All natural events are epi-phenomena of naturally occurring systems that show consistency of pattern, cyclical development and change processes. Because all naturally systems are inherently and extrinsically complex, their patterning tends to be indeterminate and there is therefore an inherently uncertainty attached to our modeling and knowledge of such systems, to our prediction of their outcomes and their expected state-path trajectories. Because all events occur within natural systems, our attempt to comprehend these events in relation to their systems in an objectively real manner constitutes the comprehensive foundation for all of our sciences and the basis for both their theoretical and methodological unification. Regardless of the impossibility of completely representing natural systems in their minutiae of details, it remains possible to model the most important structural relations of such systems in a reasonable and realistic manner based upon our theoretical understanding and methodological competency relating to problem sets such systems present to us.
The self-organizing capacity and the emergent properties associated with this capacity is remarkable in natural systems. We mostly take this patterning for granted in our formulations and explanations about how the world works, without realizing that these processes arise by chance, by stochastic process in open systems, and by chance alone. That natural systems should become through such spontaneous development intricately stratified upon multiple levels, with systems built upon systems that are built upon systems, all on a random and stochastic basis, stretches our credulity beyond our normal limits.
All natural systems therefore occur or operate within a paradigm of possibilities. This paradigm of possibilities governs the parameters and rules of behavior of such systems, and determines the order of relationships among its components and subsystems. It is important to understand and frame all event structures and empirical phenomena we may study in terms of such paradigms of possibility, and it is the explication of such paradigms of possibility that makes science interesting and non-trivial, for it is the case that we do not understand the full range of variation or possibility of adaptation of different kinds of systems, and discovering new patterns in a comparative fashion, between experimental or controlled in a laboratory context, or naturalistically in uncontrolled settings, provides the basis for all scientific methodology and theoretical construction. It is clearly the case that such scientific understanding has extended not only the range of the possible by such methods of systematic discovery and comparative observation, but has actually extended the range of the real by means of the applied engineering of principles discovered through science to the invention of new devices and artificial systems that did not exist previously. Thus science through its technological extension has a teleological function of augmenting reality and extending its range of possibilities in a number of different directions.
Any paradigm of possibilities that describes the behavior and change dynamics of a system can be represented in a similar manner on a mathematical basis. Though the differential formulas attached to these matrices may be insoluble in their multivariate indeterminancy, it is possible nonetheless to describe in a systematic manner the behavior not only of the system as a whole, but of the interrelationships which recur between many of its various parts and subsystems.
A general systems framework depends upon the elaboration of an accurate natural hierarchy of systems that can place naturally occurring systems, in order of their observance and occurrence in relation to one another. This order should be scientifically non-arbitrary in the sense that the strata and relations are primarily definable by the data and inferences drawn logically from our extended observations and conclusions, rather than being primarily artificial constructs that are superimposed upon the patterning. I have offered such an order, from the subatomic level to the level of human symbolic behavior and symbolic (abstract) and applied systems that represent artificial (cultural) extensions of human symbolic capacity. This order carries through molecular structures to several biological levels of integration at the sub-cellular, cellular and super-cellular levels, as well as upon larger macro-biotic levels that involve large-scale biomes and ultimately the entire biosphere. There is a very real pyramidal hierarchy in this sense of order in that as we advance to more complex systems characterized by emergent properties, we factor the order of physical reality that seems to be involved in such systems down by several orders of magnitude. The total mass that comprises human systems is only a small subset of the total mass of the global bio-system, and this is only a very, very small mass of the total mass of the observable physical universe, even if we could safely hypothesize the probability of other extra-terrestrial colonies of life. At the level of the subatomic particle, especially the stable configurations that account for atoms, we reach a level at which the problem of mass itself becomes possibly an emergent property associated with componential systems that can be further broken down on smaller and smaller scales. There appears possibly to be a great negative mass that affects the structure of space-time, of which the forms of mass that we experience in terms primary of matter, are only a small subset. The object of this second part is to outline in as succinct and concise a manner as possible this natural hierarchy of systems, as far as it can be known and logically deduced in what appears to be a non-arbitrary manner.
