Preface to Advanced Systems

I have undertaken a rewriting of Advanced Systems as a comprehensive compendium and primer in general and natural systems theory and in meta-scientific and operational applications of systems to real world and hypothetical problem sets. I have done so with one eye towards simplification of the overall text, and the other eye towards complication of a more systematic organization and elaboration of the details, a form of complication that is more or less ordered and presentable for the expert reader. I serve two masters in this effort--first is to provide an introduction to Advanced Systems as an alternative scientific paradigm for dealing with reality, the second is to provide a reference text book for those wishing to take on and learn methods and methodologies of this alternative paradigm in greater detail. Behind all of this is an effort on my part to make this manuscript a central textbook for the Meta-systems framework that I have been elaborating for several years now, in different ways. I leave it to fate to judge the success of my efforts in the long term.

The patterning of nature at any scale of observation is as sublime as it is intricate. Order in relations occurs in all natural phenomena, at all levels of event structure that we may be able to observe or hypothesize to exist. We observe it in the motions of the stars, in living organisms, and in our own cultural behaviors and knowledge systems. We hypothesize it with a very high degree of confidence in atoms and in subatomic phenomena. The apparent complexity of this patterning at all levels of its phenomenal demonstration belies a grand sense of underlying simplicity of order such that, if we can understand the hidden nature of this structure in one context, we can directly apply these principles to similar kinds of events in other contexts. We trust in this in our sciences, and depend upon it for our technological development.

This sense of natural order is in a precise sense as systematic as it is determined. No natural system though can be wholly or completely determined (by determined I refer to implicit structural rules). The leading characteristic of natural systems is their underdetermined character, which general property can be attributed to the degree of change and complexity encountered in natural formations. All natural systems come to an end, and thus change is inherent to the natural order of things and events in reality. Natural systems can therefore be said to be intrinsically chaotic, and to tend toward complex disorder of their design. This may seem like an intuitively obvious statement to make, but it has implications for general theory and operational methodologies alike that are far-reaching and of critical importance to the understanding of the physical and systematic structure of our shared reality.

This patterning can be presumed to exist for all event structures in reality whether such patterns are known by us to occur or not, or are merely inferred to occur by our deductive reasoning. Order in nature is not overly determined, and hence all things in the long run tend toward disorder. Pattern in nature is ephemeral and temporary. And yet we only come to understand nature through this patterning, and it is the consistency of order of relations in the natural world that forms the foundation for our scientific knowledge. 

It is not too grand a leap of faith therefore to acknowledge that science and scientific knowledge, whatever form it may take, is understanding about natural systems, and scientific theory is therefore a kind of natural systems theory that aims at the comprehension of the natural patterning encountered in the world in terms of the underlying principles of design and the associated emergent properties. The order that nature presents to us at every turn provides for our models of reality a certain coherence and predictability that we come to depend upon, count upon, in our collective view of the world. And science is, if it is nothing more, a collective, public view of the world.

From the standpoint of general systems theory, we speak of a sense of holism of structural patterning that is found among the relations between things. This holism is synergistic in the sense that the system of parts constitutes a corporate whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and the pattern of which is analytically irreducible to a mere summation of the operations of its individual components.

In nature, emergent patterns exist at every level of stratification of natural systems that do not exist at other levels. These emergent patterns are often so consistent that they constitute dependable properties of behavior at a certain level of analysis that is defined in terms of general scientific laws. The observation of emergent properties, or synergism of holistic systems, is so significant in our scientific worldview that we cannot safely overlook its importance to all our models or our way of thinking about the world. This is the way that the natural world is made, and not just the way it is perceived or understood to occur from our own point of view. When we look at the everyday world full of colors and solid forms, it comes as something as a phenomenal inconsistency to imagine the things, shapes, colors and forms we see to be dissolved at some level to a sea of cells, molecules, atoms and energies, without the attendant associations we make in relation to these structures. We do not normally think of a person as merely a collection of cells arranged in tissues and performing various functions, which cells are composed of macro-molecules in turn composed of atoms, in turn composed of a mysterious interaction of subatomic entities and events. We ascribe to the person a name, a sense of individuality and personality, even a soul that says, even if that person should lose a finger or a limb, the person as a whole would remain.

Holistically organized systems occur at every level in the stratified organization of natural phenomena. It is possible that there is no greater or smaller boundary to this pattern of occurrence of emergent properties. No matter how large a structure we may generalize upon, we may yet find an overall sense of holistic order, nor no matter how small a realm we may specify, we may discover that there may be yet smaller composite systems that we do not yet comprehend.

Nature is so well ordered that we can accurately state that nothing happens in nature that does not have a reason, a cause, or a "situation" of logically structured circumstances that decisively determines the outcomes. Even apparent disorder and events that seem chaotic harbor hidden relations that, upon closer examination, make sense to us. Astronomically complex configurations arise commonly as a consequence of relatively simple sets of systemic relations and a remarkable simplicity most often appears to underlie the complexity of natural pattern that enables science to form its theoretical generalizations and make deductions and predictions.

This may seem like an overly deterministic view to take of objective reality, except when we realize that the sense of order is always dynamic and itself structurally underdetermined in the sense that the complexity of variables and differential relations pertaining to any one event, at any particular level, much less to entire systems containing numerous event structures and encompassing entire fields of relationship, is always so great that it not only defies strict analytic description or explanation, but the system itself incorporates a kind of inherent, built-in uncertainty of developmental outcome that cannot be exactly predicted or predicated by the formulation of rules and the strict and extended application of data. This means that even very sophisticated supercomputer models probably cannot really or adequately represent such systems in a predictive or precise way or predetermine real outcomes in the flow and process of events.

A great deal of the beauty and wonder of all of nature resides and emanates from this amazing sense of underlying order and the intricacies and vastness of its patterned structure. I developed the framework of natural systems theory as the basis of getting at the structure of natural patterning at all levels of its occurrence and presentation to our awareness, and to provide a better understanding of how we ourselves, as parts of the larger picture, fit into and in our turn influence this patterning in critical ways.

Natural systems theory is really a logical extension of Ludwig von Bertalanffy's work in General Systems Theory and in his life-long interest in the organic and holistic framework for all forms of scientific knowledge, and for understanding how and why all events occur in nature as they do and not otherwise. Bertalanffy's work was a constructive response to received prejudices and limitations of the conventional sciences, bound paradigmatically as they were and continue to be in the specialized domains of knowledge and monopolized knowledge-producing methodologies.

Natural systems theory as I have previously articulated this has come to define fairly specific general theories governing natural systems at different levels of analytical stratification. Most generally, we can refer to the theories of the dynamic state universe as based upon a systems approach to physical phenomena and physically occurring event structures, whether these are of the fundamental scale of subatomic events and relations, or on a cosmic scale of whole universes. In terms of biological or living systems theory, we can refer to a meta-biotic framework for eco-evolutionary adaptation of systems. In terms of human systems, which represent a special case of biological systems to which a sense of symbolic culture can be ascribed, we offer a general theoretical orientation based upon the notion of the cultural construction and symbolic integration of reality, which, though lacking in paradigmatic consensus, does logically provide a comprehensive framework for understanding human systems in a naturalistic framework.

We have also extended the notion of natural systems to encompass a larger set of "real" systems that include the alternative, humanly constructed systems that we have created and which did not previously exist in nature, and which have had an influence in shaping not only our understanding and view of the world, but the world itself and our relations to the world. A subclass of these alternative applied systems can be said to be those "automatic" systems that exhibit some degree genuine automation through the application of artificial intelligence. These are alleged to represent a unique and important strata of extended natural systems, the consequences of which have not been fully explored, much less mapped out, by ourselves. I have not yet formulated a coherent general theory of such alternative applied systems, especially what we can call "automata" systems, but I believe such a theoretical unification at this level of order is not far off and may in fact be already well understood in terms of the mechanics and thermodynamics of real working systems. A greater part of our conventional physical sciences is in fact devoted to the description and descriptive explanation of just such systems.

Possibilities of alternative real systems that have not yet been described but which may well exist in the universe, or in the larger framework of reality but remain as yet undiscovered is probably not remote in the sense of likelihood of their occurrence, only remote in the probability of our discovery of them. This is true at all levels of stratified patterning of natural systems, from the physical through the biological to the human and human-made alternative systems. It is not anyway clear exactly what such alien type systems will look like or how they might be configured along principles of design that we may or may not share with them in the same proportions, but what is clear that, perchance their human discovery, they will be nothing less than totally revolutionary for the state of our scientific knowledge, for at once they will both relativize our received general notions about reality, what is real and what is universally true in reality, confirming some knowledge and disconfirming others, and at the same time, they will provide us a sense of objective parallax to our own embedded sense of anthropological relativity of what we know and how we know it.

The goals of this extended manuscript have been and continue to be the complete excoriation of a natural systems theoretic framework, incorporating as fully as possible general systems theory, and methodologically elaborating a related set of pertinent operational procedures guiding experimental and exploratory research, which I have named collectively as "metasystems science." The goals are grand in both a formal and existential sense, but this sense of grandiosity is tempered somewhat by the text-book approach to the organization of the framework and the problem sets it contains.

I have set about in a rather desperate attempt to regain a sense of intensive focus in my life to rewrite the Advanced Systems work from the beginning, incorporating elements of the previous text into it as it gradually unfolds before me. To do justice to the topics and central subject dealt with in this Advanced Systems framework requires and deserves a degree of integrative complexity that is very difficult to achieve in the daily turn of affairs, much less to sustain for the period of time needed to bring it to real developmental fruition. Nonetheless I have committed myself to such a redoubled effort. My motivation is the understanding of the vital importance that I believe this framework represents. I've had to work with incentive structures that lie any longer totally outside any social framework of reinforcement, whatsoever, and therefore to muster whatever discipline and energy needed to complete this project successfully from my own limited reserve of personal resources, that seem now to be slowly waning with the accumulation and passage of years. Achieving focus, and then sustaining and maintaining this focus on sufficient levels for sufficient periods of time to yield productive results, becomes a major trial of my life, to say the least.

I offer the framework of the post conventional worldview, that, like the post-conventional sense of meta-ethical commitment, extends beyond the received parameters of common and even specialized knowledge in the social, and socially constructed world, and that seeks a higher sense of truth to reality than can be found in everyday affairs, structured as these have become by somewhat limited and constraining cultural models. In hindsight I believe it is quite true that one eventually achieves such a frame of mind, after much progress and intellectual exploration and development, and that, once having so achieved a state on a relatively permanent basis, there is no returning to the narrow viewpoints and illusions of a reality that is less comprehensively integrated. I feel I have basically accomplished this feat of intellectual development, albeit through an unusual trajectory of theoretical and methodological anthropology and a professional preoccupation centered on human systems rather than upon biological or physical systems. At some stage, the boundaries between domains of knowledge appear to dissolve and appear more arbitrary and deliberately constraining of our research and model building than anything else, and at that stage only a form of systems theory remains sufficiently comprehensive enough to encompass the entire range of possibilities it opens for us. I see systems theory as nothing less than a comprehensive philosophy of science, and general scientific theory that is applicable to all levels and forms of scientific knowledge, and that integrates all these diverse approaches to natural phenomena within a common theoretical and methodological framework.

One is then set rather permanently at odds with the normal and customary ways of seeing and relating to the world, even from conventional academic and scientific frameworks of understanding. I would be inclined to call such a worldview "post paradigmatic" but this has implications that we can hope to step completely outside of the relativistic limitations of our own knowledge systems, which is itself a fallacy and categorically false. Paradigms remain even if only tacitly embedded in our knowledge systems, but there is at least a sense of the apperceptive recognition of the paradigmatic and relativistic boundaries surrounding any knowledge, and hence the capacity to deliberately step beyond or outside of these boundaries, even if in a limited and incomplete manner.

In hindsight the price one pays for such intellectual development is a sense of naive consonance and communicability with the normal world, and the marginalization of worldview and potential response that at times seems to border on the world of the insane. Reality becomes immeasurably complicated and always relativized from one angle or another. Such development is a dear price to pay for a little bit of wisdom and understanding, and I would say too costly for most people on earth to attempt, especially if it also results in a degree of social marginalization and systematic exclusion from the more normal conventional processes of one's world.

I persevere in this writing effort, as in all my writing projects, not because I have any great expectation that anyone else will ever read even a portion of this manuscript, much less the entire compendium, but because the writing and process of thinking through the text provides myself at least a kind of developmental symbolic transformation, a way of becoming and growing into something intellectually that is beyond my own current boundaries. This symbolic transformation is an undertaking that belongs in a larger world, and is of the kind that all people and societies must pass through if they are to achieve a vision of the world that is greater than the often sordid and violent realities. This is the often unacknowledged and misunderstood power of the writing word to change and build better worlds than the one's we have previously known. If we can imagine such a world, and put it into words in the act of writing, then we can go one step further and make such a construction a part of our larger world.

