Lewis Works

This open, on-line Newsletter is published weekly, every Friday Afternoon at 4:30 PM PST. It is updated with new announcements and articles each week.

The E-zine of Applied General Systems Science

By Hugh M. Lewis, PhD, MA, general editor

Vol. I, No. 5

02/27/04 Copyright 2004 ©, Hugh M. Lewis.  Facsimiles of this page or parts of this page may be printed and distributed for non-profit research, consulting and educational purposes only, as governed by fair use policy.

On Top

We are slowly moving forward in our consolidation efforts. 

We have added a new Senior Partner. We are keeping biographical details confidential at this time until we have a full complement on board our first tier.

We would like to invite and openly recruit at least two more people to join us at this time on the senior partner tier. 

We work strictly on a first come, first serve basis, and at this stage we are not being too picky. There are no costs or fees, nor any initial obligations for any working contributions beyond learning more about our framework and systems based approach, and regularly attending the conference call meetings that will be arranged in the forthcoming weeks, in order to assist us in the further planning of the framework that will proceed through until the end of May.

Benefits for joining us are considerable, and will increase as we grow ourselves. This is a true ground floor opportunity, and you will have the chance to directly influence the direction and outcomes of our new company. Inquire with Hugh about becoming a senior founding partner and its benefits.

If are interested even slightly, or you know of anyone who may have such an interest, or who might even remotely benefit from such partnership, you are strongly encouraged to inquire with Hugh

We invite you to submit any kind of information you would like to see published on these pages.

Suggestions, Criticisms, Comments, Advertisements & Feature Article Submissions are most welcome.

All submissions or other materials must be received by me by e-mail attachment no later than Thursday Evening, the day before publication, otherwise they will be posted the following week.

If you would like to submit your own feature article, please inquire.

Mission Statement

• 1. Lewis Works seeks alternative meta-systems based development through applied general systems with the main goals of:

• a. Achieving a mutually stable and harmonic balance between future human systems and earthbound biological systems.

• b. Providing all human beings in unbiased structural or cultural contexts the alternative systems-based frameworks for their individual & social development by means of increased opportunities, productivity, security and resource availability that they would not otherwise have in conventional frameworks.

• c. Developing the infra-structural context and means for the regular extension of human and biological systems beyond the boundaries of the earth.

• 2. Lewis Works is dedicated to achieving a better world for all people and for all life-forms through the implementation and articulation of an applied general systems framework to general and specific problem sets that occur in the adaptive organization of human behavior in a shared natural environment.

• 3. Lewis Works is non-exclusive, open, non-authoritarian, philanthropic and pacifist in orientation.

• 4. Lewis Works pursues a combination of both profit and non-profit programs and projects to the achievement of its main goals.

• 5. Lewis Works protects and promotes universal human rights and human responsibilities throughout its various programs and projects by the systematic pursuit of human development strategies.

• 6. Lewis Works is law abiding and honest in all its dealings and transactions in all contexts, and respects and honors the customs and manners of all peoples and all ethnocultural groupings.

• 7. Lewis Works protects and promotes the confidentiality and legitimate interests of its clients and customers under all circumstances and in all cases.

• 8. Lewis Works seeks to efficiently provide a comprehensive range of profit-based services and related product lines within an open, web-based forum of exchange that is global in scope, regional in character, and local in focus, and that serves as the basis for the development of a structurally open meta-systems based context in the world transcending local, regional and national identities and affiliations.

• 9. Lewis Works seeks to promote non-profit programs in alternative human development for the sake of alleviating human suffering, educating people openly and in an unbiased manner, and promoting pro-social human development.

• 10. Lewis Works seeks to create trans-national meta-cultural orientations in the world through various organizational frameworks that promote open, democratic principles of government, fair-play and the rule of just law, and through the development of anti-structural multi-media based systems that provide humanity a common symbolic context for their meta-cultural integration.

by: Hugh M. Lewis

I address in this main article a simple question. Why "Systems?" 

Doctoral work a decade and a half ago taught me that "systems" models are themselves something of eidetic, reified symbolic structures. Then, why all the fuss?

Or, in layman's terms, "from the cup to the lip, there is many a slip." 

Or, in those old, by-gone Marxist articles of bad faith, if you should meet a "mode of production" (or any other kind of "mode") on the road of life, then kill it before it does any further harm to anyone. 

Or, in a more elegant Zen Koan, the only real system is the teacher rapping the dizzy, sleepy student on top of the head with a big book. 

Or, as a devote Taoist, the simple unthinkable system, or, in Orwellian double-think newspeak, "UN-SYSTEM."