One of the key problems in the scientific understanding of physical reality is the problem of infinity. It is a problem that exists in part because the imagination of an infinite system is less difficult, and perhaps less logically paradoxical, than the imagination of a finite system that is physically total. It seems as if the problem of infinite physical sets is one that may always be without final proof or logical or empirical resolution. We may approach this problem from the problem of immense or very large numbers, which are so large that they are essentially uncountable, or are impossible of solution by mathematical means. There is a point at which an immensely large set is virtually infinite if its final limit is several orders of magnitude greater than our capacity to comprehend or analyze it, and even this impossibly large set would yet be just a small subset of a much larger and infinite system. An extension of this is the paradox that, easily observable with number systems, an infinite set may contain one or more (an infinite number) of subsets that are themselves infinite in size. Though the subsets can be said to be dimensionally smaller than the set that contains them, from a purely mathematically standpoint we would have to treat all such infinite sets as equal or equivalent in total size, being infinite. Thus the size of an infinite set, compared to some other infinite set, must be relative only to the dimensionalities that are ascribed to the sets in question. Such dimensionalities of infinite systems must in essence be non-dimensional because we can ascribe in their analysis no non-relative value to their expression, being as they are functions of infinite and unbounded systems.
I suggest the problem of infinity or infinite systems is central to the problem of a comprehensive theory of natural systems because it lies at the heart of both a fundamental conception of physical reality, and of the grandest conception of the total universe at the same time. If for instance, atoms represented only a very small subset of a larger system of space-time mass that contained it, than even an infinite number of atoms in the universe (a distinct possibility) would still be only a small subset of a much larger set. If this is the case, then we must also accept the distinct possibility that for any infinite system for which we can ascribe a fixed set of dimensionalities, that system becomes logically subsumed within a larger infinite system of greater dimensionalities. We reach a point that not only are systems or sets are structurally infinite in size, amount, count, etc., but ultimately systems may be also dimensionally and processually infinite in their event structures and dynamics.
The problem of natural meta-systems therefore seems to come to a focus in terms of the paradoxes and fundamental problematics of infinite systems. We can say for instance that if the total physical universe is indeed somehow bounded, as many enlightened scholars would have us believe, albeit in four dimensional space-time, we can still conclude from all observational evidence that the universe comprises sets of very immense size and numbers, which are for many purposes virtually infinite (especially if they are impossible of mathematical resolution.) Hypothesizing a bounded, finite state universe of extremely immense proportions does not necessarily resolve the basic dilemmas we confront in describing our world as a natural meta-system, except that we can safely hypothesize some non-relative dimensionality of such a grand system upon which the entire thing has been based.
A related problem arises if we consider the following example. If physical energy, whatever form it may take in the universe, cannot be created or destroyed in some way, but only converted from one form into another, more or less efficiently, then we must ask several questions pertinent to our problem. Whether the total amount of energy in the universe is infinite or very large, we must conclude that it always existed, in one form or another, and had no beginning and will have no end, no matter what form it assumes in the future. I am inclined to think this way about our larger world in terms of the model of the dynamic state universe. This implies a temporal form of infinity, that I will call eternity. It runs against the grain of scientific instinct to accept a physical entity in the universe that has not been somehow created, since causality is fundamental to our deterministic logic in science. We can explain the origin of energy in a non-relative manner, nor in a way that does not require some leap of faith or divine intervention. Ultimately, according to this model, energy had no origin, and therefore not ultimate cause--it only had a history of possible transformations. If we look at the structure of our reality, we see that change is one of the most universal and fundamental constants. This sense of change may be related directly to the notion of continuous transformation of energy. This notion of eternal energy ties back to the notion of an infinite universe in the sense that it is equally difficult to wrap our scientific minds around a physical entity that has no boundaries or limits, as science depends greatly upon such boundaries and limits for its definitions and explanations of reality.