I have undertaken writing this primer in natural systems theory and meta-systems methods in the on-going theoretical development of ideas that has taken place for many years now. It was the natural outgrowth of the work Natural Systems that I completed before undertaking this work in the Winter and Spring of 2001. Subsequently in early Spring of 2001, I wrote a brief work entitled Cosmology and Reality, and later in the year Meta-systems and then in the late Spring of 2002, Digging the Past: Anthropological Essays in Archaeological Systems Theory. This current work represents both a collection of related essays written during this time period, as well as basic extensions of theoretical and methodological inquiry into related areas. Of special interest to me has been the extension of broader frameworks of applied systems, abstract systems, philosophical systems, and artificial or automated systems, as well as operational methodologies that would be unique to a meta-systems science.

The book Natural Systems was confined to the general outline of naturally occurring phenomena on general levels. It proposed several sets of theories at these different levels that are held to be essentially but partially correct, though they represent radical departures from previously held ideas at many levels of conventional science. This Primer in Advanced Systems Science seeks to extend the work done in Natural Systems in several ways.

First, it seeks to more concisely elaborate the basic theoretical constructs at each of the levels, and to extend these constructs to embrace a more precise mathematical description and model at all levels. Numerous theoretical breakthroughs have been made in this regard over the last year especially.

Secondly, it seeks to extend advanced systems analysis and synthesis to embrace alternative and artificial systems as a part of a larger paradigmatic model of advanced systems science that includes functionally integrated and applied frameworks in the system.

Then it seeks to elucidate the comprehensive and general model underlying basic design patterning in all systems science, and to build a working research model from this. This relates the work specifically to the work of Ludwig Von Bertalanffy in General Systems Theory, to whom we owe a growing debt for germinal ideas and insights into how natural systems behave.

Finally, this Primer in Advanced Systems seeks to elaborate a comprehensive alternative and artificial system that represents the application of systems science to real world problem sets, in the process delineating the systematic and structural components of this framework  in its various possible applications in the world.

A primer in advanced systems science should therefore be a work not only upon the subject of what is advanced systems science, but also about how to do it in theoretical research and in applied senses. It should be a guidebook and a manual on the active conduct of advanced systems science as much as it is a programmatic statement explaining and defending such a general approach.

I have continued in a somewhat disparate fashion to work theoretically upon meta-systems science and natural systems theory. I have made substantial progress in these areas since my first work two years ago entitled Natural Systems Theory and the follow up work last year, Meta-systems. I have reached a frame of mind that the emphasis of this approach, with a foundation in the anthropology of knowledge, is a preoccupation with and a need for greater objectivity in our comprehension of reality. The structure of physical reality will stand and occur regardless of our conceptioning or misconceptions about it. Reality therefore stands as our primary and ultimate reference point for all knowledge and thought systems by which we must test these systems of knowledge for realism and accuracy. The universe will go on in the way it has for millions, billions, nay, even trillions, of years, regardless of what our theories may be of its origins or final destiny.

This Primer in Advanced Systems Science is also intended as a companion piece to what I have called the Blue Book for Alternative Development which is meant to focus upon systemic application to real world problem sets in terms of alternative design engineering and development. I anticipate also that this work will complement other work I have been undertaking in the areas of Anthropology, Education, Philosophy and in applied systems. Alternative Anthropology has become my professional bailiwick, and therefore it focuses centrally upon the core issues of "human reality" and the key theoretical issue of "anthropological relativity" as a central constraining aspect of all our knowledge. Another extension of this basic work, that I believe is necessary to make it complete, would be to undertake two other related works on the Philosophy of Knowledge and upon Scientific Philology that deal with some of the philosophical and epistemological implications and ramifications of systems science in our shared world. These I believe are necessary in as much as they lead to some interesting (nontrivial) results that are important to our reality.

Collectively, including the original Natural Systems work, these books form the intended core of a larger cycle of works that would comprise a multi-volume compendium upon specific topic areas within each of the larger frameworks. They in essence frame a new scientific paradigm for construing reality that is functionally integrated and generally comprehensive and realistic. This paradigm is not a new science, but a new comprehensive synthesis of scientific worldview that leads to teleological consequences in the world in terms of developmental and purposive integration.

*****

Science has come of age in a systems framework, and this framework is really the only appropriate one for construing the diverse range of knowledge and activity that is continues in various disparate scientific disciplines. In short, all science is necessarily systems science, both theoretically and methodologically, or else it is nothing.  Systems approaches are designed heuristically to handle the complexity of large and chaotic sets. By itself, without theoretical insight that is both mechanistic and relationally integrative when applied to particular natural phenomena, or more importantly, kinds of phenomena, systems approaches do not transcend the programmatic and dogmatic ideology of being a methodology without a reason or a sense of rhyme. The theory that is expected and pertinent to different levels of stratification of natural phenomena in reality is distinct and non-reducible to a common set of constituent elements within another level of stratified patterning nor within the entire framework of systems science itself. Systems science, properly applied, does provide insight and the vision to see beyond ideological and paradigmatic obstacles in our knowledge, and it serves to provide a sense of unity and relationship between different domains and areas of scientific thought and activity. But it does not, in itself, provide the theoretical models that are inherent to natural systems and that can be used to understand and predict their patterning.

It is clear that we can reduce the structures analytically of the human mind to that of the organic human brain composed of complex cellular networks, and we can reduce these structures in turn to large protein molecules and other forms of organic molecule, and these in turn can be reduced to organized sets of atoms and the inter-relationships of subatomic particles. It is possible that we could carry this sense of analytical explanation to even more fundamental levels of quarks, strings, or other quantum "things." But it is equally clear that the description of the human brain and its functioning as mind in terms of cells, molecules, atoms and elementary particles is equally insufficient to a valid or objective understanding of how the mind functions in a manner as to produce symbolic, or representational, intelligence.

It may be said in a systems framework that all natural phenomena, or rather all things and events of things that are real in some objective sense, observe and obey the following set of basic properties:

1. All things are related to one another, however indirectly or remotely.

a. All things are naturally bound to a field of relationships and are constrained and limited in critical ways by this field.

2. All things real are subject to change, and the understanding of change is one of the main goals of scientific understanding and endeavor.

a. The principle source of change in things are in the relational field pattern to which things are naturally bound, in which interaction between elements occurs upon different levels.

We may say furthermore and therefore that all things real cohere within a larger framework of relationships, and this framework constitutes a system of sorts. Such a system unfolds in complex, chaotic ways.

We may further qualify our statement by the following observational conclusion:

3. All things real that are known are composite structures that are constituted by component elements.

4. Composite structures cohere upon multiple levels of stratification, and encompass componential subsystems.

Science has yet to discover for itself the fundamental atom or element that is irreducible and that composes all other matter. Evidence suggests that even if there is a fundamental level of constituent structure in the fabric of reality, even this level may prove to be heterogeneously constituted by even more fundamental "things" we have yet to observe or account for.

5. It follows therefore that if all things real are composite structures, then the systemic fields of relation in which they are embedded, are also composite in structure.

a. Systemic fields of relations are stratified in an analytic/synthetic sense, upon multiple levels of structural composition.

Finally, I make a profound conclusion that I take to be the theoretical and philosophical foundation for all systems sciences, and that is the central hypothesis of universal physical relativity of all knowledge:

6. If everything is composite and hence reducible, and if the fields of relations are therefore stratified, then it follows that there is no upper or lower limit to the structural stratification of reality, and hence physical reality may be said to be infinitely complex and complexly infinite.

a. Hence, our knowledge of physical reality is inherently limited to the levels of stratification/articulation of event structures that we can either directly observe or indirectly infer from implication of mathematical and mechanistic logic.

In other words, we cannot directly know the total reality in a complete or exhaustive manner or in either an extensive or intensive manner. We can only understand parts of reality in a partial and approximate sense. Reality therefore is the forest in which we are forever entrapped and lost. It is a forest so vast and so intricate in detail, that we cannot hope to escape it or move beyond its entanglements.

There are implications of this set of principles for physical systems theory in particular. If total reality is complexly infinite and infinitely complex, then we may say by logical extension that the total physical universe is also by homology complexly infinite and infinitely complex. If this statement is true, then a great deal follows in terms of the understanding the cosmological structure of the universe and the elementary structure of physical reality. We may never be able to prove this assertion in any scientifically or empirically sufficient manner, if the forest of our reality is always surrounding us and bounding our knowledge.

There is one class or form of knowledge that can be said not to be universally relativistic in this sense. I call this knowledge abstract idealism or representationalism, and essentially it is the knowledge that is comprised by pure mathematical theory. It can be argued as well by philosophers that certain other kinds of knowledge, like the knowledge comprised by pure goodness or beauty, might fit a similar non-relativistic status, except that these are ultimately normative forms of knowledge. Only mathematical reason appears to me to truly transcend relativistic constraints and limitations. I do not offer an explanation of why this may be so at this stage, but only draw attention to this curious paradox. It perhaps comes as no surprise then that mathematics has become the language of the sciences par excellence, even if in heterogeneous systems this language breaks down in its descriptive realism and explanatory detail..

This then, in my book at least, constitutes the foundation premises for the development of an integrated systems framework that is suitable for all the sciences, and all forms of human knowledge and understanding. The concern of a systems approach is with objective knowledge that is situated in, somehow, and draws reference from, the physical world. My concern is not with the symbolic stuff of dreams or mythology, unless this stuff is construed as symbolic constructions of the human mind that then are approachable, if not analytically reducible, from a scientific framework. There is only one form of "truth" that is non-relativistic to our point of view or ability to observe, and this is, again, the truth embodied in pure mathematical relationships. The paradox of this form of "truth" is that it has no perfect or pure exemplifications in the real world, that are not only imperfect, hence relative approximations of this truth.

It follows as well therefore that the appropriate point of view of the sciences from a systems framework is that all event structures and patterns are reducible ultimately to a form of relative determinism that is in the final analysis based upon chance or stochastic development. This is another way of saying that reality and the event structures that compose reality are ultimately chaotic in their natural pattern of organization. This chaos is wonderfully sublime, because though it is fundamentally indeterminate and underdetermined as systems, it results in complex patterns and systems that appear wonderfully organized. Another way of saying this is to say that in the strictest of scientific senses, God actually did play dice with the universe.

There is a boundary in the quest for scientific knowledge. I believe scientists cannot ask questions of ultimate predetermination, especially if we hypothesize the structure of physical reality to be infinite. This is a question to be answered by theologians, and not by scientists. Of course, it can be argued that if God really did create the universe, then God must be a real entity and if God is real then its proof is amenable to scientific investigation. I suspect that a scientist only needs to reply with yet another question: Who, or what, created God?

*****

Systems theory has been largely a post-World War II phenomenon, but there were clear precedents and a convergence of thinking prior to this period in a number of areas. Ludwig Von Bertalanffy began laying the groundwork for systems science, coming from a healthy holism in the understanding of biological systems, especially cellular organization and behavior, in the 1930's, but this coalescence became eclipsed by the events of the war. It was in the 50's and 60's that the implications of a systems approach made itself more fully felt in various fields of inquiry. Louis Binford shattered a 50 year tradition of a sterile Culture Historical approach in American Archaeology with his adoption of a systems method to the interpretation of sites in the early 1960's. Various schools of psychology realized the potential of a systems approach at about the same time.

I believe it was Gregory Bateson who carried the implicit concept of the meta-system to its greatest development as an outgrowth of information theory and cybernetics in his work Steps to an Ecology of Mind and subsequent work Mind & Nature: A Necessary Unity. The theoretical thicket and the noetic mindscape these works encompassed is vast and variegated. There is a veritable minefield of alternative perspectives and overlapping ideas in a wide plethora of theoretical and operational orientations. In hindsight, I can understand clearly the mindset and direction that Bateson was headed in as a theoretical anthropologist. As an anthropologist who has also been interested in information theory and in the problem of mind and meaning, it strikes me as reasonable and inevitable that like-minded people would end up in the same general terrain of ideas undergoing a similar noetic evolution.

In this work, I propose the central concept of the meta-system as a grand unifying metaphor, and also as an operational construct, or a hypothetical model, if you will, for all knowledge on earth that entertains the presumption of being scientific and naturalistic. I distinguish critically between the general theory of natural systems, which I take to be mostly comprehensive in approach, and what I would refer to as meta-systems methodologies that represent applied research and development systems in various areas of the natural and applied sciences. But I want to stop short of employing this concept as a catchall for every trivial sundry detail under the sun. By invoking one idea to mean everything at once, we render the term useless and meaningless in being interesting about nothing in particular.

As the basis for understanding the empirical and rational foundations for meta-systems theory, I hold forth the following presuppositions:

1. All phenomena that occur in nature, indeed all reality as this is experienced or able to be experienced, exhibits a fundamental order or unity of patterning, no matter how chaotic and disordered it may be presentationally speaking.

