Theme 4. Transdisciplinarity of systems sciences and cybernetics: developing areas of knowledge

In the world we know, a structural and long-term transformation is taking place. Centralization of communication platforms, rapid expansion and the use of artificial intelligence along with major environmental, demographic, sociopolitical and economic shifts are impinging on a major change in our society. This situation demands empowering of citizens to promote economic growth, sustainability, social justice, and political stability. In particular, youth should develop capacities to think and act differently, which requires a major transformation of our education systems.

 

Decision-takers all around the world in public institutions and private organizations are recognizing the complexity of issues (ecological, social, health, economic, energy, transport, migratory, etc.) and their interrelations. The underlying systems are intricately and intimately intertwined. The current narrative goes around economic competitiveness and focuses on supporting people to act in a digital and virtual economy leaving aside the enormous challenges humankind is facing, some of them existential. 

 

In the last four decades events like Chernobyl, the Global Financial Crisis, the Gulf Oil spilt , Fukushima’s tsunami and current pandemic have shown the danger of this lack of consciousness of the potential planetary effects of man-made decisions. Decision-takers need to use systemic approaches to cope with the complexity of these issues and ameliorate their impact in impending global crises. Crisis, in ancient Greek, refers to the breaking of connections.

 

Within the systems movement, a wealth of conceptual and methodological knowledge has been created that should help in these tasks. The challenge for researchers and practitioners is to make everybody, especially young people aware and knowledgeable of these foundations and proficient in their application. Cultivating cyber-systemic approaches, with their related ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies, methods, tools, and concepts provide ways of thinking and acting that allow developing such a collective consciousness. 

 

The aim of this theme is the cyber-systemic exploration of distinct social areas, and at the same time the search for connections, relations and transverse knowledge. What is that makes education unique in society? What is special to education that requires receiving both holistic attention and the development of particular communication mechanisms? What makes it different to the economic or the transportation systems?

 

What can be said about the commonalities of these systems in different regions of the world? What can be said about their cross cultural nature? How are they producing their unique hybrid realities? In all areas it is necessary to avoid fragmentation by facilitating the alignment of people’s purposes. What is unique about levels of self-organisation and self-regulation in each case? How are they addressing their interactions with their environments? What do their unique perspectives have in common? How to develop trans-disciplinary learning processes?

 

In a world increasingly requiring  interactions, one of the challenges is facilitating self-organization processes for the emergence of desirable values in societies and for the creation and production of related policies from the most local to the most global levels. These are processes, aimed at individual innovation as well as making more meaningful coexistence.

 

In this theme the invitation is to open debates to explore in specific areas people’s wide variety of possible interactions, communications and relationships to make them more effective. Through the investigation of specific institutions and evolving technologies for each of these areas, we foster discussions that guide, enable and facilitate interactions among existing, necessary and available resources to increase society’s requisite variety to deal with challenges to areas at different structural levels in different cultural contexts

 

It seems important to go beyond interdisciplinary approaches to develop a new transdisciplinary way of thinking and acting; a kind of indiscipline in which we must recover Aristotle´s practical wisdom. The WOSC Congress is offering a platform for cyber-systemic contributions of group discussions for collective synergy supported by state-of-the-art individual research.