LONDON — It has taken mankind almost a century to begin embracing thought processes proposed by Albert Einstein and Jan Smuts. In this masterclass, Dr Claudius van Wyk takes us through the four levels of thinking from reductionist to holistic, explaining we are all on a journey of evolving the way we look at things. If that sounds a bit too shoo-wah for you, give the interview a listen. Van Wyk is a wonderful teacher. And he draws on examples used by some of the smartest people who ever lived to unpack the concepts in a way that all can understand. – Alec Hogg
It’s a warm welcome to Dr Claudius van Wyk. Claudius, we’ve been talking about issues and how to fix our world but I guess the real place to start on all of this is thinking. We’ve got these problems. How would a genius like Einstein have approached these difficult problems and his whole process of addressing them?
Hi, Alec, that is quite an amazing way to start an interview and let’s go straight there. Einstein is credited for being one of the major scientists who changed our view of the world. The one before that, of course was Copernicus who brought it back into Western consciousness that the world wasn’t at the centre of the universe. The world was a ball floating around with other bodies in the universe. The Copernican Revolution was followed by Einstein’s Revolution. That really was the idea of relativity. Everything is in relationship to everything else and the real dynamic we should be looking at is the relationship between the living entities and the bodies in the world.
That view then immediately invites us not to be focusing on hard fixed parts to construct a view of the world or construct the view of what is going on but to look at the interactions of past. It’s a different way of thinking so, just to put this in a context with a view of holism. There is a report that says that when Einstein engaged with Jan Smuts’ holism that he said these two thoughts would dominate the mental construct of the 21st Century. So, let us put holism aside forcom the moment. The major shift then that Einstein would have brought is to say we have to see the dynamic interaction of entities in the world as the real substance of what’s going on and the real place, that energetic place, where if we touch into that energy we can make a real difference.
It was an interesting part of the Isaacson’s biography on Einstein where he says that if you take a person who is sitting in an armchair pouring a cup of tea and somebody else who is in an aeroplane, travelling at a much more rapid speed who is pouring a cup of tea. They’re both pouring a cup of tea yet the one is moving at much faster rate than the other one and hence… This kind of boggles minds if you start thinking it through but theory of relativity gives you an understanding of why that is so.
Yes, so Einstein’s own model that he used. He used two models to describe relativity to describe how human subjectively how we feel about the experience of relativity. The one was going up in a lift. He said, when a lift is accelerating you actually, feel the pressure under your feet but when it’s reached its standard speed everything feels normal. That feels to be a kind of static reality. But as the lift slows down again you feel the lightening of the pressure under your feet. So really, we tend to generalise the current experience into a ‘this is always the case’ perception.
The other example he uses is two trains passing each other. He says that when the trains are passing/crossing each other, say at 60 miles an hour. He says, although the one train is doing 60 miles an hour and the other train is doing 60 miles an hour in the opposite direction. The actual experience of the trains passing are120 miles an hour. The train appears to be much shorter, the train that’s crossing the train that you’re sitting in. However, he said, if you are going in two trains and the one is going 10 miles an hour faster than the other, in a similar direction on parallel lines, the train would appear to be much longer.
What he was saying is that the real contribution of relativity to human experience is how we experience the changing dynamics and how we generalise those dynamics and that provides a huge challenge to our thinking but it’s an invitation into a new type of thinking and that says it’s about the relationships of dynamics, the relationships of people, the relationships of forces.
And that’s’ where we’re going to end up with this conversation but let’s just start at the real basics, reductionist thinking – how does that work?
That then follows immediately from the proceeding question. Reductionist thinking is where we try to understand the nature of things by breaking the things down to their smallest constituent parts. I’ve just been reinvestigating again how the biomedical model of medicine actually got caught up in reductionism when we say that the human body actually consists of cells. Cells are the reality of the human body, those are the building-blocks.
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Then it progressed from there to say but inside the cells is the genes. The genes are the actual reality that constructs the human body and so reductionist thinking is drilling down to the smallest parts so that if we understand what builds the parts that construct the entity, like a living organism, then we understand the organism. That’s the reductionism. It’s like the model we’ve used of the wristwatch. You can dissemble a wristwatch into all of its parts and then you know what the wristwatch is made off but it’s actually the interactions of all of those components that define the non-reductionist approach.
So, where we are moving now to take reductionism and locate it in the question that you opened with, Einstein’s contribution to our thinking, is the shift from the focus on the past to the shift of the relationship and interaction of the past. That’s the big shift and when Einstein made that statement where he said, “We cannot solve the problems of the world from the level of thinking with which we generated those problems.” That’s exactly what he was referring to, Alec.
So, the next step, if you like, after reductionist thinking and getting it down to the smallest possible part is systems thinking. How does that work?
If you take systems thinking I would say it’s a probably major shift in the direction that Einstein was asking us to go. The great thinker there was a chap called Bertalanffy. Now, systems thinking says, in order for us to understand the nature of an entity we have to understand all of the interactions that are taking place within the components of that entity. How they relate to each other? As I say, it’s an important shift and you get different gradations of complication. Can I just make a distinction here between a system being complex and a system being complicated?
In systems thinking we’re looking at complicatedness. That means there can be many interacting parts and we want to track all of the interactions of those parts. Like, for example, take a jetliner. The people that designed that know exactly all of the components in the jetliner and they know exactly how they all interlink so, that you can fix what needs to be fixed. To use the word complex means many of those relationships actually can’t be tracked. That’s the difference between complicated and complex and we’ll get to that whole idea of complexity.
So, in systems thinking we are wanting to identify within a system all of the parts, and the focus now goes to the interaction of those. How they are working together and the solution to things that aren’t working is the idea of re-engineering. The idea of redesigning systems or updating systems or adding more novelty to systems so, that is a major shift from reductionist thinking to systems thinking.
