Lewis Works

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Lewis Works Newsletter

The E-zine of Applied General Systems Science

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

Vol. II:  No. 1

10/07/04 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 have restarted our newsletter after a three month hiatus. We suffered significant losses as the result of a failed partnership arrangement with unreliable people. We have as a consequence rethought the entire framework and have gone back to basics in many ways. We have parsed things in our framework to a level that is more manageable and therefore more efficient. We are leaner and meaner than we have ever been before.

We have rethought our frameworks and we have streamlined this newsletter with the aim of making it easier to read and more available on-line to any potential readers. We have rearranged the sections, putting the main article at the top, and the other business stuff at the bottom. We are confining the content of this newsletter to a single main article per week plus any new announcements of modifications or changes to our framework. 

Criticisms/Comments, then Provide Feedback

Main Article

Systems philosophy concerns primarily the conceptual foundations for a systems-based framework in the world. The role of traditional philosophy has been eclipsed by the rising sun of the empirical-analytical sciences and conventional philosophy became in the later half of the 20th Century an exclusive, restrictive, entirely academic preoccupation. The call for holism and general integration of scientific knowledge across disciplinary boundaries has entailed rethinking the place of philosophy from a systems perspective. Modern scientific worldview demands increasingly a systems-based approach in order to achieve the comprehensiveness of perspective it needs, and this in turn demands a reinstatement of a philosophical framework that both transcends and incorporates scientific theory and methodology across all fields of knowledge. The time has arrived therefore for a full-blown systems philosophy to envision the leading role of the sciences in the 3rd Millennium and to lead scientists beyond the role of remaining pawns in service of authoritarian puppet-masters.

Systems philosophy addresses some of the most vital questions concerning the foundations of reality and the role of human beings in the mediation of this reality. How we answer these questions in part determines how we will respond and adapt to our ever changing world, and in the final analysis may determine the outcome of human survival upon earth. There is a deep connection between our worldview and our behavioral and social adaptation in the world--we cannot clearly say that worldview guides our behavior or that worldview is guided by behavior, but surely there is a very high positive correlation between the way people look at and think about the world and how they respond and interact with others in their world, their position and status-identity in that world.

The central challenge of systems philosophy, to be relevant in a contemporary world, is to successfully mediate and overcome the Mind/Body dichotomy that has served to dialectically define and constrain Western Philosophy for the past two and a half millennia. This dichotomy affects how we approach scientific problem solving and how we carve up our experience. We may say simply, from a systems philosophy perspective, this dichotomy is really a hen or egg dilemma, and it is a false dichotomy. Mind and body are two heads of the same coin. Simply put, mind is a function of the integration and action of the brain as a complex system of neural activity.

We may say that from a systems perspective, the synergistic, holistic qualities and emergent properties that are associated with a unified system at one level of observation, do not exist and cannot be adequately explained in terms of the analysis of the components of the system or their individual functional specializations. But if we observe the pattern of integration of the various parts of a system, the principle of synergistic holism follows logically. That the component parts of systems become bound up within the system, and their behavior constrained by the operational environment and external conditions of the system, is a part of the process. 

That there occurs mostly a degree of variability in the behavior and structure of component parts, does not affect the general outcome or sense of dynamic equilibrium maintained by the system as a whole. We may observe that real systems would not be capable of adaptation and long term life if they did not have built-in variability. All real systems have built-in tolerance limits that permit component parts to vary from one instance to the next, within the same system, or if we compare one system from another. This is as true of physical systems like stars as it is of biological systems like animals or human systems like societies.

All classification in science proceeds from these tenets, as does all logical relationship that we infer in phenomena. The concept of causality is derivative of this basic principle--we can call the developmental behavior of systems complex causality. From this, we can see that typical clausal logic is a constrained form of symbolic analogy, and we may refer to it as symbolic homology.

