Enigma

If one asks a cinephile for recommendations on science fiction movies or books about the future, the film lover will most likely suggest a number of books and movies with different titles but very similar scripts or at least topics. What would be so common about them? According to the online encyclopedia Britannica, in the science fiction pieces, we would most probably see alternative societies and aliens, different representations of sexes, genders and their roles, space and time travels, alternate histories and parallel universes, and high technologies. And eventually, all of these create utopic or dystopic scenarios.  

Take a moment to reread what has been written before. Don’t you think that these motives reflect many moments of human life in this century? Or does our life reflect science fiction movies / books? Let’s discuss it from the perspective of system theory and media.

Alternative societies 

Science fiction writers work hard on creating alternative societies. This doesn’t mean that people living in societies created by the author look differently than we do, it is more that they behave in a way that is alien to the human experience and have a different value system. Also, these characters are capable of dying or changing their personalities multiple times.

Now, let’s see: are we not able to change our personalities multiple times? 

Of course we can, and now it is even easier than ever before. All social media platforms, forums, blogs, online video games, and many other internet activities that do not require us to prove our identity allow us to be anyone but the authentic us. We can create personalities that are not even closely related to the real us, and we can kill them anytime we want to create new representations of ourselves. And I would say that this is a really engaging activity. It is becoming harder and harder to resist tension using, for instance, social media accounts. One can argue, that “my account is different; I am not faking myself there.” Yet, is it really possible to represent 100 percent of your life and your thoughts on social media as they are in real life?

Anyway, returning to the topic of how it is becoming increasingly difficult to resist the pressure to use social media, it should be noted that it is precisely through social media that we create the alternative societies on the internet that are frequently depicted in science fiction films.And we create societies like these while participating in the positive feedback loop. Consider what happens when a new app or social media platform is released. Of course, sooner or later, millions of people will create one more alternative society there. And even if you try to resist participating there at the beginning, you will still most likely take your place in the alternative society later because your friends told you that this is a cool new social media, totally different from the previous one, and this is why it is worth having it.

Alternate histories and parallel universes

In the beginning, most science fiction movies explored the possibility of traveling back to the past, changing something there, and then dealing with the consequences of it in the present. Murray Leinster’s Sidewise in Time (1934) suggested that there can be a multiplicity of “histories,” all occurring at the same “time.”

Even though people are still not capable of traveling through time, we can for sure travel to see parallel “universes” (countries, continents) that somehow differ from those we see in our everyday lives, as well as observe how people in those “universes” create their alternate histories.

However, what we tend to forget is that although those “universes” may reside far away from ours, we still have some connections that we cannot deny. Thus, how do you maintain your autonomy while being interdependent? Which of these is more important? I would say that the most significant thing is not to try to distinguish the importance of the concepts but rather to understand that all inhabitants of our earth’s “universes” belong to one system. As a result, even if you are far away from your “universe,” you should not lose sight of the interdependence.

And this is crucially important in this Anthropocene epoch that we live in. Today, humankind faces many challenges (climate change, the disaster of environmental resources, and so on) that weren‘t so extreme before. Thus, only understanding that each of us individually and collectively has to work hard to save our planet can soften the situation.

Hence, one should try to save water, not litter, and use more public transport, not only when at home but when visiting parallel “universes” too.

Technologies are becoming our “Big brothers” and we are willing to accept them.

There is no doubt that the main similarity our lives have with science fiction movies is high technology, or, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, scientific technology involving the production or use of advanced or sophisticated devices, especially in the fields of electronics and computers. 

On June 8, 1949, the world was gifted with the explicit science fiction book “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” written by George Orwell. What is most incredible about this book is that even though Orwell wrote about an imaginative future based on the situation in totalitarian countries during the Second World War, the book nevertheless made some predictions for the future we live in as well.

This piece can be analyzed as the representation of the whole system in some totalitarian countries, or it can be viewed as the sum of various features that are more or less expressed in different countries. However, there is one idea presented in the book which representations can be seen almost everywhere in the 21st century. It is the idea that “Big Brother is watching you,” which means that it doesn‘t matter where you go or what you do, you are constantly being watched. How does it affect people in the story? They were paranoid and afraid of it, and they were trying to behave properly so that no one would make a complaint about them.