Or, as the Great Anthropology Guru Gregory Bateson may have put it: "Making Muddles of our Models" (Thanks Neville Dyson-Hudson)

But back to my main point, why all the fuss about "Systems?"

I would only say, in answer to this, that Systems are naturally and logically good for human being's to think about. Our own knowledge is systematically structured, at multiple levels, or otherwise it is simply chaotic and hence meaningless. We certainly bring the sense of order to our experiences of nature and natural patterning, but this sense is itself derived from the experience of order that is innate or inherent to this patterning in the first place.

To put it concisely, if all of nature is patterned, and this pattern "makes sense" then it is structured by implicit, or imputable rules, and therefore all nature can be called in some minimal manner "systematic" in its patterning. This includes as well our own natural presence in this world, and our own "systematic" and patterned understanding of the world and our place in it.

I will try to rationalize my answer to this question in the following way:

1. Our understanding of reality, or of our life-world, is based upon recognition of patterns that we discover and seek to reflexively understand in our phenomenological life world. I would say this is what separates a human from a dog, but I'm not sure a dog doesn't come to know its own life-world in a very similar manner.

2. Our world-view, or our way of looking at the world, is constrained in fundamental ways by the experiences we selectively interpret and the patterns we come to know and impose upon our experiences, as well as upon the conditioned responses and habits that we form in reaction to our received experiences.

3. Our worldview, our perception, our language, our behavioral reactions and initiatives, our social relations, and all our knowledge and understanding, is essentially structured upon a cognitive level by symbolism and symbolic constructive processes.

4. The very manner in which we perceive, understand and respond to the world is structured in a patterned way that is inextricably tied to the same patterns of the world of which it is an intrinsic part and with which it interacts. Our ability to comprehend and see structured order in natural patterning is a consequence of the natural patterning of our own sense of order in our conscious awareness.

Digital computing has made possible the information revolution. The main consequence of this new semi-conducting technologies is the tremendous increase in information storage and processing capacities. New supercomputing architectures, coupled with rapid, revolutionary advances in micro-chip miniaturization, have permitted for the first time the modeling of complex systems in a realistic and representative manner. We are for the first time in human history capable not only of imagining complex systems, but of actually representing them, not in an oversimplified manner, but in a way that is faithful to the actual reality, or the plausible or possible reality. Thus, for the first time, we are capable of almost completely modeling by digital information extremely complex systems, such as advanced aircraft or cars, in a manner that we can then systematically replicate and reproduce technologically, with performance variables remaining true to the original models and calculations.

The main trend in the development of alternative, human based systems is towards increasing distributed integration of otherwise independent systems, coupled with the increasing intensification of systems in terms of their sophistication and intra-structural complexity. This trend will continue into the indefinite future, and there are no foreseeable boundaries to our horizon in this regard. 

How we continue to define ourselves, and our own role, in relation to the operation of these systems, as well as to the tremendous knowledge fund that they represent and depend upon, is our own choice to make, both individually and collectively. We have the choice to decide whether to define our relationship with the systems of our own creation as generalists or as specialists, or, preferably, as both generalist/specialist or some combination of general specialist or specialized generalist. But it will make a critical difference in terms of the structural patterning of the social order we end up with, and the outcomes of this patterning in terms of the increasing or decreasing quality and quantity of our lives in a global, collective context.

Another way of putting all of this is to state that Systems are not only a good and natural way to think about the world, but provide us a common framework of understanding, a common ground, and a common language, in which to relate a broad range of interests and areas of knowledge together. Such a framework is essentially non-ideological in the sense that symbolic ideology usually demands some sense of terminological closure and a leap of faith concerning basic tenets of received truth that may or may not be real. Systems thinking carries with it the inherent reference to information and knowledge that is connected to the larger world, and that is intrinsic to this world, because systems are based upon the understanding of the structures implicit to the patterning of all natural phenomena, and, in the larger scheme of things, all possible phenomena.

The Differences Between Knowledge and Information: Part I  Building Knowledge Systems versus Informational Networking.

by: Hugh M. Lewis

In the strictest sense, the real difference between "information" and knowledge may be in fact a moot point. The way information is defined, in information theory, is relative to the significance of the content of information to the receiver, or what can be called the "effectiveness" of the communication, over the efficiency of the transmission or signal, or the ratio of meaningful signal pattern over noise or chaotic signal pattern. The effective value of information therefore is relative to the received content of that information, versus all other possible signals that may occur in its place instead. In short, both information and knowledge are relative to the context of its transmission and reception, and achieve value only within such contexts.

