Prospectus of the Lewis Works Framework

This work represents the product of five years of planning and more than 25 years of preparatory training and life-experience. It is a culmination of a life-time of experience, education, and deep thought on the issues that are most pressing and important to myself at least in the world--not only today, but yesterday and tomorrow as well. And yet, I do not rest upon my poor laurels and spotty track record to provide legitimacy or a sense of authority to what follows. This work represents a coming together, a culmination, a climax of a diverse range of elements and forces, and as such it stands by itself in the world and represents itself. It is hoped that the issues dealt with in this work will seem somehow important to others in the world as well.

It is not unlike the discovery of a loose artifact buried in the ground. If it is not embedded within the original matrix of its deposition, if it was a curious nature-port or manuport carried far from its place of manufacture and utilization, then its informational significance is far less than if the same item is found embedded in the provenience of its origin and primary cultural identity.

It is this issue of contextuality and contextualization that makes the ancient anthropoid fossils so difficult to interpret and so open to wild conjecture. Things done in context have greater significance, greater informational content and import, than things done divorced of any context. And if the context is by definition a grand panorama, then the informational significance of things embedded within it are greater still.

Of course, context is something often slippery to isolate, shifting, transient, dynamic and continuously changing in the background. Contexts come and go just like the things that are contained within them, and if the key to the significance of any thing is found in its relational context, we must understand therefore that the significance of things is always also subject to change, modification and shift depending on the context that we encounter it with. The artifactual background is subject to our own interpretive contexts and the background of our own world from which we derive value and meaning in a real, living, versus a fossilized and archaic sense.

The contextual relativity of meaning and importance, of information and significance, is subject to change both by the things embedded within the context, hence composing that context on a very local level, and the relations of the context itself within larger meta-contextual frameworks--contexts relating to other contexts, etc.

The value of a meta-systems approach can be said to rest primarily in that it provides an objective approach to the entire problem of contextual relativity of significance and value that we bring to our experience of reality, even in our objectification of reality like science or in technological applications. This objectivity does not depend upon a sense of paradigmatic or ideological closure around a core set of ideas, other than the application of a general and natural systems approach that attempts to identify from phenomenally apparent patterns and relationships in isolated and semi-determined structures. The objectivity of science rests upon this systems approach in a methodological and theoretical sense.

A general systems approach to all the sciences rests primarily in the presupposition that there exists a certain sense of order in the natural world. This order underlies its phenomenal patterning, even if this patterning appears chaotic and haphazard. So far, various scientific disciplines have all achieved great success based upon this presupposition.

From this we may refer to a basic model of a system, any real system that is capable of existing in reality, as a core set of structured relationships involving interaction of variables of some way, which set can be expressed generally by means of one or more differential equations using one or more variables each. There arises a patterning, a dynamic matrix of populations of "points" or values as a consequence of this central or core interaction. This patterning is dynamic and partially determined.

As is usually observed to occur in the structural articulation of the natural world, the patterning of the points that are a consequence of the first set of differential relationships, begin interacting in the formation of their own structured interrelationships. The consequence of this secondary level of structural patterning in systems is the emergence of yet a new set of matrix "populations" that exhibit sometimes an entirely new sense of patterned chaos.

This process appears to go on ad infinitum in the physical world. A meta-systems framework rests on the realization that we are ourselves a part of that process, and at the same time, we are paradoxically capable of stepping outside of the structure of our own patterning, in a symbolic sense, at least enough to try to comprehend this patterning in some objective manner. The consequence of our capacity to do so in a structured and systematic manner is the creation and realization of new realities that did not hitherto exist, that would never had existed, if we human beings, or some other intelligent life form, did not think them up and do them.

The primary purpose of this work is to provide a skeletal outline for the structure of the Lewis-Works Framework, and therefore my principal interest is in elaborating certain workable structures for an applied meta-systems framework that I at least tout as constituting an objective, scientific foundation for alternative human development on earth. Embedded within this main purpose is also my taking advantage of the opportunity of such a framework to elucidate in no uncertain terms the theoretical and methodological points and implications of a meta-systems framework in a pure, versus an applied, sense.