There are several sets of caveats that need to be pointed out. First, we have inherited an abstract conception of the world from Western Philosophers, and we have a decided tendency to confuse the abstraction with the reality. We have a further tendency to not allow for variability of rules or relationships, even in our basic concepts of positive or logical identity--a thing is a thing, and not something else. If a thing is an abstraction that stands for a set of real things, then we can understand that real things may vary in detail and still remain parts of the set as a whole. The consequences for this tendency, we can call it a logical fallacy of absolute identity, or the fallacy of over-abstraction, is to deny or fail to see the exceptions to the rule that we set down for ourselves, and to fail to see, especially in science, that the rules follow the exceptions and observations, and not the other way around.

The second set of caveats concerning this issue is the quest for absolute certainty in our scientific knowledge of our world, a quest we have again inherited from an abstract, mathematical model of the world. Failure to gain a sense of certainty due to the inherent variability encountered in real systems and their components results in a kind of "epistemo-pathology" of knowledge--a neurosis that attaches itself to a rigid, obsessive-compulsive form of methodology in the quest for knowledge that leads to the rejection of evidence that does not fit the type.

The final set of caveats concerning this issue involves the paradigmatic structure of scientific theory and methodology as this is articulated by scientific communities, as pointed out by Thomas Kuhn for the field of physics and cosmology. A community arrives at a received worldview, a theoretical model of their knowledge forte', as demonstrated by a body of methods and the results of these methods. As a consequence of the consensus and reinforcement for conformity, the constraint of the community as a knowledge system controlling the state of affairs regarding a particular problem set and subject, competing or alternative viewpoints are not permitted to coexist or be developed, even if new evidence emerges as the consequence of empirical investigation that does not clearly or cleanly fit the received view of the world.

It was the physicist Niels Bohr who, encountering the problem of the relativity of knowledge concerning the exact instantaneous state of an electron in its orbit about an atomic nucleus, derived the conclusion that scientific knowledge is not built on exactitude or on the notion of direct causal determinism, but instead on the built-in possibility of the complementariness of alternative viewpoints depending upon the context of observation, and it was this same philosopher of science who extended this epistemological and methodological paradigm to the biological and anthropological sciences as well. I think it was he who should be first credited with the insight of natural systems philosophy, even if he did not at the time directly refer to it as such. 

Contemporaneous to Niels Bohr, the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy arrived at similar conclusions, especially concerning the behavior and structure of cells and organisms, and who sought to extend the principles in a systematic way to all fields of the sciences. It was von Bertalanffy who appended the name "general systems theory" to this philosophical approach towards the sciences, and who afterward elaborated many of the basic tenets of this approach.

Announcements & Updates

Some new announcements are in order!

* We are publishing our book Robidoux Chronicles and it will become available in bookstores within a couple of months at most, hopefully before the new year.

*We are developing a "Meta-systems Primer" to soon become available on-line.

*We have begun work on a "Systems Compendium"--a multi-volume set on systems based frameworks.

*We are putting on the ground hands-on project development systems in a coordinate manner and are simultaneously developing a centralized operations management framework to complement these development systems.

*We are pushing ahead on four main fronts simultaneously, and are initiating a number of new projects intended to assist in the development of the framework overall.

Mission Statement

Lewis Works is dedicated to realizing new human adaptive possibilities in order to create alternative long-term frameworks for human & biological systems development on earth and beyond.

The primary mission of Lewis Works is to fundamentally empower all human beings, without regard or reference to their individual or cultural differences, so that they may function in a more constructive and non-violent manner by means of their integration within an applied systems framework that enables them to contextualize and focus their independent developmental efforts toward comprehensive solutions to common problems in resource distribution, environmental adaptation, and social-structural interaction.

• 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.

Products/Services

Lewis Works strives to offer a genuinely comprehensive range of services and products for the global e-consumer in an informed, non-aggressive manner. It has taken us time to develop our resources into an integrated framework that will provide largely automated self-service to our members and other customers, bolstered by one-on-one account management and attention to personal details. But persistence & a great deal of patience is finally beginning to pay-off in terms of the emergence of a real web-system with an active presence on the Internet.

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 seek to be as honest and transparent in our dealings and relations with the world as possible, putting as a premium in our transactions building the values of trust and reliability.

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.

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This Newsletter will be published at 4:30 PST each Saturday afternoon. 

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