On the other hand, from a qualitative standpoint, we expect something more from "knowledge" that we do not usually expect from mere "information." Reading the current share-prices on the daily stock exchange is only so much ticker-tape of information--finding a pattern in this information that may affect the outcomes of one's investment decisions, especially in a successful manner, and this process takes information one step closer to becoming true knowledge. Without experience to know what one is looking for, to infer larger patterns in all the signals that are not directly self-evident by the print alone, the information presented on the daily stock market page of the newspaper would be meaningless--as it seems to be to most readers who simply ignore that part of the paper.

Another way of putting this critical difference between information and knowledge is to suggest that while both forms of "communicative symbolism" may carry meaning, by whatever means of signal conveyance, or vehicle, the kind and quality of meaning that is carried by information is fundamentally different than that carried by knowledge. Knowledge implies a sense of understanding, especially understanding that has functional or other value in an active sense. 

When we speak of dead knowledge, we refer to forms of information that no longer have current relevance or significance beyond their own intrinsic patterning. Latin has been called a "dead language," not only for the lack of a native speaker community of Latin, but because as a system of meaning it is attached largely to a bygone era that no longer as any great significance in the modern world.

Roughly the difference between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence, between a machine and a mind, is analogous to the critical difference between an information network, on one hand, and a knowledge system, on the other. It is mainly in terms of such analogy that we can best and most immediately comprehend this kind of contrast, as otherwise it is a problem too difficult to concisely articulate. Another comparison that seems apt is between the communication system of an ant or other insect colony, well organized, predictable, run purely on "numbers," that depends on the transmission of signals, whether chemical or visual, and the language of a human cultural grouping, depending not so much on the force of numbers in communication, but on the sophistication and tonal/behavioral qualities of mutual understanding and "intuition" between speaker and listener.

Another way of looking at the problem, is to state that while all knowledge systems are informational systems, by default, and must depend upon an informational system (i.e., meaningful or significant communication), we can say by the reverse token that not all information systems are sufficient to or necessarily knowledge systems.

Are there non-human knowledge systems? Perhaps in the greater sphere of the universe there are intelligent civilizations that have developed their own independent knowledge systems. We can impute knowledge systems to many forms of life, especially advanced species of Kingdom animalia that require a degree of infant dependency and environmental contextualization for learning appropriate behaviors for survival and social interaction. It is known that many predators, raised in captivity or domestic situations, lack the capacity to stalk or hunt prey in a successful way, or to forage on a natural landscape within which their feral species has evolved a capacity for adaptive success. The degree to which instinct plays a part in this process, integral to it to say the least, is indeterminate and probably variable depending on the species in question, but undoubtedly we can conclude that the boundary between neuronal organization of natural knowledge systems, and genetic organization of information on a more basic level, is not as clear-cut as some would otherwise like to think.

What are some other facets of knowledge systems that are different from what we can identify as information processing or communication systems? One set of differences includes the level of value that may be attached to a certain pattern or bit of information. "Facts" or "data" at least in a superficial way represent various forms of information that are themselves knowledge only if they find a function or use in human terms, whether directly as a source of understanding, or indirectly in the operation of systems of production or behavior that affect the outcomes of the modulation of human life-worlds.

The Webster's unabridged dictionary sitting now on my bed side-table is a compendium of "information" about virtually the complete English lexicon. It sits mostly unused except when we need to look up a special word, usually for writing purposes. We say it contains a lot of information, for those who can access it and understand English. If a Russian or Spanish speaker who knows no English access it, they are liable in the first instance to find it rather confusing, if not downright meaningless. On the other hand, it would contain enough information that either speaker could eventually learn the complete English language by means of this book alone, if given enough time and motivation to learn. This dictionary can be said to be both an information system and a knowledge system, if and when we fit it into the right context, the appropriate provenience of its culture-historical background, being English and not Russian or Spanish. It is an informational system that becomes a knowledge system upon its being accessed and utilized for purposes of deriving meaning in linguistic (namely English) terms.

If this dictionary perchance became buried in a safe location that preserved its acid-free pages and protected its binding from destruction, it might be possible that in a few millennium some future archaeologist, speaking some other language written in a completely different script than English, would dig the dictionary back up to discover a treasure chest of information about not only a lost language, but a lost culture and civilization as well. But what if English by then were a dead and forgotten language, and this period became a era of another lost civilization? 

If this dictionary turned ancient artifact of a lost civilization were found in isolation, in a remote place, disconnected from anything else of meaning connected to its place and time of origination, then it may prove a challenge for the future archaeologist to decipher its contents and interpret its true significance. Of course, the many small pictures it contains would provide vital clues that would assist in unscrambling the many pieces to the puzzle.