This work is first and foremost a prospectus on a new kind of human system that is based on an explicit meta-systems framework. It features comprehensive integration and universal applicability to the full range of problem sets encountered within human systems. Secondly, it is a theoretical and methodological explanation and justification of a meta-systems framework in itself. There is a strange sense to me now that the two agendas go hand-in-hand, and must do so, in the presentation of the meta-system to the world.

It is the larger sense that if we are to step outside of the dialect of our own anthropological relativity, then we must on one hand maintain a symbolic dialogue, at least with ourselves, and then on the other attempt to implement in the real world, in an applied sense, a meaningful sense of order in the world. This is after all what human culture is all about. It is as inescapable as it is inundating of our every experience. It is not only that we symbolize and think about the world in symbolic terms good to think, but we must actually try to apply how and what we think about the world and reshape the world to the terms that suit us, that are "good to do." If it is desirable to achieve a certain consonance between what we do and what we say, between how we think and the way we act, then perhaps we can understand that this may in fact be the very basis of psychological health in the world, however anthropologically relative it may be from a cultural standpoint.

Embedded within the meta-systems framework that I am about to unfold, is the general and applied notion of "meta-culture." The concept of meta-culture may be redefined as the meta-system of human culture, and it points the meta-systems concept back to the human problem in which it was embedded in the first place. The concept of meta-culture and its elaboration achieves its full elaboration and application in division 4 of the Lewis Works Framework, though it resonates across the entire Lewis-Works framework in one form or another.

There would be of course many, and many different kinds, of obstacles to be overcome if something even remotely like a meta-systems framework is to be actually articulated in the world. A principle part of strategizing and strategic implementation of such a framework would therefore consist of devising the means to recognize, mediate and eventually overcome such obstacles in an efficient and timely manner. By and large, most of these kinds of obstacles are extrinsic to the problem of the meta-system itself, which is its own inherent complexity, uncertainty and relativity. Learning how to deal with such problems, and actually dealing with them successfully, is an avoidable part of putting something like a meta-systems framework in motion in the real world in a meaningful manner.

For most people, locked as they most often are in the parameters of their own systems and situations, change that betokens uncertainty can be a real threat, and anything promising change with uncertainty can be expected to meet with negative resistance rather than positive acceptance. This is a natural human response to change that, unfortunately, certain powers that be learn to capitalize upon in the manipulation of the imagination, worldview and collective, social behavior of people.

In dedicating this work I have no one other than myself, my own selfishness, stubbornness and spirited independence of thought and values, to thank for its production. Unfortunately, the sense of isolation, even from my own family members, within which this work was conceived and undertaken, was well nigh complete and about as total as one would unfortunately wish upon anyone. I wish it had been otherwise, and could be otherwise, and I suspect it will have to be otherwise if the framework proposed in these pages is to have any chance of real success. I have no doubt now of either its potential for success or that it might somehow be the "wrong" framework--it may be wrong in small senses of adjustment of this or that part of the larger thing, but as a whole it stands alone and I am confident in its ontological and teleological outcomes.

The entire meta-systems framework concerns the design development of various kinds of applied human systems. Applied systems are defined within the framework of natural systems theory as the consequence and extension of human cultural systems--they are an expression of such cultural systems, and a function of them. Applied systems are those alternative systems that do not fall under the aegis of natural systems theory except indirectly by the application of the principles to such systems. Such systems are essentially working systems in that they are not unlike machines that do work. A machine that works somehow is in fact an applied system. That the machine does not work alone, but is really an extension of the human worker who operates the machine, and essentially performs the labor to make the machine work, should not be lost upon our understanding of applied systems. We can imagine at this time no completely automated process or working system that does not require some degree of human mediation and involvement in the work process. And so far as we now know, the only working systems that exist are those that have been created by and largely for human systems. Human beings have created an entirely new order of real systems that did not previously exist in reality, as far as we know. The success of these systems have ultimately been based upon an at least implicit understanding of the structural order of relations and processes that occur in natural systems, and the creative capacity to manipulate these relations in new ways.

