NR 500 Week 6 Discussion Systems-Structure and Function
NR 500 Week 6 Discussion Systems-Structure and Function
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Write My Essay For MeMany of you have experience in complex adaptive systems whether you realize it or not. Thinking about your future practice specialty area, identify a situation in which an issue or concern common to your future specialty would impact that system. (Note: This can be the same practice issue identified in Week 5.) In your initial response, please identify your specialty track, as well as the issue or concern. Discuss how this issue or concern will impact the system at the micro, meso, and macro levels. How will you address this issue or concern at each of those levels? What is the expected impact on each of these system levels using your solution(s)? Remember you can use an information technology-based solution to address the issue or concern.
System and Structure
The system and its elements. A system is an internally organised whole where elements are so intimately connected that they operate as one in relation to external conditions and other systems. An element may be defined as the minimal unit performing a definite function in the whole. Systems may be either simple or complex. A complex system is one whose elements may also be regarded as systems or subsystems.
All things, properties and relations that strike us as something independent are essentially parts of some system, which in its turn is part of an even bigger system, and so on ad infinitum. For example, the whole of world civilisation is no more than a large and extremely complex self-developing system, which comprises other systems of varying degrees of complexity.
Every system is something whole. So anything that corresponds to the demands of unity and stability—an atom, a molecule, a crystal, the solar system, the organism, society, a work of art, a theory—may be regarded as a system. Every system forms a whole, but not every whole is a system.
We usually call the parts of a system its elements. If in investigating a system we wish to identify its elements we should regard them as elementary objects in themselves. Once we have established them as something relatively indivisible in one system, elements may be regarded in their turn as systems (or subsystems), consisting of elements of a different order, and so on.
The concept of structure. The aim of scientific cognition is to discover law-governed relations between the elements forming a given system. In the process of this research we identify the structures peculiar to that system. When studying the content of an object, we enumerate its elements such as, for example, the parts of a certain organism. But we do not stop at that, we try to understand how these parts are coordinated and what is made up as a result, thus arriving at the structure of the object. Structure is the type of connection between the elements of a whole. It has its own internal dialectic. Wholeness must be composed in a certain way, its parts are always related to the whole. It is not simply a whole but a whole with internal divisions. Structure is a composite whole, or an internally organised content.
But structure is not enough to make a system. A system consists of something more than structure: it is a structure with certain properties. When a structure is understood from the standpoint of its properties, it is understood as a system. We speak of the “solar system” and not the solar structure. Structure is an extremely abstract and formal concept.
Structure implies not only the position of its elements in space but also their movement in time, their sequence and rhythm, the law of mutation of a process. So structure is actually the law or set of laws that determine a system’s composition and functioning, its properties and stability.
Structure and function. The life of a structure manifests itself in its function, they condition each other. The structures of the organs of the body, for instance, are connected with their functions. Any breakdown in structure, any deformation of an organ leads to a distortion of the function. In the development of organisms changes begin with the reorganisation of an organ’s function under the influence of changing conditions of life, while its structure may survive for a time without any substantial modification. However, change of activity sooner or later leads to a change in structure.
Functional disturbances in organs precede their morphological distortions. The contradiction between the organism’s new mode of life and its structure is resolved by a modification in the latter. All the organs and functions of a bird, for example, are adapted to an aerial mode of life. The amazingly purposeful feather structure protects the bird from cold during the rapid changes of temperature in flight. The fact that a bird can fly is observable even when it is on ground.
We can see this from its streamlined body, its fine-boned structure which allows it to pass through the air with minimum expenditure of energy, and from the design of the wings. The whole structure embodies the idea of flight. But a colourful butterfly resembles a flying flower. And this too is understandable because a butterfly feeds on the nectar of a flower and its resemblance to a flower protects it from birds when it is sitting motionless on a blossom. The life of the bird is associated with air and the life of a butterfly is bound up with flowers. Their functions, their ways of life determine their structure.
To sum up, function organises structure. The methods of morphology are subordinate to the methods of physiology. The function of sight organised the eye, while labour was responsible for the structure of the hand. But being an organised function, structure in its turn determines function.
Whole and part. We call something a whole that embraces all its parts in such a way as to create a unity.
The category of part expresses the object not in itself but as something in relation to what it is a part of, to that in which it realises its potentials and prospects. For example, an organ is part of an organism taken as a whole. Consequently, the categories of whole and part express a relationship between objects in which one object, being a complex and integral whole, is a unity of other objects which form its parts. A part is subject to the influence of the whole, which is present, as it were, in all its parts. Every part feels the influence of the whole, which seems to permeate the parts and exist in them. Thus, in a tragic context even a joke becomes tragic; a free atom is distinctly different from an atom that forms part of a molecule or a crystal; a word taken out of context loses much or all of its meaning.
At the same time the parts have an influence on the whole. The organism is a whole and disfunction of one of its organs leads to disbalance of the whole. For example, against a background of rational thinking an obsessive idea may sometimes have a very substantial effect on the general condition of the individual.
The categories of whole and part are relative; they have meaning only in relation to each other. The whole exists thanks to its parts and in them. The parts, in their turn, cannot exist by themselves. No matter how small a particle we name, it is something whole and at the same time a part of another whole. The largest whole that we can conceive of is ultimately only a part of an infinitely greater whole. Everything in nature is a part of the universe.
Various systems are divided into three basic types of wholeness. The simplest type is the unorganised or summative whole, an unsystematic conglomeration of objects (a herd of cattle, for example). This category also includes a mechanical grouping of heterogeneous things, for example, rock consisting of pebbles, sand, gravel, boulders, and so on.
In such a whole the connection between the parts is external and obeys no recognisable law. We simply have a group of unsystematic formations of a purely summative character. The properties of such a whole coincide with the sum of the properties of its component parts. Moreover, when objects become part of an unorganised whole or leave such a whole, they usually undergo no qualitative change. For this type of whole the characteristic feature is the varying lifetime of its components.
The second, more complex type of whole is the organised whole, for example, the atom, the molecule, the crystal. Such a whole may have varying degrees of organisation, depending on the peculiar features of its parts and the character of the connection between them. In an organised whole the composing elements are in a relatively stable and law-governed interrelationship. Its properties cannot be reduced to the mechanical sum of the properties of its parts. Rivers “lose themselves” in the sea, although they are in it and it would not exist without them.
Water possesses the property of being able to extinguish fire, but the parts of which it is composed, taken separately, possess quite different properties: hydrogen is itself flammable and oxygen maintains or boosts combustion. Zero in itself is nothing, but in the composition of a number its role is highly significant, and at times gigantically so, by increasing 100 into 1,000, for instance. A hydrogen atom consists of a proton and an electron. But strictly speaking, this is not true.
The statement contains the same error as the phrase “this house is built of pine”. The mass of an atom of hydrogen is not equal to the total mass of the proton and the electron. It is less than that mass because in combining into the system of the hydrogen atom the proton and the electron lose something, which escapes into space in the form of radiation.
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