This is precisely the problem the contemporary archaeological record confronts in dealing with periods and places of human civilization remote and somewhat lost from our own current worldview. We know there is information in the artifacts we unearth, and we have developed rather clever and sophisticated methods for increasing the kinds and quality of information we can derive from various artifacts, but unless we can contextualize these artifacts in a larger, more complete view of lost worlds, we cannot claim that such an artifact would represent a knowledge system that is accessible in an complete manner to ourselves.

Why do I bother to be a dilettante about this kind of difference. I would say primarily that it has become a kind of difference that carries special and decisive significance for our modern age. It is furthermore a kind of difference that will grow increasingly important in our common future. A case in point--most companies have turned to computing and computers to help manage their informational and networking needs, even though these computers are almost never utilized to anywhere near their complete capacity, and often times are poorly employed compared to their relative cost. In short, computers as informational carrying & processing devices have a tremendous and almost unlimited capacity, but as knowledge systems that assist us in the mediation of our world, they remain somewhat underdeveloped and underutilized. Our knowledge systems have yet to catch up to the current trends in the development of informational systems, and this lag is not only widening, but critical in the outcomes of whatever we may do, and how and why we do it. Thus, we remain largely underdeveloped in terms of the state of our knowledge systems and the kind of understanding that these bring with them, while we are largely overdeveloped in terms of the state of our informational systems, with the kind of often empty communication patterning that we associate with these systems.

Furthermore, we may point to a sense of critical feedback that occurs between information systems on the one hand, and the kinds of knowledge systems that we configure from our informational background. If for instance, knowledge is erroneous, we are liable to draw poor conclusions, even if our conclusions are entirely logical based upon the received "facts" of the case. But even more importantly, the facts themselves may in fact be defined and interpreted in terms of the knowledge systems we use to contextualize and bring relevance to the information that we receive. This is the classic case of distinguishing between a wink and a blink--or telling the difference between the two sorts of signals. 

Thus, to summarize, it is important to distinguish between information and knowledge, especially in an emerging information economy, in order to know where one kind of pattern and meaning leaves off and another begins, and thus not to confuse the one kind of pattern for the other.

Consolidation efforts continue on different levels. Progress is slow but steady.

We continue to keep apologizing for numerous broken links, erroneous links, unfinished sites and dead-ends within the current system, and we are working to resolve this state of affairs as soon as possible.

We went E-commerce on November 1st, 2003.

On February 1st, 2004, we are entering a second period of consolidation. This period should be marked by considerable structural and content development of our web-system, by network development and by further script-based integration of the system. 

During the month of February, we expect to go on-line with several store fronts.

During this same month we hope to go on-line with the following networking frameworks:

• An affiliate program 

• An open membership program

• A home-based business partnership program

• A strategic e-business partnership program

We will be launching a concerted advertising campaign in March, and this campaign should run until the end of the consolidation period on the first of June, 2004.

We expect to become officially incorporated in June of 2004.

We act both as a reseller for other providers, and we also are increasing the product range that we actually own or buy ourselves wholesale and then resell. We also provide a range of peripheral options through associate/affiliate accounts.

We will soon be adding a comprehensive product service catalog link here.

At this time most of our services and products are web-based Networking & Telecommunication services:

Hosting: We offer free, standard, business driven (coming soon!) and premium quality hosting services.

Domain Registration: Quick-Stop, Bulk and Do-It-Yourself or Tucows Open-SRS (coming soon)

Website Design & Construction: Updateable Websites

Web-system Development & Management: Coming Soon!

Advertising Services: Coming Soon! At this time, submission of Banners & Links are free!

Submission & Consolidation Services: Coming Soon!

ISP Connection Services: Coming Soon!

Telecommunications Services: Lewis-Com: Related Communications Portal: Lewis-Com.Biz

E-Marketing Services: Coming Very Soon!

Network Development Services: Coming Soon!

Integrated Business Services: Lewis Business Net

Secure Payment Gateways: Coming Soon!

We will be offering an increasing array of type of service and product we can make available to our clientele within the consolidation period. This services will include:

• Systems-based Consulting & Troubleshooting
• Systems-based Meta-scientific research & development services
• Systems-based Digital Publication and Production Services
• Systems-based Development Services in a range of areas, including Non-profit, Consolidated Business Services, Education & Human Development, Organization, Production & Engineering

We also recommend our current Link Palette for related links & portals, though most of these are as yet unfinished.

For external topic-organized links, we recommend Hugh's Hot Links

For popular, top-search links, we recommend Haut Lynx

Query us for advertising on our Advertising Pages that are shown throughout our web-system on more than a eleven hundred distinct URLs.

Subscribe to our Newsletter below: