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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
im skipping it because it reads like a lot of bullshit and wanted to get to the point of the book as a whole
the chapter seems to be designed to persuade you that the guy knows what he's talking about so you believe him. seems to me there's nothing in it that is required to understand the rest.
shit like this quickie epistemology for example:
Each experience begins and ends--ergo, is finite. Because our apprehending is packaged, both physically and metaphysically, into time increments of alternate awakeness and sleepness, as well as into separate finite conceptions such as the discrete energy quanta and the atomic nucleus components of the fundamental physical discontinuity, all experiences are finite. Physical experiments have found no solids, no continuous surfaces or lines only discontinuous constellations of individual events. An aggregate of finites is finite. Therefore, universe as experientially defined, including both the physical and metaphysical, is finite
the emphasis is mine, because that's so much bullshit. it's much like saying that because integers are finite, the series of real integers is finite. yes, so we perceive in packets. can't draw such huge conclusions from that. but that's not all. he proceeds with this gem:
It is therefore possible to initiate our general systems formulation at the all inclusive level of universe whereby no strategic variables will be omitted. There is an operational grand strategy of General Systems Analysis that proceeds from here. It is played somewhat like the game of "Twenty Questions" but G.S.A. is more efficient--that is, more economical--in reaching its answers. It is the same procedural strategy that is used to the computer to weed out all the wrong answers until only the right answer remains.
he seems to be claiming that because "the universe is finite" (somehow) we can incorporate the whole of it into our analysis and somehow arrive to "the right answer" (to what question?) via successive approximations.
it's so much bollocks, to my ears.
he seems to be saying that we understand everything already and therefore can plan it all. like there's no chaos and everything can be predicted. sure, this seems to be a salvo against free market advocates and economists who warn us of unintended consequences, and that's not a bad thing in itself, except that it's totally made up and unprovable. i tend to side with the socratics who only know they know nothing at all. or at least that any truth we have is only partial.
but the general drift of the book (just not this chapter) is rather inspiring, up to a point.
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Hahaha... yes, well, it's all rather self-serving, and man oh man does he take "general" to some pretty goddamn ludicrous extremes. But he was a dude standing behind a theory (for, like, everything), that is not testable in the scientific sense. Freud did the same thing. Which is why I tend to read this kind of stuff as a philosophical writing. When I approach it that way it tickles my gag reflexes a little less.
I just thought that General Systems Theory/analysis chapter would serve as a pretty good breakdown of the basics behind the general systems. But it's certainly got some pockets of hot air floating around in it.
I'm not sure I agree with your interpretation of what he's saying as stated in this post, but I don't have the book on me and I only read it once, years ago, so I certainly am in no position to offer a counter-interpretation. I do think there might be a bit more of a cohesive flow to it than you do, but it gets quite bogged down in metaphor and meta-speak, so I'd have to revisit to even attempt to untangle.
Anyway, it's not bad for a lecture given to a bunch of engineers in the 1960s. Hahah.