2. All phenomena cohere therefore in some kind of minimally ordered system of relationships, and all systems are somehow interconnected with one another to create a larger meta-system.

3. Information is possible because it allows us to make meaningful predictions, or to draw meaningful, or hypothetical relationships, that are only indirectly discernible from the experiential presentation of the phenomena itself.

4. All systems are organized into a larger framework that encompasses the total reality, including the total physical universe, and this organization appears to be naturally stratified at various levels of relationship and in different orders of phenomenal patterning.

5. The interrelationship of all systems, at all levels, entails that all systems and all phenomenal patterning, at any level, are primarily determined by a single set of operational principles that govern and constrain the behavior of these systems in the most fundamental of ways. These principles appear to be dimensionless and yet well ordered in a Pythagorean sense that they may be defined in terms of precise formulas. These principles constitute the basic paradigm of meta-systems.

In a sense, most conventional physical systems are thermodynamic, and hence thermodynamics constitutes what can be considered a part of a grand meta-system. I would claim that not all physical phenomena that we observe are fully explainable by an unrevised set of thermodynamic principles. Gravitation appears to violate thermodynamic principles in several important, fundamental ways. In consideration of these apparent discrepancies, I have offered revised models of gravitational dynamics and what I refer to as universal dynamics that encompasses a hypothetically broader range of physical phenomena than that embraced by conventional mechanical principles.

At the same time, it can be argued metaphysically at least that there exists certain abstract truths or primes of knowledge that are in a sense not susceptible to the laws of thermodynamics in any conceptualization of these principles. Such abstract notions appear to be constant, immutable, and necessary to the understanding of all systems.

Heraclitus, the obscure philosopher who presaged in wisdom the great Greek thinkers, at the dawn of Greek Civilization and in the age of Homer, left us with a fundamental paradigm of meta-systems. He taught us that change was the basis of reality, and all things are in a constant process of change, and nothing stands still completely, even though it may appear to do so. All change is guided by an intelligent law or the logos. Wisdom is based upon understanding the harmony of the logos. Logos leads all things through great cycles of birth and death, darkness and light, through the days and the seasons and includes basic elements of earth, fire and water. I take a meta-systems approach to be a fundamentally Heraclitian frame of thought about physical reality, owing its origin to this early time in human history.

Intelligence has many sophisticated definitions and implications in our modern Information age. A natural definition of intelligence is concomitant and inherent to an understanding of what constitutes an information system. In other words, an intelligent system is so because it conveys significant information in its patterning, and an informational system is intelligent if its information is ordered in a meaningful manner but not predictable. Important to the definition of an intelligent information system is that such a system is somehow self-sustaining as a coherent system, and that it is self-adaptive to changing circumstances.

But the definition of intelligence in our reality has a fundamental and inextricable human dimension to its expression and patterning. No informational patterning is significant or intelligent if it is ameaningful to us, who are that's systems, or any systems, ultimate reference points. In other words, intelligence is a direct function of our own human brains and abilities to make sense of the patterning and ordering of natural phenomena. Such natural systems become intelligent because they are perceived by us as being so. We make sense of them, and they become relevant thereby to our own anthropological sense of intelligence.

This caveat of human intelligence imposes a fundamental anthropological relativity to our understanding of informational systems. It makes all our knowledge, indeed, all our reality, ultimately anthropocentric in orientation. The only way out of this conundrum is by assuming hypothetical realities that are independent of our own experience. This, fortunately, is not difficult for us to do, and constitutes a fundamental leap of faith that makes possible both science and religion.

But meta-systems in an objective sense are presumed to exist both before and beyond our own human abilities to intelligently make sense and define the underlying principles of these systems. Indeed, our own intellectual abilities were derived from more basic physical systems and processes that exist before and independent of our ability to conceive of them. They exist as patterns, and the logos that defines their order exists implicit to these patterns. Science needs to make this presupposition if it is to rest theoretically on any universal framework at all. Such is the relativity of our knowledge and existence in reality that unless we do make such a presupposition, we could not even assume the existence of an objective physical reality that extends one inch beyond the circumferences of our own skulls. But because we can and need to make such a presupposition, a whole train of other truths then follows deductively and inferentially as real or hypothetical possibilities.

The anthropocentrism of our own intelligence, and hence of our understanding of meta-systems, brings us to the horns of Goedel's dilemma. We cannot objectify that which is a part of ourselves and that we therefore cannot get outside of or beyond. We confront this basic dilemma in any version or vision of science we wish to entertain, and it sets certain fundamental constraints on our ability both to observe and to understand what we are observing. To make a claim like "This statement is false" entails an inherent self-contradiction about what is true and false, and hence violates the principle of the excluded middle upon which a coherent system of truth must be based. Goedel's answer for his own dilemma of course was to propound the existence of a meta-system that allows a resolution of the contradiction by means of external reference to a larger framework. This is indeed how we understand our sciences to work, as they always refer our otherwise tautological truth systems to some larger experiential basis in reality. Hidden in this presumption of a meta-system is the notion that such a system exists before and independently from our own anthropologically relative knowledge of or within such a system.

The challenge of this anthropological relativism of our definitions of intelligence and of information in reality will be met fully upon our encounter with an alien intelligence that has perhaps attained a greater level of civilized development than even ourselves. When we consider the challenges of adequately comprehending cetacean intelligence or the intelligence of Primates, rats, octopuses, dogs or other animals, we face immediately problems of communication and of the hypothetical "black box" of getting inside of other creatures heads, and of even our own black boxes. This kind of challenge will only be magnified if and when we encountered an alien intelligence that possibly evolved along lines completely different than how we now comprehend earthbound biological evolution. But if evidence of alien intelligence that is non-anthropocentric should present itself to us in our explorations and observations of the universe, then we would for the first time be presented with the possibility of stepping entirely beyond the boundaries imposed by own anthropological relativity.

Defining for ourselves meta-systems as a form of intelligence that is potentially beyond our own human boundaries creates for us other kinds of challenges as well. It is apparent that we must come forth with a kind of meta-logos that transcends and encapsulates our own logic and knowledge, as knowledge of knowledge, and information about information. A greater part of the opacity and abtruseness of Bateson's essays were in part that he was himself perhaps not entirely clear, and also that he was attempting to approach the problem holistically from the standpoint of maintaining metalogue about reality. This has both intellectual and aesthetic appeal, as it implicitly accentuates the anthropological boundedness and construction of our knowledge.

Furthermore, the challenge of defining meta-systems seems to rest upon the problem of reconciling science as a brave new world kind of knowledge system, with the more traditional and ancient philosophy, that appears, in the face of the advance of science, somewhat outdated and useless. Bridging philosophy and science points up both the scientific nature of much philosophical inquiry and the complementary philosophical nature of scientific inquiry. Science and philosophy need one another, perhaps even more than did Einstein believe that Science and Religion needed one another in a way that is entirely parallel and homologous to the way that mathematics and science intersect. Thus we are interested in the marriage of the purely physical, as that range of possibility beyond the boundaries of our own consciousness, and the metaphysical, which, like Kant, we can say defines fully the boundaries of our consciousness, or "Cogito, ergo sum."

We can demonstrate for instance that doing metaphysics is not strictly speaking a-scientific or without scientific method, and that even doing science requires that we conduct some kind of metaphysics at the same time. It is clear for instance, that a great deal of metaphysics went into the formulation of the theory of evolution, as hypothetical constructs without firm empirical foundations, long before the actual empirical or experimental validation of this theory was in hand.

This of course is all an intrinsic part of the nature of the human mind that is both rooted in the same natural systems that it seeks to comprehend. It simultaneously has the power both to comprehend these systems, itself potentially within it, and even new and previously unrealized systems as well. We can only guess at the power of the mind of Heraclitus, who preferred the wealth of wisdom over the promised riches of a King.

*****

In attempting to understand the metaphysical and ontological foundations of meta-systems theory, it is important to recognize that meta-systems as scientific constructs are concerned with reality first and foremost. Therefore such systems posit an a priori precedence to physical systems. To say that all systems, even noetic systems of the human mind, are reducible to physical factors and processes may sound a bit reductionist. But we realize that by definitions meta-systems comprehend and transcend the analytical description of the physical processes and encompass a holistic description of the state-behavior and systemic patterning involved. This patterning is held to be inherently synergistic at all levels, such that the results are always something greater than the mere enumeration or summation of the parts involved. If synergistic patterning did not arise from complex systems, that permitted new orders of informational patterning in nature, then we would be left with nothing but the physical description of the constituent elements.

The basis for understanding natural information systems and natural forms of intelligence is to realize the synergism of "metaphysical systems" that arise from the complex interactions and state behavior of bounded and contextualized meta-systems. A meta-system is therefore something inherently more than the mere sum of its parts. It is rooted in regular and ordered relationships that define in an implicit sense determinist rules.

We understand the relationship of information theory to meta-systems theory when we understand the nature of patterning of any informational system. An informational system can neither be wholly random, or wholly determined. Such a system cannot permit a continually meaningless repetition of states, nor can it permit a totally unpredictable repetition of states. We find throughout the natural world, at all levels of analysis, whether it is in terms of human imagination and creativity, or in terms of subatomic dynamics, a surprising sense of sublime order and regularity of principle. We can say therefore that an informational system is one that is implicitly ordered in its relations between its parts, and this ordering is definable within a set of rules that may be inductively inferred from observation of the system and deductive derivable by an understanding of the patterned relationships. This is, needless to say, the basis for all science.

Any system, as a meta-system that is informationally organized, can be said to be bounded or constrained in some manner such that it exhibits a limited number of degrees of freedom along one or more dimensions. Usually, we expect physical systems to be finite in number and size, but if we seek the larger universe as a system, we open up the possibility of infinite systems. Physical systems as we understand these appear to be constrained at least in terms of the four physical dimensions known in an Einsteinian universe. There are also non-physical dimensions of constraint that may operate upon systems, as well as dimensionless constraints or relationships. Systems can be characterized therefore by the kinds of constraints that serve to define the system, and these constitute a paradigm of relational rules are implicit to the patterning of the system.

Language is a perfect model for an information system. Any human language must be made up of a core set of sounds, words and grammatical rules that define the relationship between words, and between words and the meanings they indicate in the real world. Within the constraints of any language, we can find infinite possible permutations of patterning that permit that language to effectively encode and represent reality at multiple levels. Without language, there would be no human symbolic intelligence as we know it, and hence, in a sense, language is the core part of anthropological intelligence as an informational system.

Genetics is another informational system that defines the patterning and evolution of all life-forms on earth--genetic information is constrained within the parameters of DNA chains, which are remarkably uniform and limited in number. Nevertheless, from simple cellular constructs an amazing variety of substances and forms and functions of life have evolved.

Chemistry has the periodic table of the elements, and physics is gaining a surprising well ordered model of the subatomic realm. This model has not yet been completely described and, like genetics in terms of evolutionary theory, we still await a grand synthesis that ties the microscopic with the macroscopic.

We can seek meta-systems as well on another level of human behavioral patterning, and in terms of the technological civilization that has created new artificial systems. These are in a sense natural informational systems, as the functional extension of human intelligence, though they are not stochastically self-organizing in the way that we understand naturally occurring systems. They have arisen artificially as the consequence of human intelligence and problem solving, either as serendipitous or intentional systems. But there is also a sense that if human intelligence is a stochastically occurring natural process, the eventual and perhaps inevitable result of biological evolution that leads to intelligent life-forms as adaptive systems, then the artificial products and systems forthcoming from this intelligence are also indirectly stochastic and self-organizing. If this is the case, then we can hypothesize that there is indeed a logical and perhaps inevitable development of these systems as meta-systems in some direction. In other words, their continuing development will eventually lead us to solutions that are implicit and possible in the true informational ordering of the universe. Of course, we do not immediately comprehend and cannot foresee what these developments will be.

This leads us to a definition of intelligence as a naturally derivative system. Intelligence is in a sense immanent in natural information systems as stochastic process and possibility of development. It is emergent as a complex metaphysical process that is capable of defining solutions to problems that confront the continuing order, sustenance and growth of systems. We can say that with the emergence of animal life forms, limited forms of intelligence took hold and began evolving into more and more sophisticated systems. We would like to say that such stochastic development has reached its pinnacle in the evolution of humankind that, with its language, its symbolic intelligence, cultural creativity and its hands, has lead to the articulation of entirely new levels of informational patterning. But in the larger scheme of things we must understand this to be a relative assessment, and to define the basis of what can be called anthropological relativity of our understanding of such systems. We exhibit in our selves and in our world just one possible variety of intelligence, as a system that is complex and involves many components. Neither is this intelligence unlimited or so highly evolved that is precludes people behaving typically like other kinds of animals on a regular, indeed normal, basis.