The concept of universal relativity that underlies the model of the dynamic state universe based upon a universal Heraclitian constant of continuous change, may provide us with an alternative scientific worldview, or at least a new framework for the conceptualization and operationalization of what we construe to be reality from a scientific standpoint, and I would claim that this problem relates indirectly to other paradoxes that arise with systems theory and models. Niels Bohr dealt with the problem of the physical relativity of fundamental forces and particles, a problem he referred to as the complementarity principle of systems, as opposed to the conventional scientific wisdom of determinism or causality, and he was capable of generalizing this problem to some extent to be applicable to other kinds of natural systems in biology and human culture. We are left to deal with realities in a reasonable way for which there are no precise empirical correlates or no non-relative means of observation and possibly no simple or even complex mathematical correspondence, and yet remain true to a vague form of science that claims not to stoop to metaphysical symbolism or existential leaps of faith in achieving a sense of symbolic closure about reality.
At this point we come to the limits of not only what is known, but what is potentially knowable about our shared reality. These are the limits beyond which our intellectual capacity does not seem to be able to carry us, and our physical capacity for observation comes to a kind of event horizon. They are the limits that relativize all our knowledge, and set boundaries around the possibilities of our science.
It is possible to imagine a universe that is closed and finite--such a universe could not be expanding, if such expansion meant that the universe was open in some dimensionality. The current theory of the Big Bang is a theory about the relative density and expansion of energy in the universe, and its transformational history as a product of that expansion. In the original state of the cosmic egg, time as it occurs now would have no relevance. Energy would be in an infinitely dense state, at a point known as singularity. If this energy is expanding entropically, as demanded by the laws of thermodynamics, into a larger energy-sink, then we will see this energy become increasingly rarefied until at some point it essentially disappears. In this version, the universe may be thought to be continuously depressurizing itself like a balloon leaking air in all directions simultanaeously. If the universe is somehow closed (an not in any necessarily simple way) then this energy may either expand to some limit before it begins recoalescing and contracting, or else it remains in a state of continuous equilibrium, or a continuously pressurized state that just keeps flowing around and around in grand circles.
Actually, I'm now inclined to think that all of these models are over simplistic of the actual forces and energies involved in nature, and therefore any of them are insufficient to account for the actual cosmological dynamics of the larger universe. Observation of basic gravitational phenomena appear to defy thermodynamic principles in basic ways and represent forms of contractive and mass-based energies that may somehow regulate and compensate for the apparent entropic patterns of thermodynamic energy upon which these models are based. Black holes appear to be frequent phenomena that are relatively long lived, if not actually infinite, in their life-trajectory, once having formed. There appears to be as well a great deal of hidden, or rather invisible, or more precisely, unobservable mass in otherwise empty space-time that must have an important inertial influence on the entire universe as a meta-state system. These considerations in my mind are important and significant enough to preclude facile models of thermodynamic expansion or closed, finite state systems that exist at a continuous state of thermodynamic pressure.
If the universe is indeed an infinite system, then all of this speculation may be a moot point to begin with. There is a sense that space-time is not about the things that it contains--namely what I will call positive energy and matter of varying forms. Space-time appears to be a container, like a glass, that holds the things within it, like water. It is not the structure and shape of the water that is contained in the glass that I am concerned with, so much as it appears to me to the structure and shape of the glass itself that constrains and gives form and definite shape to the things it contains. The consideration of the structure and dynamics of space-time take us to levels of scientific speculation and observation with which we may be totally unfamiliar.
The principle concern of science is in the theoretical comprehension and controllable application of knowledge to reality. It is a grand paradox that the foundation of science is rooted in a purely abstract system of mathematical language and logic that owes nothing of itself in any fundamental sense to the external world of phenomenal experience. At the heart of this paradox is something fundamental and quite interesting about our sense and sensibility of reality. There is a sense of absolute truth that rests at the base of our scientific knowledge and drives it forward in its quest for both a greater sense of realism and a grander sense of understanding. I believe it ultimately stems from the fact that on some most basic of all levels, we, with all our fanciful ideas and ideals, share the same realities, the same processes, the same structures, the same sense of order, as the physical universe and all possible realities that surround us. Ultimately, there is a convergence of what is real and what is true about reality, such that they become one and the same thing in terms of our abstracted systems.
The beginning of advanced systems science is in the conceptualization of the abstract system that lies at the foundation of human knowledge systems and informs it upon every level and in all areas of its articulation. This abstract system is rooted in an alternative conceptualization of mathematics in both its pure and applied senses. We must ask basic questions of reality and of mathematics as something that is unusual in reality and the answers we give to these questions provide us a foundation for the development of our abstract conceptual systems.