The Lewis-Works framework encompasses a general range of frameworks, separated into five divisions, that are intended to provide comprehensive coverage to all the kinds of working systems that occur, or might possibly occur, within human reality. Each of these divisions involves a set of subsystems that are organized around the articulation of a general kind of applied system. Four general kinds of applied system have been recognized--1) what are considered applied in the literal sense of the term, i.e., real working systems and their extensions, including but not limited to tools, machines, etc.; 2) alternative systems, which are those that are the consequence of experimental research design, and that cover the entire range of natural systems stratification; 3) automated systems, or those systems that fall under the rubric of artificial intelligence, and represent the attempts at cybernetic control of working systems, principally by means of digital computing; and 4) artificial systems, or those systems that are the product of human imagination and creative expression, and that generally involve some form of aesthetic and symbolic organization.

The four key sets of words that are enshrined in the Lewis-Works framework are: applied systems (division 1), alternative systems (division 2), automated systems (division 3) and artificial systems (division 4). The fifth component is that of general systems (division 5) that ties all the other four together and provides the necessary control and feedback structures for the integration of the framework as a whole. Schematically these may be represented thus:

The five divisions comprise multiple subsystems that are integrated together for the achievement of general meta-systems designs. There is substantial overlap between all of the systems, both in terms of basic areas of research and design, as well as in terms of sharing of common areas of interest, resources, technologies and facilities. A brief descriptive outline of these five divisions is as follows:

Division 1: Applied Meta-systems (represented by Lewis Development Systems) is concerned with the articulatory integration of real working systems into a general working meta-system framework. The subsystems of this framework include a general purpose heuristic modeling system, a multi-purpose design workshop, a materials laboratory, a machining laboratory and multipurpose machine shop, prototyping and related testing facilities, a construction and engineering framework, an earthbound systems framework for the development of alternative agricultural and resource acquisition systems, and a human development systems framework for the creation, organization and mobilization of human resources in appropriate ways. The model of a globally integrated applied meta-system may be thought of as a grand machine with many parts and components, that is capable of performing an endless array of tasks without substantial human mediation or involvement in the actual production processes. Division 1 is considered an extended and applied framework that encompasses eventually all the other areas of the Lewis-Works framework in an integrated manner. It can be said that it is the main set of outcomes as a comprehensive working metasystem of the integration of the Lewis-works framework.

Division 3: Computer-based Meta-systems (represented by Lewis Web-Systems) is intended as a comprehensive web-based informational/knowledge system with automated extensions to real world applied working systems. Its central purpose is as a form of applied artificial intelligence within an integrated, web-based format. Automata systems are really a form of applied abstract system, not unlike applied mathematics and engineering of which they are an extension.


	Lewis Works \| home Lewis Works \| More Lewis Works \| Prospectus of the Lewis Works Framework \| For Future Reference \| Table of Organization \| Alternative Frameworks \| About Us \| Retropective \| Frames of Reference \| Mission \| Prospectus \| Coming Soon \| Links \| General Metasystem Model \| How Lewis-Works Relates To You Prospectus of the Lewis Works Framework Hugh M. Lewis Preface This work represents the product of five years of planning and more than 25 years of preparatory training and life-experience. It is a culmination of a life-time of experience, education, and deep thought on the issues that are most pressing and important to myself at least in the world--not only today, but yesterday and tomorrow as well. And yet, I do not rest upon my poor laurels and spotty track record to provide legitimacy or a sense of authority to what follows. This work represents a coming together, a culmination, a climax of a diverse range of elements and forces, and as such it stands by itself in the world and represents itself. It is hoped that the issues dealt with in this work will seem somehow important to others in the world as well. To try to summarize what it all means, it represents the attempt, if not the actual achievement, of devising a truly comprehensive systems approach that is directly applicable to all the major problem sets confronting humankind today. There is a sense that many projects done independently outside of such a meta-systems framework achieve larger contextual significance somewhat by accident, haphazardly, while everything done within such a framework automatically achieves such larger contextual significance. It is not unlike the discovery of a loose artifact buried in the ground. If it is not embedded within the original matrix of its deposition, if it was a curious nature-port or manuport carried far from its place of manufacture and utilization, then its informational significance is far less than if the same item is found embedded in the provenience of its origin and primary cultural identity. It is this issue of contextuality and contextualization that makes the ancient anthropoid fossils so difficult to interpret and so open to wild conjecture. Things done in context have greater significance, greater informational content and import, than things done divorced of any context. And if the context is by definition a grand panorama, then the informational significance of things embedded within it are greater still. Of course, context is something often slippery to isolate, shifting, transient, dynamic and continuously changing in the background. Contexts come and go just like the things that are contained within them, and if the key to the significance of any thing is found in its relational context, we must understand therefore that the significance of things is always also subject to change, modification and shift depending on the context that we encounter it with. The artifactual background is subject to our own interpretive contexts and the background of our own world from which we derive value and meaning in a real, living, versus a fossilized and archaic sense. The contextual relativity of meaning and importance, of information and significance, is subject to change both by the things embedded within the context, hence composing that context on a very local level, and the relations of the context itself within larger meta-contextual frameworks--contexts relating to other contexts, etc. The value of a meta-systems approach can be said to rest primarily in that it provides an objective approach to the entire problem of contextual relativity of significance and value that we bring to our experience of reality, even in our objectification of reality like science or in technological applications. This objectivity does not depend upon a sense of paradigmatic or ideological closure around a core set of ideas, other than the application of a general and natural systems approach that attempts to identify from phenomenally apparent patterns and relationships in isolated and semi-determined structures. The objectivity of science rests upon this systems approach in a methodological and theoretical sense. A meta-systems perspective can be said to represent a comprehensive scientific perspective on human reality, within which we can find the clear theoretical and methodological unification of the sciences and of their applied spin-offs. A general systems approach to all the sciences rests primarily in the presupposition that there exists a certain sense of order in the natural world. This order underlies its phenomenal patterning, even if this patterning appears chaotic and haphazard. So far, various scientific disciplines have all achieved great success based upon this presupposition. From this we may refer to a basic model of a system, any real system that is capable of existing in reality, as a core set of structured relationships involving interaction of variables of some way, which set can be expressed generally by means of one or more differential equations using one or more variables each. There arises a patterning, a dynamic matrix of populations of "points" or values as a consequence of this central or core interaction. This patterning is dynamic and partially determined. As is usually observed to occur in the structural articulation of the natural world, the patterning of the points that are a consequence of the first set of differential relationships, begin interacting in the formation of their own structured interrelationships. The consequence of this secondary level of structural patterning in systems is the emergence of yet a new set of matrix "populations" that exhibit sometimes an entirely new sense of patterned chaos. This process appears to go on ad infinitum in the physical world. A meta-systems framework rests on the realization that we are ourselves a part of that process, and at the same time, we are paradoxically capable of stepping outside of the structure of our own patterning, in a symbolic sense, at least enough to try to comprehend