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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. You may subscribe to our newsletter at: Newsletter
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Lewis Works Newsletter The E-zine of Applied General Systems Science "Opening the Collective Mind with Imaginative Design" By Hugh M. Lewis, PhD, MA, general editor Vol. II: No. 10
On Top: Planning Frameworks (and the teleology of implementation) Main Article: "The Message becomes the Medium: Web Cybernetics and the Automation Revolution " Physical Systems: "Natural Order and the Dao of Chaos" Biological Systems: "Global Domestication, Cultural Selection and Unnatural Evolution" Human Systems: "Of Symbols and Power" 12/10/04 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. |
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#10 Dec. 10, 2004 #9 Dec. 3, 2004 #5 Nov. 5, 2004 |
Criticisms/Comments, then Provide Feedback |
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On Top: Planning Frameworks (and the teleology of implementation) Much of our attention this past week has fallen to planning frameworks and related matters of consulting systems and other operational and research stuff. We have made significant strides in this area and what started as a poster-board/white-boarding system has evolved into a more sophisticated framework of mapping and project planning that permits daily updates and revisions to be performed and that allows tracking and scheduling of projects of most of the framework, largely from a single reference system. Current planning boards are such that we are able to specify down to specific detail in matters of any project or framework module in the larger context of Lewis Works, and to organize resources schedule projects in a manner coordinate to the framework. Our attention at the end of the week has fallen to development of the front-pages for the consulting module.
In general I am working from the top down, and from the front-end backward. At the next stage, I will begin working the backend-forward simultaneously, and there is expected to occur a convergence in the middle ground. I am at a stage that I can make the following kind of paradigmatic statement about Lewis Works as a meta-systems framework:
Under the desirable circumstance that the framework can continue to be articulated in a conducive context with increasing volume of resources available to its development, we can expect several related outcomes from the continuing development of this framework:
Because in the past month or so most attention has been paid to development of front-end frameworks to complement and transform Lewis Works in a more functional and less top-down manner, we had neglected consideration of the development of related backend modules and functional structures that would be complementary to such front-end configurations. Our planning frameworks therefore have shifted some focus, and a sense of greater balance, back to the backend and to a sense of an important structural dialectic that takes place daily and over time in the articulation and development of Lewis Works as an on-going framework. Namely this dialectic is the interplay between front-end and back-end, on one hand, and "soft" systems and "hard" systems on the other.
We will turn our attention increasingly to modeling frameworks and strive to develop a multi-purpose modeling system within the next few weeks. This will primarily include hands-on type modeling projects and we will report the progress of these projects on-line.
This Newsletter has become a central forum of the Lewis Works Framework, and we are putting an increasing amount of effort and resources into its development and promotion. |
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The Message becomes the Medium: Web
Cybernetics and the Universal Digital Language of the Automation Revolution
What is clearly emerging from the continuing development of Lewis Works as a systems based framework is a sense in which and how digital electronic literacy is transforming how we see, relate to and communicate in the world. This transformation of information is vital to the organization, storage and articulation of knowledge in the world and will fundamentally alter our worldview and how we go about dealing with the world. Cybernetically integrated web-systems are rapidly emerging in many areas of knowledge in the world, and this integration has important implications, I believe, for the manner and form in which we symbolically represent and mediate reality. The very symbolic structure of our knowledge is being thus transformed, and this process has created new possibilities for knowledge and informational organization hitherto unimagined. In short, we may say that human knowledge itself is being rapidly and permanently transformed. Though language barriers still exist, the Internet is providing a common forum and framework that is truly trans-cultural in scope and global in scale, and this has a consequence of transcending traditional linguistic and related knowledge barriers and providing a common communication platform for all people who are attached to the web. We may say and look at this in another way, and this is that knowledge, by becoming almost completely virtual and virtually without effective limits in terms of storage capacity, informational carrying capacity or accessibility, will no longer a completely material form of embodiment, and that the symbol structure of this knowledge will become increasingly "scripted" and controlled by programming languages and hence will become increasingly dynamic in its developmental articulation. In considering this proposition, it is important 1) to invoke a duality of structure model in symbol systems and to recognize 2) that symbol systems themselves are nothing unless human beings enact and make these systems happen. They are entirely relative therefore to the people who are engaged in their construction, articulation and reproduction. In understanding the first point, it is important to recognize that symbol systems are usually divided between the sign as an external marker, and the meaning that is carried by the sign, or signification. The cybernetics of human symbolic meaning comes in the reading of these sign systems and their construction and utilization in everyday life. The principle function of a symbol is to represent something, to stand for something, that is not physically identical and that is remote in reference from the sign. It is the interaction between the sign and the signification, and the productive play between them, that symbol systems may be referred to as cybernetic--but they are so only from the standpoint of the human symbolizer who is capable of reading the signs and understanding the significations. To understand the first part of this problem, the duality of structure of symbol systems, it is interesting to look briefly at the human history of the writing and literacy in human information systems and the changing symbolic units and functions these basic units took as a consequence of the progressive development of new writing systems. If we examine the earliest icon-graphic and pictographic forms of writing, we see that the content of the sign was not necessarily independent of the form of the sign itself, and that both content and sign were relatively context dependent to the period, place and people of its articulation. One could not read a set of signs in a coherent or meaningful manner, if one were not privy to the particular contexts of its production and origination. Thus, petrified texts today