The beginning of advanced systems science is therefore not a question we must ask of physical reality per se, as this is a naturally occurring system. It is rather what we must ask of total Reality, or of our sense of reality, as this is encompassed by our relative sphere of knowledge. It embraces what can be called "meta-physical" reality in that it includes both physical reality, as this is normally construed by natural science and our sense of perception, and our knowledge of reality that to some extent transcends physical reality. It comes to include at the same time, by its systematic extension, our understanding of physical reality in a larger set of knowledge.
Reality is encompassed by our knowledge, and includes all things known or knowable, however indirectly. It is only bounded by the unknowable. We cannot directly know what is unknowable. Whereas the work Natural Systems was rooted in a fundamental presupposition about nothingness in the world, this work is rooted in a similar, and in some ways, homologous presupposition about the ontological status of the unknown.
The unknown is a boundary of our knowledge, but as a boundary condition, it is itself an important part of our knowledge system. This follows from the first presupposition of the work in Natural Systems, that nothing cannot be known, and therefore there cannot be nothing because all things are known or are by definition knowable. Thus, whatever remains unknown remains part of a larger implicit system of unrealized knowledge that is, by its attachment to our knowledge of reality, an intrinsic and important part of that system. It is not unknown in any absolute sense of being unknowable, but only relatively unknown from the always limiting perspective that our own knowledge always presents to us and imposes upon our sense of reality. The philosophical paradox is that we can never be certain of what we do not know, and this sets the limits to our science in a way that nothing else can do.
Our sciences then become a matter of always attempting to test the limits of what we know by making forays, however blind and ill fated, into what we do not know. We begin these forays with only intuitive and vague questions. We try to do this more systematically by imposing arbitrary constraints upon our methods and our procedures, in order that we can approach the problem of the unknown by measurable degrees that we can easily deal with. Going slowly to the finish line is always better than racing headlong into oblivion. Our sense of reality has to be testable as a fundamental limiting condition of our scientific validation procedures. Scientific method can afford no leaps of faith, though scientific theory must make such leaps. Knowledge that cannot be tested in some way by means of our independent experience is knowledge that cannot ultimately be validated, and hence cannot be clearly segregated from what we do not and cannot know.
This brings up a grand paradox about our sense of reality and our place in reality. Reality as a sphere of knowledge bound by the unknown, always encompasses the physical reality that is its principal object of reference. But this sphere of knowledge can be said, at the same time, to be encompassed by this physical reality upon which the ability to know has been based. This is the grand paradox posed by the anthropological relativity of our knowledge, at which we are ourselves always and forever at the center of our sense of reality. It leads to another kind of relativity of knowledge, that I call metaphysical relativity of our ability to know, that says that while the unknown is always a diminishing domain on the horizon of our knowledge, our knowledge is always encompassed within and a subset of this larger horizon.
The point of departure for this work in advanced systems science, and what fundamentally separates it from the previous work in natural systems, is that it begins with the problem of the self-reflexive role of knowledge in the construction of our sense of reality. This is ultimately a separate problem than the question of physical reality itself, in which the question of our ability to know is assumed away and held in control except perhaps on the horizons of our knowledge of the physical universe.
The presumption underlying our definition of physical systems, at whatever level of our analysis and reference, is that this sense of reality is inherently mechanical in both abstract form and in its phenomenal expression. Science as a description of reality is therefore a fundamentally mechanistic view of the world, and this is particularly true if we add the constraint of referring to phenomenally occurring systems. It can be demonstrated that a mechanistic view of the world is an inherently relativistic one, and therefore it can be extended systematically to embrace exotic phenomena that are not conventionally a part of mechanical explanations, especially not in any classical sense. Because it is relativistic, we can also correctly say that all naturally occurring systems are fundamentally non-linear control systems, by innate design.
The questions we must ask is about our knowledge itself, assuming that this always embraces the principle of total Reality defined by our comprehensive but always limited sphere of knowledge. It is about our ability, and inability, to know, and the structural patterning that knowledge itself takes independently of the naturally occurring systems that it becomes attached to.
