On Flows III

"As soon as we are convinced that all technical and non-technical feedback systems are closely related, these relationships must not be distinguished by their specific designs in anatomy or technology; on the contrary their only common characterisation is the analogy of signal flows and the dynamics of control." (Hermann Schmidt, "Regelungstechnik - die technische Aufgabe und ihre wissenschaftliche, sozialpolitische und kulturpolitische Auswirkung", Verein Deutscher Ingenieure, Zeitschrift Vol. 85 (4), 1941)

"What is in the present is what the image ‘represents‘, but not the image itself which, in cinema as in painting, is never to be confused with what it represents. The image itself is the system of the relationships between its elements, that is, a set of relationships from which the variable present only flows. […] What is specific in the image, as soon as it is creative, is to make perceptible, to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented object and do not allow them - selves to be reduced to the present." (Gilles Deleuze, "Cinema 2: The Time-Image", 1980)

"The new information technologies can be seen to drive societies toward increasingly dynamic high-energy regions further and further from thermodynamical equilibrium, characterized by decreasing specific entropy and increasingly dense free-energy flows, accessed and processed by more and more complex social, economic, and political structures." (Ervin László, "Information Technology and Social Change: An Evolutionary Systems Analysis", Behavioral Science 37, 1992)

"When the pinball game is treated as a flow instead of a mapping, and a simple enough system of differential equations is used as a model, it may be possible to solve the equations. A complete solution will contain expressions that give the values of the variables at any given time in terms of the values at any previous time. When the times are those of consecutive strikes on a pin, the expressions will amount to nothing more than a system of difference equations, which in this case will have been derived by solving the differential equations. Thus a mapping will have been derived from a flow." (Edward N Lorenz, "The Essence of Chaos", 1993)

"The worldview of the classical sciences conceptualized nature as a giant machine composed of intricate but replaceable machine-like parts. The new systems sciences look at nature as an organism endowed with irreplaceable elements and an innate but non-deterministic purpose for choice, for flow, for spontaneity." (Ervin László, "The Systems View of the World", 1996)

"Complex systems operate under conditions far from equilibrium. Complex systems need a constant flow of energy to change, evolve and survive as complex entities. Equilibrium, symmetry and complete stability mean death. Just as the flow, of energy is necessary to fight entropy and maintain the complex structure of the system, society can only survive as a process. It is defined not by its origins or its goals, but by what it is doing." (Paul Cilliers, "Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems", 1998)

"Much of the art of system dynamics modeling is discovering and representing the feedback processes, which, along with stock and flow structures, time delays, and nonlinearities, determine the dynamics of a system. […] the most complex behaviors usually arise from the interactions (feedbacks) among the components of the system, not from the complexity of the components themselves." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)

"The mental models people use to guide their decisions are dynamically deficient. […] people generally adopt an event-based, open-loop view of causality, ignore feedback processes, fail to appreciate time delays between action and response and in the reporting of information, do not understand stocks and flows and are insensitive to nonlinearities that may alter the strengths of different feedback loops as a system evolves." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)