this patterning in some objective manner. The consequence of our capacity to do so in a structured and systematic manner is the creation and realization of new realities that did not hitherto exist, that would never had existed, if we human beings, or some other intelligent life form, did not think them up and do them. Unlike a human being, a dog can watch a bird fly but will never be vexed by the problem of flight itself, and that is the real difference between a dog and a human. Needless to say, this entire process is complex at every turn, and we must, if we are to continue to pursue a meta-systemic orientation and worldview, become quite comfortable with the idea of complexity as well as with the actual problem of real complexity in the world. The primary purpose of this work is to provide a skeletal outline for the structure of the Lewis-Works Framework, and therefore my principal interest is in elaborating certain workable structures for an applied meta-systems framework that I at least tout as constituting an objective, scientific foundation for alternative human development on earth. Embedded within this main purpose is also my taking advantage of the opportunity of such a framework to elucidate in no uncertain terms the theoretical and methodological points and implications of a meta-systems framework in a pure, versus an applied, sense. This work is first and foremost a prospectus on a new kind of human system that is based on an explicit meta-systems framework. It features comprehensive integration and universal applicability to the full range of problem sets encountered within human systems. Secondly, it is a theoretical and methodological explanation and justification of a meta-systems framework in itself. There is a strange sense to me now that the two agendas go hand-in-hand, and must do so, in the presentation of the meta-system to the world. It is the larger sense that if we are to step outside of the dialect of our own anthropological relativity, then we must on one hand maintain a symbolic dialogue, at least with ourselves, and then on the other attempt to implement in the real world, in an applied sense, a meaningful sense of order in the world. This is after all what human culture is all about. It is as inescapable as it is inundating of our every experience. It is not only that we symbolize and think about the world in symbolic terms good to think, but we must actually try to apply how and what we think about the world and reshape the world to the terms that suit us, that are "good to do." If it is desirable to achieve a certain consonance between what we do and what we say, between how we think and the way we act, then perhaps we can understand that this may in fact be the very basis of psychological health in the world, however anthropologically relative it may be from a cultural standpoint. Embedded within the meta-systems framework that I am about to unfold, is the general and applied notion of "meta-culture." The concept of meta-culture may be redefined as the meta-system of human culture, and it points the meta-systems concept back to the human problem in which it was embedded in the first place. The concept of meta-culture and its elaboration achieves its full elaboration and application in division 4 of the Lewis Works Framework, though it resonates across the entire Lewis-Works framework in one form or another. Applied systems are after-all human engineered and human constructed systems. These systems require planning, deliberation and work in their implementation. The concept of meta-culture therefore brings the entire meta-systems framework back upon itself in this sense. There would be of course many, and many different kinds, of obstacles to be overcome if something even remotely like a meta-systems framework is to be actually articulated in the world. A principle part of strategizing and strategic implementation of such a framework would therefore consist of devising the means to recognize, mediate and eventually overcome such obstacles in an efficient and timely manner. By and large, most of these kinds of obstacles are extrinsic to the problem of the meta-system itself, which is its own inherent complexity, uncertainty and relativity. Learning how to deal with such problems, and actually dealing with them successfully, is an avoidable part of putting something like a meta-systems framework in motion in the real world in a meaningful manner. For most people, locked as they most often are in the parameters of their own systems and situations, change that betokens uncertainty can be a real threat, and anything promising change with uncertainty can be expected to meet with negative resistance rather than positive acceptance. This is a natural human response to change that, unfortunately, certain powers that be learn to capitalize upon in the manipulation of the imagination, worldview and collective, social behavior of people. In dedicating this work I have no one other than myself, my own selfishness, stubbornness and spirited independence of thought and values, to thank for its production. Unfortunately, the sense of isolation, even from my own family members, within which this work was conceived and undertaken, was well nigh complete and about as total as one would unfortunately wish upon anyone. I wish it had been otherwise, and could be otherwise, and I suspect it will have to be otherwise if the framework proposed in these pages is to have any chance of real success. I have no doubt now of either its potential for success or that it might somehow be the "wrong" framework--it may be wrong in small senses of adjustment of this or that part of the larger thing, but as a whole it stands alone and I am confident in its ontological and teleological outcomes. Introduction: Synopsis of the Lewis Works Framework The entire meta-systems framework concerns the design development of various kinds of applied human systems. Applied systems are defined within the framework of natural systems theory as the consequence and extension of human cultural