I started this course because I wanted to get a general introduction to what systems theory is and also how I could use it in both my personal life and in an academic context as well. I had little to no knowledge about what defines systems theory but rather a vague concept based on what I loosely associate with it. Of course I have heard about systems theory in my four semesters of psychology studies but, as far as I remember, it was never awarded much attention. So what I associate with systems theory is mostly based on what I randomly heard about it which is not something you can base a valid opinion on.

So I came to the course with nearly no preoccupation and thought to myself let’s just give this a try and maybe a fantastic new world opens for you and everything starts to make sense or you just learn about how people with a different point of view perceive and analyse the world. Either way it would be a gain.

When we had our first meeting I directly noticed that this course in going to be different from what I’ve done before, at least in an academic setting. The atmosphere was more relaxed than in other courses, especially in courses of this smaller size. But relaxed here is not meant in a way that you have to keep yourself from falling asleep or that you just consume what someone tells you without having to think about it. This setting just had the right vibe in which you are willing to participate and where you do not fear to make your contribution, because you are afraid of being judged. To make it short: it is a place you want to go and not one you have to go.

This atmosphere probably has many reasons which I assume to be the students who are all in the same new situation, the teacher not being an old-school, didactic-orthodox professor, the way we all sat around a big table and not in rows in front of a blackboard etc.. But the main reason is probably that we all socialized, grew personal connections, understood from which position each of us comes and most importantly learnt that we are all just more or less insecure people and therefore do not have to feel stupid if a contribution turns out to be less smart than it seemed to be in your head.

And why did we socialize? Of course, as an Erasmus-student, especially in the beginning of your semester you kind of have to talk to new people because most of us arrived alone here and at least I would consider it hard to stay here for half a year without any personal relations and I am sure I am not the only one thinking like this. Therefore there obviously already is a certain willingness in everybody to try to connect to new people who, in first place, are all potential new friends. And then this general mood was met by the many interactional tasks we were asked to do during the course. Working together like this, even if it is only for five minutes, in activities like drawing together, debating the current topic, working on common texts and so on really helped to get to know the other people better than it would probably work I you just had smalltalk for a couple minutes.

Of course the activities also helped a lot regarding the understanding of the topics of each lesson. If you just have to take a couple minutes to think about what you just learned and on top of that also have to ponder how you can find the right words to explain what just went through you head to your partner, it helps so much to really get a deeper sense of what was just discussed. And of course then there are your partners thoughts as well which, in most of the cases, opened another point of view regarding the topic and therefore added a lot of new facets to my own picture.

So in this sense all the partner work and teamwork we did had an impact on three levels: development of new personal relations, personal reflection on the topic, other aspects you did not think of before.

As you might have gotten by now, I really liked the way the lessons were structured really differently than what I heard and saw before in a university context. But now let us get to the content of the course.

Like I wrote in my blog about the first meeting, I started to have issues with the systemic approach right after the first meeting and these issues prevailed for most of the time. But as I am now reflecting about what felt irritating to me I start to understand that maybe I just did not really understand it right in its wholeness until now.

The first thing that felt weird to me was that I did not understand why there is a need systems theory as a separate discipline but now I think I get that I just had a wrong perception of the goal of systems theory. It always annoyed me that systems theory seemed to be about everything and nothing at the same time in a way that you can see a system in everything so it is not something special anymore. This now feels very short-sighted to me because you could apply this argument to everything else. You can see physical or economical or whatever aspects in everything you look at. But this is not the main point why I feel different about this now. I just did not fully realize that the essence of systems theory is that you can perceive everything as a system but you do not have to perceive it that way. The focus is set on the features of something you only see when you look at it as a system.

Directly connected to this is another point which made me doubt the usefulness of systems theory: I did not understand what is so special about seeing something as a system. I asked myself: “Which new aspects of something do open up to me through this different approach?” And I could rarely find an answer. My explanation for this is that I just used to be thinking from a systemic perspective before. This way it felt normal to me to see things like that and I obviously could not see an advantage to what I saw before because it was (nearly) the same. Like I said before, I did not really know anything about systems theory before but also seeing things from this perspective probably just felt reasonable to me. And because I did not see a difference I could not appreciate the systemic view as something revolutionary and new. I just seemed appropriate to also look from this angle. So regarding this one could consider this course a self-discovery journey in a way.