In the previous work, we took for granted the question of the objectivity of our knowledge, and thus planting it as a universal reference point, we assumed that the physical objective reality was all encompassing and embraced even our ability to know itself. In this work, we do not take this question for granted, but we plant instead as our universal frame of reference the inherent problematic of our ability to know reality, especially our physical reality, in fundamental ways. We presume therefore that what always lies behind this problematic framework is the solution of reality itself. We have shifted our fundamental coordinates and reference points, but the central dilemma of the relativity of our knowledge remains regardless of our starting point or frame of reference.
To a great extent, mathematics is articulated in a manner that does not ask or answer implicit philosophical questions about its own knowledge base or its ontological and metaphysical status as a knowledge system in reality. Mathematical signs are assigned and operations are performed on a deductive basis without making any deeper inquiry into the implications of the constructs involved. Inquiry in mathematics is usually not in terms of the epistemological foundations of its sciences, but in its ability to solve basic problems that are intrinsic to the knowledge itself, such as deriving a formula for calculating all prime factors. But philosophers have involved themselves from the beginning in basic mathematical questions, and they have frequently made important contributions to mathematical knowledge by means of their inquiry into its foundations in reality and knowledge. This is just as scientists have both used mathematics and contributed themselves to the expansion of mathematics by means of their creative and constructive applications in theory and experiment.
The concern in the first part of this work is in the consideration of the fundamental relationships between the three fields of abstract inquiry into reality:
1. Philosophy, which concerns especially the status of our knowledge in reality,
2. Mathematics, which occurs as an independent and abstract knowledge system in reality, and which relies to some extent upon philosophical constructs,
3. Science, which depends to a great extent upon validation and description procedures derived from Mathematics and indirectly from philosophical conceptual systems, but which depends for its validation not on the internal criteria used in mathematical systems, but upon empirical substantiation.
It is not difficult to see how, in the history of all these areas of inquiry, the three fields are bound up with one another in very basic and important ways, such that progress in one area usually leads to advances in the other two areas as well. By means of progress achieved in any one of the areas, our sense of reality becomes somehow expanded by our horizon of knowledge. We embrace a wider region of the previously unknown, but we create a wider boundary of the still unknown, which surrounds us like a wall of unasked questions begging to be answered.
As an abstract system, we are therefore attempting to describe a model of the following kind stated in terms of the fundamental questions that are asked in each area:
I will call this the fundamental conceptual framework of reality, and for the interests of our advanced systems science, I will make the following kinds of initial generalizations:
1. All reality is a unified system that is based upon abstract information that is intrinsic and implicit to the patterning of order in systems.
2. Abstract knowledge, in its purest form, is absolute (i.e., it is non-relative to the subject knower, hence it is a priori to our realization of knowledge, which is always relative, and it will remain valid whether we exist to realize it or not).
3. As such, Abstract knowledge, in its purest form, does not change. It can be said to be perfect.
4. Our ability to know reality in any abstract (non-concrete, or conceptual) sense, is rooted in our ability to apprehend abstract information in either pure or applied senses, however imperfectly, through logically derived inference.
5. Abstract knowledge does not exist itself physically in reality, though physical manifestations in reality exemplify and represent abstract information.
6. Abstract reality exists only abstractly. "Order" is only inherent to order itself.
7. We can only know abstract reality indirectly by means of its physical or conceptual demonstration in our knowledge, whether this is pure or applied in terms of some mechanical system.
8. The validation of abstract knowledge is completely internal to itself in its own system of ordered relations, what I call an inference framework, and does not depend upon its empirical manifestion or external reference. Only science, which deals with naturally occurring phenomena, requires ultimately an empirical frame of inductive reference by which to achieve progress.
9. Abstract knowledge that is valid is objective and non-subjective, though it can only be subjectively apprehended as such.
10. We can only know and validate abstract knowledge by means of hypothetical deductive inference. Our methods of deduction have been arbitrarily and unnecessarily constrained by over restrictive versions of logical standards of truth.
11. Abstract truths, if they are valid, can never be contradicted in reality. Hence, empirical counterevidence is a means of falsification for untrue abstractions.
12. Though abstract reality is absolute and a priori, our ability to know it is always relative to our system of knowledge itself. Hence, the paradox of our knowledge is that it is absolutely relative to itself, and what is known absolutely is always relative to our knowledge of it.
