Introduction to Metascience

Knowledge does not only exist in an ideal world of propositions and abstract relations. Knowledge coheres upon a living landscape of the everyday world. It is in this natural human landscape that knowledge gains expression, validation and historical reality. Thereby knowledge develops, grows, changes with the social world of humanity. It is not only changed by the world, but it acts upon and serves in turn, 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 unembedded 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 orbitals, 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.

Metasystems 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 revisioned 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 metasystems 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 Goeddel'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.

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All theories are first and foremost tentative hypothesis and hypothetical constructs modeling reality, more or less. Theories that pretend to be anything more than this risk ideological closure and eventual falsification by the occurrence of counter-factual evidence and the eventual development of contrapuntal hypothesis. We may trace the evolutionary history of knowledge by the graveyard of extinct theories and dead ideas found in discarded textbooks. The doom of an unsuccessful hypothesis is that it will sooner or later become forgotten by all but the most pedantic of esoteric philologists.

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 meta-systems 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.

Conventional theory and methodology, largely monopolized by academic institutions and controlled by major funding agencies, remains in many respects, especially from a systems point of view, rather underdeveloped and often paradigmatically self-serving. Of course, we most often do not realize this until after the fact of the advent of new evidence that does not fit our old hypothesis and a new theory to explain this evidence better than before. It is not too far fetched to suggest that there are many important areas of scientific thought and activity that are basically being hung-up and immobilized by the unquestioning commitment to theoretical models and ways of seeing and responding to the world that are essentially erroneous and fallacious, even if we cannot understand the sense of fallacy we embrace.

The value of a systems-based approach derives from the presupposition that all of nature is self-organizational in terms of underdetermined systems--they evince structural pattern and order in their relationships and dynamics, and even processes of change can be understood in terms of developmental trajectories of complex non-linear systems. Thus, we can count on systems-based perspectives to be generally applicable upon all levels of natural patterning and order, and we can thus search for the phenomenal clues that belie the sense of systemic order and pattern encountered in the natural world, at all levels.

We may say that all of nature is a meta-system, in a total sense, and it presents to us the paradox of a possibility of being a meta-system that may ultimately be without any real limits or absolutes that are non-relative to some level or other set of dimensions by which we measure and determine a system in an objective manner. Nature may indeed be without limit in a number of different ways, even more than we are conventionally used to thinking about--to describe a sense for instance of being infinitesimal, or of a form of infinitude that comes from an infinite regression of analysis, from parsing event structures into finer and finer bits and pieces of reality. Or, alternatively, it is entirely possible and not so far fetched to imagine and dimensional infinitude about the structure of physical reality, with the suggest that our observed sense of reality occupies only a limited range of a much broader spectrum of dimensions.

We are safe to conclude therefore what I would call the first precept of natural systems theory, or the natural systems principle--any and every natural event, upon any level of occurrence that it may be observed or logically inferred based upon measured observation, is part of a non-random system occurring within a larger meta-systems context, and can be understood and studied as such. In other words, all of natural phenomena is thought to cohere as a system or a manifestation of a system, upon whatever level it is phenomenologically encountered or "observed" or "measured," and therefore we can come to expect all such phenomenal occurrences to exhibit signs and patterns that are indicative of an implicit or underlying sense of order or, formally speaking "structure" that can be said to be non-random and semi-deterministic in its dynamic outcomes. 

The key word here is really "non-random" as this imposes a sense of being at least semi-deterministic and therefore regulated by some principle or set of principles that are logically available and derivable. We emphasize non-random because nature has this nasty underlying predisposition and predilection toward total randomness in the structure of the large and the long run. Total randomness, or chaos, lacks any sense of order, and we certainly cannot base any theory, much less a science, upon the observation and deduction of random events, except perhaps for a theory of randomness itself. But, somewhat miraculously, we find that nature has another, observe tendency as well, and this is the tendency towards self-organization into non-random systems. Furthermore, nature manifests both sets of tendencies upon almost every level of its phenomenal occurrence upon which we have observed it. There is no reason not to conclude therefore that these principles do not occur upon all levels of natural manifestation and that there are ultimately an unbounded number of levels of such manifestation.