I would confer upon the question of intelligence, as a special case and set of informational systems, as those systems that are capable of self-deterministic change and interaction with its environment in adaptive ways. We can say that evolution itself, as the form of terrestrial biology occurring on earth, forms a system of intelligence that is fundamentally blind and non-reflexive. It achieves problem solving and adaptation largely through trial and error in a system that permits remarkable adaptive trait-plasticity in almost every characteristic governed by the system. We can say that the physical structure of reality as this occurs in the known universe at least, is basically non-intelligent. It does not adapt as systems in any sense. Systems occur in physical reality as ordered relationships, but these systems are not intrinsically self-maintaining, adaptive or evolving in the sense that we understand living systems. Stable systems do arise that attain complex and dynamic equilibrium states in physical reality, but these systems are purely a matter of chance process. Cosmogenic evolution is therefore a purely stochastic process that is defined completely within the parameters of its basic constraints. If these systems change, then it is in terms of dimenions or constraints the basis of which are either completely deterministic or completely random, unless this change is ordered upon some lower level of constituent complexity.

The challenge of understanding intelligence in informational patterning in a naturalistic way must necessarily bring us to the question of hypothetical alternative intelligence--or non-human forms of intelligence, and of course to the issue of alien intelligence. It is more than likely that in the universe there are numerous biological systems that have evolved sophisticated forms of intelligent life. It is probable that somewhere in the universe there are creatures that can be considered, from the criteria of metaphysical problem solving, even more intelligent than our selves. These creatures would have probably attained a state of technological development far beyond our own level.

It is likely, perhaps necessary, that these creatures would have a language, and some kinds of hands to do work, and would have elaborated some form of symbolic intelligence and culture. But we should not assume therefore that such creatures would be anything comparable or similar to human or anthropoid forms of intelligent systems as these are found upon earth.

It appears to me that the measure of intelligence of any system would be in terms of the meta=systemic science that that system has attained. It appears to me that in terms of science, some common ground of understanding of principles would be had. This would be true, for instance, in basic mathematical knowledge structures, as mathematics remains the language of science. It would also be true metaphysically in terms of the propositional organization of knowledge and inference structures. In other words, it seems to me that very intelligent creatures must at some level of their evolutionary development exhibit a convergence of intelligence upon scientific meta=systems, in the sense that very different creatures must at least become in fundamental aspects "like minded" if nothing else. This universal like-mindedness would be evident in terms of the artificial and alternative patterning that such living systems developed for themselves in their civilization and augmentation of reality. We would know alien intelligence at least in terms of the tools and functions to which it put these tools.

In other words, we must hypothesize that we can only seek to know alien intelligence in an abstract sense that transcends real differences, and in an applied, operational sense that brings these differences to realization.

It would behoove us therefore, if we are to seek to understand alien intelligence, to seek to understand the structure and limits of our scientific knowledge itself.

*****

Being anthropocentrically relative, meta-systems theory faces several inherent dilemmas. The liar's dilemma was already broached. We must understand that the meta-system by definition and design entails the possibility of prevarication. No information system could be assumed to be intelligent if prevarication were not possible within such a system.

Another dilemma of such anthropological meta-systems is that in the conceptualization of meta-systems theory in an abstract sense, or in its operational application in the real world, we confront of a problem of being subjectively caught up within the system that we are seeking to objective describe, as if we were not a part of the system itself. Among other issues, this leads us inevitably to the challenge of solving the problems of our own survival and adaptation on earth, as a meta-system. We are left with the challenge of trying to engineer human systems that are effective in overcoming our own innate shortcomings of intelligence and lack of intelligence. These issues become unavoidable as part of our meta-systems development.

A third kind of dilemma is the inherent structural dilemma of all meta-systems, and of the concept of the meta-system. Meta-systems are in theory all encompassing, and yet any meta-system is by definition bounded and constrained, contextualized and encompassed within some larger system. It is in part a dilemma of context, and in part a dilemma of level of structural relation by which we seek to define and understand any particular meta-system we seek to comprehend. In other words, we must seek to define meta-systems generally, or any and every meta-systems, in terms of meta-systems that are part of these systems. If we cannot step anthropologically beyond the meta-system of our own biology and culture, we cannot step metaphysically beyond the abstract parameters by which we seek to define meta-systems in the first place.

This dilemma relates us directly back to the first liar's dilemma. We cannot have information if we had no possibility of being wrong. Information as order encodes its own disorder. In order to escape such a dilemma, we must posit some larger meta-system, and so on ad infinitum. Thus we can see that indirectly, the first dilemma is relatable structurally to the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic question of being bound within the constraints of our own knowledge system. Somewhat paradoxically, in our conceptions of the physical structure of reality and the total universe, we are also bound within a very similar kind of dilemma--any cosmological model we develop leads us directly to the conundrum of hypothesizing a meta-structure to contain that model. It follows that the kinds of solutions we find for one aspect of this "meta-lemma" will lead to resolutions of its other aspects. On one hand, we can see that the universe in the largest sense must be self-contained entirely, somehow. On the other hand, if we are to agree to such universal laws as thermodynamics, we must see that whatever scale or structure we posite for the universe must "leak" into a larger background context, if it is composed of energy. It is impossible to imagine, it seems, a universe that is at once infinite and totally self-contained, and these seems like an oxymoronic, self-contradictory statement.

*****

Finally, I must close with the notion that there is an entirely different way of looking at meta-systems as these relate especially to ourselves, as human beings, and relate ourselves to reality. All other life forms that we know can be said to be a part of meta-systems and yet are not reflective of or upon the meta-systems that they constitute or share. As intelligent life forms, we have the capability of thinking about our meta-systemic relationships, about where we came from, and where we might be going in terms of the meta-systems we are a part of.

In other words, I think it is important also to construe meta-systems as a possible meta-system, as something that is real and applied in the real world, especially that is the product of human civilization and development. We have reached a juncture in our own history of development that we must consider the possibility of the elaboration of a grand meta-system that best serves our interests as a species and a form of life on earth.

The development of a meta-system from this point of view is one that brings to teleological consequence the implicit structures and purposes of knoweldge that is inherent to what we have already elaborated. Such a meta-system would comprise a kind of permanent long term solution to the problems and predicaments that confront humankind, particularly upon a global level.

There has been an unfortunate and pervasive trend in higher education, and in the world at large, that thought and knowledge has been prestructured and constrained in certain paradigmatic ways that discourages the freedom to think differently or to explore openly alternative points of view. Received points of view that are in conformity with largely unquestioned and unproven paradigms of knowledge, or what I would call as scientific ideologies of worldview and knowledge, predominate the literary forums and professional dialogues as well as the general mindset of the legitimate scholars who profess this knowledge. This is regardless of the simple historical conclusion that whatever our ideas or ideologies, the measure of goodness of fit to the realities or the lack thereof and therefore of the discrepancy between received ideology and reality, it is the reality that in the long run shall prevail. Therefore the unmitigated failure to deal effectively with reality in a non-ideological manner represents the failure to realize the potential benefits of scientific knowledge in the reform and introduction of innovation in our world. Ideologically driven policies and programs, and theoretically ill-founded research efforts will all fail to the extent that the premises of these collective efforts do not accord with actual reality.

Of course, what is reality in this sense remains an open question, and therefore subject to debate and competition of ideas and the resources that accrue to legitimization of ideological orientations. This is the case because there remains much about our world that we do not truly understand, even though we may have the illusion of understanding that comes with belief and knowledge. There remains even more things unknown and as yet undiscovered that we may never truly come to understand, though we would be embarrassed to admit this.

Reality in many ways remains quite contestable regardless of the sense of authority and perhaps spurious sense of objectivity that scientists and their administrators and advocates bring to the common table. The contestability of ideas and knowledge is a mixed blessing, for while it permits the ascendancy of ideology and false belief and the restrictive control of paradigmatic thought over dialogue and thought, it also ensures us that this sense of control can never become total or complete or completely closed as we might fear it becoming in the worst-case scenarios.

Nowadays the boards of inquisition are composed mostly of self-serving administrators and gate-keeping academics who mostly have their pet-peeves and narrow sense of intellectual territories to protect and promote, often at anyone's expense. The greatest damage they seem to be doing is simply stifling dialog and the open exchange of ideas, and the systematic structural frustration of potential intellectual growth by free thinking intellectuals. But for richer or poorer, free-wielding intellectuals will continue to think outside of the paradigmatic fold regardless of the sense of received legitimacy they are able to bring to their work.

My greatest concern therefore is with the independence of thought, or rather the relative lack of such independent thought, that is being consistently promulgated in academia in many different areas, as a consequence of current predominant paradigms that govern our collective view of the world. These paradigms are simultaneously both scientific and ideological, and they appear to have a governing influence on new directions being taken in research and funding of scientific projects. Gate-keeping in academic and administrative circles, as well as in publishing forums, tends to protect those who have a paradigmatic investment to the intellectual status quo, and professional ostracism and social death greet those who wish to question or actively go against this status quo. There has been little that has been unintentional about this state of affairs--often the effort to protect a theoretical framework or one's status-role identity within such a framework or promote a particular view of the world is deliberate, and, even more, deliberately coercive and intolerant of any form of alternation.

We live in an unusual era, for it is wrought with great contradictions. Never before have we created more new scientific knowledge and the pace of this acquisition is accelerating with each passing year. Communication and information storage systems are achieving levels of integration and articulation that make even traditional text-based systems look archaic and primitive. And yet, at the same time, we are perhaps ensconced in an era and within a larger system that maintains its own symbolic and ideological blinders, and that sets limits to what we know and imagine about our world in invisible ways. So all powerful has the current world system become, that it has become very difficult and problematic to think beyond its bounds or framework. Any new evidence is automatically interpreted to fit the received framework, rather than attempting to redefine the framework to accommodate and make better sense of new information.

Theories predominate in the physical and social sciences that demonstrate a fundamental lack of paradigmatic unity. Einsteinian relativity is proving to be, like the predecessorial models of Newton and others, but limited and limiting "covering law models" that have a place in the larger scheme of things, but that by themselves are insufficient to account for all the phenomena that occur.

Dogmas have been promulgated, of the Big Bang and of political economic structure, that make a crime of dissent and that constrain the freedom of thought in basic and essential ways. And it is especially where political economy and the Big Bang structure converge that we can expect to find the worst case of this kind of paradigmatic closure. This convergence is most clearly felt in the ossification of old-boy networks within academic institutions at all levels, and in the unmitigated and wide-open brain drain that has lead to a selective bias in favor of foreign brains over domestically produced software.

A similar situation occurs in the social sciences, in general, but here the intrinsically divisive and complex nature of the knowledge and subject matter tend to occlude the action of paradigmatic and structural control factors that influence and constrain thought in critical ways.

I have taken central issue with the Big Bang theory of our cosmos because it attributes nearly the entire process of the physical creation of the universe to a single event structure, the nature of which is without precedence or exemplification in the known, observable universe, and without explanation by known physical processes and laws, which in itself defies the application of the Cosmological Principle, and which leads us to many unaddressed contradictions and logical conundrums if we realistically consider its consequences.

I accept (not without reservation) Thomas Kuhn's general accounting of the paradigmatic structure and history of thought in the physical sciences especially, and in accordance I see the Big Bang theory as having become in the last half century especially a received orthodoxy, a paradigm par excellence, within which all data and all knowledge must be conformed and made to fit, even if this leads to rather absurd and logically contradictory conclusions. And this goes to show how even very bright and brilliant minds can be shackled by the constraints of unquestioned prejudice and a structural framework that rewards intellectual conformity and punishes through systematic denial and ostracism any form of intellectual alternation.

The fact that new cosmological heterodoxies are springing up in response to new information being gained, and that the entire state of affairs is in general unrest, suggests that the predominant points of view are both insufficient to account for reality and are therefore probably at least partially incorrect, if not wholly so.

I have therefore ventured on a risky independent path, and borrowing the more sensible aspects of the early Steady-State model, in keeping with a revised Cosmological principle, I offer a view of cosmology that I have termed the Dynamic-State Universe that does not begin in an instant that witnesses the coming into being of all the hydrogen and helium in the universe, but that, as the name implies, seeks to identify basic equilibrium processes in the universe that may account for the on-going processes of stasis and change that is apparent as we look out upon the night-time sky.

According to the Dynamic State Model, the universe did not start so much as a big bang as it did as a endless process of "cold-fusion" and gradual aggregation of increasing amounts of basic matter as the result of as yet unexplained processes of energy-conversion that may be related to the dynamic and fundamentally non-isotropic flow of space-time through itself.

