Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

by Carlo Rovelli

The key concept of Bogdanov’s theoretical work is the notion of organization. Social life is the organization of collective work. Knowledge is the organization of experience and of concepts. It is possible to understand the whole of reality as organization, structure. The picture of the world that Bogdanov proposes is based on a spectrum of kinds of organization that become gradually more complex: from minimal elements that interact directly, through the organization of matter in the living, the biological development of individual experience organized in individuals, up to scientific knowledge, which, for Bogdanov, is collectively organized experience. Through the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener and the system theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, these ideas will have a little-recognized but profound influence on modern thought, on the birth of cybernetics, on the science of complex systems, down to contemporary structural realism.