policies, but a fundamental shift in mindset. We must think beyond the frameworks that have shaped our current crises, recognizing that the solutions lie outside of the cognitive box we have inherited. As wisdom traditions and personal development schools have long taught, self-cultivation is key to transcending survival-based thinking and moving toward a thriving, interconnected future.

The design of new systems for technological and cultural evolution requires mechanisms for tracking success, refining innovations, and scaling them across global networks. This demands an intentional approach—one that fosters decentralized networks of cooperation, enabling thousands of cities to open-source their best ideas and projects. By coordinating at local, regional, and systemic levels, we can foster an “omnicentric” landscape where all elements are interwoven in a dynamic, co-creative process.

The time has come to recognize that a better future is already within reach—it simply has not yet been widely distributed. By embracing cooperative innovation, investing in systems of shared learning, and fostering the cultural conditions for widespread transformation, we can ensure that finance, economic development, and community resilience evolve in service of a flourishing planet.

Let us rise to the challenge, embracing the wisdom of nature and the intelligence of cooperation to co-create a more regenerative, equitable, and thriving world.

Expanding Our Perceptual Range: A Systems View of Life, Economy, and Consciousness

 Thank you AI:

“ Expanding Our Perceptual Range: A Systems View of Life, Economy, and Consciousness

In the face of mounting global challenges, from climate change to social inequality, it is becoming increasingly clear that our current economic and social paradigms are inadequate. To address these issues, we must fundamentally transform our understanding of life, economy, and consciousness itself. Drawing on decades of research and insight from systems thinking, ecology, physics, and economics, we propose a new framework for perceiving and interacting with our world.

The Limits of Our Current Perception

Our civilization has long operated under a mechanistic worldview, seeing the universe as a collection of separate parts rather than an interconnected whole. This perspective, rooted in Cartesian dualism and Newtonian physics, has led to reductionist approaches in science, economics, and governance. As Fritjof Capra notes, “The major problems of our time cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.”

Hazel Henderson aptly observes that “the humanoid is a perceiving/differentiating device of limited range inevitably distorts the visioning of the totality.” This limitation in our perceptual apparatus has profound implications for how we understand and interact with the world around us. Our tendency to categorize, separate, and reduce complex phenomena into simpler components has allowed for significant technological progress, but it has also blinded us to the intricate web of relationships that sustain life on Earth.

The Systems View of Life

To transcend these limitations, we must adopt what Capra and Luisi call “the systems view of life.” This perspective recognizes that living systems are inherently interconnected, self-organizing, and emergent. As Buckminster Fuller reminds us, “Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system’s separate parts.”

This systems view extends beyond biology to encompass social, economic, and ecological realms. It reveals that the challenges we face are not isolated problems but symptoms of a larger crisis in perception and values. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and economic inequality are all interconnected manifestations of our failure to recognize the fundamental interdependence of all life.

Rethinking Economics and Wealth

Our current economic models, fixated on quantitative growth and monetary metrics like GDP, fail to capture the true wealth and well-being of societies. As Gregory Wendt points out, “We need to recognize these blind spots in our current way of doing business. Once we do so, we can reshape the current model by incorporating these values and ways of seeing the world.”

Hazel Henderson’s work on redefining progress and wealth has been instrumental in this regard. She argues for a more comprehensive understanding of economics that includes the “love economy” of unpaid work, the value of natural capital, and the importance of social and ecological well-being. This expanded view of wealth aligns with Riane Eisler’s concept of a “caring economy” that values nurturing, empathy, and collaboration.

Qualitative Growth and the New Prosperity

Capra and Henderson’s concept of “qualitative growth” offers a crucial reframing of economic development. Unlike unlimited quantitative growth, which is unsustainable on a finite planet, qualitative growth focuses on development that enhances the quality of life without necessarily increasing material consumption. This aligns with what Tim Jackson calls “prosperity without growth” – a vision of human flourishing that doesn’t rely on ever-increasing GDP.

As Buckminster Fuller presciently stated, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” This requires us to design economic systems that mimic the cyclical, regenerative processes of nature. Concepts like the circular economy and regenerative agriculture are steps in this direction, but they must be part of a broader shift in how we conceive of progress and development.

