The Hidden Connections

In this book Fritjof Capra presents a conceptual framework that integrates life's biological, cognitive and social dimensions. His aim is to offer a unified view of life, mind and society, and develop a coherent, systemic approach to some of the critical issues of our time. His extension of the systems approach explicitly includes the material world. What is unusual about that is a fact that social scientists have not been very interested in the material world (natural sciences usually deal with material structures and social sciences deal with social structures), but Capra believes that this strict division is no longer possible because the key challenge in the twenty first century will be to build ecologically sustainable communities, designed in such a way that their technologies and social institutions, their material and social structures, do not interfere with nature's inherent ability to sustain life.
The Nature of Life
In Chapter one, Capra starts his book with a question about the nature of life as a biological phenomenon. The question also refers to the defining characteristics of the living systems. The writer underlines the importance of understanding the social phenomena in a unified conception of the evolution of life and consciousness. Throughout he draws on certain principles which are as applicable to the living cells of the smallest organisms as to business corporations and political structures. At root are ideas about self-generating networks among elements in a system, non-linear evolution, often producing the unexpected, and emergence of new forms of order out of apparent instability.
From all this Capra develops the idea that "the interactions of a living system with its environment are cognitive interactions, and the process of living itself is a process of cognition." Here he uses cognition in the sense of ability to react to perturbations in the environment. Thus "mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories but... [continues]

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