Social Systems Quotes

“The fact that most of the mass of the atom is concentrated in its center is just a fact of distribution but does not make atoms more or less 'empty space'. This is really a very not serious description taken from the propaganda of popular science. See for yourself, climb on your scales and say 'I am mostly empty space' and see if your scale is impressed and will show you a more favorable number... The solidity of matter at the molecular level is not due to them being 'full' or 'empty' space but due to interactions between atoms mediated (mostly) by electromagnetic forces. Also this is a gross simplification, but seriously solidity is achieved through interaction of physical forces and not boundaries of concepts.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Social Systems: Where is the Ground?

“It is not that the spider stands on a solid ground 'composed of' whatever... it is the spider itself which is composed of that whatever. The distinction and separation between spider and ground is a philosophical confusion. No matter how many levels of spiders you would come up with, they are immanent one within the other. This is the heresy of Spinoza about God. He denied this very separation, equating God with the organization of 'lesser forms and substances'.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Social Systems: Where is the Ground?

“Social systems can move mountains and eventually perhaps planets and stars. Still, no walking through walls.... And if they come to allow walking through walls eventually, just as a point, it will require a serious tweaking of constraints and degrees of freedom at the relevant substrate level (i.e., atoms, molecules, etc.) just as the very reality of your mobile phone requires.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Social Systems: Where is the Ground?

“While the initial ‘hardware before the software’ injunction may be quite innocent, the addition of the ‘software as transmission’ one produces a description of the composition of reality which lands us in the methodological procedure of the Newtonian science being applied to humanities. That methodological procedure goes like this: since individuals in the former substratum exist a priori and individuals in the latter superstratum only exist a posteriori, in your observations and explanations you should follow the same linear sequence of emergence. That is: you should delineate former systems, equip them with their own properties and actions and from then on you may approach such clearly attributed actions as 'processes' - in the higher strata. Therefore, you cannot speak about processes without this sort of a solid attribution to individuals, their properties, and interactions, which have been legitimately observed and delineated before. Attribution of processes to processes will not fly. Note that this is no longer an assumption about the composition of reality; it becomes an epistemological procedure. In that sense we have switched from following reality, following the particular processes of interest, to following the acceptable procedure of science (which, let me remind you, is a social system...).”
― Marta Lenartowicz, Social Systems: Where is the Ground?

“Atoms can stay. But other than that, I believe one needs to suspend most of the assumptions about the granularity of the reality that is normally invoked once you start speaking about social systems.”
― Marta Lenartowicz, Social Systems: Where is the Ground?

“I do not want to end up not being able to observe and account for cases where it is actually a word, an idea, a dream, a symbolic distinction, etc., which brings about a particular physical manifestation, or transforms a physical state of affairs to something else.”
― Marta Lenartowicz, Social Systems: Where is the Ground?

“When you say that in science we need to follow what is 'out there', and let it surprise us, the trouble is that when you start from the 'out there' which is called 'physical', and continue with your reality checks which are appropriate for physics, you will observe social systems differently than you would, if you had started from the 'out there' that is located in these very systems which are of our interest here.”
― Marta Lenartowicz, Social Systems: Where is the Ground?

“I am not convinced that a simulated tornado can lift only simulated cows. As far as our social systems are concerned, being made in 99,9% of the intangible matter of interrelated meanings, they are doing with the 0,01% of the physically tangible matter basically what they want. They regulate most of the mental and physical activity of almost all humans for almost all time, they move natural resources and other objects from one place to another across the planet, including probably all cows which exist, dead or alive. They dictate where everything will go, where it will stay, for how long, what it will be transformed into…”
― Marta Lenartowicz, Social Systems: Where is the Ground?