But besides my “newfound” enthusiasm there is still a thing that I see critical about systems theory. I fell like there is a tendency to overemphasize and therefore romanticize the impact that small changes have on the whole. The systemic motto “everything is connected” suggests that every small piece can have an impact on the whole system which itself is not false but I feel like if this potential of small changes is highlighted a lot it is given more attention than it deserves compared to the rather irrelevant impact these changes normally have. I want to take the fight against climate change as an example. Of course every persons individual consumption decisions, be it plane travels, eating meat or whatever, has an impact on this global phenomenon. This impact is rather small and the impact decisions by international companies or governments have is incomparable bigger. But by talking about how one person can make a difference the focus is set on the romantic idea that one person can change the world which, in most cases, is just not true or at least very unlikely, unless this person is not a president or CEO. The big problem here is that since the focus is now set on insignificant individual action it is not set anymore on those who really could make a difference. This of course is not a problem of systems theory in general but rather a tendency it supports, I would say, by seemingly providing a foundation for such narratives.

As you can see my attitude towards systems theory actually did change even though quiet late.

I write this text directly after watching the movie Mindwalk. I really liked the movie from an aesthetic point of view. The acting was great and the dialogues were written very well and naturalistic. The only thing I didn’t like regarding this aspects was the romantic style of describing and the overuse of metaphors by the woman.

But if I look at the message of the movie I’m not so sure anymore what to think of it. Despite feeling like I’ve just watched a 90 minutes advertisement for systems theory there is still a lot of reluctance inside of me towards systems theory. I can’t really tell why but since the beginning of this course I can’t get rid of the feeling that systems theory doesn’t really lead anywhere. To me it rather seems like the attempt to revolutionize scientific thinking by using a different language and pointing at obvious deficits in the scientific process. But I don’t see anything revolutionary if the whole message is just: „Things can be better and everything is more complexly connected than you thought.“ 

This statement is probably true but I don’t see a qualitative difference between the systemic perspective and the „conventional“ perspective. I feel like systems theory is just like normal science but with a slightly different focus and new vocabulary.

But maybe I just don’t get it and have mistrust because it’s just not my preferred style of language. 

Our last meeting was again drastically different from the one before. From a rather relaxed talk about our hometowns and what connects them to us we went to a short but dense presentation of a difficult topic. This meeting was about Rhizomes and I feel like nearly everybody (including me) had their difficulties understanding it at first.

Rhizomes are networks of non-hierarchical connected elements which form a whole. These networks are not to be seen as static but always in development.

When talking about plants or fungi I totally get the point of why you would consider these rhizomes, but if you apply this concept to a group of humans its not that clear to me. That is because I would in nearly every group of humans assume that there is some kind of hierarchy. Even in a friend group or similar groups most of the time there are some people in such a group who tend to decide more things than others.

After the presentation and the following discussion we kind of got back to the more relaxed part of the course and drew a picture in group of four. If I remember it correctly we only had one specification. The picture should have something to do with rhizomes. Drawing the picture was way more fun than I initially thought. I haven’t been drawing for years and I really enjoyed it. Maybe I’m going to draw more often in the future.

The last meeting of our course was really different from the one before because we didn’t really have a presentation about a topic but only did an interactive task.

The first thing was to write a short text about our hometown but not in a descriptive way but rather from a personal point of view. At first I was kind of worried because I didn’t really knew what to write. Not worried in a sense of not being able to complete the task but rather worried because I somewhat vaguely really like my hometown but couldn’t break this down to a few clear points. But reflecting on this, I think this is exactly what makes my relation to this place so special. I don’t just like specific aspects of this town but more the combination – or the system – of all of them. The bad things as well as the good things.

For example, you wouldn’t consider the weather in my hometown as really nice from an isolated point of view because it is often windy, gray and rainy. But in relation with the people, the places and just the over-all serious and melancholic spirit it is something I can really appreciate. 

The other task was to write comments to the texts about the other hometowns. This added another systemic layer to the task because when commenting on other cities you have to compare them to your own experiences and of course mostly them of your own town. So, in a way, through these comments you connect all the listed cities through a web of personal experiences and comparisons.

What is interesting is that all connections just came to my mind while I was writing this text so the biggest lesson for me in this week is probably that I learned how important it is to talke your time to reflect on the experienced and learned contents.

When will we reach the point where artificial intelligence is no longer controlled by us but controls us? When will we reach the technical singularity and how? These are questions I normally don’t think about because I have the feeling because I think they are so difficult to answer that I couldn’t come to a valid answer. The difficulty I see here comes from the sheer complexity of this topic and the many many factors you have to consider. And of course it is also difficult because I don’t really know how artificial intelligence works.

But here I am in a course discussing exactly these questions. Did I come any closer to answering them? No. But did my interest in these questions grow? Yes. My interest did grow because todays course demonstrated me the importance of these questions and the possible dangers of ignoring them. I didn’t really learn new facts useful for thinking about technical singularity but I got a more or less structured overview of where we stand right now in the development process of artificial intelligence.