systems--they are an expression of such cultural systems, and a function of them. Applied systems are those alternative systems that do not fall under the aegis of natural systems theory except indirectly by the application of the principles to such systems. Such systems are essentially working systems in that they are not unlike machines that do work. A machine that works somehow is in fact an applied system. That the machine does not work alone, but is really an extension of the human worker who operates the machine, and essentially performs the labor to make the machine work, should not be lost upon our understanding of applied systems. We can imagine at this time no completely automated process or working system that does not require some degree of human mediation and involvement in the work process. And so far as we now know, the only working systems that exist are those that have been created by and largely for human systems. Human beings have created an entirely new order of real systems that did not previously exist in reality, as far as we know. The success of these systems have ultimately been based upon an at least implicit understanding of the structural order of relations and processes that occur in natural systems, and the creative capacity to manipulate these relations in new ways. The Lewis-Works framework encompasses a general range of frameworks, separated into five divisions, that are intended to provide comprehensive coverage to all the kinds of working systems that occur, or might possibly occur, within human reality. Each of these divisions involves a set of subsystems that are organized around the articulation of a general kind of applied system. Four general kinds of applied system have been recognized--1) what are considered applied in the literal sense of the term, i.e., real working systems and their extensions, including but not limited to tools, machines, etc.; 2) alternative systems, which are those that are the consequence of experimental research design, and that cover the entire range of natural systems stratification; 3) automated systems, or those systems that fall under the rubric of artificial intelligence, and represent the attempts at cybernetic control of working systems, principally by means of digital computing; and 4) artificial systems, or those systems that are the product of human imagination and creative expression, and that generally involve some form of aesthetic and symbolic organization. The four key sets of words that are enshrined in the Lewis-Works framework are: applied systems (division 1), alternative systems (division 2), automated systems (division 3) and artificial systems (division 4). The fifth component is that of general systems (division 5) that ties all the other four together and provides the necessary control and feedback structures for the integration of the framework as a whole. Schematically these may be represented thus: The five divisions comprise multiple subsystems that are integrated together for the achievement of general meta-systems designs. There is substantial overlap between all of the systems, both in terms of basic areas of research and design, as well as in terms of sharing of common areas of interest, resources, technologies and facilities. A brief descriptive outline of these five divisions is as follows: Division 1: Applied Meta-systems (represented by Lewis Development Systems) is concerned with the articulatory integration of real working systems into a general working meta-system framework. The subsystems of this framework include a general purpose heuristic modeling system, a multi-purpose design workshop, a materials laboratory, a machining laboratory and multipurpose machine shop, prototyping and related testing facilities, a construction and engineering framework, an earthbound systems framework for the development of alternative agricultural and resource acquisition systems, and a human development systems framework for the creation, organization and mobilization of human resources in appropriate ways. The model of a globally integrated applied meta-system may be thought of as a grand machine with many parts and components, that is capable of performing an endless array of tasks without substantial human mediation or involvement in the actual production processes. Division 1 is considered an extended and applied framework that encompasses eventually all the other areas of the Lewis-Works framework in an integrated manner. It can be said that it is the main set of outcomes as a comprehensive working metasystem of the integration of the Lewis-works framework. Division 2: Alternative Meta-systems (represented by Lewis Meta-Systems) is involved with the research and design development of applied natural systems that are the extension of understanding and knowledge derived from research in natural systems at their various levels of stratification. Division 3: Computer-based Meta-systems (represented by Lewis Web-Systems) is intended as a comprehensive web-based informational/knowledge system with automated extensions to real world applied working systems. Its central purpose is as a form of applied artificial intelligence within an integrated, web-based format. Automata systems are really a form of applied abstract system, not unlike applied mathematics and engineering of which they are an extension. Division 4: Media Systems refers to the capacity for human cultural construction and creation of new symbolic forms. The basis of division four is the development of aesthetic based production systems along with related presentation and recreation systems. The diagram above represents the planned developmental inheritance structure of the Lewis-Works framework, and shows the overall structural integration of the framework from both a formal (conceptual) and functional (organizational & operational) standpoint. Division 5: Articulating the General Meta-systems Model Division 1: Applied Meta-systems Division 2: Alternative Metasystems Division 3: Automated Metasystems Division 4: Artificial Metasystems