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Connections and complexity

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on July 7, 2007 at 7:45:41 pm
 

 

Connections and Complexity

 

In 1839 Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle was published as his Journal and Remarks.

 

100 years later, A E Van Vogt published The Voyage of the Space Beagle, including a story called The Black Destroyer. The plot draws on ideas from Alfred A Korzybski’s 1933 work Science and Sanity: an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. In Van Vogt’s science fiction work, a new field of “nexialism” was mentioned, as a specially trained professional member of the crew – a “nexialist” – brought together knowledge from several areas to save the Beagle from attack from a predatory alien species.

 

In 2006, I dimly recalled this story in the context of my book on explorativity. Essentially, the idea was that an approach to life and work that was “explorative” was likely to generate connections, opportunities and potentially productive developments for creativity, problem-solving and personal satisfaction.

 

It seems to me that the creative demands on students and tutors in a complex or super-complex world would require a general set of personal qualities and approaches that could be termed explorative, and that would make unpredictable links across various sources of experience and learning.

 

On 14 December 2006, BBC Radio 4’s programme The Material World considered the topic of complexity science. Without getting too deeply immersed in the very complexity of complexity science itself, the programme explained that there were certain systems (such as animal populations, financial markets and the brain) that involved “non-linearities” that made unpredictable, complex, compounding links across the systems, and were so unfathomably complex that their operations could not be understood in detail.

 

The programme referred to the interdisciplinary concept of nexialism, attributing it to a later edition of Van Vogt’s story, published in 1950. Furthermore, the very definition of nexialism from the book was quoted, as a candidate definition for complexity science:

 

The science of joining together in an orderly fashion the knowledge of one field of learning with that of other fields to provide techniques for speeding up the processes of absorbing knowledge and of using effectively what has been learned

 

As a definition, this seems sound except for the phrase “in an orderly fashion”…

 

Anyway, the connections between these concepts and their origins fascinated me, as they seemed to demonstrate the very points that had been advanced.

 

As a footnote, apparently the story of the Space Beagle was the inspiration for the classic Sigourney Weaver film Alien some years later.

 

 

Sources:

Barnett, R (2006) Slides supporting address at official launch of Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education, 23 June 2006

Korzybski, A A (1933) Science and Sanity: an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics

Law, R (2006) Get a Life – An Introduction to Explorativity. Surrey. http://www.lulu.com

Law, R (2006) Learners For A Complex World – What Are They Really Like? Paper written following launch of Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education, 23 June 2006

McDonnell, J and Tosey, P (2006) Learning to Learn through Supported Enquiry. Paper presented at Surrey University, SCEPTrE, 27 February 2006

Thomas, N (2006) Address at official launch of Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education, 23 June 2006

Van Vogt, A E (1939, 1950) The Voyage of the Space Beagle

 

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