1981-1996 yılları arasında çeşitli yerlerde biraraya gelerek entellektüel
konuları tartışan “The Reality Club”
adlı grup, 1996 yılından itibaren Edge
Foundation çatısı altında ve www.edge.org adresindeki e-dergi ile tüm dünyaya
açılıyor.
1996 yılından günümüze kadar Edge
Foundation her yıl bir soru sorup sanatçı, yazar, bilimadamı ve diğer
düşünürlerin sorulan sorulara verdikleri yanıtları www.edge.org
web sitesinde yayımlıyor.
2011 yılında sorulan soruyu Harvard Üniversitesi’nde bir psikolog olan Steven Pinker önerdi;
“What scientific concept
would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”.
Türkçe’ye şöyle çevrilebilir;
“Hangi
bilimsel kavram herkesin bilişsel aracını geliştirebilir?”.
Bir başka deyişle, şöyle çevirmek de mümkün;
“İnsanlar
dünyayı daha iyi anlamak için aldıkları bilgiyi yorumlama yolunu nasıl
değiştirebilirler?”
Bu soruya yazdıkları makalelerle yanıt veren 167 sanatçı, yazar,
bilimadamı ve diğer düşünürlerin yazılarına aşağıdaki bağlantıdan
ulaşabilirsiniz.
Yazıları ile bu soruya yanıt veren ve katkıda bulunan kişilerden birisi de Nicholas A. Christakis (Harvard
Üniversitesi'nde Doktor ve Sosyal Bilimci). Kendisi, “Connected: The
Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives”
başlıklı kitabın eşyazarlarından bir tanesi. Sosyal Ağ’ların günümüzde
yaşamımızı ne kadar etkilediği ve yaşamımızı ne kadar şekillendirdiğini
anlatıyor… bugün ülkemizde yaşananları anlamamız için de çok yararlı olabilir!
Nicholas A. Christakis’in yukarıdaki soruya yanıt olarak yazdığı
yazının aslını şu bağlantıda
“Holism” başlıklı bu yazıyı bloğumuzda yayımlanmak üzere bana
göndererek holizmi daha iyi anlamama ve ayrıca www.edge.org
web sitesini keşfetmeme sebep olan Sn. Mustafa
Özcan’a teşekkür ederim.
Mustafa bey’in ifadeleri
ile; “makale
holizm konusunu yüksek bir genellikle işlemesi yönüyle yetkin ve
ilginç bir içerik sunuyor. Hele hele "bütünün parçalarından fazla
oluşu" ve sinerjik etki hususları ile ilgili olarak mikro kosmoz
(parçacıklar dünyası) ve mezo kosmoz (canlılar dünyası) ile igili
örnekleri son derece aydınlatıcı bir mahiyet ortaya koymaktadır.”
KDP katılımcılarının
ilgisini çekmesi durumunda önümüzdeki günlerde www.edge.org
web sitesinden daha fazla yararlanıp KDP bloğunda buradan daha fazla yazıyı
paylaşabileceğimizi belirtmek isterim.
Ümit Ersöz (20 Haziran 2013)
* * *
Holism
Some people like to build sand castles, and some
like to tear them apart. There can be much joy in the latter. But it is the
former that interests me. You can take a bunch of minute silica crystals,
pounded for thousands of years by the waves, use your hands, and make an ornate
tower. Tiny physical forces govern how each particle interacts with its
neighbors, keeping the castle together, at least until the force majeur
of a foot appears.
But, having built the castle, this is the part
that I like the most: you step back and look at it. Across the
expanse of beach, here is
something new, something not present before among the endless sand grains,
something risen from the ground, something that reflects the scientific
principle of holism.
Holism is colloquially summarized as "the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts." What is interesting to me,
however, are not the artificial instantiations of this principle — when we
deliberately form sand into ornate castles or metal into airborne planes or ourselves
into corporations — but rather the natural instantiations. The examples are
widespread and stunning. Perhaps the most impressive one is that carbon,
hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, iron, and a few other elements,
when mixed in just the right way, yield life. And life has emergent properties
not present in — nor predictable from — these constituent parts. There is a
kind of awesome synergy between the parts.
Hence, I think that the scientific concept that
would improve everyone's cognitive toolkit is holism: the abiding recognition
that wholes have properties not present in the parts and not reducible to the
study of the parts.
For example, carbon atoms have particular,
knowable physical and chemical properties. But the atoms can be combined in
different ways to make, say, graphite or diamond. The properties of those
substances — properties such as darkness and softness and clearness and
hardness — are not properties of the carbon atoms, but rather properties of the
collection of carbon atoms. Moreover, which particular properties the
collection of atoms has depends entirely on how they are assembled — into
sheets or pyramids. The properties arise because of the connections between the
parts. I think grasping this insight is crucial for a proper scientific
perspective on the world. You could know everything about isolated neurons and
not be able to say how memory works, or where desire originates.
It is also the case that the whole has a
complexity that rises faster than the number of its parts. Consider social
networks as a simple illustration. If we have ten people in a group, there are
a maximum of 10x9/2=45 possible connections between them. If we increase the
number of people to 1,000, the number of possible ties increases to 1,000x999/2=499,500.
So, while the number of people has increased by 100-fold (from 10 to 1,000),
the number of possible ties (and hence, this one measure of the complexity of
the system), has increased by over 10,000-fold.
Holism does not come naturally. It is an appreciation
not of the simple, but of the complex, or at least of the simplicity and
coherence in complex things. Moreover, unlike curiosity or empiricism, say,
holism takes a while to acquire and to appreciate. It is a very grown-up
disposition. Indeed, for the last few centuries, the Cartesian project in
science has been to break matter down into ever smaller bits, in the pursuit of
understanding. And this works, to some extent. We can understand matter by
breaking it down to atoms, then protons and electrons and neutrons, then
quarks, then gluons, and so on. We can understand organisms by breaking them
down into organs, then tissues, then cells, then organelles, then proteins,
then DNA, and so on.
But putting things back
together in order to understand them is harder, and typically comes later in
the development of a scientist or in the development of science. Think of the
difficulties in understanding how all the cells in our bodies work together, as
compared with the study of the cells themselves. Whole new fields of
neuroscience and systems biology and network science are arising to accomplish
just this. And these fields are arising just now, after centuries of stomping
on castles in order to figure them out
________________________________
NICHOLAS A.
CHRISTAKIS
Physician and Social Scientist, Harvard University; Coauthor, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
Physician and Social Scientist, Harvard University; Coauthor, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
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