The model of the dynamic state universe rests upon certain presuppositions about the fundamental structure of physical reality and its relative limits and sense of overarching limitlessness. First, we may say that what we have conventionally construed as "empty" space-time that nevertheless has a structure implied by an Einsteinian model, is in fact a non-empty form of physical "something" that interacts gravitationally and mechanically with all forms of energy and matter, and is fundamentally equivalent to these alternative forms. In fact, spime (a portmanteau of space-time as I have called this "something") is essentially an alternative form of energy and matter that has its own set of properties.
The interaction of spime and known forms of energy and matter therefore sets the stage for all gravitational phenomena that we observe in the universe, and provides us with a framework for extending and revising the fundamental laws of thermodynamics that takes into account a range of phenomena that I refer to as gravitational dynamics (or, more accurately, spime-gravitational dynamics.) Therefore, we bear witness everyday on earth, and in relation to our own sun, that demonstrate an endless source of gravitational energy that fuels the sun and drives the molten furnace at the earth's iron core. This energy does not diminish, does not become depleted, as one would expect from a standard view of thermodynamics.

If we apply basic rules of the universal conservation and equivalence of alternative forms of energy and reality, then we can understand how a sense of gravitational equilibrium can be maintained indefinitely between a large gravitating body and the region of space-time that surrounds it. Gravity is one of the gravitational effects that we observe generally as a consequence of these processes. They keep our feet bound to the ground and guarantee that what goes up, must come down (that is unless a certain escape velocity can be achieved.)

An as yet unexplained aspect of this process is how hydrogen-helium nuclei may have first been formed before the existence of large masses of gravitating bodies. It is almost certain that in bodies like our sun, and like all the stars that exist, that new mass is being created at rates equivalent to the size, density and mass of these systems, as the consequence of the gravitational induction of spime into the body and the conversion of this spime through gravitational displacement of the "rest mass" of this body. The new mass thus created leads to a rate of loss of mass from the system, a continuous shedding or casting off that maintains gravitational equilibrium. But we do not yet know how new mass might be created in contexts without such large bodies.

The theory I have proposed is the creation of intensive releases of light at high temperatures in regions of space-time that form gravitational vortices. These vortices act like gravitational centers where, as a result of the intense collision of light energy, hydrogen-helium is produced in relatively large concentrations, and, in relation to the same central regions, these gas clouds are drawn together into gravitational unity to crate new stellar formations. This model redefines the subatomic structure of reality, and construes all subatomic particles as but various combinations of essential electron-positron-neutrino pairs, which in turn are nothing but photons-gravitons and their symmetrical pairs (anti-photons and anti-gravitons). We may speculate that in essence a positron is nothing but a positively charged electron, and an electron is nothing but a photon-graviton pair with a right-hand spin (arbitrarily speaking). It appears that the universe spins in a fixed framework of directions, and this relates directly to how space-time unfolds in an instantaneous event structure that is forever on-going. A proton then is nothing but a positron that has been captured into a stable orbital trajectory that is rather tight compared to its sister electron. I predict the capturing of the positron is the result of positron-positron collisions and interactions that produce fundamental nucleonic entities. It is possible that a positron-electron pair may collide, and not mutually annihilate one another, but produce a neutron pair that is complementary to that of the proton, minus the charge and with a slight difference in mass. It is the gravitational effect and interaction of the proton with its space-time manifold, compared to the electron, that is of greatest interest. The proton and the neutron, in cumulative aggregation, are the source of gravitational effects of an integrated body of mass. They appear to interact with the surrounding space-time manifold in such a manner as to produce these effects, far less than does the electron. It appears also that both electrons and protons, when created, occur in complementary and balanced manner, and are fundamentally interchangeable, such that any electron may become attached to any proton, and vice-versa.

Knowledge does not only exist in an ideal world of propositions and abstract relations. Knowledge coheres on a living landscape of the everyday world. It is in this natural landscape that knowledge gains expression, validation and historical reality. Thereby knowledge develops, grows, changes. It is not only changed by the world, but it acts upon and serves, through human agency, to change the world as well. Therefore we can describe a certain kind of noetic equilibrium of human reality that is the consequence of the interaction between knowledge and the world. Knowledge is invariably embedded in an intricate web of human social relations and is both the motivating force, the framing justification and the consequence of human action in the world. We must see knowledge therefore, however formally defined or ideologically received or conventionally constructed, as intrinsic, indeed integral, to human reality in a practical, everyday sense. Furthermore, knowledge becomes critically constrained by its real world relations and expressions. Therefore, knowledge is not as free and pure as many may believe, but is subject to coercive forces that channel, shape and predefine its expression.

Knowledge to a great extent becomes the product of culture and cultural worldview. It is both the by-product and the basic building block of worldview, and in this it serves its ideological function. Values shape our knowledge, even in ways that we do not directly see or understand. Much of the constraining force that cultural and psychological orientation exhibits over knowledge therefore becomes indirect and implicit to the background context of our understanding. How we see the world and respond to it in a typical manner is very much the result of this set of constraining relationships. Like culture itself, this connection between culture and knowledge is transparent and invisible to our objective consciousness, and only emerges to the foreground of our awareness when it becomes symbolically relativized by alternatively constructed realities.

We cannot completely disembody our selves, or rather our apperceptive awareness of ourselves in reality or the knowledge that comes with it, from the subjective contexts in which this knowledge arises, gains shape and has force and power. We have, through our sciences and wisdom, been able to disengage our knowledge in a relativistic manner from its subjective frameworks, and some knowledge, (i.e., abstract and mathematical knowledge) can be claimed to exist independently of any real system. We achieve gain in our knowledge as a function if this capacity to "objectify" it in a relative manner, or rather in a manner that is relatively independent of any embedded context in which it has significance.

Symbolic knowledge provides us the illusion of truth, or of being generalized and disembedded from any real contexts. I call this an illusion because in fact all knowledge remains embedded in our own organic environment at least. The illusion of symbolic generalization is a necessary and important illusion in reality, for it is the basis of our intelligence and capacity to understand reality in a disembodied manner. That intelligence rests on an illusion, a magical trick of our symbolic capacity, comes as something of a paradox that plagues our comprehension of reality as something greater than mere physical existence. Though it is ultimately only an illusion, it is a necessary and indeed a grand illusion. Most religious and other ideological belief stem from this epistemological and rational illusion that is rooted in the symbolic structure of our knowledge and conscious awareness. This is a part of the anthropological relativity of knowledge and of the experience of reality.

In the modern world, we cannot engage in an informed discussion in any area of science or technological application or even in human social organization without bringing up the word and the concepts of "systems." Systems provides us a way of looking at and framing a diverse range of phenomena in the real world and serves thereby to make fundamentally obsolete many previous ways of looking at or seeing the world. Systems approaches allows us to generalize comprehensively across disparate and otherwise very divergent fields of inquiry and knowledge, and it allows us to conceptualize and categorize reality in terms that are at once both empirically testable and rationally generalizable. Systems do not make the mistake, if we do not allow them to, of becoming reified abstractions and naturalized constructions. Systems remain in a sober sense just that--tentative theories that explain and predict the patterning that occurs, or might occur, in reality. We do not disprove or prove systems, because all systems are in a sense only semi-deterministic and complementary to other systems and their subsystems. We merely test them by trial and error, either controlled or naturalistically, and improve systems or fail to. In this sense, all science has always been systems science, whether they were self-conscious or deliberately so or not. Neither does it do to impose upon the ordered relations of the natural world our own "system" or force-fit these patterns to some formulae of systems science. Systems are all unique and different, and in there complexity of pattern or of implication, they do not lead to the same kinds of explanations.

I have decided to pull out all stops in the writing of this central text about Meta-systems, and to try within the breadth of a single volume to cover in a sufficient manner all the basic areas that are important to the full articulation of a meta-systems approach.

My interest in meta-systems has grown over the years in response to increasing contradictions that humans are facing and must deal with everyday of their lives. It has grown out of keen desire to advance to the limits what is thought possible and what can be made certain in this world. When it is found that the majority of humanity continue to live in some measure of coercive and involuntary servitude in regimes that can be considered only totalitarian and corrupt, in spite of all the advances of science and technology that we have achieved, and when it is realized that the fundamental disparities between the wealthy and the dispossessed in the world are only increasing, it becomes necessary to both get back down to basic and to side-step the ideological conundrums that come with dealing with conventional systems in conventional ways, (i.e., in their own terms.)

At this time, I see such an approach as fully consonant and coordinate with the current and on-going information revolution, and in a sense to be a logical consequence of this revolution, if we can carry the logic of these developmental changes full circle in terms of its greater significance as an integrated system in the large and the long run. Human cultural integration of reality is knowledge based, and unlike natural integration has to be driven by logic that is dictated both by what is necessarily and what is most desirable. Up to this stage in our history, humanity has not been guided by Reason alone except when reason is manacled by narrow self-serving interests and goals of petty power and gain. And yet it is only to a sense of infallible reason that we must hang our greatest hopes and lay our bets for an uncertain future.

Logic demands for instance that humankind must eventually abandon fossil fuels as a primary form of energy and convert to solar-hydrogen systems if they are to avoid global eco-catastrophe and achieve long-term sustainability and increase in energy output and productivity. There is no necessary schedule for when these kinds of transitions need to occur--putting the development of solar-hydrogen platforms off until after humankind has expended all available fossil fuel resources is a short-sighted and illogical approach to the problem. Many other issues can be considered in the same way. A point will be reached, and some experts would say has already been over-passed, when total warfare no longer makes any sense because it is inherently self-defeating when the level of mass destruction it may bring destroys the objective of using weapons in the first place. To less obvious but in some ways more pressing issues, the institutionalization and monopolization of knowledge into elitest specializations brings with it the risk that such knowledge becomes paradigmatically inbound and therefore ideologically regressive--this is happening in all major fields of science even if we are unaware of its consequences for the advancement of new ideas, theories and forms of thought about our shared world. In economics, if there is increased productivity and increasing labor-saving efficiency in productivity, then there is no reason not to expect generally falling prices on products and goods, rather than on continuing inflation and rising prices. Increasing costs of living across the board entails and is symptomatic of increasing socio-economic stratification between people and classes of people, with the implication of widening asymmetries in fundamental access to basic resources. A truly healthy economy that made basic commodities like energy and food more available and hence at less cost to the consumer would be a healthier economy in which more people would flourish and be productive in meaningful ways.

The obstacles impeding progress are everywhere the same or of similar form. Authoritarian power structures recur the world over and serve to protect limited access to the basic resources produced within any system. This is in fact no less the case in developed and relatively democratic societies than they are in less developed and more totalitarian systems. Overall, development to a large extent depends upon democratization of a system, which entails opening the system up structurally. In developed societies big brother forms of politics become disguised behind screens of public institutions, media propaganda, and bureaucratic obfuscation.

Meta-systems are basically two sets of things at the same time:

1. Meta-systems are systems of systems, mostly naturally occurring systems, or alternatively real and human-made systems. They can also include abstract and imaginary systems. Most systems themselves are super-complex--therefore meta-systems science deals with super-complexity in the interrelationships between different systems or their component subsystems. In a sense, we can describe a single hypothetical meta-system that comprehends and encompasses all other systems. It can be said that all of nature, indeed all of reality, which seems to be somehow a greater and more general notion than that of nature, can be unequivocally said to be constituted by systems that occur upon multiple levels of articulation. We understand the functioning, organization, operations and patterns that occur and recur in reality in countless cycles in terms of systems, in terms of the ordered relations that recur between like elements, in terms of rules that are consistently reiterated in the processes of change and occurrence. A systems approach is ultimately how we approach knowledge of reality scientifically once we move beyond simplistic deterministic models that are based upon strict correspondences between events and terms names and the classical sense of causality that is used to explain such event structures. It was Niels Bohr who pointed out the relevance of a view of complementariness in all fields of the sciences, at all levels of the articulation of reality, and this amazing insight, as true for cultures and the designs of frogs as it remains for realistically understanding the structure of subatomic particles in their atomic orbits, remains at the heart of a meta-systems approach.

2. Meta-systems are knowledge theories and heuristic methodologies relating to knowledge. In this sense, meta-systems are comprehensive and they represent both a form of philosophy and philology and a kind of science about knowledge. Because all knowledge that is known is fundamentally human knowledge, or at least human mediated knowledge, this sets certain basic constraints and conditions on the normal or typical structure that knowledge takes. Therefore, we may say that meta-systems provides a heuristic system for the organization, articulation, application of received knowledge and the generation of new knowledge.

Meta-systems as a perspective and approach grew out of my professional involvement in the Anthropology of Knowledge, and represents an extension and application of this approach to a wide range of issues and areas that are both trivial and important in our world. The anthropology of knowledge has had an eclectic history of development, and is related but not the same as the sociology of knowledge though it comprehends many components of this other area. Anthropology has long been interested in the problem of the psychic unity of humankind and the general problem of "primitive thought." It has had its own tradition and contributions to psychology and the study of human behavior and symbolism in cross-cultural contexts. It has been intimately interested in problems of socialization, enculturation, identification and the linguistic ties of the native speaker to a coherent worldview. The focus of the Anthropology has come to focus upon what has been known as the worldview problem, or how we articulate a coherent view of the world and function in relation to such a world.

