The self-organization of living systems is a phenomenon that appears across biology (body, ant colonies), neurology (brain), psychology (individual), sociology (human society), and economics (markets), yet each discipline handles the same core phenomenon separately, illustrating why systems perspective is valuable for lifting interdisciplinarity to another level.

The wish to see things as a whole again is appearing across society in systematic psychotherapy, holistic medicine, growing calls for interdisciplinarity, and the increasing search for spirituality, all of which may indicate people asking about larger connections the dominant scientific perspective hasn't been able to answer.

René Descartes in the 17th century split the world into two fundamentally different substances: the mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), creating Cartesian dualism that separated the inner world of thoughts, feelings, and consciousness from the outer measurable physical world.

From Cartesian dualism followed the practical consequence that if matter is completely separate from mind and has no soul or inner perspective, then you can take it apart, measure it, and analyze it without having to account for anything immaterial, enabling the reductionist motto that the whole is the sum of its parts.

Reductionism is one of the most successful methods humanity has ever developed, evidenced by decoding the human genome, building complex machines like the particle accelerator at CERN, and raising skyscrapers into the sky.

The parts alone do not explain the whole because billions of neurons running on chemical reactions and electrical signals cannot by themselves explain how thought, memory, or consciousness arises as something that is not contained in any single part.

A hurricane demonstrates emergence: it is made only of air and water molecules in disorder with no single molecule knowing about the storm, yet from their interplay a vast, stable structure emerges that holds its shape for days, travels thousands of kilometers, with order that exists only in the interplay, not in any single molecule.

Emergence is the first great riddle that reductionism cannot solve because patterns, connections, and relationships between parts disappear in the process of taking things apart.

Universities are organized under the belief that psychology, sociology, and anthropology are separate disciplines, and the world is made of separable items of knowledge that can be examined in isolation, but this is not how the world actually is.

Systems theory as an umbrella term refers to viewing the world as one complex and connected system and turning attention to the interactions between its parts, and this is the most general formulation and the perspective at the very top.

System theory refers to hard science disciplines that concretely research, measure, and describe phenomena mathematically, but these theories are incredibly numerous, sometimes contradict each other, use different words for the same phenomena, and illuminate only one aspect of the perspective.

Whitehead and process philosophy belong to systems philosophy because process philosophy understands reality not as a collection of fixed things but as an ongoing process of becoming, built on process and relations rather than fixed substance.

Hegel attempted to systematize the fundamental mechanisms of reality itself through a metaphysics of a whole that unfolds through contradiction and change, representing an early systems philosophy approach.

The funnel model organizes systems theoretical and holistic theories from scientifically established at the bottom to esoteric and mystical perspectives at the top, with intentional inclusion of mystical/spiritual traditions as holistic perspectives because people long ago tried to grasp the world as a complex fabric of systems using symbolic and rudimentary non-scientific language.

At the bottom of the funnel sit reductionism, atomism, and classical physics where the world is reduced entirely to individual parts.

On a level higher come theories discussed in science but not yet fully accepted that nonetheless find broad resonance among many established researchers, including integrated information theory (IIT), panpsychism, and process philosophy.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) understands information as the most fundamental event in the universe and proposes that consciousness arises wherever a system integrates information to an especially higher degree, with the more connected and integrated systems being more conscious.

From systems perspective it becomes clear that we cannot consider our environment as separate from ourselves because we are part of the system, and that is why we have to protect our environment.

Systems perspective entails that social equality is necessary because systems work better when all of their parts are doing well, like in a human body.

Systems perspective makes clear we shouldn't presume to fully control nature because every massive intervention can lead to chaotic tipping points that can no longer be calculated; instead we should intervene less forcefully in nature, trust in self-organization, question power structures, and live in harmony with our environment.