Essays on Life Itself Quotes

“The essence of an open system is, as we have seen, the necessity to invoke an “outside,” or an environment, in order to understand what is going on “inside.” That is, we must go to a larger system, and not to smaller ones, to account for what an open system is doing. That is why reductionism, or analysis, that only permits us to devolve system behavior upon subsystem behaviors, fails for open systems.”
― Robert Rosen, Essays on Life Itself