Meta-systems science was where theoretical and methodological development in the Anthropology of Knowledge had been leading me consistently over the last decade, one step at a time. It took my fieldwork experience in the heart of central China to precipitate this framework out--perhaps it was the totalitarianism of daily life there that demanded of me a sense of totality of worldview that was not violent or destructive but at least appears benign and constructive. But even more importantly, I believe, it was my students and their continuous questioning me about the larger world, making me think about the consequences of a shattered or ill-defined or incomplete worldview, that the consequences of its ideological manipulations that the true power of genuine independent thought and intellectual freedom came to the foreground of my anthropological concerns.

Of course, an entire decade of graduate training and prior fieldwork led up to this stage in my own development. There as a growing dissatisfaction with conventional solutions and pat answers that even an esoteric field like the Anthropology of Knowledge could offer.

Since that time four years ago, I have been devoted in one way or another, and usually in multiple ways at the same time, to the development and fulfillment of a meta-systems approach, not only on paper, but in terms of lived reality as well. I believe the world is more than ripe for such a frame-shift or maze-way reformulation, but it is not yet prepared psychologically or ideologically to receive or participate in such alternation, especially in any collective sense that would be necessary to bring such a vision to fruition. It was I believe Buckminster Fuller who saw the most optimistic and positivistic vision of a world governed not by politicians and their private interests, but by the good intentions and wisdom of scientists and the public benefit that is derived from this. In this sense, he was completely a visionary, a man ahead of his own times. But he had the open and naively idealistic framework of the 60's, set against the evils of Vietnam, to propel him forward in his vision. Since then, socially and ideologically, human knowledge has seen much regression in spite of the quickening tempo new scientific revolutions, discoveries and inventions around every corner. We have revived for administrative attention and public obfuscation issues that were supposed to have been settled with the Scopes Monkey Trial.

There has arisen an unfortunate legacy of this sister area of the sociology of knowledge that it has been construed as somewhat anti-scientific and political in its interpretation and application. In terms of its central tenets and methodologies, nothing could be further from the truth--it has only striven for a more realistic vision of the articulation of scientific knowledge in the world and how this articulation is susceptible to social and ideological influences. Like the general anthropological doctrine of relativism, with which it is closely associated, this doctrine of the social construction of knowledge and knowledge systems has been reinterpreted and reenvisioned to suit the interests of whomever it is doing the re-visioning and reinterpretation, regardless sometimes of the accuracy of the point of view being promulgated. In such a manner, we see that even the field like the sociology of knowledge is susceptible to the same ideological constraints and influences that it was created to critique and "deconstruct" in the first place, and this makes sense because even knowledge about knowledge becomes susceptible to the same kinds of structural patterns and limitations and distortions that all knowledge is prone to.

Coming from the anthropology of knowledge, these political and ideological issues can be at least partially side-stepped. The problem with the anthropology of knowledge has been that it has been conventionally received as such an esoteric professional interest that even most other anthropologists themselves are mostly unfamiliar with its terrain, much less the average non-academic.

There are five basic sets of questions that mostly deeply concern meta-systems, each of these questions informing and guiding research at different levels of meta-systems stratification:

1. What is physical reality? Or What is real?

2. What is life?

3. What is intelligence?

4. What is possible?

5. What is true?

The answer to these kinds of questions is never straight-forward, and attempting to answer them results in a life-time of research and query. Some might claim that these kinds of questions are unanswerable, though I do not think so, at least from a relative point of view. Unanswerable kinds of questions are those that science should not appropriate ask, and, when we boil it down, there may be only one such unanswerable question:

How and why did it all begin in the very first instance?

A logical extension of this is to ask the opposite but complementary question:

How and why will it call end in the very last instance?

The question that I believe to be ultimately unanswerable is the question of ultimate origins of our reality. This is a question that cannot be answered even if we adopt a purely mechanistic and material point of view. It is therefore a problem not for science but for religion and symbolic ideology to deal with. There are also non-absolute or relative questions that I believe it to be ultimately beyond the purview of science to resolve. These are normative or human evaluative questions like:

What is good?

And what is beautiful?

There are no absolute or absolutely certain answers to this kinds of questions that science can grab hold of in a fully objective manner. That does not mean that explication and especially elucidation of these kinds of questions should not be attempted in the name and spirit of science, to yield what greater objectivity we might from them. Religion and symbolic ideology can also answer these kinds of questions as well in some ultimate sense.

Otherwise, I see the range and possibility for scientific query to be fairly unrestrained and wide open. Science can and ultimately will, if provided enough time, solve all problems relating to the questions of reality and truth listed above, at least in a way that is mostly satisfactory if only approximate. If we consider the fullest logical and natural implications and consequences of these kinds of questions, we realize that they extend beyond the boundaries of the current state of knowledge in critical ways. They open us up to asking questions we might not otherwise think to ask, and to seek answers to problems we previously did not even imagine existed. And this augmentation of reality has been a normal and common function of our sciences.

The development of systems theory and methodology in a complete sense allows us this degree of openness and flexibility, and permits us to approach and formulate new kinds of problems that were previously unapproachable without this consistent framework.

I make no bones about a straight-forward scientific perspective in meta-systems theory and methodology. I see sciences in all areas as evolving eventually, minus the social and structural inertia, toward a meta-systems framework in a self-organizing manner. I see that this framework does not have to be the serendipitous product of chaos and the natural self-organization of knowledge, but can be perhaps "forced" a bit and deliberately designed in a way that makes it ultimately not an accident of human history but a direct product of this history. A meta-systems framework promises much more than merely another human construction of reality. It offers the promise of providing a central goal and normative structure for all subsequent human development and progress, in a manner that can be said to be more genuinely scientific and that embraces a larger and less restrictive view of science in the world.

It would be wonderful if all the problems that confront humankind today were resolvable into a single set of interrelated components that dictated a single grand strategy of solution and reconciliation. In a real sense, this is exactly the promise the meta-systems purports to accomplish, and it is its driven raison d'etre in the first place.

I have undertaken writing a brief introduction to Meta-systems Science and Natural Systems theory as a way of providing to a broader readership a more readily digestible synopsis of the basic theories, methods and problems with which these approaches to knowledge and understanding are concerned. The point of departure for these approaches are in the recognition of the status of knowledge in reality and the role that knowledge plays in shaping our view of the world, even and especially in our sciences, but also in all areas and forms of knowing and behaving. My intellectual interest in this regard stems back through training, field research and scholarship in the Anthropology of knowledge and in the so-called interdisciplinary field of the cognitive sciences. What we cannot escape are the implications and ramifications of our own anthropological relativity that we bring inevitably to our knowledge systems. We prefer to carry forward with the illusion that our knowledge is relatively objective and true enough at least for most practical purposes. We fail to see how even our sense of common sense may be prestructured and filtered through cultural and psychological lens that are the extension of our own biological state of being that defines our capacity for action and response. We attempt to insert specific kinds of controls and tests that have the deliberate intention of factoring out or away these kinds of preconditioning constraints. Much of our traditional scientific methodology is based upon the explicit enunciation of methods designed for unequivocal proof in an empirical and inter-subjective manner. Koch's principles and procedures for the identification of a specific form of disease infection is perhaps an archetypical example of such a systematic and intentional methodology. Such controls are frequently effective, at least in a relative way, except when we fail to take into account the social and cultural contextuality of our knowledge and knowledge constructions--a problem most frequently encountered in the human behavioral sciences.

A great deal of controversy has arisen in the last half century, and become more acute as a critique of scientific knowledge, methodology and culture. This controversy has focused upon the constructive aspects of scientific knowledge, and as critique it has unfortunately been both misunderstood and misrepresented by many people of both academic camps, the sciences and the humanities. It is not within my realm or power to try to correct the errors and misunderstanding that has been the consequence of this controversy. I believe its effect has been to further separate the two cultures more than they already were, and to create an atmosphere inhibiting greater communication rather than facilitating this communication.

In terms of the anthropological relativity of knowledge, the construction of human knowledge, as a human artifact and by-product of the human brain and condition is an observation of scientific fact and objectivity that in its self cannot be honestly denied. What becomes missed follows from the easy interpretation of this to mean that all human knowledge is therefore arbitrary and only relative in a cultural or social deterministic sense. At this point, science becomes conflated in its epistemological status with the problems of ideology and ideological knowledge systems, and it is little wonder why scientists ignore and ridicule the humanist critic of science.

There are several caveats that must be kept in mind at this point in the digression about the construction of scientific knowledge. First, all knowledge, whatever form, even science, is anthropologically relative in the genuine sense of the term that ultimately the foundations of knowledge are insecure and uncertain. Knowledge is inherently non-absolute. Only mathematical knowledge, and some would argue various forms of philosophical knowledge, may claim a status of being relatively absolute in its ideal theoretical form. To confer on knowledge inherent uncertainty, or non-absoluteness, or what is generally referred to as relativity in an epistemological sense, is to make a claim that is founded in scientific and empirical observation as well as in rational deduction of known principles. This is not the same as claiming that all knowledge is therefore arbitrary and merely and only a solipsistic whim of human caprice. The arbitrariness of any form of knowledge is a separate but related problem to the issue of the relativity of status of knowledge. The arbitrariness of knowledge is a consequence of the human constructive process. We can choose to believe, and even to see, what we want to believe and see, but this is not the same question as whether what we choose to believe or look at is any more or less true or real than what we choose to arbitrarily ignore and discredit.

The second caveat concerns what we mean by "construction" and its implications for our world. Construction has a connotation of being arbitrary and relative to the point of view of the builder, but there is a sense that it is not necessarily arbitrary and that, if it is relative, it is not necessarily so only from the observational point of view that is adopted. Human constructive processes of knowledge are biologically and cognitively based, and are a function of a complex brain that is the byproduct of millions of years of evolutionary experimentation and biological exploration. There is an inherent plasticity of learning, creativity and symbolic synthesis in these processes of knowledge construction that can be said to be environmentally situated, culturally rooted, and psychologically dynamic. Our arbitrariness about knowledge, our ability to choose to believe or disbelieve, to ignore or select, is the consequence of our constructive capacities of human intelligence and cognitive function. Our constructions are therefore not ultimately merely the consequence of the application of our own arbitrariness and our willful natures. As human beings, or rather as Homo sapiens, we cannot but help construct our worlds in an anthropologically relative manner in which knowledge, as an adaptive mechanism, plays a critical part. Our knowledge has no choice therefore but to take on basic characteristics of being symbolic in design and communicative in function and culturally contextualized in a social world.

The critical difference separating our scientific constructions from our merely symbolic, ideological or cultural constructions of knowledge systems exists in the natural and logical extension of the "more or less" clause of anthropological relativity of human knowledge, which clause permits us to have more (or less) arbitrary forms of knowledge. We can say that, relatively speaking, some forms of scientific knowledge are less arbitrary than many other forms of non-scientific knowledge. Anthropological relativity permits us this choice--any form of absolutistic or deterministic argument would ultimately preclude such a possibility. It is because our realities are uncertain, they are not only black and white, that science, and the scientific progress of more objective knowledge, becomes possible in the first place. To live in any other world is to live in a world of the vision of an animal that does not question its own sense of reality. It is a world without alternation or the possibility of change. The price we pay is the inherent uncertainty, the knowledge of the inevitability of our own death, the Kantian antinomality and existential ambiguity of our knowledge. To live in a world that is ordered by scientific worldview is not necessarily to live in a world that is more ordered or more certain than otherwise. It is the sycophant's world that is well ordered and certain. I would think that the worldview of a genuine scientist is one that suffers the inherent crises of meaning, the uncertainty of not knowing, and the questioning curiosity to learn about the unknown. And yet there is madness in every method, but no knowledge without some sense of systematic organization and order. So our proverbial "true scientist" must proceed in a manner as if one is certain, as if one's world is ordered by the same principles that govern the motions of the stars in the night sky. Otherwise, there must only be fear and the terror of an unbridled imagination that meets us in the darkness of the night. Without its method, science would be madness and couldn't be anything but blind ideology groping in the darkness with a small candle light by the sparks of one's own willful determination.

There is no anthropologically un-preconditioned knowledge, but there is knowledge that is "tested to death" and that passes, more or less, scientific criteria that is relatively objective, as determined by the special methods that all sciences employ.

*****

The point of departure of meta-systems science and natural systems theory is the recognition that in nature, in the real world, there is nothing that is not somehow interconnected, however remotely or indirectly, with everything else. One consequence of this that is not so obvious is the observation that no event or entity in reality is wholly or independently "determined" in and of itself. No thing or happening is without at least some residual indeterminancy of its nature or behavior that is the product ultimately of its connection to the larger "universe" of reality. Just how determined or undetermined is the total universe of our experience (and hence knowledge), or our total reality, is a subject of debate and speculation by scientists and philosophers alike. Whether or not we can describe the "total reality" as an integrated system remains a question we are not likely to know the answer for anytime soon.