that are largely pictographic, mainly as petroglyphs, are, the world over, largely mute as to their true meaning and significance, and their interpretation is largely conjectural and itself contextually relative to the point of view of the observer. At some point, associated with the rise of early pre-state societies, recording systems that were largely rebus and memory devices arose that served to count things and to record basic events and things in the world, largely in a pictographic manner. Eventually we have the rise of primitive syllabaries, still pictographic, in which each sign becomes associated with a particular phonemic consonant-vowel sound pattern, or alternatively, large pictographic libraries in which each pictograph is associated with a morpheme, or a sound carrying meaning. Of course, at some point in the rise of western civilization we have the invention of true alphabets, in which the sign carries a particular phonetic sound entirely independent of meaning, and which can be arranged in an almost infinite number of possible combinations to which meaning is arbitrary and mostly independent of sound pattern. The printing press and printing techniques was the next major revolution to occur, and the consequence of this was widespread literacy and the rise of mass communications in which information for the first time could be transmitted in a completely horizontal manner across a broad base of population. It is my opinion at least that with each stage in the development of human writing systems, signs and their significations became increasingly detached and independent of one another, and the symbolic association between sign and signification became increasingly arbitrary and dualistic in structural patterning. Meaning at this stage became increasingly manipulatable in a manner for purposes of remote communication and transmission of information. The remote representation of meaning by unrelated and independent signs is the basis of the definition of true human symbolic systems. With the advent of print technology and alphabetic writing systems in particular, as long as we knew the structure of a language and code decode a foreign script in familiar terms, we could translate any language and text into any other language available to us, certain considerations of contextual parallax and relativity of cultural semantics notwithstanding. We are at an interesting state now, as we have cybernetic systems in which information can be stored digitally in terms of an infinite number of sequences of ones and zeroes, and these sequences can be arranged and organized into an infinite number of alternative combinations or "strings" that can be assigned meaning in a completely arbitrary manner. In a sense, by such a system we have a universal language that can transcend the boundaries of different linguistic codes. At the same time, it will be observed that in the history of writing, larger and larger quantities of information could be collected and stored in a single location, and this information became increasingly independent of the context of its production and original articulation. Essentially, now, we can store an infinite amount of information remotely, and we have virtual access to unlimited quantities of information almost instantaneously. At the same time, we are able to access contexts for information within the system itself--information has come to completely incorporate its own context on the web. I think perhaps that domain names have come to take on a particular significance in the modern global information economy, like "Google" or "Amazon" or "Microsoft" because symbolically they stand for something more than just successful e-commerce ventures. It is likely today that more people in the US when they casually hear "Amazon" are more likely to associate it with the ".com" than with the gigantic river in South America. These represent significant new entities in the organization of human knowledge in the world, for they are almost purely and completely symbolic in the cybernetic sense of an arbitrary sign standing for something else that is remote and otherwise physically unrelated. What seem to be some of the significant features of the new global information ecology? I would include the following points:
When we talk about artificial intelligence, I think we are talking really about cybernetic symbolization of human knowledge. As with all symbolic systems, we bring to the computer program our intentionality structures, our sense of meaning and contextual relevance. We construct the code and run it and ultimately turn it off or on. I am not sure if automation can ever completely eliminate the ultimate human factor of control, or the basic constraint of the anthropological relativity of knowledge. In a sense, with the digital information revolution, we are coming to realize what might be called a perfect and scale-free cybernetic system of human symbolization. As with all symbolic systems, the requirement of the human cultural component, to construct and to bring meaning to such systems, remains, but his component itself is becoming rapidly transformed. As a consequence, I see knowledge systems becoming on one hand increasingly more complex, and on the other, increasingly more powerful and facile in manipulation and meaning. |
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Natural Order and the Dao of Chaos
We cannot attribute any form of outside agency or predetermination in natural systems. The only form of determinancy that we can validly recognize as causal to the original organization of nature and to the continuing development of this organization, is through the meta-systemic organization and interaction of systems in relation to other systems. Such attribution of independent agency or predetermination to natural systems of any kind or order is considered to be a projection of human motive and human intention in the explanation of events and their origins. Natural order, unlike human-made order, is generally speaking "self-organizing" in an open meta-systemic context. It follows logically that if we are to contemplate the original sense of order or disorder of the primordial state of physical reality, the origins of the universe, we must consider the possibilities of whether any system could have existed in an original sense, and what factors or events may have occurred that would eventuate in the organization of reality as we encounter it now. There is a paradox about natural order, and that is it appears to rest upon a basic state of random disorder. The fact that everything appears in the long run to pass from a state of order to disorder does not preclude by itself the reverse possibility that ordered states may have arisen stochastically from disordered states. The likelihood of a system going from a state of disorder to one of increasing order, everything else being equal, appears highly unlikely. The only way we can consider this as arising is if the system that increased in order internally did so at the expense of a larger system that constituted a critical part of the environment of the ordered system. It is difficult to understand how living systems for instance could have arisen from nothing, from a non-living state of nature. Science not only demands that we accept this as so, but attempts to show us how this could be so. Of course, if construed from a purely systems standpoint, there might not seem anything unusual about the organization of biological systems from a physical substrate. The emergent properties demonstrated by living systems might be understood as just that--as