These are somewhat radical and also probably unprovable assertions to make, especially considering the commitment of advanced systems science to an empirical and scientific view of the world. But they are made as a necessary leap of faith that is intended to give us some kind of foundation for our ability to know reality in some fundamental way, regardless of the relativities that seem to so inform reality at every level. It serves as a final anchor point and central fulcrum to the articulation of our advanced systems science in a broader sense. We plant the foundation of this field of inquiry in a framework that is ultimately unassailable except perhaps by means of blind faith and conviction alone. It is necessary to do this, I believe, if our advanced systems science is to have any nontrivial consequence in our world and in our reality.
The danger of this of course is to fall into the complacency of accepting a classical conception of a non-relativistic world in which knowledge has some final sense of certainty that is attachable to it. We know this not to be true, or we've learned that this is never the case in reality. Hence, there is always some sense of fundamental discrepancy between what we know as a conceptual system that is at least internally coherent, and what we experience in reality as a phenomenal system that is at least minimally consistent with our knowledge. We can rest assured that there is absolute truth in the world, that two plus two always equals four, and not any other number, but we can never move past our fundamental sense of uncertainty about what we are observing and know in reality. We can say that our knowledge systems as abstract systems of conceptualization inform our ability to know and what we select to know about empirical reality, and that our phenomenal experience of empirical reality necessarily feeds back to test and challenge our fundamental presuppositions and propositions about our reality. This kind of critical feedback between what we know ideally and what is known in reality is a crucial part of the dialectic that informs our sciences.
We can say that though abstract systems are by tautological self-definition closed and ultimately independent in their validation to our experience of reality, they always inform and shape our experience of reality in basic ways, and are always paradoxically subject the verification of our sensory experience. In other words, they are no use to us whatsoever, at least as science, and not as simply closed ideology, if we do not have some kind of external reference-coordinate system within which to frame such abstract understanding and knowledge. If our abstract system cannot be used to validate our external knowledge of reality, it is either useless or false as a scientific system of knowledge.
I will say that an abstract system, to be functionally useful and true, must have some frame of reference and inference, whether this is external or internal to the system, by which its conceptual constructs can be validated or rendered invalid. This essentially relativizes all systems in some basic way, at least in term s of the criteria of essential anthropological and metaphysical relativity. In other words, systems of abstraction must somehow be credible systems if they are to be believable, and if they are non-relative in some absolute sense, they must yet retain some means of validation that is independent from their conceptual construction but upon which their design may be ultimately based.
If follows that if we are to devise an abstract system for advanced systems science, this must entail as well in its fundamental design a framework of reference/inference by which its constructs can be validated in some reasonable way.
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It also follows that if we are to understand what is mathematical knowledge, we must also seek to understand forms of knowledge that are essentially non-mathematical by way of fundamental contrast and complementarity of knowledge systems. It seems to me that the fundamental difference between these kinds of systems are that mathematical systems are constrained systems of signification, where as non-mathematical systems, particularly metaphysical systems of truth, are not constrained in the same basic ways, and occur as naturally defined systems of symbolization. Pure mathematical systems do not use nature or experience as its fundamental frame of reference. Its frame of reference is a completely abstract system of relations that occurs in terms of deductive logic and some non-arbitrary scale or scales of measurement. Natural symbolic systems ultimately depend upon some real frame of reference for their achieved realism, though they may adopt some arbitrary and relatively abstracted frame of reference as well, and though such frames of reference are still not constrained in the same way as are mathematical systems. They remain arbitrary in a fundamental sense and represent ideological or mythological systems that remain essentially non-mathematical though they may take on the guise of mathematical systematicity.
There are hypothetically abstract ideals or values that are essentially non-mathematical and yet which may be claimed by some to be absolute and by definition universal. Some candidates to this are "right" and "love" and "beauty"--all these moral valuations are not incontestable in the same way that mathematical systems can claim to be. We can find no meta-ethical definitions of right or love that are not somehow culturally or historically relative. "Truth" itself is perhaps the ultimate such ideal. Philosophy in a classical sense is based upon the abstract excoriation of "truth" which is often held to be noumenal and a priori to its empirical manifestations. Absolute or non-relative truth remains a questionable issue.
