When I started this course, the first question I asked myself was: what is emergence? Going back to the first concepts we saw in class, I realized that, in fact, everything that was shown to us can be related to emergence and systems thinking, which I can understand better now.
Thinking about emergence and the idea that “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”, that these parts interact as a network, makes me think about the basic concept of systems thinking and that everything is connected, that systems are everywhere. That this device I’m using to type my text is somehow connected to a whole process of fabrication, and also can lead to a whole series of situations.
I also learned terms that I had never encountered before: ecoliteracy, anthropocene, panopticon, etc. There are a lot, but those ones were the ones that stuck with me. And all of them are connected to the systems thinking concept. Ecoliteracy means ecological network: a model used to describe the different elements in an ecosystem and the network of relations between them. Anthropocene is a term used to label the current epoch in which we are living, the commencement of significant human impact on the earth’s geology and ecosystems: meaning how human’s activities have been having an impact on other systems, because they are part of one themselves. Panopticon was the one that fascinated me the most because of how we could connect it with the social media part.
Panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed in the late 18th century, that allows all inmated of an institution to be observed by a single watchmen without the inmated being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. For me, this is the definition of the internet. We are being watched, and sometimes we don’t even know we are being watched. The internet is a dangerous place, and when we talked about AI in class and how it was an enormous part of our lives right now, it made me scared, but it also made me aware.
I feel scared about how AI occupies most of our lives nowadays; our phones, in schools, universities, work. It is everywhere and it is impossible to run from it. When we are born, our parents usually have phones or live in houses full of technology, so we are exposed to this world since little age, and we don’t hold the power to be free of it, at least not completely, which is extremely scaring.
I remember that in one class, someone told a story about how there was an experiment done about the internet: a artificial intelligence spent some hours (or minutes, I can’t recall) analyzing everything on the internet to create a personality to represent the internet. The result was a depressed boy or something like that, which made me think of how diseases like depression and anxiety have been occupying a way more important place in life than before. Since our generation basically doesn’t know how to live without technology, consequences have been showing up.
I talked about how these concepts made me scared, but I guess I also need to talk of how it also made me aware. Aware of our current situation of observation, aware with how I expose myself, but also aware of the things around me, of how everything is somehow connected and how that also has to do with me, because I am also part of the system. And what I learned with this class is that to be part of the system, I need to understand it so I can take the best things out of it. What goes around me has an impact on my day-to-day existence, and my actions are continually affecting whatever is around me. It is a bidirectional look.
All of that means that we are not alone, we are always part of a context, or we are always in dialogues with other entities. I guess that we cannot talk about one without mentioning the other. Just like the Mindwalk movie states: “How you can talk usefully about a tree without talking about its roots, or its leaves or its bark?”
This whole idea of systems also makes me think of chaos, because since everything is connected, it is difficult to organize it. And that is where the concept we saw in our last meeting comes in. Entropy was a term introduced in thermodynamics (physics), representing the idea of “irreversibility”, a term that everyone is familiar with. Entropy is associated with disorder, and what I understood is that our universe is heading towards entropy, so how is life, evolution, and self-organization possible in an entropic universe?
This question made me think that everything we done is now irreversible. Men have infiltrated too much in our planet so that we could go back in time and reorganize or change the bad things that were a consequence of it. Global warming shows us everyday that we are ruining our home. It is sad, but I guess it’s the truth: we live in chaos, and instead of tryining to change ir or reverse it, we are now learning to leave with it.
In my perception, negentropy is an illusion. I don’t think we can reverse entropy at this point. I don’t think we can organize and structure the earth again, not after all we have done. I think we can maybe decrease some of our doings (for example, the hole in the onzone layer has been shrinking its size), but erase everything we did and go back to a state of order? I am pretty sure it is impossible. And it is sad.
I guess, in this case, we can talk about dissipative structures. They are open systems that are able to reduce their internal entropy, and then move to higher organizational states, by absorbing information from the environment and by disposing disorder. So they are kinda like islands of organization in an entropic environment, which goes to back to what I said about dicreasing just a bit our entropic world, but not erasing it.
As human beings, I think we also have internal entropy. We find ourselves, sometimes, in a current feeling of desperation, insecurity, chaos, and, most of these times, we don’t know what to do to reduce it. This class made me aware of this, and now I think I will be able to look at my inner self more in search of this feeling of entropy, and try to reduce it the maximum I can by creating dissipative structures or looking trying to atteign a state of negentropy.
In someway, I think that this class introduced me to new concepts that I have never heard of and made me scare of how much they are present in my everyday life. However, just like I said, this class also made me aware of how I can identify them and fight against it or just control it. Thinking in systems made me aware of my own system, of how my connections are important and how I can use it to live my life while taking the best out of it. This idea of chaos was what striked me the most, because it is something that I constantly feel: the feeling of being lost in a world where everything is happening at the same time, of not having any kind of control in what is happening to me (inside or outside). But talking about it in class with my classmates made me realize that I can somehow deal with it.
For me, the part of the class where we could talk with our classmates and meet new people who we weren’t so intimate with, was the best for me. Even if it’s awkward in those moments where no one knows what to say, or when we just don’t have anything to say, I guess it kinda put me a little bit more in this erasmus experience, and it was great.
In my last talk, during our last meeting, where we talked about entropy, I talked with my partner about this concept of chaos and how it is present in our life, and they said something that really striked me and I think that it is what I will carry with me for my whole life after this erasmus experience: my partner was talking about how entropy made them think of needing to stop focusing on being afraid of chaos or what could go wrong, and just live with it and focus on what could go right.
It is an optimistic way of seeing life, but I think it is what we need nowadays. Even if I don’t believe we can erase all of our mistakes to atteign a state of negentropy, I think that we can still work with the positive sides that still exist. I think it is what we need in a world full of chaos. I’m not saying that we need to be ignorant of all the negative things that exist, but we cannot live thinking about only that. We need to look for the bright side, look for what makes us feel good and live with that. Otherwise, life is not worth it.