synergistic properties associated with the holistic organization of systems that, upon a basic level, are purely physical in character. If we can imagine a thousand pennies being tossed every second at the same time, and their face-up value read instantly with each toss, we can predict at random that most like about half of the pennies will land tails up and the other half heads up. This is pretty much the basic state of a disorganized natural world. Now the likelihood that 2/3rds or 3/4 of the coins will all land with the same face value at the same toss decreases substantially, and the likelihood that all thousand coins, or nearly all thousand, all land with the same face-up value is even far more remote. The occasion for the spontaneous, stochastic organization of living systems from a non-living substrate is comparable to landing nearly all heads-up or tail-up coins among the entire population of pennies simultaneously. The coins could toss every second for thousands and thousands of years and still never arrive at this state of affairs. For life, it appears to have concatenated one time in our remote earth history, and never again. It is possible that it may have arisen multiple times in multiple places during a very brief window of our remote geological history, when conditions on earth were so complex and ripe for these kinds of events to occur. But this window, by geological standards, must have been a very brief epoch--perhaps only a few years, or a best a few thousand years in duration. Once life emerged, it appears to have done so in a fairly resilient and robust manner, such that until now, it has survived, adapted and evolved into a multiplicity of forms and possibilities. This evolution itself is nothing less than remarkable, as it again appears in fundamental ways to violate our preconceptions about the organization of natural systems--namely that systems go from a state of order to one of increasing disorder. The evolution of living forms, particularly the taxon cycle, appears to have produced increasingly complex and sophisticated living systems, and to have passed from a phase in which all of life was probably a single set of unicellular organisms, to what it is today, that is distributed between several major Kingdoms and many, many differentiated sub-groupings. This appears to mark the rise of increasingly ordered systems from systems that were originally less well organized. It can therefore only be by a similar manner that we can explain the rise of physical systems in the universe, as the occurrence of a system of order in a background of natural disorder, however long or brief this may have been and however widespread or local a point in time and place we must consider. In terms of the rise of the universe, we have the notion of a genuine butterfly effect, and we can put forward on the basis of this the theory that the universe arose to its current states and distribution of matter an energy by a series of events now extremely remote in time and space, the long-term consequence has been the rise of increasingly organized natural systems from a background of random pattern. We cannot know how many butterflies may have originally occurred, and perhaps this number is curiously enough infinitely large as well. It would have been tantamount to a bias in our penny example, introduced at some early stage of the tossing events, that resulted in more pennies coming up heads than tails, and with each subsequent toss, the pennies biased in favor of the heads becoming increasingly biased in favor of the heads. In other words, we must hypothesize a certain structure of dependence of early events that influenced the outcome of subsequent event structures. If we adopt this kind of analogy, we might wonder what kind of early cyclical bias may have tipped the balance in favor of the kind of universe we have, versus some alternative form. For instance, though it theoretically can occur, we appear to find no real anti-matter in the known universe on a scale comparable to what we find matter, and in matter we find a uneven distribution between positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. In other words, we do not find negatively charged protons, as least not as we have observed them, though we have found positively charged electrons, or positrons. We observe that most anti-particles do not stick around in the universe very long, and we must speculate whether the entire universe may not be asymmetrically lopsided in favor of the distribution of matter versus anti-matter. This of course is probably an overly simplistic view of the fundamental structure and dynamics of the universe, but it is a good analogy for illustrating the natural organization of physical systems in reality. If at some early stage in its evolution the likelihood of matter or anti-matter were even distributed on a random basis, then something must have occurred that would have tipped the balance in favor of matter over anti-matter. Some set of events or general conditions must have occurred that favored the selection of matter over alternative states of anti-matter. Indeed it is very likely that the same universe, or universal state, could not be both matter and anti-matter at the same time unless the universe is more isotropic cosmologically in the grand sense than we are aware off. States of matter and anti-matter would be mutually destructive of one another in the same space-time manifold. There is a fundamental sense in the natural organization of reality that we can refer to chaos as the grand design of natural systems, and that all order is based upon and derived from disorder. This makes the analogy of the collective coin toss a fitting model of how natural order can occur stochastically, even if and when the odds always tend to favor random events. In nature, order appears to be a subset of disorder. Non-random formations appear to arise out of a very large number of simultaneous random possibilities. The difference between the random pattern or background noise of physical reality and the non-random structures that arise appear to be one based upon the occurrence of dependency relationships. We can attribute to the endurance and developmental differentiation of non-random pattern in the Universe at all levels of the stratification of natural systems, to the development of interdependent relationships that tended to bias the outcomes of otherwise inherently random event structures. Thus, the kind of imperfect determinancy that we come to associate with natural systems, becomes in due course the butterfly effect of natural chaos. If we can attribute a fundamental sense of indeterminancy of systems of natural order, we can at the same time discover a profound sense of order to apparently, complexly disordered systems. Order and disorder appear like primordial Greek divinities, engaged in a kind of dialectical play in the fashioning of the natural world, with natural change being the consequence of their cosmological dance. We are their offspring. Returning to the question of cosmology, there must have been a state and time in early stages of the universe (how early could this be if the universe proves to be eternal and infinite in time and space?) when protons were produced in fairly prodigious quantities, without the kinds of pathways that we can hypothesize that they might be produced today. During this period of time, for whatever sets of unknown reasons, these protons, produced in vast quantities, began coalescing into more organized states of matter. Protons thus produced generated large amounts of radiation, and this