Mathematical systems that are correct in their logic are inarguably true, and this is a form of mathematical correctness that embodies a kind of non-relative truth. We can have non-relative mathematical truth in the sense of "correctness" which is ultimately non-arbitrary. I believe, if we attach ideal or abstract systems of generalization to natural systems then we can also derive another kind of non-relative truth that is essentially scientific in nature. This kind of truth also has the sense of "correctness" in that it involves puzzle-solutions to problems that have finite and definite kinds of solutions. Mathematics often enters into this kind of limited truth formulation, but always as an applied rather than a pure system.
I will speculate as well upon the hypothetical possibility of a third form of non-relative truth. I believe, lacking any clearer terms, I will call it metaphysical truth that is inherent to the structure of knowledge and our knowledgeability itself as somehow something a priori and absolute. I believe that knowledge as a general system of abstraction of Reality has its own system of order that must be founded upon some sense of absolute truth that serves as its fundamental frame of reference and inference. This is neither empirically derived from the observation of natural phenomena nor is it necessarily derived by the same logical and constructive means by which mathematical truths are made known and gain expression.
I would call it a form of rational truth, but it is not clear to me exactly what rational means. Neither would I call it "logical" truth as well. I do not know if a moral system that is descriptive/prescriptive would be forthcoming from its elaboration or not. I would not prematurely say no, though any kind of moral formulation, no matter how meta-ethical, must be always critically suspect of some kind of relativity of values. In a sense, such truth cannot be scientific, as science cannot ask and answer fundamentally nonscientific questions. It is essentially a form of metaphysical truth, thus it transcends the physical parameters of scientific systems. It is neither a purely abstract system in the same sense that mathematics is. I will not go so far as to call it a form of spiritual truth either, though this may be related to it, and may point towards a fourth kind of truth system lying somewhere beyond.
I would see it rather as some sense of an ideally "perfect" system that is always abstractly and at least implicitly contrasted with real and by definition always "imperfect" systems. The systematics derived from such a truth-system would be the measurement of the discrepancy between ideal and real states exhibited between perfect and imperfect systems, and would implicitly entail as well therefore a precise definition of what a sense of "perfection" would be. In a scientific and mechanistic sense, we have only different kinds of perpetual motion machines as representing somehow perfect systems. We know that such systems are impossible, but we also know that they exist as abstract and ideal conceptions that help us to think about such troubling realities like relative efficiency and entropy.
Its would go something like this: Given such and such variables and initial values, what is the best possible system that can be derived for such limiting factors. These factors do not have to be necessarily quantitatively defined. They can include qualitative definitions, as long as we are clear and concise about our definitions in a manner that leaves little room for doubt or "play."
It is not within the scope of this text to attempt a full elaboration of this form of philosophical truth. I have reserved this for a companion work entitled The Philosophy of Knowledge. I believe it does emphasize though the continuing critical role that philosophy still plays in the conceptual background of our lives, though academic philosophy is all but dead.
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I have undertaken therefore in the first part to get to the core of an abstract system that underlies all systems. Hence it is in this sense meta-systemic in being both a system in the most abstract sense possible and about all systems in the widest possible way or largest applied sense of the term. I would say that it is both mathematical and non-mathematical at the same time, and thus we need to enlarge our sense of understanding the implications of mathematical and non-mathematical knowledge systems, to the extent that they influence our meta-systemic comprehension of any and all systems. Therefore, I believe that in order to outline and detail the essential abstract features of a meta-system, we must approach it from all angles at the same time, as both a mathematical, a scientific, and a philosophical or metaphysical system of abstraction.
In the following chapters, I have attempted to do this in a synthetic and integrated manner that attempts to account for all types of abstract systems in equal measure. I have intended to do it in a way that remains faithful to the objectives of advanced systems science as a nontrivial system of knowledge and inquiry in the world. To do justice to this problem set would require perhaps an entire series of related works, but it is beyond the scope of this primer to attempt such detailed excoriation of all the implications entailed by such problems. I soon exhaust my own limits of tolerance of the obtuse and esoteric.
Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.
Last Updated: 04/19/05