Science at least proceeds on the illusion that reality is well ordered and perhaps even totally "determined" as a system. It was after all Einstein himself who refused to accept the idea that "God played dice with the universe." In a sense, science has no choice but to carry forward on this presupposition of the total unity of reality and its underlying sense of deterministic causality. According to this general ontological perspective, everything has a "reason" and there is a cause for every thing, and a good scientific theory will "explain" both how and why things happen one way and not in any other way. This has informed a conventional, (compulsive) Newtonian scientific view of the world up until the Twentieth Century when new insights, knowledge and theory, of relativity of both the very large and the very small, of complementariness, of chaos and complexity, has risen to challenge the collective mind of science. And yet even the major architects of Twentieth Century science found it difficult to reconcile and deal with the contradictions of order and disorder, entropy and design, in a single sense of reality.

Meta-systems science attempts therefore to pick up the theoretical and methodological ball where the conventional sciences have tended to leave off. The main characteristics of meta-systems science and natural systems theory are the following:

1. The holistic emphasis of the contextuality of constructed frames of reference, complemented by analytical reductionism and resolution of particular or specific instances or events.

2. The cross-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary "hybridization" of knowledge systems that follow lines of least resistance in the natural ordering of phenomena in the world, paying respect to the emerging social and historical stratigraphy, landscape and boundaries of knowledge systems.

3. An emphasis upon the theoretical construction of alternative frames of reference derived both deductively from natural and rational reason, and inductively from empirical observation and experimentation.

4. The use of both a "systems" modeling or heuristic approach to learning, design and problem solving, in a framework that is itself meta-logically contextualized by a meta-systems framework that serves to contextualize such approaches within a comprehensive knowledge framework.

5. An emphasis upon the comprehensiveness of objectified knowledge systems, or of a "scientific worldview," that nonetheless does not exclude or preclude or occlude an interest in the particular or the specialized frame of reference and that does not factor out necessarily or methodologically other possible ways or forms of knowing reality.

Whether or not our "total reality" is ultimately disheveled, a cosmological hodge-podge and a fateful crap shoot, or it is quintessential clockwork that Einstein and others dedicated their lives to discovering, becomes from the meta-logically perspective of meta-systems science and natural systems theory a "hen or egg" kind of dilemma. It is a form of paradox that we cannot answer, like Goedel's Theorem or like the Cretan liar, in the terms of its own intrinsic logic, but can only resolve if we are able to step outside of its conundrum and contextualize the complementariness of its relationship. Niels Bohr wrote especially the importance of the recognition of complementariness of structure in reality and its consequence for our scientific worldview and he applied this to the biological and anthropological sciences as well as to his own fields in physics. In this sense, meta-systems science and natural systems theory therefore follows directly in the footsteps of Niels Bohr's observations about the changing ontological and epistemological status of science in human reality.

The theory embraced by this approach is not without its methodological madness. I have sought a combined systems approach that includes information theory and communication theory with nonlinear dynamics, alternative control theory, theory of automata and alternative intelligence. I have sought thereby to define a legitimate role to the understanding of knowledge systems and knowledge systems theory, the role, function, status and structure of knowledge in our reality, and the possibility and probability of non-human forms of knowledge. Such an approach allows us the opportunity to both grapple with the terms of our arguments, however paradoxical they may seem, with one arm, while keeping the other free to stand and work beyond the terms and terminologies implied by an particular argument or problem set. The objective of such an approach ultimately is to integrate any such knowledge into a larger working system of understanding--a system that is ultimately comprehensive in a total, but relative, sense. Knowledge systems science has many interests and many applications, and knowledge theory leads to both experimental methodologies as well as to knowledge engineering applications. There are many pressing issues in our humanly ordered world that are well addressed through these kinds of applications, and particularly when it comes to the problems of the translation and reconstruction of our knowledge systems, and the use of such systems in the inculcation, integration and adaptation of human reality.

Thus we arrive at a final definition of meta-systems science, and that is of a knowledge systems theory and methodology that has the fundamental problem of the integration of reality and the description and explanation of all real phenomena, whether this is natural or humanly constructed.

*****

The approach I have taken in this work, as an introduction to meta-science as a way of understanding reality complementary to all forms of science, is to address what I consider to be the basic defining problems and perspectives underlying this approach. It intends to identify through basic notes and queries the fundamental questions and possible answers that are defining to meta-science. It seeks to address as well the basic operational methods, theoretical forms, and applications that serve to distinguish any science and to give to that form of science a special place in the world. In short, meta-science is what can be called the science of knowledge and knowledge systems engineering. In being so it necessarily also becomes a science about reality and of the world, or a scientific view of the world, as it is itself a knowledge system.

The intention of this work is to offer up to a wider potential audience the intellectual work, theories and insights I have gained over the last two years especially, but as the result of an extended career in anthropological research and development in related areas. In this I do not shy away from making controversial statements nor do I pull any punches at what I see to be paradigmatic gate-keeping by the intellectually privileged priests of higher knowledge. Such gate-keeping costs humanity dearly in the perpetuation of unquestioned ignorance and self-serving prejudices that abound in the world, even at higher, self-possessed levels, and that serve to frustrate and systematically stymie genuine intellectual development and productivity in all areas of human society.

This work is seen as being both complementary to the work of normal and specialized scientific knowledge systems. As such it is ancillary to such work in the hope of countering to some degree the divisive trends that have characterized and compartmentalized knowledge systems into increasingly narrow and overspecialized domains of expertise and interest. There are of course political and moral concerns involved in this as well as purely intellectual problems. Whose paradigm is the received paradigm is largely a question of political-economic sanctioning and social-symbolic legitimization, and vested interests have a great deal of control over the exchange of information and the entertainment of new ideas. Worldview becomes for many nation states, our own included, the privilege of a technocratic elite, and it becomes not the right and responsibility of every human being. It becomes the object of manipulation by the machinery of the state, especially through the communications media, education, and other forms of information dissemination and transmission. This even concerns the appropriate scientific view of the world, whether it is a view of bacteria or a view of the vast inter-galactic spaces.

The world depends upon a democratic worldview, and the rise of a democratic world state, more than ever before. Only truly democratic institutions can assure to humankind the freedom and openness of knowledge it needs to thrive and to eventually overcome the challenges of its current and future predicament on earth. Such democracy depends critically upon realistic knowledge and information, and an independence of mind that characterizes every individual human being from the dictates and coercion of prejudice and narrow conformity.

If meta-science is about nothing or anything else, it is first and foremost about worldview. As such, it is instantly and inherently a political beast. Totalitarian states, that want the entire human race to think and see in the narrow and stilted frame of a single reference point, often the arbitrary machinations of some madman, will not find meta-science to their liking. It would invariably lead their citizens to question the conceptual and symbolic status quo of their controlled lives. In political reality, there is no right nor wrong--there are only losers and winners. Might makes right and weakness is wrong. Therefore, the political-economic relations implied by a meta-scientific perspective and approach to reality is a matter of the empowerment of ideas and the strength of knowledge to see through the illusions and fabrications of state-controlled media. Liberation of humankind begins in the freedom of the mind to think its own thoughts independently of others. It extends from there to the freedom of all humankind from the bondage of ignorance, poverty, violence and unnecessary suffering.

*****

It has become evident and pervasive in the social relations and in academia in America during the last two decades especially that there has been general intellectual closure and repression of freedom of speech and thought, articulated through legitimizing channels and forums. This sense of closure of the mind of academic culture has had an unfortunate consequence of stifling and gate-keeping new views or alternative perspectives of unknown productivity. Gate-keeping as a form of selective censorship and suppression of marginal voices and points of view have become the expected and reinforced manner of higher academia especially, and it has led to academia lapsing back into a rather intellectually sterile "classical" academic mediocracy. By mediocracy I imply both an emphasis upon media-presentation and media event, as well as a bureaucratic framework of academic correctness that rewards the hyper-conformism of the mediocre scholar and ostracizes alternative realities.

In all the areas that I have developed metasystems science, I have adopted non-center and counter-paradigmatic points of view. The dynamic state model of the universe is an alternative cosmology which borrows from the older and largely abandoned steady-state model, and is based upon a theory of the fundamental structure of reality that is unified. I take issue with a big-bang model because of the logical failure of this model to explain scientifically ultimate origins and non-isotropic structures of the universe as mandated by the cosmological principle, or to account for obvious phenomena and discrepancies of our current models. In anthropological systems, I fall back on my own professional training as an anthropologist to elucidate a systematic theory of human systems in terms of symbolic framing and the anthropological construction of reality in a manner that has as yet been ill-received and wholly refused by the normative status-quo and status mongers of this increasingly closed and narrow discipline. I adopt a new linguistics and a new psychology as well as applied methodologies that would not be well receive without considerable controversy. Even in biology, where comprehensive theoretical frameworks have already been well in place and in an advanced state of sophistication, there remain issues of biological systems theory as yet unresolved, such as the extent to which forms of horizontal genetic transmission may have played a vital role in evolutionary development, or the role that meta-biotic relationships may have played from the beginning in modifying and mediating evolutionary trends in development.

In attempting to write this book, I soon discovered several obstacles in my path that I had no prior awareness of. First, it entailed extensive elaboration of mathematics on very basic levels. It is unfortunate that mathematics continues to be taught in some ways in our system that makes it not only more difficult than it really should be, but also far less interesting than it really could be. Of course, this is understandable if it is a case of the blind leading the blind. Central questions in the theory and application of mathematical problems, an important foundational aspect of this work, remains open to further inquiry.

Second, there appears to be few markers or maps available which help to mark the way we should go about constructing such advanced systems, or even in the demarcation of what areas such knowledge systems should entail. Third, and related to the first two, was the problem of the central organization of the text in a way that at least seemed to suggest itself as relatively unforced and at least rational, if not fully logical. Unlike the previous work on Natural Systems, central problems did not jump out at me screaming for solution. Central issues in the intended text appeared elusive and vague in definition, much less the means for resolving them in a coordinated and concise way.

Nevertheless, at the same time, I came to a clearer and confirmatory understanding of just how important such issues were if we presume to develop an advanced systems science that is both abstract and realistic at the same time. It is a central set of issues that cannot be sidestepped or avoided if we are to achieve a certain level of progress in our understanding of reality that has mostly been lacking and to a greater than less extent, systematically ignored. I believe that some of the reasons for this has been the general lack of intuitive grasp for the central issues involved, much less any clearer understanding of the appropriate solutions to these questions. We cannot hope to answer questions we do not yet know how to ask.

Working through the book, dense paragraph by dense paragraph, thick page by thick page, became a matter of sooner or latter learning what kinds of questions to ask and how to ask them. But, in hindsight, I would say that any new science or systematic perspective upon reality must begin in this way and in no other. Indeed, whenever I choose to look around, it is not very difficult to find ample evidence of the limitations of our own ignorance. If it yields fruits in terms of the kinds of answers that are eventually forthcoming, then it was worth all the effort and struggle.

Part of the challenge was therefore the willingness and capacity to think beyond the bounds of our knowledge in the most basic of senses, of questions and answers that we take so for granted that we do not normally even think to ask them in the first place. We deal with limitations and constraints in all we think and do. Even successful science demands some form of studied and systematic constraint, usually expressed by means of specialization. But at some point convergence of our limitations becomes reached where we can no longer tell when the boundaries of our knowledge leave off and the limits of our ignorance and the prejudices derivative of what we do not know take over.

Knowledge is of course a relative and uncertain thing. I would not call it a thing so much as it is a condition and a process of our reality. To live with knowledge is to be able to maintain a relationship with the world that is fundamentally enlightened and informed in a way that ignorance impedes and precludes. It renders our experience of reality richer and more interesting, fuller of more kinds of possibilities, than if it remained bound in by ignorance. Knowledge liberates us and empowers us with the possibility of our own change and progress in the world. Without it, we are doomed to repeating our same old mistakes, mistakes that in the long run seem so futile and costly and unnecessary.

I have undertaken to write this primer in advanced systems science as the outcome of the previous work on natural systems theory that resulted in successful integration of scientific theory on several levels of the self-organization of natural phenomena. This primer therefore serves two sets of purposes. The first is to extend the theoretical work that was begun in the book Natural Systems. The second purpose is to try to tie the theoretical work together at another, more abstract level of meta-systems theory that incorporates a core set of operational and theoretical constructs. These are held to be hypothetically and therefore heuristically applicable to all areas of systems science, as well as the transformational functions that are applicable in each area of systems analysis. It also leads to a more coherent and detailed synthesis of the significance of alternative systems theory and the role of artificial systems in both our understanding of reality and in the application of our understanding to real world problem sets.