radiation in turn may have collided to produce, for instance, electrons and positrons. If protons were produced, we can hypothesize that anti-protons were also produced simultaneously, but for whatever reason did not appear to survive or build up to the massive quantities that we find protons. It is possible that protons that appear to be almost perfectly stable and hence long-lived as fundamental particles, are in this characteristic precisely opposite to anti-protons in that they may be extremely unstable and short-lived fundamental entities, virtually disappearing at the moment of their creation. I suspect that we might find in the universe today the production of massive quantities of protons wherever we find massive amounts of radiation of a very short wave-length being produced from a single source or area at the same time. If anti-protons do not survive that production process, then they must either become a part of that radiation emitted or else dissolve into some even more fundamental states of nature, or possibly some combination of both. It thus appears sensible that the chance development of stable configurations like protons, "practically, permanently perfect in almost every way," resulted in the biases of change events in the structure of the universe, and thus the rise of new interdependent systems that became no longer strictly subject to the laws of disorder. But I do not see protons as fundamental, self-constituent structures, which they are from a general systems standpoint, but rather as componential entities that are composed of yet more fundamental event structures, but this is a subject for future reference. |
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Global Domestication, Cultural Selection and Unnatural Evolution
A large part of Darwin's observations upon which he based his theoretical model of natural selection was in fact taken from the context of the breeding and management of domesticated species in his native England. Many of the patterns of selection he was basing his theories upon were in fact the kinds of human selection that had resulted in the domesticating of many kinds of plants and animals, and that had a fairly well known human history behind its occurrence. Darwin was able to infer from the domestic to wild populations that a similar kind of system of selection was occurring that resulted in the on-going modification of species. Taking our cue from Darwin's theory, I would like to revisit the idea of cultural selection that has resulted in the domestication of so many different species of floral and fauna for human cultural purposes. We are in a time now of the global human being, in which increasingly culture and human civilization is converging to a single set of implicit technological standards, and this process of human development is increasingly encapsulating the entire earth and quickly dividing up the earth's remaining natural spaces as so many sectors between the interstices of human civilization. We may hypothesize a kind of global domestication of feral life forms occurring, that is increasingly forcing many species of life to either make a jump to a culturally adapted form or else to face the prospect of rapid extinction. A few species appear to have made the leap from feral to semi-domesticated and appear as quite successful within a human background. Other species appear to be unable to make this kind of jump and appear therefore doomed for evolutionary removal. In fact more species than not appear to be incapable of effecting this kind of evolutionary transition, and we may be in the midst of an unprecedented evolutionary epoch, that really probably started more than 10,000 years ago, that is overall witness another mass extinction event and the bottlenecking of surviving species. Recent advances in cloning, genetic engineering and modification is adding an entirely new dimension to the age old practice of cultural selection for domestic forms of life. For the first time it appears that we have the entire mechanism of evolutionary change in our grasp, under our control, and that we can for the first time begin shaping species in a kind of designer fashion without having to wait generations of careful selective breeding and culling to see the results. We have in a sense accelerated the pace of evolution at the very moment that natural selection and the evolution of feral forms appears to be reaching a global standstill and dead end. Natural selection in the world appears therefore to be undergoing an important revolution, or rather "evolution" of its own. Biological systems worldwide, and the global ecology in general, is becoming increasingly subject to human cultural influences whether these influences are direct or indirect in effect, and these influences are serving increasingly as basic factors of constraint, or limiting factors, that increasingly determine the outcomes of natural selection regimes and events. Many forms of life are having therefore to adapt to and survive within the context of a global human ecology, and many forms of life are failing to achieve this mode of adaptation and as a consequence are running the risk of extinction. Human culture has become the modern comet of global mass extinction. The rise of penicillin resistant strains of bacteria, many of which are almost exclusively dependent upon the human body as a host, is a clear example of the rise of new life-forms that are an unintended but expectable consequence of human cultural selection. An expectable outcome of this is not only what we are in the midst of, which is a global mass extinction event that is playing out over thousands of years, but at an increasing rate that is positively correlated with the rate of human population growth, but that as a consequence new forms of life will continue to emerge that come attached and primarily dependent upon human cultural selection, intervention and management, either directly or indirectly. It is sort of like the Yellowstone Grizzlies at the dump site, behaving in ways that are strikingly human. I would think this kind of transformation of nature to be something of a perversion of natural design and evolutionary ecology. It is a kind of Frankenstein complex that leads to the evolution of monstrosities that merely pass as viable forms of life. This is true whether we talk about pygmy chimp populations being breed in captive experimental facilities or stock salmon that return each year to their hatcheries. We all know of proverbial story of the monster rats of Chernobyl. Fewer people hear about the pig-sized nutrias invading Louisiana. This transformation of the natural world therefore begs certain basic questions about the future course of life on earth. I do not think, in the bigger scheme of things, that human kind will come to completely control or manage all of nature, and that nature might not in the long run succeed and rebound where human beings fail and themselves face extinction. We in fact may be much closer historically to this consequence than we realize or care to admit. I'm sure that even if we cast human civilization in the shroud of a long-term nuclear winter, and irradiate ourselves to a bizarre extinction through mass mutation, we would at the end of the day find life emerging once again with renewed vitality between the cracks of where our over-rated civilization crumbles. Just the same, while we are around and in the driver's seat, it would behoove human beings to carefully consider where they are going and how they are going to get there. If we wish to accept the meta-ethical responsibility of our global dominance as a life-form, then perhaps we should take the proposition of the cultural selection and management of life at all levels of its occurrence more seriously and more to heart than we previously have. With great power to shape life anew comes grave responsibility to limit and constrain this power in constructive and wise ways. By and large the main impact humanity is continuing to have upon the biosphere is destructive. The shear volume, mass and behavioral impact of very large human populations on earth seems perhaps to be more than the earth itself can bear. As with all destruction, there is the occasion for the reemergence, the rebirth, of life. |