Now, let’s talk about our reality. Today, surveillance is everywhere, as it was in the book. For instance, in all shops and public institutions, we have cameras that are observing every customer‘s move. There are also some cameras on the streets for cars and even sometimes for pedestrians. “Ok,” one can say, “but at least no one is watching us at home.” Is it really like that? Even though we physically are not being followed at home, our activity on the internet is.

In the 18th century, we had a panopticon – a prison constructed so that a watchman in the center was able to observe all prisoners at the same time. Also, in Greek mythology, Panopticon refers to the giant many-eyed creature. We no longer need to construct a specific structure or have a large number of eyes to observe others. Today, it is enough for a web page owner to start using Google Analytics. According to Elizabeth Stix, even though this tool doesn’t give us the names of the web page visitors, it can tell us where the visitors live, what browser they use, what they looked at, how long they stayed, and what was the search query that brought them there.

And now let’s get back to the same question that was asked referring to the book: how do people feel about being followed? We often forget about that, or even if we know, we tend to turn a blind eye to this fact. Sometimes the reason for this is that we are addicted to googling, sometimes we think that we cannot survive without it, yet in most cases, we do not have any other choice. Our reality is constructed in such a way that we now, according to Fritjof Capra, have to bear in mind three values: faster is better, more is better, and I come first. Thus, googling and accepting the reality of surveillance assist us in keeping up with the pace of modern life. And everything seems under control for now.

Dystopia or gladly utopia?

George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is a dystopic book where the main character, after being heavily tortured, accepts reality and agrees to stop searching for an escape from the totalitarian regime. However, not all science fiction movies and books have dystopic plots, some of them present scenarios where people become even more intelligent creatures and somehow save the world or transform it into a better place.

What is our scenario? What if we have already lived through our utopia? When did it happen? When we created all the technology, we learned to outsource part of our intelligence / cognition to the external world. This way, we optimized many routine tasks and made our everyday lives easier. On the other hand, smartphones seem to have slowly been taking over our time, whereas the internet, algorithms, and artificial intelligence – privacy. It is time to ask if the structure we created still permits a dialogue between us and the technologies we produced. Can we still control technology and its curious roots, which constantly reach our most private corners? If not, then, as Paulo Freire once said, such structures must be changed.

So whether a book or film about humanity has an utopic or dystopic ending is entirely up to us. When we realize that we all live in a massive, constantly evolving system in which we are all interconnected, and that individual actions are as important as collective ones, perhaps we will find a way to not only deal with environmental problems, but also to create a balanced life in which the technologies around us help us to become even more intelligent and advanced, rather than using us to become that way themselves.

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P.S. I would like to express a special gratitude to the Systems Theory course lecturer, Dr. Alex Brailas. Thank you for your interesting insights and novel teaching methods.

First and foremost, I would like to emphasize that the human brain is an explicit organ, and it is only because of it that we live in a world where every new invention outperforms one that was recently created with the passage of light. Also, because of our intelligence, we are able to connect different things, concepts, and ideas together to create even more extraordinary conclusions.

For me, the most fascinating thing from the last lecture was how philosophers and psychologists found a correlation between the double-slit experiment from physics and our everyday lives. The experiment that was only created for scientific purposes was suddenly observed as a phenomenon that can influence thinking and behavior of others.

We are a part of the 2023 Newest Swiss Replica Watches On Sale in easewatches.me,Fast shipping, Money back guaranty. system that we observe – this is an unexpected conclusion that was drawn from the scientific experiment to check which slit do electrons actually go through.

Somehow, this conclusion makes me think about bullying that usually occurs at school. If one person bullies another and others observe, which side are they taking? The automatic answer would be the side of the bully; however, if they are just afraid to say something and stop the situation, maybe it is the side of the person being bullied? I think that the most important thing that is usually forgotten while trying to answer this question is whether the kids who are observing know that they are not only the observers but also a part of the situation and the system created.

Thus, we shouldn’t forget to educate kids in school on these topics.

