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

SUPRA-HUMAN SYSTEMS 1)4)

← Back

This notion has been introduced by F. ROBB (1992)

According to ROBB very vast and developed human systems escape essentially out of the control of their individual participants.

While such supra-systems are initially bottom-up constructions they end up exercizing a top-down control on their paricipants.

The following reasons seem significant:

- statistically, each member of the society is practically powerless at the supra-level. He is just carried along by the massive flow of the famous "silent majority", even if that flow reflects merely a herd-effect (the so-called "public opinion")

- structurally, the individual member find himself generally closely encased (and even ensnared) within some social structure (institution, organization, business) that he has been more or less obliged to join to prosper (or simply survive) personally

- the two former aspects have systemic undertones: mainly, SABELLI's principle about "priority of the simple, supremacy of the complex" traduces itself as a fundamental dissymmetry between levels in highly differentiated complex systems.

The general impotence of the isolated individual explains probably the existence of lobbies, pressure-groups, cartels, and even mafias which are coalitions of individuals trying to recuperate or obtain some control on society. Of course in such cases symbiosis turns into parasitism.

Anyhow, modern mass-societies are becoming more and more similar to global self-organizing automata.

→ Cross-level research; Crowding effects; Dissipative structuration; Institutionalization; Network (Evolutionary); Proxemics; Superorganism

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]

We thank the following partners for making the open access of this volume possible:

© 2020 BCSSS Contact/Imprint