In June, I attended a seminar held by Fritjof Capra at the Center for Ecoliteracy, called The Systems View of Life. It was a great experience to meet people with a similar viewpoint on how systems thinking can fundamentally affect our way of living on this earth.
I gave a presentation there called “Liology: Towards an Integration of Science and Meaning,” which was my first opportunity to present my ideas of how the traditional Chinese notion of the li – the organizing principles of the natural world which are the outward manifestation of the tao – are describing the same principles of self-organization that complexity theory and systems biology are trying to understand.
The implication of this is that science and spiritual meaning are commensurable – they describe the same reality. They are not separate ontologically from each other, as both the scientific and the monotheistic traditions would have us believe.
- Liology: Towards an Integration of Science and Meaning
Here’s a link to a “studio version” of the presentation that I gave to the seminar, and here is a pdf version of the slides.
Liology: Towards an Integration of Science and Meaning: pdf presentation
Finally, here is the introductory first chapter of the book I’m writing on the subject, also called Liology: Towards an Integration of Science and Meaning.
Finding the li 