keepitsimple

In the course of the System Theory, Psychology and Social Media lectures, a number of broad topics were covered that I had never given much thought to before. I started this course without knowing what I was going to learn and what exactly it was going to be about, each lesson was an introduction to a topic that could be talked about for hours and I often found myself confronted with topics that I had never really paid attention to. 

What does system thinking mean? That was the first question I asked myself. 

System thinking is defined as ‘a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into its parts’. 

I think I have understood, by the end of this course, what system thinking really means in practice. Systemic thinking allows you to see things from a distance, to look at the big picture of a situation, to understand the correlations of the parts, to immediately see the sides of the puzzle that fit together. 

This is a bit what happened with me during these lessons. Reflecting on the topics discussed, comparing myself with my classmates, rereading the very useful reflections made each week, I was able to see the glue that bound the pieces together, the topics that intertwined, interacted and unknowingly prepared you for the next one.  

Systemic thinking is something extremely practical and something I unknowingly experienced during my Erasmus experience in Athens. The simplistic, linear and almost mechanical reality I was used to in my city was turned upside down, revealing itself to be dynamic and unpredictable. 

Thinking systematically means doing mental reconnaissance, it often means stopping and thinking, it means realising that even the most insignificant of details potentially has a huge impact on the ecosystem of things. In our daily lives we feel we are the protagonists of our own stories, of our own continuous film, while others are extras that influence the course of the plot. These extras are actually protagonists in just as many films, perhaps more interesting perhaps less so, but nonetheless just as important as our own. The meeting between two people is the result of processes behind each of us; we are all the result, inconstant and mutable, of a process that makes us what we show to the world. So, perhaps, we should think of our experience in a serendipitous way; it is a rather optimistic outlook on life when you think about it, the idea that any encounter or event can have an unexpected twist that, can fit on the side of a puzzle piece, which metaphorically is the film of our life.

From this systematic view of interpersonal relationships, it is evident how the concept of empathy emerges spontaneously. From the Greek εμπάθεια, passion, empathy represents a phenomenon whereby a kind of affective communion is created between us and another individual following a process of identification. Scholars consider empathy as a pyramid consisting of three superimposed levels, a basic empathy, common to all human beings, above which there is a more articulated construction associating various qualities (reciprocal empathy) and, finally, that energy (intersubjectivity) that drives a bond, an interpersonal relationship. Basic empathy means the possibility of identification, of changing one’s point of view on a situation without losing oneself. Hence imagining what one might feel and think in the other’s place. Added to this is the desire for mutual recognition, not only do I identify with the other, but I also recognise him or her the right to identify with me. It refers to the idea of a mirror and implies a direct contact with the person. At this level, empathy consists in recognising to the other the possibility of clarifying aspects of myself that I ignore, it is what a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst named Tisseron, calls ’empathy extimising’, linking it to the concept of estimity, the counterpart of intimacy, that is, exposing to a more or less vast public fragments of oneself until then protected from extraneous gazes, kept intimate, in order to have their value recognised and thus obtain validation. It is then a matter of discovering oneself, through the other, as different from what I thought I was and of allowing myself to be transformed by this discovery. It follows that each of us simultaneously discovers the other and himself, and this mutual discovery and the pleasure that accompanies it are the key to the high forms of empathy and solidarity of which man is capable. But at the same time, such proximity between self and other cannot fail to arouse intense anxieties: the fear of being manipulated, of being alienated from one’s own freedom and desire, that is, of being absorbed into the other and ceasing to exist autonomously. The risk is therefore to want to come to have dominion over the other for fear of being subjected to the other’s domination. 

Acknowledging that the person with whom we are interfacing has a past and a history behind him/her is fundamental if we are to succeed in empathising with the other.

Returning to our system thinking lessons, the subject of climate change has come up several times, a subject to which we are, unfortunately or fortunately, increasingly exposed. Is it not that we have lost, as a whole species, empathy for the planet that hosts us? Is it not that our fear of being manipulated by nature has led us to dominate it in turn? 

For today’s man, nature is experienced as a reality outside of us, which we use to feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, build houses and machines, of which we consider ourselves masters by exploiting its materials and energy. It corresponds to our modern scientific consciousness: we study the laws of Nature with a purely quantitative and analytical approach, considering the moral dimension of our experience as a private and personal reality, completely detached from scientific research. A clearly dualistic view. The ecological drama we are exposed to is the clearest expression of the destructive character we adopt towards Nature. The analytical principle, the counterpart of the systemic principle, in fact has within it a process of division, we reduce a whole into pieces and are left holding the parts, which we later try to recompose by creating an artificial synthesis, a machine.

The human being is terrified by something as irrational and unpredictable as Nature, but at the same time he is magnetically attracted to it; an author of Romanticism would use the term sublime to indicate the dualism between tacit admiration in front of the immense power of nature and the will to act to go beyond that limit, which tended towards infinity.

The philosopher Empedocles, who lived in the 5th century BC, maintained that the principles of the world reside in four eternal and immutable elements: Earth (γαῖα), Water (ὕδωρ), Air (αἰθήρ) and Fire (πῦρ). He calls them roots, ριζώματα, rhizòmata. From their aggregation and disintegration, originated by the simultaneous antithetical action of the two cosmic and divine forces Friendship (φιλóτας) and Dissension (νεῖκος), the birth and death of all things are determined, in a cyclic and infinite process. However, this is only apparent birth and death, since neither exists in reality, but only mixing and separation, the perennial transformation of things. Man too is formed from similar mixtures of the four roots, moved by the same attractive and repulsive forces, he is able to know the four elements not with reason alone, but with the aid of the senses, because the similar recognizes the similar, and in man himself are contained all the elements of the universe. Man is Nature, it is a system of which the human being is also a part. 

We need nature in order for us to feel alive. We need Nature to breathe, to eat, to continue doing everything that keeps us alive, yet we continue to perceive ourselves as apart from nature and not part of it, without considering that by damaging the system we are part of, we will inevitably end up damaging ourselves, more than we are already doing. 

The continuous production of technology has certainly brought ease to the daily lives of all of us; in these lessons we have talked about artificial intelligence in many forms, as it is an increasingly visible and tangible reality. Through discussion with other classmates, it emerged how it presents itself as a novelty that can frighten, instil fear and lead to rejection. Artificial intelligence is an expression of the technological development that has taken hold of our lives since the industrial revolution, but technology has been talked about since the dawn of civilization, Aeschylus in Prometheus Unchained writes: “Prometheus, who had given technology to men, posed this question: ‘Is technology stronger or the necessity that governs the laws of nature? Prometheus, friend of men and inventor of technology, gives his lapidary answer: ‘Technology is far weaker than the necessity that governs the laws of nature’.

We should try to recover the original connection with Nature inherent in our biology and incorporate this perspective into the irreversible era of technology and production in which we live, trying to continue building on an ethic that makes us aware of the effects of technology, re-establishing a balance between our ‘power to do’ and our ‘capacity to foresee’, recovering that virtue that the Greeks had attributed to Prometheus, whose name literally means ‘he who sees in advance’.

During this last lesson, what aroused my curiosity the most was the video we watched about artificial psychotherapy, a topic I had never really thought about despite the fact that the robotization of many professions is increasingly a concrete and tangible reality.
I therefore did some research online to look into the subject.
The use of artificial intelligence to support the treatment of certain psychological disorders is actually an idea that has been around since the 1980s, the contribution of information technology, however, was limited to supporting the therapist in the search for symptoms and the subsequent issuing of a diagnosis. As early as the 1970s, the first programmes (chatbots) were being tested that were capable of responding to an interlocutor, who was more or less aware of being in front of a software interface, and was listened to and made suggestions, trying to simulate communication between two human beings. So unlike diagnostic support software, these chatbots have the far more ambitious goal of simulating one of the most profound and characterising human skills, empathy.
A study conducted at Palo Alto University wanted to test the functionality of a chatbot named Tess, which carried out a psychological intervention for students with social phobia and depression. The results showed good feedback from those who used the tool and there was also a reduction in symptoms compared to a control sample. Although it is a reality that frightens me incredibly and for which I hope there will be no future, it probably also has advantages, this type of instrument in fact, in its impersonality could allow people with a certain type of social withdrawal to feel more at ease because they are less judged, but it does not however fulfil the most complex and fundamental part of the therapeutic intervention: providing empathy and interpreting the patient’s experiences and giving a dynamic reading of emotions. Moreover, the feeling of not dealing with an individual, lacking the relational and in some way affective aspect, makes the tool useful, but not entirely effective; a virtual psychotherapist therefore cannot replace a human therapist, but could function as an integrative support capable of performing minor functions.