This last issue of dealing with real world problem sets points up a functional purpose of pursuing advanced systems science and also provides a justification for such studies in the context of real world dilemmas. The functional integration of advanced systems sciences is achieved through such application. In general, it can be said that the problem sets dealt with in the real world are systemically interrelated at all levels, and thus demands the comprehensive and inclusive or exhaustive integration of our scientific understanding and applied resolution of such issues.

Because these problems are inherently complex, and because the applied systems solutions to these problems must therefore also be complex, the use of computers and computer programming theory becomes central to the articulation and organization of advanced systems sciences. But computer design is itself an artificial and applied system, and therefore we must be clear to distinguish between the a priori design aspects of advanced artificial information systems from those features which may be in the final analysis only arbitrary.

Solutions to the inherent problems of complexity in advanced systems sciences should at least in theory be "simplifying" and this is a standard that is comparable to "Ocam's razor" or the principle of parsimony in systems sciences. We seek formulaic solutions in mathematical and symbolic terms that are as elegant and concise as possible, and that achieve as much mileage and efficiency as possible. More than one kind of solution is always available to any given delimited problem set, and there is thus always an intrinsic competition between alternative solutions. There occurs therefore a progressive streamlining of understanding that leads us to a general refinement of our theoretical constructs, and leads from a rudimentary descriptive understanding towards a more sophisticated and precise explanation of natural and artificial phenomena. Hence, solutions are by definition almost always comprehensive as well as isolating, noting the caveat that what is analytically isolating in a successful manner is a functional reiteration of what is also synthetically encompassing.

I refer therefore to the increasing differentiation of the phenomenal field of our systemic understanding and knowledge, and this is complementary and concomitant to the increasing integration of our conceptual understanding of such systems. We are able to achieve finer details of analysis in the accurate understanding the articulation of the parts to the whole. Simultaneously, we are able to achieve a broader and more realistic and synthetic understanding of the entire system.

Ultimately, theoretical understanding should achieve a set of basic symbolic definitions of the components and values of the system being described, as well as a set of concise formulas describing the relations between things so defined. In the ideal scientific form, these would be a relatively brief and precise set of equations, which might be integrated into a larger functional framework that describes the working system and the alternative patterns or state-transition pathways possible within such a system, or what we might call a functional paradigm. Thus, the functional model of the system, as a logically coherent extension of the set of equations, describes the fundamental dynamics of the operation of the system.

Such models have heuristic and experimental value in that they allow useful testing and validation of the underlying principles, and allow therefore also a progressive streamlining or refinement of the description towards greater scientific accuracy. They are heuristically useful also to the extent that they permit us to extend our model to alternative artificial applications that do not normally occur otherwise in nature.

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Advanced systems science is useful in the world only to the extent that it is problem solving at whatever level we construe and apply it. This problem-solving aspect of systems science is the basis for its principle of progress and for its functional integration of reality. It should be problem-solving on at least three distinct levels:

a. Promoting a more realistic and accurate descriptive understanding of reality in all its aspects leading to either predictable or at least expectable outcomes.

b. And leading to effective resolutions of real world problem sets occurring in our human adaptation to reality by means of application of working systems models.

c. And/or leading to alternative solutions to possible problems based upon the artificial application of knowledge (a) and working systems models (b), thus extending the range of our reality in previously unknown ways.

There is often feedback between these areas, such that identification and resolution of problem sets in one leads to realization of problems and progress in other areas. Systems science in its operationalization is also a system that is a part of the thing that is its principle subject of study. There is a dilemma in this that is at times difficult to overcome in our theoretical constructs.

We thus can judge the success of our systems science, of the ideas and theories it embraces, by means of its systematic operationalization in the context of delimited problem-sets occurring in reality. Defining problem-sets itself becomes an intrinsic aspect of our systems science, both in terms of identifying manifest relations in areas of our knowledge that can be described as "problematic," and in terms of their possible resolution.

It is clear that advanced systems sciences come to embrace and incorporate synthetically everything in the world that it comes into contact with. In the larger and more general sense, there is nothing in the world that is not potentially at least capable of being dealt with by means of our systems science. This is part of the comprehensive power of this approach to construing reality.

But there is a clear danger in this, as systems science is not everything and cannot be at any point a substitute for reality. It is nowhere ever perfect or beyond improvement. It is always limited by its quest for simplifying solutions both internally and externally, and always requires some kind of realistic framework in which its terms and definitions gain significance. It is a working system that is itself a part of the larger set of relations that it seeks to describe.

In a sense, we have been doing systems science all along, though we have not before recognized it as such. We have done it because we have discovered its power and its capacity for problem solving in our world. We arrived at a scientific vision of the world gradually and incrementally, and this vision has long contested religious worldviews that to some extent predated and structurally and symbolically underlie more advanced points of view. Scientific progress only accelerated and became more noticeable as something unique in the world in the last couple of centuries, and especially in the last century.

It is leading to a progressive integration and more realistic refinement of our worldview at every level. As an integrated view of the world, it naturally competes with other ways of seeing the world, and is itself composed of many competing models at many levels. Competition is good in the sense that it leads eventually to selection and development of our ideas that promote greater integration. The challenge of integration is never complete, and it reflects the incompleteness of our own natural point of view in the world, anthropocentric as this has always really been.

But competition is not always healthy and desirable if and when it results in destructive interference in the development of our systems sciences. Paradigmatic commitment to preselected points of view, to the point of editing empirical realities and ideological closure of ideas, results in the obfuscation and obstruction of development of scientific understanding, and can indefinitely prevent or forestall its development. It poses a threat and a risk to our ideas and our worldview when and if it is socially promulgated in a restrictive manner, as for instance the ardent promotion of Christian doctrine of Creationism that is inherently anti-scientific.

Understanding advanced systems science for what it is in reality, as the foundation for a more objective and comprehensive view of the world, represents the beginning of a new scientific synthesis. It is not the terminus of an intellectual tradition that prided itself upon its objectivity, its standards, its empiricism and commitment to a sober sense of reality. There is some residual risk that systems science can itself become paradigmatic in its sense of commitment to restricted points of view. The design of advanced systems science should be such that it is intrinsically "anti-paradigmatic" in its continuous operationalization and reality testing procedures. In this sense, no theory is complete, no solution beyond improvement, no perspective without some alternative point of view. It is a critical and hermeneutic stance as much as it is inherent to the design of our operational procedures.

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The specific purpose of this primer is to get at and explicate the basic paradigms and functional-operational models relevant in the main areas of knowledge distribution in advanced systems science. This proceeds from and leads to refinement of a general paradigm and functional model that is central and basic to all possible applications. Hence, the different operating models are in some limited sense but alternative demonstrations of the main general model.

Systems science describes a kind of "hub" of a wheel that reflects earlier Continental idealist theories that underlay the concept of culture history and the spirit of holism in 19th and early 20th Century thought. This kind of thinking can be dangerous and paradigmatic to the extent that we force fit alternative empirical realities to suit the interests of the center. The theoretical center of advanced systems science is something remaining to be fully explained. Its explanation and demonstration occurs as its exemplification in numerous alternative instances of its successful application. Thus it is not an a priori prime mover or a noumenal abstract set of ideas. It is part of a system of relations established in the world and the provides a sense of minimal order to these relations. Empirical demonstration is itself a priori and inherent to the expression of all systems.

Science requires a center, if it is to remain a human enterprise that is in self-control. It is a choice all scientists must make, whether to allow their daily actions to assume a central sense of direction or to allow this sense of direction to become defined and shaped by other considerations and influences extrinsic to the daily operational procedures of normal scientific activity.

Science, as a system of knowledge that is ultimately coherent and objective, also requires a center in the larger structure of its reiteration and articulation in the real world if it is to maintain final control over its sense of coherence and objectivity. We can see this clearly in all the sub-fields of scientific activity, whether in the physical, biological or human sciences. It is also true in a grander sense tha t encompasses the roles that all the sciences play in relation to one another in the organization and objective integration of human reality. This grander sense is strategically decisive and pivotal to the general role that the sciences will come to play in the future unfolding of human development on earth.

But to identify and seek to define the center of science needs to be offset by a continuous critical decentering of science. Science cannot be allowed to become just one thing or about one thing or even a single finite set of things in the world. Science has its own course of evolutionary development, and we should not hamstring this sense of development by artificially superimposing extrinsic and culturally rooted standards upon its role and function in the world. The state transitions that science might undergo in the 21st Century should not be predefined or arbitrarily constrained by preconceived notions and ideas of what its center should be about in any final sense.

Thus, it seems important, at least to myself, that science must face the irony of always seeking some center while simultaneously seeking to escape whatever sense of center it has pre-established for itself. I do not want to fall into post-structural or post-modernist jargon in the critical excoriation of the internal contradictions of a centered science. I leave this to the brave new social theorists and literary specialists and critics to do. I only want to point out that science cannot always be only and just "disinterested inquiry" in the service of the status quo of the world. It also cannot always just exist in a fundamentally non-critical and self-serving way that paradigmatically monopolizes the center of its fields and implicitly, paradigmatically defines the normative standards for its articulation and reiteration at whatever levels it exists upon. These are related issues that are vital to the identity of science as a powerful force in the world.

I would say that the scientific community has a sense of responsibility defined by its knowledge, to see this knowledge used in wise and eufunctional ways in the world. As Buckminster Fuller was fond of saying, if we jettisoned all the world's politicians out into orbit around the earth, and left only the scientists to manage themselves, then most of the world's problems would be cleared up in a single year. We can manage ourselves by our own design systems, and we do not need to be managed by self-appointed others.

But human reality is an unequal reality of power and privilege in social life. This guarantees us that science must always suffer at the hands of those who wish to promote their own power base at the expense of either scientific advancement or of the objective work of others in the world. We must understand that human equality is ultimately a relative thing, especially in terms of its realization on earth. This means that however unequal things may really be, there is always the residual possibility for readjusting the balance sheet to make things more equal than before. Science has a responsibility to itself and to the larger community of humanity for doing this both in terms of its own standards of objectivity and in terms of its justification for other forms of human equality.

To some extent, the explication of advanced systems sciences serves as the touchstone for this to happen in the world, or at least is intended as such. I believe that scientists must provide for themselves their own "cultural" and symbolic framework of understanding, rooted in a sober scientific worldview, that will provide the necessary context for their own operational integration and independence in the world separate from controlling bureaucratic and political-economic structures. Scientists can and probably should be allowed to define their own agendas in the world, and as a community, to define larger agendas for the world, than to be relegated as delimited "technocrats" in their own little internalized social hierarchies.

It is said that if you can't bring Mohammed to the mountain, then you must bring the mountain to Mohammed.

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All systems can be schematized in terms of their relative inputs, throughput interactions or state transitions, and their outputs. For most systems, the number and relatedness of inputs and outputs tend to be complex and multiply determined. Natural systems tend therefore to be extremely complex arrangements of dynamic variables that can be somewhat arbitrarily defined by initial or start states, any number of intermediate or transitional or, better yet, transformational states, and some final end state, and these states may be represented by the complex factors and relationships that constitute them.

Generally, the final output state of a system that marks the end of a cycle, is related to a new input set that perpetuates the system and represents a form of critical feedback in the development of a system. Feedback relationships may be continuous or intermittent or stadially differentiated into consequential periods or types, but such interactions tend to establish a complex form of equilibrium for a system. The discontinuities and relative continuities of systems may be more the artifact of the language we use to describe them rather than anything real in and of itself as an intrinsic attribute of such systems. The most noteworthy characteristic of any system, beyond its input-output and transition cycles, is the long-term stability or reiterative continuity such systems exhibit and which serves to define their enduring structural characteristics. If this were not generally true of all systems, then science would not have a methodological handle upon reality in a predictive sense. Interaction of variables at all times tends to be both dynamic and chaotic in the sense that the outcomes or nature of the interaction is underdetermined. Input and outputs tie a delimited system to a larger contextual framework of relations that embeds the system in real time and constrains it in real terms. The state-path trajectory of a system overall is its process of reiteration of the main feedback cycle.

In a general sense, the input-output characterization of systems lends itself to a general theory of automata. We may claim that naturally occurring systems comprise a form of underdetermined or chaotic automata that is self-organizing.

We may say something else critical about a system--all systems are by definition limited and constrained in finite ways. We cannot have a system that is totally open, totally random, or totally infinite. Though systems may emerge in a complex manner, embedded and built upon other underlying subsystems, and themselves constituting parts of larger meta-system relations, the boundaries of any system should be clearly definable and isolatable, enough at least to allow us to put a nomenclatural and scientific methodological handle upon its analysis and observation. A solution for any system may therefore be said to be an optimal possible structural configuration for the system that solves the dilemma of its context, or rather that bounds the problem in a manner as to render it tractable and available to our scientific language and reason.