Francis Paul Heylighen is a Belgian cyberneticist investigating the emergence and evolution of intelligent organizations. He directs the transdisciplinary "Center Leo Apostel" and the research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition" at the Free University of Brussels.

He is a major contributor to the Principia Cybernetica Project, a model of the Internet as a global brain. He has made contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization.

In a page on complex systems, Heylighen writes...

My fascination for rocks, plants, animals and other phenomena of nature also found an outlet in my early inquiry into the theory of evolution. Like most children nowadays, I had been exposed from an early age to pictures and stories about dinosaurs. The difference, perhaps, is that my grandfather who had collected or drawn these pictures for me was rather scientifically minded, although he was just a primary school teacher. He taught me not only their Latin names, such as Brontosaurus, Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus Rex, but also about the periods in which they lived, and the kinds of creatures that preceded and followed them in the course of natural history. So, from an age of eight or so, I was well aware that life on Earth had evolved, and that plants and animals looked very different in different time periods.

As I became a little older, I started reading introductory books on biology, which explained the mechanism of natural selection behind this evolution. This idea became one of the two fundamental principles on which I have based my scientific worldview. As an adolescent, this mechanism seemed so obvious to me that I was quick to generalize it to other domains, noting that for example ideas and societies also evolved through variation and selection. I called this “the generalized principle of natural selection”. Much later, while working on my PhD, I came into contact with other scientists (in particular the great Donald T. Campbell and his disciples Gary Cziko and Mark Bickhard) who had developed a similar philosophy, which they called “selectionism” or “universal selection theory”. Its basic assumption is that all complex systems—whether physical, biological, mental or social—have originated through an evolutionary process, which at the deepest level consists of some form of “blind” (not necessarily random) variation, followed by the selective retention of those variants that are most “fit”.

In this radical formulation, the theory has few adherents. The reason is that most complexity scientists view Darwin’s theory of natural selection with its emphasis on individual organisms or genes as reductionist, ignoring the “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” mantra that characterizes self-organization and complex systems. Yet, I never saw a contradiction between this holistic perspective and my beloved principle of natural selection. The explanation lies in another fundamental idea that I developed while I was 15-16 years old, and which I called the “relational principle”.

After reading popular science accounts of Einstein’s theory of relativity, I was inclined to conclude, like so many others with a somewhat rebellious streak, that “everything is relative”, and that there are no absolute laws nor truths, neither manmade nor natural. (Later I learned that Einstein’s own philosophy could hardly have been more different). More recently, this irreverent philosophy has gotten some form of academic respectability under the label of “postmodernism” or “social constructivism”. Its main thesis is that different cultures and different people see the same things in different ways, and that there is no absolute criterion to say who is right and who is wrong. But this negative interpretation did not satisfy me: I wanted to truly understand how the world functions.

Therefore, I focused on the positive aspect of relativity: the importance of relations. A phenomenon can only be conceived with respect to, or in relation to, another phenomenon. No phenomenon can exist on its own—without context or environment from which it is distinguished, but to which it is at the same time connected. Later, this idea led me to analyze everything in terms of “bootstrapping” networks, where nodes are defined by their links with other nodes, and links by the nodes they connect. This philosophy is intrinsically holistic: it is impossible to reduce systems to their separate components; it is only through the connections between the components that the system emerges. This relational point of view is not in conflict with selectionism: networks do undergo variation and selection, both at the level of the nodes and links that constitute them and at the higher level of the systems that emerge from clusters of densely linked nodes.

After having formulated the fundamental tenets of my philosophy already while in high school, my challenge was to choose a discipline to study in university. With such a broad interest in complex systems of all types (I had even “reinvented” the concept of social network by drawing a map of all the relationships within my high school class—an exercise that did not make me too popular among my classmates), coupled with a healthy skepticism towards traditional reductionist science, this was not an obvious issue. I hesitated between biology, physics, philosophy and literature, and finally settled on physics, reasoning that I could study the other ones on my own, but with the math underlying physics being so difficult, I would need some solid tutoring if I wanted to become mathematically literate enough to understand the most advanced theories. This reasoning turned out to be correct: studying theoretical physics was hard, but it gave me a basis that allowed me to afterwards investigate a variety of other scientific disciplines on my own. Within physics, my interest initially did not go towards complexity—which at the time (around 1980) was not yet a fashionable topic. I was lucky enough to get some courses on thermodynamics and statistical mechanics from professors who had worked with the great Ilya Prigogine, the founder of the Brussels School of complex systems. But these particular individuals were less inspiring to me than a young assistant researcher, Diederik Aerts, who was investigating the foundations of quantum mechanics. So, I decided to make, first my Master’s thesis, then my PhD on that subject, hoping to be able to elaborate my relational philosophy in a more formal manner. An analysis of the role of the observer in quantum theory together with the creation at our university by Luc Steels of one of the first Artificial Intelligence labs in Europe inspired me to focus on cognition: the processes by which knowledge is acquired and represented.

I submitted a short paper looking at knowledge acquisition as relational selforganization to a conference on cybernetics. There I discovered a whole community of researchers interested in the same transdisciplinary subject of complex systems, their self-organization and cognition. After defending my PhD thesis in 1987, I basically abandoned my work on the foundations of physics, and positioned myself squarely in the field of general systems and cybernetics, hoping that I had finally found my home. Yet, I felt there was still something lacking in that approach, which tended to consider systems as pre-existing, static structures. I missed the evolutionary angle. Therefore I wrote a “Proposal for the creation of a network on complexity research”, sketching a theoretical framework that would integrate systems, evolution and cognition.

From the reactions I received, the most interesting one came from a young systems scientist, Cliff Joslyn, who had just developed a similar proposal in collaboration with the veteran cyberneticist Valentin Turchin. They called it the “Principia Cybernetica Project”. In 1991 I joined them, and in 1993 I created the project’s website. Principia Cybernetica Web (http://pcp.vub.ac.be) was the first and still is one of the most important websites on complex systems, cybernetics, evolution, and related subjects. As such, it has gotten countless students and researchers interested in the domain.

5 Questions on Complexity, pp.6-8

Sadly, as of 2025/10/10 all direct and indirect links to the Principia Cybernetica Project (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be) are dead. The above quote was accessed on the Internet Archive.