2016-05-18

May 18 is the thirty-sixth meeting for Systems Thinking Ontario. The registration is on Eventbrite.

Anticipatory Systems Theory, and Thinking Ahead

What is life, and how are living systems different from non-living material systems?  How do living organisms anticipate their environment?  These were questions explored by theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, best known for his work on complexity science and pioneering anticipatory systems in the 1960s through the 1990s.  Rosen served as president of the Society for General Systems Research (now known as the ISSS) in 1980-1981.  His work was to become foundational to the new field of resilience science, and his work on relational biology has been extended by John Kineman, the current president of the ISSS.

For May, we have a special guest visiting from Rochester, New York.  Judith Rosen is the Vice-President for Conferences (2015-2016) for the International Society for the Systems Sciences, taking leadership in the planning the 60th meeting of the society in Boulder, Colorado, July 24-30.  She was a driver in the republication of Anticipatory Systems in 2012, exercising her intuitive appreciation of the work of her father.

Venue: 

• Lambert Lounge, OCAD U. (TBC)

Suggested pre-reading: 

• Judith Rosen, "Robert Rosen's Anticipatory Systems Theory: The Art and Science of Thinking Ahead", Proceedings of the 53 Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (Brisbane, Australia) at http://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings53rd/article/view/1249

• A. H. Louie, "Robert Rosen's Anticipatory Systems", Foresight v12 n3, pp. 18-29 (2009), cached at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228091658_Robert_Rosen's_anticipatory_systems

• Judith Rosen, "Redefining Objectivity", presentation at ISSS 2015 (Berlin, Germany) at http://www.slideshare.net/isssdigital/isss2015-berlin-judith-rosen-redefining-objectivity

Participants should not feel limited to this suggested pre-reading, but should recognize that other attendees may have not read, or are reading differently, that content.

Agenda

Post-meeting artifacts

Systems Thinking Ontario:  Judith Rosen describing Anticipatory Systems Theory, being alive as Metabolism and Repair, complexity and the modeling relation, and refreshing on the Aristotelian four causes. Deep thinking covering a lot of territory in less than 2 hours. A return visit when university is in session is called for. (Systems Thinking Ontario, Lambert Lounge, OCAD University, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20160518