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Trees talk (share resources and information) secretly both underground and on the ground. The underground communication is performed with the assistance of fungi (they connect the roots of the trees using their invisible part – mycelium) and the aboveground communication is conducted by the trees themselves sending one another microscopic molecules in the air, or by birds/insects that can transfer, for instance, pollen from one plant to another. To make a long story short, we can see that trees have multiple ways of Swiss Replica website sells the best Swiss replica watches worldwide, and you can get top quality fake watches at a cheaper price. secret interaction even though they may be separated by some distance.

It seems that as humans we tend to share some similarities with the trees in the field of communication. First of all, nowadays technologies provide us with the opportunity to talk secretly with one person or more people. Yes, there are situations when conversations from private social media chats, chat rooms, or blogs are extracted by third parties but generally speaking it is our way of exchanging information and resources, which in this case is knowledge, without physical words.

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Viruses are not considered live organisms – this is the statement that most scientists currently believe in. Some main arguments are these: viruses are not able to grow, metabolize (break down the food into smaller substances), maintain homeostasis (the tendency to resist change in order to maintain a stable, relatively constant internal environment, for example, the ability to maintain constant body temperature), produce and use internal energy, respond to stimuli as well as reproduce independently (a host cell should always be present for their reproduction).

Let‘s discuss these criteria in the context of artificial intelligence.

Ability to grow: AI can be programmed by the human to grow and expand its size as well as the capacity to perform more and more complicated tasks

Ability to metabolize: looking from the biological perspective in order to metabolize one has to eat. If we consider food as data that one inputs to AI or which is gathered by the AI itself, we can say that it can eat. Is it able to break down the food though? Data analysis takes many small steps, thus looking from this perspective – yes.

Ability to maintain homeostasis: AI is not really affected by the environment. Does not matter what happens around it will continue to work on its tasks. However, this may change in the future when artificial intelligence will become even more intelligent.

Ability to produce and use internal energy: Since this one is a true biological phenomenon, AI will never be able to meet this criterion.

Ability to respond to stimuli: AI acts differently depending on the changes made in its code or the data it has to analyze. So, from this point of view, it is sensitive to stimuli.

Ability to reproduce on its‘ own: Even though AI is in general the product of human creation, right now we are facing the very first cases of AI-independent evolution. Some of the programs improve themselves every generation without human input. Let‘s see what the future holds.

In a nutshell, it can be seen that artificial intelligence already possesses more characteristics of living organisms than viruses do. There is only one question: do we really want them to be alive?

Right now we are facing not only the climate but also planet changes, that are caused by our activity; thus it is our responsibility now to face all of it and take some action. However, in the Anthropocene epoch, we are living it is not enough to act either individually or either collectively. Now, the only way to ensure the future of other generations is by acting both collectively and individually at the same time. This approach can be easily understood through some examples.

For instance, today, 197 nations have endorsed the Paris agreement, whose main goal is to limit the global temperature increase in this century to 2°C while attempting to limit the increase even further to 1.5°C. It was a collective action. After the first countries agreed to reach the decarbonization goal, the European Union proposed a plan for how to decrease carbon consumption in Europe. It is also a collective action. Then each ES country had to come up with its action plan – one more collective approach. Now we have an agreement, many proposals, and long action plans on how to decarbonize our planet. But who actually will have to perform all those actions that nicely written documents describe? And here it is time for individual effort. We all understand the problem, we have a scheme of how to solve it in front of us, now whether we will reach some changes is only up to every individual. What does he/she emphasize in this problem? What everyday choices does he/she make?

The last lecture brought me two concerns: one related to reductionism and another to self-organization.

According to reductionism theory, a complex system can be interpreted as the sum of its parts. Consequently, any phenomenon, method, concept, or system can be explained by the lower-level phenomena, methods, concepts, or systems that compose the previously mentioned things. At first, everything seems clear, however, let us imagine the situation where one breaks, for instance, some system into segments, then explains them separately, and then combines those explanations into single description of the system. And the same process is performed by another person as well. Will the two understandings of what the system is and how it works be the same? I would say that they even not gonna be similar. And the main reason for this is the different interpretations of the links between separate variables. Thus, I would say that the outcomes of the reductionism theory application firmly depend on the methodology used for the analysis and making connections between concepts while attaining a single meaning.

