Health Inequality as a Socially Created Complex System

Brought to light by COVID-19, and the Black Lives Matter and Twitter #BlackBioethics movements, bioethics as a discipline has not intentionally accounted for distributive justice in its scholarship. Modern society exhibits gross disparities that affect marginalized populations who suffer amid social, financial, physical and emotional stressors. While marginalized groups that are underserved are not monoliths, disparity persists in disadvantaged communities regardless of social and economic strata. Disparity is the epitome of injustice. The overemphasis on proximal determinants demonstrates ill placed overemphasis on personal culpability whilst ignoring systemic factors that result in structural injustice. The sciences of complexity and systems thinking move healthcare beyond historically ingrained heuristics that more often than not entrench disparities meant to be reversed. This paper sets out the argument that the application of complexity and systems as a groundwork for culturally inclusive bioethics by framing health disparities as structurally and morally complex.

Medicine and the Sciences of Complexity

<p class="p1">S<span class="s1">ome year</span><span class="s2">s</span>ago, physicist S. Hawking was asked his point of view about the highly prevalent opinion that described the twentieth century as the century of biology, while the twenty first was touted as the century of physics. Hawking replied that, in his opinion, the twenty first century would be the century of complexity.</p>

Can the new cosmology, cosmogenesis, serve as a basis for a shared value system in architecture? On Charles Jencks

According to the architectural theorist Charles Jencks, a major problem in architecture at this moment is the spiritual crisis, and the loss of a shared metaphysics. He believes that it is the task of architects to take responsibility for the public and esoteric meanings of a civic building, although this is an especially difficult task in a global culture where many believe there is no shared value system. Jencks is aware of the problem but at the same time he believes that a new paradigm in architecture is emerging. He describes this new paradigm as follows:We have moved from a mechanistic view of the universe to one that is self-organising at all levels from the atom to the galaxy. Illuminated by the computer, this new worldview is paralleled by changes now occurring in architecture.Jencks concedes that this shift in worldview is only beginning, that there is no widespread cultural movement under way, but one can discern the beginnings of a shift in architecture that relates to a profound transformation in science. Jencks is particularly interested in new sciences of complexity: fractals, nonlinear dynamics, self-organising systems, and the new cosmology. At the core of this new worldview is the new cosmology, ‘cosmogenesis’, which reveals the universe as a single, unfolding, creative event perpetually striving for new levels of self-organisation. Cosmogenesis tells us a new story of the universe and therefore Jencks perceives it as our new Genesis.

On Emergent Phenomena

“Emergence” is itself emergent; although originating in the context of the “sciences of complexity” — i.e., life sciences, cybernetics, multiagent systems research, and artificial life research — “emergent thinking” has spread to other parts of the academy, including the social sciences and business. Utilizing examples drawn from popular culture, this chapter looks to the ways IT has proven influential in other cultural contexts, but not without a price. The second part of the chapter interrogates the transportation of emergent thinking into these other discourses, taking them to task for not embracing the promises inherent in emergence and, in fact, merely reproducing the old under the sign of the emergent new. Finally, by borrowing notions of “surprise” from robotics and multiagent systems, I suggest new possibilities for emergence to lead to genuine paradigm shifts in the ways we think.