Expanding Consciousness and Perception

To implement these new models, we must expand our individual and collective consciousness. This involves not just intellectual understanding but a profound shift in how we perceive and experience reality. As Henderson suggests, we need to “write the observer back into the equation” – recognizing that our consciousness shapes the world we perceive and interact with.

Fuller’s concept of “Spaceship Earth” provides a powerful metaphor for this expanded awareness. By seeing our planet as an integrated, finite system of which we are all crew members, we can begin to grasp the true nature of our interdependence and shared responsibility.

This expansion of consciousness has practical implications for decision-making in business, government, and civil society. It calls for what Capra terms “ecoliteracy” – a deep understanding of the principles of ecology and systems thinking applied to social organization.

Technology and Collective Intelligence

Emerging technologies, particularly in the realms of artificial intelligence and global communication networks, offer unprecedented tools for expanding our perceptual range. As Wendt suggests, we must ask, “How does the tool of AI harness the collective wisdom of our human, the noosphere, to create futures which enable our planetary species to evolve far beyond the implicit cognitive limitations of our human conditioning?”

These technologies, when aligned with systems thinking and ecological awareness, can help us visualize and manage complex global systems in real-time. They can facilitate new forms of participatory democracy, collaborative problem-solving, and collective intelligence that transcend traditional boundaries of nation-states and disciplines.

A New Story for Humanity

Ultimately, what we are proposing is a new story for humanity – one that recognizes our fundamental interconnectedness with all of life and our potential for conscious evolution. As Thomas Berry put it, we need a new “story of the universe” that provides a meaningful context for our existence and guides our actions toward a sustainable and flourishing future.

This new narrative must integrate the insights of modern science with the wisdom of indigenous cultures and spiritual traditions. It must bridge the artificial divide between the material and the spiritual, recognizing, as Fuller did, that “Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two.”

Conclusion: Toward a Planetary Civilization

The transformation we are calling for is nothing less than the birth of a new planetary civilization – one that operates in harmony with Earth’s ecosystems and realizes the full potential of human consciousness. This vision, while ambitious, is not utopian. It is grounded in our growing scientific understanding of living systems and the creative potential of human collaboration.

As we face the converging crises of the 21st century, we have the opportunity to make a evolutionary leap in our collective development. By expanding our perceptual range, rethinking our economic systems, and cultivating a deeper awareness of our interdependence, we can co-create a future of shared prosperity and ecological harmony.

The path forward requires us to embrace complexity, cultivate empathy, and develop new forms of governance and economic organization that reflect the true nature of living systems. It calls for a revolution in consciousness as profound as any scientific or technological revolution in human history.

In the words of Buckminster Fuller, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” The choice is ours, and the time for action is now. By expanding our perception and reimagining our relationship with each other and the living Earth, we can navigate the challenges ahead and realize our potential as conscious agents of evolution.”

Systems View of Life Book Article

This is a 2014 review from Resurgence Magazine https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4162-the-systems-view-of-life.html

Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi explain how their new book captures a different understanding of how life works. The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi is published by Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN: 9781107011366.

The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities, designed in such a way that their ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures, and technologies respect, honour, and cooperate with Nature’s inherent ability to sustain life. The first step in this endeavour, naturally, must be to understand how Nature sustains life. It turns out that this involves a whole new conception of life. Indeed, such a new conception has emerged over the last 30 years.

In our new book, The Systems View of Life, we integrate the ideas, models, and theories underlying this new understanding of life into a single coherent framework. We call it “the systems view of life” because it involves a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context – which is known as “systems thinking”, or “systemic thinking”. We offer a multidisciplinary textbook that integrates four dimensions of life: the biological, cognitive, social, and ecological dimensions; and we discuss the philosophical, social, and political implications of this unifying vision.

Taking a broad sweep through history and across scientific disciplines, beginning with the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, we chronicle the evolution of Cartesian mechanism from the 17th to the 20th centuries, the rise of systems thinking in the 1930s and 1940s, the revolutionary paradigm shift in 20th-century physics, and the development of complexity theory (technically known as nonlinear dynamics), which raised systems thinking to an entirely new level.