Furthermore, the idea of a self-organization process made me think a little bit more about the concept of centralized coordination. It is said that during self-organization, new patterns emerge without any centralized coordination. That means that in nature, basically, every new thing originates from self-organization. That can also imply that our planet evolved through self-organization. Yet, when I say it like that, it seems that nothing facilitated its‘ emergence. And I consciously wrote nothing rather than no one.

On the contrary, the planet we inhabited, as well as other planets, and different living patterns found on Earth were formed by various physical forces and phenomena. So, perhaps “centralized coordination” could refer not only to the specific leader managing the whole process but to the physical forces as well?

As a beginning of this week‘s reflection, I would like to start by expressing my gratitude for the lecture ‘Autonomy through and for interdependence. In my last post, I wrote that I would like to hear more theory – and here it comes in the most interesting shape it could be with the most valuable discussions. Thus, thank you for that!

As concerns the topic itself, I would say it was both: easy and sophisticated at the same time. As it was said in the class ‘we need to simplify things to start understanding the process of sophisticated things’. It is a good approach, however, the deeper into the topic you go, the more questions emerge. So, basically, you are going in circles: simplifying the topic to better understand it but eventually making it even more complicated.

And the question ‘What is the system?’ entangles you in a similar circle. As it seems a pretty hard riddle at first, we try to categorize things and separate those things that clearly aren‘t a system.

Yet, after we finish, we start to think and realize that maybe some of the so-called ‘collections’ may be systems as well. And here we are at the beginning of our circle asking the same question again: So what is the system and how it differs from the collection?

Then we say that in the system all its parts are interrelated and the system cannot work without any component of it missing, and that system has a purpose. And for the moment everything seems clear.

Nevertheless, we remember that a naturally evolving system can change its purpose over its lifetime. As well as the collection also may have a purpose. If it hasn‘t why it exists at all? Someone had to collect all the things together and there was a reason why one did that.

But the same someone can collect the system as well.

So I would say that the only way to get out of the vicious circle of asking questions and transforming the answers from simple to sophisticated and opposite, is to look at the question from the point of view of different people.

After all, each of us are the systems, we evolve and we change our relationships and perception of other systems as well.

I have mixed feelings concerning the second lesson of the course. Since I came from a scientific background and all my bachelor courses were strictly planned it is still really hard for me to get used to the kind of lessons we have in the System Theory course. I like alternative ways of learning nevertheless psychology and system theory itself are new fields for me, and thus I would prefer more clarity during the lecture. By this I don‘t mean that we should not play, by this, I would like to suggest having a bit stronger introduction, identification of the topic, and clarification of why we are going to do one or another group exercise.

Howbeit, what concerns thoughts I had after a group exercise and then exploring the places people relate to on the map, I understood that we all are so different. So to have proper communication or to create relationships we have to have two inner wishes: wish to get to know one another and wish to listen. And I do not even know which one of those can be considered foremost. Without a wish to get to know another, we are not able to listen. And without being a good listener one will never get to know another. And I think that this is especially important to realize now when life decided to take us from our diverse backgrounds and bring us all to one place – Athens. I think that the same place and same time are not connecting vires but more like a platform for connection. If you truly want to connect you have to put some effort and create the connecting process yourself.

How often we notice that we are different everyday? We have different (maybe even opposing to yesterday’s) thoughts we prioritize, learn new things, we experience different situations with their consequences affecting us. And even though it may seem that we encounter same and same people everyday actually we interact with people who are in the process of becoming like us.

Thus, process meets process.

We should remember it more often. If we do then probably we will be able to accept each other and situations we are in easier. And safe some energy that we spend worrying what happened or what will happen.

Moreover, understanding that we are everyday evolving creatures that have many contacts with others who are also in the same process might lead to thoughts that we should be more conscious with our actions. We should bear in mind that have an invisible power to affect those that surround us. And now it is our priority to choose whether that impact will be positive or negative. To the rude person we may answer bitterly and make our and his day even worse. Or we can analyze him a bit, and maybe come to the thought that he is in a bad mood because something unpleasant happened to him today.

So eventually, this knowledge that we are process of becoming that is constantly affected by other processes brings us a lot of choices.

And then you have to ask yourself which choice and consequences would you prefer.