How to best try to understand this paradox of our reality? Perhaps we can surmise that all non-random events that are possible are always a subset of a much larger set of total possible random events that may occur within a given set of coordinate reference points. And if the total set of possible random events is infinite, we can conclude that the total subset of non-random events may also be infinite. If all possible random events have some fundamentally equal or probable chance of occurrence, then all non-random events also have some probability of occurring. If both random and non-random events have some differential set of probabilities of occurrence, then, given enough time, non-random events will eventually occur against a larger background of random events. We would therefore call all such non-random event structures that occur naturally and spontaneously as "self-organizational." 

We observe something further that seems to be distinct about non-random self-organizing systems, and that is that they have a tendency towards self-propagation, reduplication or regeneration as non-random event structures. In other words, a self-organizing system must be something more than merely a set of non-random event structures, but they must be a set of non-random event structures that become self-maintaining or self-propagating through time, usually in some developmental sequence. The easiest way to explain this is perhaps to hypothesize the simultaneous co-occurrence of two (or more) non-random event structures, the patterning of one of which results in and in turn results from the patterning of the other, and vice-versa. This describes a kind of pendulous closed-loop feedback system--non-random order in self-organizing systems in nature that are otherwise completely stochastic, may become self-maintaining and self-propagating when the sense of order of one set of event structures leads to and results in the non-random organization of another set of event structures, and so on.

I suspect that conventional theories get into the most hot-water when they neglect the universal application of this principle, and proceed as if some thing or event structure occurs in an isolated manner and with some absolute sense of non-relative, irreducible fundamentality of occurrence. And because we would like to endow all theories with the status of universality, the temptation to reify our ideas is both quite normal and quite irresistible.

I would put this principle another way, in terms of a basic definition of what a system is. A system is some finite structure or pattern of relational events that co-occur and reoccur in a minimally non-random manner in a common set of dimensions, sequentially or synchronously or both, within a larger meta-systems context of alternative possible relationships. A meta-system is therefore some unbounded and at least semi-open relational context within which systems of a certain kind or set of systems of various kinds, can be expected to co-occur and recur with a non-random chance.  The key word here for a system is that it is a finite and bounded structure of relationships, compared implicitly to a meta-system that can be expected to normally contextualize such a system. We have operating here a kind of figure-ground gestalt framework in understanding the systems-based organization of nature, and, going back to the point above, the failure of most theories can probably be attributed to the failure to account sufficiently for the meta-systems framework or for a "system" as some kind of a bounded set of relationships within such a context.

We can further extend our understanding of systems and meta-systems to stipulate that a "closed" or bounded system is one in which the determining constraints that occur non-randomly within the relational structure of the system have been internalized to the system as a self-organizational entity, most frequently characterized by what are referred to as emergent or synergistic properties. We can compare and contrast this to externalized systems that are semi-open or unbounded and which are constrained in some non-random manner by relationships that extend outside of the system itself, and which may include indirectly a much larger set of interacting variables.  

This kind of distinction parallels the kind of holistic/analytic dichotomy made in the beginning between analytical and holistic approaches to science, and ultimately is a kind of analytical hen or egg dichotomy of reality. In reality, all systems are both semi-closed and semi-open, and all systems usually have a self-organizing set of internalized relational components and constraints, that are also conditioned by a larger meta-systems context of external factors that constrain the system directly or indirectly. It becomes therefore a matter of perspective and emphasis how we wish to define any particular system, as independent from a context or as part of a larger meta-system framework. How we do so determines, among other things, the ultimate success of our theoretical and hypothetical constructions.

Rethinking old problem sets in reality from a systems-based frame of reference permits us to step beyond the boundaries of our own logic and ideas, and to contextualize the problem sets in terms of larger realities in which they occur as developmental possibilities. We are not talking about overextending the systems analogy as a covering law model to describe and relate unrelated kinds of problems. Each problem set demands its own theoretical explanation that is independent of that of any other kind of problem set that may occur. It does not do well to mix apples and oranges merely because they are both more or less round systems. But as different kinds of fleshy fruit, that bear seeds, and that come from fruit-bearing trees, we can describe and even classify both as similar kinds of systems.

I believe that what a systems-based perspective allows us to do foremost is to provide us with a general and comprehensive reference frame that is suitable for all levels and areas of scientific involvement. This is an invaluable framework to have for the common contextualization of different kinds of problem sets.