Buckminster Fuller defined synergy as the behaviors of whole systems not predicted by the behaviors of the parts.
The recent fuss over some researchers’ ability to partially revive pigs’ brains came about because they wanted to be able to study the pigs’ intact brain structures (whole systems). They’ve been able to separate individual viable cells from brains for a while, but then you lose the synergies that exist in a structured set of neurons.
It shows some of the difficulty in understanding complex systems. Historically, we’ve taken things apart to understand them, but there is more and more need to understand how the parts interact when they work together.
Not all complex systems have ethical implications like this experiment does, but living beings are some of the most complex whole systems we have to explore, so we’re likely to see more of this kind of thing going forward.