Mindwalk is a film mostly made of nothing, no special effects, there is not even a particularly intriguing plot or suspenseful story, nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed watching this film. Against the backdrop of the marvellous isle of Mont St Michel in France, three characters dialogue about issues of rather existential relevance. The three protagonists are a physicist currently on sabbatical in France, a poet and a democratic senator. The serendipitous encounter of the two men travelling with the scientist results in an interesting exchange of views along the terraces and rooms of a charming medieval castle. The woman, from whose words leaks wit and sharpness of thought, expounds her view of the world, a world that is holistic and interconnected, dynamic and mutable. She criticises the mechanistic Cartesian position of a world in which everything, man himself, can be explained through a mathematical equation, despite the fact that she herself is a person of numbers. She also shows her contempt for today’s society, always racing to create new technological tools, artificial realities that often do not even turn out to be useful. The two men react differently to her words, the poet listens amused, sometimes humouring, sometimes asking questions, the politician on the other hand, predictably, is wary, counter-arguing, responding and surprised; he somehow represents the society the woman is talking about, in which a crisis of perspective persists that in his opinion can be overcome through the adoption of ecological thinking. What centuries of industrial revolution and patriarchal governments have entailed is the implementation of a way of thinking that does not help mankind, the environment and does not allow us to see the world in its actual beauty, so it should be fundamentally overturned.

It is not easy to fully describe complex concepts that in turn intersect multiple meanings, and the web and its unlimited network of connections is one of them. In this case, we could use a metaphor, a concept I didn’t really know anything about before the last lesson: “rhizome”.  The term comes from botany, the rhizome is found in many herbaceous plants and looks like a very branched root, but is instead a real portion of stem that grows below ground level, which has buds of its own and functions as a nutrient store. The appearance of the rhizome, due to its branching, connection and extension, expresses an interesting conceptual representation: any point is connected to each of the others through a multidirectional expansion. The rhizome is capable of progressing without establishing internal hierarchies and is designed to create communication through the interaction between two or more points in any direction. How not to refer to the web then? The advent of the Internet represents the perfect technological translation of rhizomatic thought: the web does not force one direction, but signals concatenations and leaves one free to play at creating connections, moving from one plane to another. The infinite data that the web accumulates, with the risk of becoming a useless stagnation, is flanked by the possibility of a rhizomatic interpretative system, mobile, multidirectional and not rigid but constantly evolving, to accommodate the perennial expansion of the data itself. This allows no barrier to be created between the various fields of knowledge, only contamination.

Last meeting we talked about artificial intelligence, which is a very controversial topic I think for everyone. Artificial intelligence is something I know very little about, even though we talk about it more and more and it is fast becoming a tangible reality, in my head there is still the idea that it corresponds to robots that will invade our planet and cause a catastrophe, a bit like what you see in dystopian movies. In reality, artificial intelligence is something we come into contact with every day, when we use the calculators on our phones, the online translator, the maps that show us the way, and these are all things we can no longer do without. It’s definitely a controversial topic because on the one hand it scares me, the idea that a machine can replace human skills, but on the other hand I am aware that we live in a society where science is progressing faster and faster thankfully. As with anything I think, it is important to consider how artificial intelligence is used. Today, we can unlock our phones or access our banks’ websites thanks to facial recognition, we can scroll through videos on social networks and only see what we are interested in, discover new music that matches our tastes, because we are totally profiled and, this, surely, can be scary. This profiling in particular makes me feel a bit uncomfortable at times, it can have as many pros as cons. On social media in particular I realise, it is often alienating because it leads us to live in a bubble where our opinion seems universal, when in reality this is not the case. It isolates us in a dimension where we are only able to connect with ideas we share or generally things we like and this, no matter how open our minds may be, leads us to see the world with blinders on.

At the end of this class, we got together in groups and shared our thoughts about what we had understood from the lesson. 

As soon as we started talking, we realised how much confusion there was in our heads and the drawing we did was an expression of that. Each of us contributed to this drawing, some of us drew a tree with a brown felt-tip pen, some completed it by colouring the leaves green, and some juxtaposed a kitten at the base. At the end of this our ideas were clearer and a very interesting conversation of inspiration ensued. The topic we focused on was climate change, a topic that is fortunately being talked about more and more lately, but certainly not enough and often not in the right way.  

In the age of social networks we are constantly bombarded with news, our eyes are constantly being stimulated and we often read headlines without even realising the seriousness or importance of what they refer to. We are anaesthetised to pain, we are anaesthetised to war, we are anaesthetised to the thought that we are destroying the world we live in. This is an idea I think about a lot, because unfortunately I find myself there too. Fortunately, our generation is showing greater sensitivity to certain issues, such as climate change, and this is something that makes me feel very proud, but a little bit sorry; a little bit sorry to see children who do not look at the future as something bright that awaits them, a little bit sorry to hear children who know they are growing up in a world that has so many problems and are aware from a young age that those problems will affect them very closely. 

Sometimes I get frustrated because in my own small way I can convince myself that I am saving the planet by not buying plastic bags, using the water bottle instead of the small bottle at the bar, using the bicycle instead of the car, but how much does this actually help? Or is it just something that makes me feel better egocentrically?