So, it is an improvement and it does bring you a little closer to the solutions but you mention complexity. How is complexity thinking, which is the third level, different to systems thinking?
Okay, so now in complexity thinking the big shift is how we see the parts so, in systems thinking we’re still looking at a kind of a mechanical view – fixed parts that have fixed relationships with each other. So, the gearbox in my motorcar has to have fixed parts that are in fixed relationships and those relationships can change according to very defined strategies that have been built, very defined operating methods that have been built in them.
So, instead in complexity thinking the component now is no longer a fixed, hard part but it becomes called an agent. In the shift to becoming an agent we’re looking at the issue of agency that it means that it’s an enabler. An agent within a complex system has a certain degree of autonomy. It can change its responses and it can adapt to its situation. In complex thinking, which now really begins to define the shift from your inorganic world, (the world of dead matter), so called, to the organic world, (the world of living matter), all the components in a living system actually can be seen as agents because they are able to alter their responses according to the signals they’re receiving. According to the stimuli they’re receiving and the whole system, (the whole organism) is in a constant state of adaptation and response to achieve an optimal functioning of the whole. It relates absolutely perfectly to Einstein’s relativity so his relativity theory really still underpins the notion of complexity theory.
So, the difference between systems thinking and complexity thinking is that in systems thinking you are looking at all the parts and the interactions of the parts that constitute the system. In complexity theory, you are actually seeing the parts now as being agents and those agents have a certain degree of freedom in order to adapt to the stimuli they’re receiving, to the actions and to the reactions that they have and those then become coordinated in the greater whole. That’s where the solution to many of our political, our social, our economic, and other issues of the day lie – we can start to begin looking in that direction.
So, we don’t want to be looking at these problems from a reductionist point of view because we’ll be on completely the wrong track, given that those agents that with complexity thinking can surprise us. The ultimate, and that’s where Jan Smuts’ thesis comes in was holistic, which is taking us to the next level yet, on thinking.
That’s right so, holism is really what you would call an emerging science. I ran a lecture series through a college a couple of years ago and I was warned by some of the scientists there that there isn’t such a thing as a complete definition for holistic science yet. It’s still and emerging science and I take that seriously. But what holism looks like and the gift that Smuts gave us is to say we now need to begin to look at fields.
As you know in any electromagnetic body there’s a field, the magnetic field, (the electrical field). The very thought that constitutes the human consciousness are generating such fields. This is the latest studies that are showing or demonstrating that the very mood that we’re in is generating an electromagnetic field from our hearts that can be actually measured from up to 1.5 metres away from us. Smuts really said, “We need to start focusing on the fields that are holding the whole together – that are keeping the whole entity together.”
To give you a very pertinent example, new models of consciousness are saying that people that think alike operate in a shared field and that field itself becomes an attractor. That field itself connects them together and binds them together. When we look the holistic view of life we look at enlivening fields. The great scientist, Rupert Sheldrake, who I’ve had the pleasure of spending some time with, he calls those morphogenetic fields. If we look at the holistic way of thinking we’re not only looking at the parts. Sometimes if a part is broken it needs to be fixed and replaced. We’re not looking at how the system is engineered, how all the parts are put together and how we can maybe reengineer and Alec, you’ll remember at one-point reengineering was whole way to get a business to flourish.
We’re not only looking at the agents that are dynamic and the agents that we might not have taken into account that can be influencing the wellbeing of a system. If we take, for example, the SA context where you have the phenomena of corruption. That is an agency that is undermining of the whole and it needs to be understood, the relationships need to be understood but we’re also looking at the fields, the shared mental attitudes, the energetic bonding that binds systems together and that provides us, right at the cutting edge of our attitude and intention, which has a major role to play.
Einstein spoke a lot about the field and how everything comes from the field. Smuts was saying the same thing but those men were making these statements almost 100 years ago. Why has it taken so long for mankind to even start embracing them in the way that you’ve discussed it?
Well, this is a really interesting question, Alec. You know that Jan Smuts published his book, Holism, and Evolution in 1926 so, as you rightly say that’s 91 years ago. His major contribution to the scientific world might have been at his presidential address to the British Association for the advancement of science in 1931 where he presented a seminal lecture. The scientific world picture of today is what he described it. Now just take this for example, in the audience was a very brilliant scientist, a quantum physicist called Richard Feynman and in his autobiography, he talks about being at that lecture when this old, white haired man was rambling on and it didn’t make any sense to him. It just shows you that there’s something about, the Germans use the word zeitgeist – a collective receptiveness, which once again brings us back to the field of notion. It has taken that amount of time for systems theory to break the mould of reductionism. To enable to see systems as living systems where the actual parts are adaptive and responsive and become agents. And to move from there onwards to begin to consider the fields that informs those agents. The shared, energetic information or intelligence that informs them. It’s taken us that amount of time to get there.
I’m very excited to say that there is an emerging world, there’s an emerging or a body of scientists, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and economists who are actually starting to study that world. Your problem is that your scientific model is still demanding some very hard proof. You must be able to prove this to be the case in a clinical laboratory in the empirical scientific method so, the challenge to the holistic scientists is to come up with proof. Yet, we somehow intuitively know that this is the case and there are those that say, I don’t even need the proof to be able to say that this makes sense. But the scientific model is saying, “Provide us with the proof.” Certainly, spectroscopy and technologies like that are being able to pick up far more subtle signals. Like, for example, the signals off the heart that I was mentioning.
It’s taken us long because it’s a major shift in the paradigm that we collectively share in the world about how the world operates and what the new opportunities might be, in able to move away from that materialistic approach to a holistic approach.
Dr Claudius van Wyk, helping us to fix our world.