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Of Symbols and Power
Universal to human beings time-immemorial and worldwide is that they traffic in symbols, and this trafficking in symbols is a source of both objective and subjective power for all people. Successful truck with symbols results in the increase of power, and a sense of growing empowerment in the world. Unsuccessful negotiation with symbols results in the loss of power and a growing sense of powerlessness in the world. The paradox of human reality, and the anthropological relativity of this reality, is that though humans must deal in the world in terms of the world, the manner in which they thus deal are defined symbolically. When they love another person, they love that person not as the person in and of oneself, but as a symbol, as an living embodiment of something in the mind of the lover. Human beings have no choice but to deal with the world, and other people, in terms symbolic to their nature. Wherever we watch the parade and pageant of power in the human world, there we will find human actors who are manipulating and managing key symbols, and serving as embodied symbols, within a larger social system. I bring up the fundamental relationships between symbols and power in human reality for several interrelated reasons. First, human beings are in a sense prisoners of their own symbol systems, and they cannot escape these prisons, as they are carried around in their own heads and constrain all way may do or even wish to do. We may refer to a fundamental symbolic solipsism of human consciousness that is the foundation of the anthropological relativity of human reality. This influences not only our attitudes, our worldview, our knowledge, but our behavior and our social relations as well. Second, these symbol systems are fundamentally arbitrary in the sense of not being bound by natural instinct or genetic endowment or hormonal fluctuations. We have a not unlimited capacity to manipulate, control and select our own symbol systems, even if the overarching tendency is for these systems to dominate and control us. Third, these symbol systems are the primary mechanisms that mediate our adaptive behavioral relationships with our environment. They are the principle mechanism of human cultural integration and social-environmental adaptation on earth, and they are the universal basis for human cultural ecology. Fourth, human relationships and human society in general is organized on the basis of human symbol systems. We would be loathe to admit it, but even our most intimate relationships, and even always our most intimate relationships, are in essence a kind of symbolic acting out and elaboration of our own fantasies, in our own heads. It is not that all other people are merely or only "objects" of our own symbolic dreams, because there occurs an important process of interaction and negotiation of symbolic forms between people. One of the key characteristics that partition off the psychotic from the normal is the lack of social rapport and in a sense the fixation and inflexibility of internalized symbolic structures. For neurosis, we find a basic social dependency and rigidity of symbolic structures that are incapable of being modified, particularly through self-initiated efforts. The key difference therefore between what we can call normal and abnormal appear to me to be in terms of the cultural sharing of symbolisms and the mutual reinforcement and modification of these symbolisms, probably upon multiple levels of their articulation. Abnormal behavior becomes deviant to the norm to the degree that such behavior is idiosyncratic and not shared in any cultural sense. The relativity of cultural patterning and social order arises from the social consequences of the symbolic relativity of human behavior and consciousness. The tremendous variation of cultural patterning worldwide demonstrates several things: 1. that cultural patterning is independent of genetic constraint; 2. that cultural patterning is highly susceptible, as systems, to processes of symbolic construction and modification; 3. that cultural patterning arises in the interdependencies of human social interactions and symbolic mediation of these relationships through time and across space. I bring up the topic of symbols and power because I want to emphasize the tremendous power that symbols and symbolisms have for human behavior and human "nature." What we do in a material sense are without meaning if they are not imbued with symbolic importance. There is a great deal of room for error and manipulation in symbols, this is the source of their power and adaptive capacities for human beings. The world attaches tremendous importance to vital symbols, even the importance of life and death itself, and there is thus much power to be gained in the manipulation and control of symbolic forms in social life. |
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Omniprise.net Topics:
Dec. 10th, 2004: Though delayed, Omniprise.net as a new web-system framework is on its way. We hope to be posting its main pages within a week or at most two. Omniprise.net has been reconfigured as an external framework to the Lewis Works framework proper, the principle motivation being to provide a fairly unstructured set of web-services and a super-user framework for a wide range of different kinds of sites to be consolidated into a single central meta-systems framework independently of Lewis Works proper. Dec. 3rd, 2004: We are announcing here the pre-launch of a new meta-systems framework at Omniprise.net to provide a wide range of web and knowledge resources to other web-based interests. |
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Omniprise.net Links:
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Omniprise.net Objectives:
The primary purposes of the Omniprise.net framework are as follows:
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MyNewsMedia Topics:
Dec. 10th, 2004: As to be expected, development of MyNewsMedia has consistently been postponed for the sake of working at a higher level in the framework. A number of issues must be resolved before we move forward with this project. We would like to provide daily news feeds and ready links from a wide range of available sources. Dec. 3rd, 2004: We are announcing here the pre-launch of a new web forum at MyNewsMedia, which will serve as a central portal system for Lewis Works. |
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MyNewsMedia Links: |
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MyNewsMedia Objectives:
The primary purposes of the MyNewsMedia framework are as follows:
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Lewis Works Topics:
Dec. 10th, 2004: In spite of numerous daily interruptions and a seemingly chronic state of distraction, functional reconfiguration of Lewis Works continues basically ahead of the schedule that has emerged itself from this reconfiguration. The daily volatility of the framework is its susceptibility to interruption of development due to the very limited resource configuration that currently drives this development. This susceptibility to disturbance suggests that the framework, as a system, has not achieved the convergent integration that would create a resilient form of dynamic equilibrium. The framework is subject to divergent development as a consequence, but a sense of stability is gradually emerging. I am quite comfortable about how things have unfolded, in spite of the delays and short-comings. Dec. 3rd, 2004: Lewis Works as a systems-based framework has been undergoing major structural renovations in the last couple of weeks, though there appears now to be the proverbial light at the end of our long and narrow tunnel. The structural instability of the system is a consequence primarily of not having had achieved a true working solution to the central problem such a framework represents. Key main pages we will be developing in the next few months will increasingly be "compressed" vertically and the number of pages associated with any particular domain name will be dramatically reduced. Compression will be achieved by reduction of the amount of graphic contents except in designated areas, and the reliance primarily on textual presentation of information in a scrolling manner of organization. |
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Lewis Works Links: Currently, Lewis Works is represented primarily by four main on-line portals that are quite stable as anchors and pivot points for the rest of the framework. These are listed in the links below, and include this newsletter. |
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Lewis Works Objectives:
The primary purposes of the Lewis Works framework are as follows:
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Xyztems Topics:
Dec. 10th, 2004: Four main domains have been assigned to Xyztems upon the third level. These include Lewis Modeling, Lewis Systems Works, Lewis Business Net and Lewis Micro. Lewis Micro has been moved to this framework primarily due to the centrality and control aspects of computing systems to the Lewis Works framework. The Xyztems framework has been conceived and construed as a necessary control framework for Lewis Works. Dec. 3rd, 2004: Xyztems has been moved from the background to the top of the Lewis Works framework for the sake of functionally shifting this framework. Xyztems was set up last year primarily as a backend extra-net that would confidential sharing of files between members and partners of our framework, thereby facilitating and coordinating common effort on the Internet. Beyond this, certain security features were intended to be associated with this domain name, and it was largely not meant for public use or exhibition. I have decided instead to bring this domain forward, and, due to certain virtues of its name, to make it a primary domain interface for the Lewis Works framework. I have set under this site the domains Lewis Modeling, Lewis Systems Works and Lewis Business Net, as these constitute the main domains of basic development systems. |
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Xyztems Objectives:
The primary purposes of Xyztems are as follows:
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Lewis Modeling
Topics: Dec. 10th, 2004: We have postponed development of Lewis Modeling for almost five years. In fact, I have been gradually accumulating modeling materials and resources, and have been putting such a framework together in the background. It is soon coming time to focus on this framework and get it off the ground in a manner that it will become a more meaningful and functional part of the Lewis Works framework. The main direction that I wish to carry Lewis Modeling is in terms of virtual modeling and computer based simulation/game systems, but not in any exclusive sense. The main function of Lewis Modeling in the meta-systems framework is that of heuristic design and experimentation that precludes and facilitates full project-cycle development. Modeling provides working prototype designs, of a reduced scale, that permits economically efficient design development that is project-centered to take place. Therefore, the Lewis Modeling studio is being set up as a general purpose framework being able to work hands-on with a broad range of materials and mediums--as many different kinds of materials in fact as can be managed in a convenient and constructive manner. Dec. 3rd, 2004: Lewis Modeling has been set up for the purposes of promulgating in a cost-effective way basic designs and for heuristic exploration and manipulation of these designs. This is seen as a central and instrumental part of project-planning, and a necessary precursor to any project development cycle that we might undertake. |
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Lewis Modeling Objectives:
The primary purposes of Lewis Modeling are as follows:
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Lewis Systems
Works Topics:
Dec. 10th, 2004: Lewis Systems Works is primarily concerned with centralized frameworks that become the basis of an operations management of the framework, hopefully with one-button manipulation. Of course, with all working systems there is huge sense of discrepancy between the design and the end-product. We are making advances though and I am comfortable with how management in the framework is coming together with an increasing sense of integration. Dec. 3rd, 2004: Lewis Systems Works provides central logistical and operations management framework for the Lewis Works framework, largely because this framework is distributed across a number of different domains and is organized to work a number of different project undertakings concurrently. |
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Lewis Systems Works Objectives:
The primary purposes of Lewis Systems Works are as follows:
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Lewis Business Net
Topics:
Dec. 10th, 2004: Lewis Business Net is probably going to be the first and the last system to be developed in the Lewis Works framework. Its continuing underdevelopment has been the most expensive burden to carry for Lewis Works, but also remains the best prospect for long term dividends in working the system. Its development has been complicated, beyond all the daily distractions, by the general problem of maintaining a generalist and holistic approach to the entire framework. Its functional subordination to Lewis Works has not come without significant cost in a number of ways, but is still deemed necessary to the eventual success of Lewis Works. Lewis Business will eventually take on the main profit-based programs and projects in Lewis Works. Many of the domains originally assigned to this area have been reassigned to Omniprise.net or other areas as a result of the functional reconfiguration. Dec. 3rd, 2004: Lewis Business Net has been around for over a year and was the first effort to set up a shopping cart and on-line store. We were not satisfied with the ASP software framework it was set up on, and therefore we cancelled our subscription to this service at the end of the year with the aim of configuring a more flexible on-line system. The purpose of Lewis Business Net has been to offer a range of business-related services and products in a central forum as well as to provide alternative forums for more specialized business frameworks that serve the larger Lewis Works framework. |
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Lewis Business Net Objectives:
The primary purposes of Lewis Business Net are as follows:
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Lewis Micro
Topics:
Dec. 10th, 2004: Lewis Micro has been moved to the Xyztems framework primarily because of the central importance of computing systems to the control and articulation of the entire framework. Many web-services previously under Lewis Micro have been reassigned to the Omniprise.net framework, and this has resulted in a drastic reduction in the size and complexity of this domain. Dec. 3rd, 2004: At this point, Lewis Micro remains in a relatively ambiguous and unstable configuration. It remains to be seen how this will play out, but we ask you to look back in next week for updates in this section. |
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Lewis Micro Objectives:
The main objectives of Lewis Micro are as follows:
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Dec. 3rd, 2004: The suggestion has been recently forwarded about creating a "super-user" level of a content-management framework. I have taken to this idea, as I had seen it previously as one facet of web-systems development, with the notion of modularizing and customizing access to accommodate as broad a range of interests and potential customers as possible, taking into account personal preferences and cultural differentials in interest and taste that seem to play upon the web. In fact, this domain, thus designated as a "content development" system, connects to an entirely new front-end framework that we are developing concurrently. I have set under this site the domains Lewis Micropublishing, and Lewis Micro. |
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Net-Maker Objectives:
The primary purposes of Net-maker are as follows:
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Lewis Micropublishing
Topics:
Dec. 10th, 2004: Modules developed this week include those for consulting, policies, and publishing options. Work in this area continues steadily. Dec. 3rd, 2004: Lewis Micropublishing continues to be developed in terms of its basic modules. There is a real trade-off between putting as much as possible on the front-page and offering a simplified outline framework and navigational structure for users. This problem is one that goes round about and oscillates from one end to the other. Lewis Micropublishing has been essentially pushed down one tier, and consequently the functions it serves have been more narrowly focused and defined than previously. Lewis Micropublishing still remains in a relatively ambiguous position because it remains an alternative main DBA name for Lewis Works, and its name has been already branded in a number of ways with my own writing and publications. |
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Lewis Micropublishing Objectives:
The primary purposes of Lewis Micropublishing are as follows:
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Lewis Notes Topics:
Dec. 10th, 2004: Lewis Notes will prove to be an increasingly important domain for Lewis Works in the next year and will eventually come to stand on its own as a knowledge systems framework. Dec. 3rd, 2004: Lewis Notes has been moved up one tier and now sits in its own domain space. It has taken over many of the publishing functions previously assigned to Lewis Micropublishing due to the displacement of these functions as a consequence of the shift of Lewis Micropublishing to as an central interface system for the Lewis Works framework. In addition Lewis Notes includes basic help and about systems assigned throughout this framework, as well as additional knowledge resources that are otherwise peripheral to this framework. |
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Lewis Notes Objectives:
The main objectives of Lewis Notes are as follows:
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Global Meta-systems Topics:
Dec. 3rd, 2004: Global Meta-systems has been reassigned to the purposes of a main department of the Lewis Works framework and serves at the primary integrated project development platform for Lewis Works. |
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Global Meta-systems Objectives:
The primary purposes of Global Meta-systems are as follows:
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Lewis Meta-systems
Topics:
Dec. 3rd, 2004: Lewis Meta-systems has been moved down one level and its functions thus more specialized and focused than previously. This framework remains critical to the design development of applied projects and systems in the world. |
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Lewis Meta-systems Objectives:
The primary objectives of the meta-system department are as follows:
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Lewis
Meta-culture Topics
Dec. 3rd, 2004: Lewis Meta-culture has been reassigned laterally as a result of the reconfiguring of Lewis Micropublishing and related frameworks, and its functions also more specifically focused and defined. Primarily, Lewis Meta-culture expressed an interest in extended aesthetic productions and designs involving alternative forms of media. |
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Lewis Meta-culture Objectives:
The primary objectives of the Lewis Meta-culture are as follows:
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Lewis Development Systems
Topics:
Dec. 3rd, 2004: Lewis development systems represents the framework for extended development platforms for project-product and service development cycles. We will be developing this section extensively in future newsletters. |
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Lewis Development Systems Objectives:
The primary purposes of the Lewis Development framework are as follows:
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Announcements & Updates
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Announcements of recent updates in our framework * We are announcing as a spin-off of this Newsletter our new "web-book" or "wook" entitled Earth-books. We may call a "wook" as a dynamic web-based book that develops over time in a number of different directions and that includes programmed functions as an intrinsic part of its structure and content. * We invite you to our main on-line Blog, or portal/content management system, at http://www.lewismicropublishing.us * Part of our server framework is being upgraded to newer and more powerful servers and there is a new backend configuration to these accounts. As a consequence, DNS changes to our main hosted domains are in the offing and there may be brief windows of interruption to various areas of our web-system. *Traffic through our system and web-play in our system has increased significantly in the last few weeks and we attribute much of these increases to the reorganization of our framework. |
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Lewis Works Preamble
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. |
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Lewis Works Ten Point Mission Statement
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Universal Human Rights & Responsibilities
All programs and projects conceived and carried out by or in the name of the larger Lewis Works framework will be done so in accordance and respect to this basic doctrine of human rights and responsibilities within the following meta-ethical paradigm:
1. Basic Human Rights and Responsibilities are interpreted in dynamic balance with one another, and there are many derivative rights and responsibilities that are forthcoming from their interpretation that apply in limited contexts and cases.