Right now artificial intelligence already is pretty dominant concerning our everyday live. Every time we use the internet we get to see advertisements that are specifically aimed at our personal interests and when we use social media the posts that a are shown to us are as well determined by what the algorithm behind the medium thinks we want to see. But I’m still optimistic. On Instagram (and probably also on other platforms) you can look up what personal interests the artificial intelligence behind the algorithm „thinks“ what your interests are. And if I look on that list its thankfully not that accurate. I actually do this from time to time because it gives me a feeling of safety. Safety from the potentially dnagerous power of artificial intelligence.

Todays classes topic was the Anthropocene which is the concept of the age of humans so to say. The most interesting question from my point of view was when this age started. The first answer that came to my mind was that start has to be the point where the human was developed to the stage that we are currently in. But the longer you think about this the harder it gets to define when this point is. The critical question here is how do you define such a stage. Which developments are big enough to attribute them a being stage-changing? One could argue this from a biological point of view and say that the Anthropocene started when the human reached a certain biological status which is similar to ours now.

But this doesn’t really address the main point of the concept of the Anthropocene since it is about the age where the human dominance over the world has developed in such a way that the human population is the main factor in shaping the world. So you have to think about specific developments in human history which gave humanity the power to actually have an impact on the world larger than that of any other species.

My preferred development in this regard is probably the moment humans started settling down and invented agriculture because this is the point where, for the first time, you could draw a clear line between the human race and other species and also because humans here started to shape, in the truest meaning of the word, the world in their interest.

Todays lesson was quite heavy because there was a lot of theoretical input for the first hour. I understood that this was necessary for the following discussion and in general for the further progress of the whole course but when we were asked to discuss what we just learned in pairs I had a hard time remembering every topic we hear about before. Especially the concepts referred to at the start of the course didn’t really stick in my head for long.

But from what I can remember and from what I read up from the slides afterwards there were a lot of interesting and also for me personally new aspects addressed. For example the idea of reductionism as a sort of counter-concept to emergence. I think in this case it is important to not think of one of the perspectives as superior to the other but rather of both of them as being equally useful and just for different purposes. I like to think of them as bottom-up versus top-down perspective.

Another interesting topic was the concept of self-organization which I think is very helpful to explain a lot processes observable in nature which don’t seem to have a rational explanation. From a human perspective you (at least me) tend to see every process as something with an actively predetermined goal behind it. But with the perspective of self-organization in mind you see that some processes develop further and further during the process itself with no specific goal in mind just through the (random) influence of parts of the system which only behave on their own „interest“ but still influence other parts through the systemic connection.

Today’s course meeting at the same time confirmed my concerns about the systemic approach but at the same time strengthened my decision to take part in the course.

What still concerns me about thinking in systems is that I feel like, if you try hard enough, you can see everything as a system – and I don’t really get the advantage of that by now. But also, this is the main thing which motivates me to further take part in this course. That is because on the one hand I’m still looking forward to getting to the point where I can appreciate the systemic approach as helpful. And I’m still optimistic with this because I feel like there has to be a reason why it is so popular among a lot of people. On the other hand, even if I don’t get to the point where I consider the systemic approach useful for myself, I still want to understand why other people consider it that way.

The video of the wolves is a perfect but also a little bit cliché demonstration of a huge interconnected system. But as cliché as it was, with all its beautiful nature shots and enthusiastic narration, it also made its point – that a change in a system has always (at least) two sides.

Of course, you feel bad when you consider how many deer were killed by the newly introduced wolves. But on the other hand, the decimation of the dears had such a positive influence on the life of a lot of other species, so you almost don’t even feel sorry for the deer.

I like this because it demonstrates how everything isn’t just black and white.

I’m not sure. I’m not sure what to think about this course and I’m not sure how I’m  feeling. But that’s not a bad thing. It would be weird if I knew all of this exactly. 

I think I decided to take this course because it’s a dive into a new world. But that isn’t reason enough, I could have picked a lot of things if it just was for the new experience. I think what is special about this course is that it’s a the same time far away and also very close to my normal academic terrain. Close because it’s still psychology, the thing I decided to make my life about (for now at least) and far because the systemic approach is something I am instinctively rather opposed to. Not that I have a reason for that. Well, I definitely have a reason, there always is at least one reason, but I’m not really aware of the reason, one could say. It’s just something that doesn’t seem like a good or appropriate view on life to me.

But still I instinctively decided to pick it. Probably because I’m interested in a new perspective and also because I feel like I need to challenge my (maybe a little bit too) dogmatic perspective on different views of life.

In this sense, I really hope that I either get to appreciate the systemic view or that I figure out what exactly bothers me so much about it. Both would be a gain.