During this class we got to talk about the difference between what we consider a “collection” and what we can call a “system”. We define a system as a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole, while a collection is just an amount of objects or people united by something. 

It is a topic I got to study in my home university and system thinking in general it’s an approach you will get in touch with many times if you study psychology. 

When we discussed about it during class , the first thought that came to my mind was the definition of group that the well known German-american psychologist Kurt Lewin, conceives: it is not similarity or dissimilarity of individuals that constitutes a group, but rather interdependence of fate. So, if the group’s task is such that members of the group are dependent on each other for achievements, then a powerful dynamic is created. 

Also Turner, says that a psychological group << is defined as one that is psychologically significant for the members, to which they relate themselves subjectively for social comparison and the acquisition of norms and values, that they privately accept membership in, and which influences their attitudes and behavior.>>.

This is an holistic theory that states that a group is not just a sum of its part, but It’s something qualitatively different.

What I can draw from this in my everyday life is that actually what makes a group cohesive is not just the collection of every member’s personality, but the dynamics, the roles, that are established in the group and that can be exclusive only for that group. Frequently it happens that we find ourself with people and we are playing a totally different role, we act differently and that’s because in a group is established a dynamic that is not analyzable in light of the breakdown of each component’s peresonality, because it’s something qualitatively different from the sum of the parts.

I think system thinking is something we could compare to this theory, since it is a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system’s costituent parts interrelate and how system work over the time and within the context of larger system. In contrasts with traditional analysis , which studies systems by breaking them down into their separate elements. 

At the beginning of this class we used a fun website, where we had to write some simple words to describe how we were feeling at the moment and, actually, I was surprised to see how everyone was kind of in the same mood. That made me reflect about the fact that sometimes we underestimate the universality of emotions: this is a concept I got to think about a lot since I’m in Athens.I have never had the opportunity before to get in touch with so many people from lot of different cultures, and because of that I was a bit skeptical about the possibility of building a sincere connection with them, or at least as I would if they were from the same country as me.

It seems like a foolish speech, but I found myself pleasantly surprised when, during some conversations, in a not too fluent English, I got to think: “that’s exactly how I feel” or “ I thought about it so many times”. So far, this experience has sharpened a lot my empathy and, It made understand even more that sometimes words are not necessary to build a strong connection between two people, there is no need to have a fluent English or a perfect grammar, because there are people with whom another type of language is activated, the emotional language, which is maybe even more powerful than the verbal one.

During this class we talked about the concept of empathy, which is a word that means a lot and you can say many things about, but today I would like to focus on a topic we have discussed about. In small groups we had the chance to talk about the place we feel like calling “Home”, tell the others what we like about it and what makes it so special for us. So i asked myself, what makes a place actually special for me? The memories you have lived there, of course are important, the emotions you have felt and the experiences you have absorbed, but above all, the sense of welcome and community that I share with all the people that live in that place. And when we got to share our thoughts, we all agreed on how the human warmth from who surrounds you is important in the place you are. 

I think it’s a great way to think about the concept of empathy, because it’s not about having deep conversations with strangers, but also shines through small things, like an unexpected smile of sympathy from a passerby.

This first meeting was really inspiring for me. Since I arrived in Athens I’ve got in touch with such different realities from mine, different point of views, different thoughts about topics I’ve never really reflected about. This class was just another opportunity to stop and think. I don’t really do that in my home country, I am so used to my routine and my fast way of living that I don’t appreciate enough the act of stopping for a minute and just think about what I am doing and who I am with. During this meeting we talked about how even the smallest living being can actually make a huge impact on nature’s ecosystem. I don’t know if I could really compare it to human system, but it’s a concept that we could apply to human’s interpersonal relationships in a way. 

Sometimes is so much easier to judge a person only from what she/he shows, I think people like to convince themselves that we can just know how the others are based on their appearance, it makes us feel confident, it makes us feel that we have control over our sorroundings. But what about when it happens to us, what about when the others judge us based on what that day we feel like to show, how do we feel? I feel like sometimes we don’t pay enough attention on other’s sensitivity, we don’t think enough about the fact that also the smallest and meaningless word for us, could have such an huge impact on someone else. It happened to everyone at least once, to have said something and see that the person’s reaction was different from what we expected to be, that’s because we don’t all live the same life, we don’t all think in the same way and most important, everyone has some painful keys.

Maybe we should think more about it.

During the class of systems theory, psychology of social media I stopped for a minute and I reflected upon the fact everyone sitting around me, myself included, was there probably for many reasons, there was a process behind them that made them being there and, we should never underestimate that or take it for granted.