An Intro to this Blog: Thinking Across Disciplines

This is a new blog where I plan to discuss my thoughts on a number of different subjects in many different disciplines.  Through my history as a political and lifestyle activist, I have found it useful to have a knowledge that crosses boundaries between disciplines.  In a world with so many people and in a society that is by necessity so complex, we are forced to specialize in disciplines or occupations.  This specialization leads to a narrowing of perspective and we become unable to understand the world as a whole.  This is not all bad, because I believe that with the increase in complexity of our world as individuals our understanding of it has greatly increased.   Many of us can understand how our world works on a larger scale of complexity than our ancestors could, we can learn how we are negatively impacting it, and we can change.  

However, the complexity of what we have created with our vast population is still far beyond what any individual can understand.  We may view the world as a complex organism made up of many different specialized beings, each contributing to the survival of the whole.  Bees as individuals each perform a role that contributes to the survival of the hive.  But beehives are akin to well-oiled machines (though the perfection acheived by nature far surpasses that of any human invention), whereas the complex society of humanity is like a body where the brain doesn't know what the foot is doing. Things could be different.  We could be more like a well-oiled machine, but in my mind we are more like a free for all of individuals grabbing at resources to meet our basic needs or simply to make our lives more entertaining. 

Often I will be listening to the theories of a specialist like say, I don't know, an economist, and it will be obvious to me that this expert doesn't know the slightest thing about disciplines that directly affect economics.  For instance, I don't know how any economist can possibly understand economic sustainability without understanding environmental sustainability.  The two are vitally linked.  Just one example is the common misunderstanding among economists that constant economic growth is possible in a world with finite resources.  This also illustrates a lack of understanding of the fundamental laws of physics.

I don't claim to be able to understand everything in every discipline, obviously, but I instead point out the necessity of looking at things on a larger level to understand certain ideas.   Instead of staying so isolated in our knowledge, we need to have a cross-disciplinary understanding of our world, to see how these complex systems interact.  In this blog I will try to write about complex ideas that I feel are very important in problem solving for a world confronting a major crisis, as I believe ours is right now.