2. Human violence is defined as the unnecessary use or threat of destructive force, social constraint or coercion/persuasion in the violation of basic human rights and responsibilities.
3. The central agenda of this doctrine is the realization of greater human potential and possibility through universal tolerance of human difference and the active promotion of human development, both individually and upon collective levels of human social organization.
4. For every rule stated, there are an unknown number of possible exceptions, conditions, extenuating circumstances, and resulting interpretations and applications that nevertheless do not violate the spirit of the implicit principles involved.
5. There is therefore mandated by the doctrine of human rights and responsibilities a general attitude and behavioral predisposition of generosity, openness, respect, tolerance and forgiveness.
It should go without saying that one's own rights generally leave off where another's responsibilities begin, but this is a central point in the balancing of rights and responsibilities that many people and governments seem to have forgotten. It is true for instance that in some "rights-based" societies like the US, criminals with high-priced lawyers often gain greater attention to their rights and interests than their victims, because there has not been a balanced definition or emphasis upon human responsibilities. On the other side of the coin, in some traditionally "responsibility-based" societies like China and India, individual human rights are frequently sacrificed and violated, and even go unrecognized or tabooed, for the sake of the preservation of a strong sense of social responsibility, which by the way becomes chronically violated anyway by the abuse of privilege and power and the maintenance of double-standards and hypocrisy of office.
It also remains quite true that these rights and responsibilities may be variously interpreted by different people with different backgrounds and orientations. It becomes therefore the case that the gray areas of the interpretation of these basic sets of rights and responsibilities serves as both a ground of contention, possible conflict, compromise, exploitation, violation and even misappropriation, misrepresentation and the dysphemization of the actual exercise of human rights and responsibilities in applied settings.
The "Right to Life" is a wonderful example of an inherently ambiguous basic statement that can be used by ideologically vested and closed interests to promote their own agendas in the world. The interpretation of these rights and responsibilities therefore becomes more critical to their realization and the promotion of human development than their legal codification and formal definition.
The answer to this kind of dilemma is the realization that the basic doctrine of human rights and responsibilities serves not only as a basic anthropological charter for humankind, but as a general ethical code of conduct in which rights and responsibilities, variously interpreted, variably expressed under conflicting and existentially uncertain circumstances, constitutes a kind of meta-ethical system for individual and community behavior. It therefore provides a template for human social action, organization, relation and definition of well being, and at least implicitly sets the standards for defining and measuring relative human well being, conduct and its consequences in the world. For instance, promotion of human development, both individually and collectively defined, emerges in this framework as a certain high priority that cannot be responsibly ignored in the world.
Different rights and responsibilities of self and others operate and condition one another in a complex way in variable settings and under different sets of conditions. The system in part or as a whole always remains open to interpretation, discussion, revision conflict-resolution, adjudication, legislation and compromise. |
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Universal Natural Rights & Responsibilities
The doctrine of universal natural rights represents a meta-ethical and logical extension of the doctrine of universal human rights. As with everything else, things can be argued both ways and nothing is incontrovertibly set in stone. There are of course gray areas in the articulation of development that will be manipulated by interests capitalizing on development. |
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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.
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| Links
& Portals
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We recommend following the links available at
our System
Map for comprehensive and regularly updated links within our
web-system. For external topic-organized links, we recommend our Link Module 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 is published at 4:30 PST each Friday afternoon. |
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 est.
1987
Faster Results € Gentle Solutions € EASY to Use! |
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Contact
Us By This Link
Subscribe to our Newsletter below: Lewis Works Newsletter is offered to the public to keep interested persons and parties informed of our recent activities and developments. Subscribing to the Lewis Works E-Zine will put you in the direct path of increasing opportunity to access our rapidly growing resource base.
Lewis Works 10709 Groveland Ave. Whittier, California 1-877-883-1400 |
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