BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

HISTORICAL DETERMINISM 1)3)

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The global influence of former states of a system on its present and future states.

This is not Marxian historical determinism.

Neither is it the rigorous monocausal determinism of classical mechanics, nor statistical determinism. It corresponds to BOLTZMANN's after-effects ("Nachwirkunge"), i.e. the effects of the accumulated and registered or recorded events in the past of the system.

However, in complex systems this kind of "memory" does not lead to strict determinism, but merely to sensibility to initial conditions. This in turn endows the system either with ergodic behavior, or with chaotic characteristics.

D. RUELLE writes: "I think that history systematically generates events that cannot be predicted and have important long-term consequences" (1981).

V. VOLTERRA, starting from BOLTZMANN's equations, showed that they implied "the initial conditions of the system, under the form of an integral (or more generally a function) which represented the whole information related to the past of the system, unlike the classical vectorial form that represented only the present state. In this way, the system was not anymore deterministic in a strict Laplacian sense: its present is not anymore sufficient to determine its evolution; which is determined by its past as a whole" (G. ISRAEL, 1992, p.268).

We thus have a historical systemic determinism, with precise and specific characteristics.

J. HOLLAND in turn, observes that: "… future populations can only develop via reproduction of individuals of the current population. In particular, the population must serve as a summary of observed sample values (performances)" (1992, p.13).

Of course, "populations" can be of very different types: biological individuals, genes, techniques, bits of information, memes, etc…

Thus, while innovations open new possible futures, they are possible only on the base of the "presently remembered" (or registered) past.

→ Present (Everlasting); Time binding; Time perception

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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