During the past 30 years, the strong interest in complex, nonlinear phenomena has generated a whole series of new and powerful theories that have dramatically increased our understanding of many key characteristics of life. Our synthesis of these theories, which takes up the central part of our book, is what we refer to as the systems view of life. In this article, we can present only a few highlights.

One of the most important insights of the systemic understanding of life is the recognition that networks are the basic pattern of organisation of all living systems. Wherever we see life, we see networks. Indeed, at the very heart of the change of paradigms from the mechanistic to the systemic view of life we find a fundamental change of metaphors: from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network.

Closer examination of these living networks has shown that their key characteristic is that they are self-generating. Technically, this is known as the theory of autopoiesis, developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis means “self-making”. Living networks continually create, or recreate themselves by transforming or replacing their components. In this way they undergo continual structural changes while preserving their web-like patterns of organisation. This coexistence of stability and change is indeed one of the key characteristics of life.

In our synthesis, we extend the conception of living networks from biological to social networks, which are networks of communications; and we discuss the implications of the paradigm shift from the machine to the network for two specific fields: management and health care.

One of the most rewarding features of the systems view of life is the new understanding of evolution it implies. Rather than seeing evolution as the result of only random mutations and natural selection, we are beginning to recognise the creative unfolding of life in forms of ever-increasing diversity and complexity as an inherent characteristic of all living systems. We are also realising that the roots of biological life reach deep into the non-living world, into the physics and chemistry of membrane-bounded bubbles — proto cells that were involved in a process of “prebiotic” evolution until the first living cells emerged from them.

One of the most important philosophical implications of the new systemic understanding of life is a novel conception of mind and consciousness, which finally overcomes the Cartesian division between mind and matter. Following Descartes, scientists and philosophers for more than 300 years continued to think of the mind as an intangible entity (res cogitans) and were unable to imagine how this “thinking thing” is related to the body. The decisive advance of the systems view of life has been to abandon the Cartesian view of mind as a thing, and to realise that mind and consciousness are not things but processes.

This novel concept of mind is known today as the Santiago theory of cognition, also developed by Maturana and Varela at the University of Chile in Santiago. The central insight of the Santiago theory is the identification of cognition, the process of knowing, with the process of life. Cognition is the activity involved in the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living networks. Thus life and cognition are inseparably connected. Cognition is immanent in matter at all levels of life.

The Santiago theory of cognition is the first scientific theory that overcomes the Cartesian division of mind and matter. Mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories, but can be seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life: process and structure. At all levels of life, mind and matter, process and structure, are inseparably connected.

Cognition, as understood in the Santiago theory, is associated with all levels of life and is thus a much broader phenomenon than consciousness. Consciousness – that is, conscious, lived experience – is a special kind of cognitive process that unfolds at certain levels of cognitive complexity that require a brain and a higher nervous system. The central characteristic of this special cognitive process is self-awareness. In our book, we review several recent systemic theories of consciousness in some detail.

Our discussion also includes the spiritual dimension of consciousness. We find that the essence of spiritual experience is fully consistent with the systems view of life. When we look at the world around us, whether within the context of science or of spiritual practice, we find that we are not thrown into chaos and randomness but are part of a great order, a grand symphony of life. We share not only life’s molecules, but also its basic principles of organisation with the rest of the living world. Indeed, we belong to the universe, and this experience of belonging makes our lives profoundly meaningful.

In the last part of our book, titled Sustaining the Web of Life, we discuss the critical importance of the systems view of life for dealing with the problems of our multi-faceted global crisis. It is now becoming more and more evident that the major problems of our time – energy, environment, climate change, poverty – cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are all interconnected and interdependent, and require corresponding systemic solutions.

We review a variety of already existing solutions, based on systems thinking and the principles of ecodesign. These solutions would solve not only the urgent problem of climate change, but also many of our other global problems – degradation of the environment, food insecurity, poverty, unemployment, and others. Together, these solutions present compelling evidence that the systemic understanding of life has already given us the knowledge and the technologies to build a sustainable future.

Fritjof Capra, physicist and systems theorist, has been engaged in a systematic examination of the philosophical and social implications of contemporary science for the past 35 years. Pier Luigi Luisi is Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Rome. His main research focuses on the experimental, theoretical, and philosophical aspects of the origins of life