Preface

Meta-Scientific Essays

Theoretical & Philosophical Explorations in Natural Systems

I have undertaken writing a series of brief essays in relation to a developing field that I have referred to as natural systems theory and meta-systems science. I am by training and research an anthropologist who has been interested in the extension of the basic principles of the anthropology of knowledge to more general knowledge systems, particularly in the sciences. As an outcome of this intensive involvement over the past two years, I have composed this simple collection intending to touch upon and highlight the key and most central points of natural systems theory. 

As a product of this development, I have formulated a field of meta-systems science, or more concisely, meta-science, in a manner that has operational and heuristic applications in sciences across many disciplinary boundaries. I have adopted the essay form as a suitable style and framework for the expression of these basic problem sets and points of view. I have striven to keep the essays within four or five pages each, and to bring focus on the key issues involved in each problem set.

Theoretically, science remains wide open, and there appear upon the horizons of our collective imagination key areas of unknown darkness. Perhaps, if we could measure it, the most significant contribution to all the sciences to date has been Charles Darwin's theory of evolution based upon natural selection, as this theory permitted the unification of the biological sciences in a manner that has not yet been achieved by any other general branches of science. Of course, saying this does not denigrate the significant contributions that have been made by other great scientists, most notably of course the work of Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton. I come short of putting Sigmund Freud in this category, because the human sciences have to date lacked the degree of integration that has been achieved in any of the other branches of natural systems science.

I promulgate a natural systems approach because, upon a theoretical level and also operationally, it is highly productive and yields results if pursued in the right way. It must be understood that a natural systems approach is, meta-logically speaking, the basis for the integration of the sciences across all disciplinary frameworks, and the basis for the understanding of the integration of reality as well, which can be defined as a central problem set for all sciences, no matter how this problem becomes articulated in any specific field of inquiry. 

At the same time, it must be understood that a natural systems approach cannot be directly applied or forced upon the knowledge base, especially across broad branches of science that encompass many sub-fields of specialized inquiry. Rather, the models and methods it yields pertinent to any particular sub-field or branch of inquiry are unique to that field and different than those relevant to other fields. Meta-logically, we cannot mix our levels of integration in reality without mixing our scientific metaphors and coming up theoretically short in our basic arguments. At the same time, though, natural systems does provide a broad heuristic framework that can be said to be comprehensive to all the sciences, and that provides the basis for cross-disciplinary integration between different fields of knowledge.

In composing these essays, I've had to pick and choose from a wide variety of possible topics that have been generated from within this framework, based on criteria that I consider to be the most theoretically or problematically significant, at least at this time of my development in this field. For fuller development of ideas in any particular area, I refer any interested reader to other texts that were precursor to this one: Natural Systems (2000), Cosmology and Reality (2001), Meta-systems (2001), and Digging Archaeology (2002). 

I have been working on a larger and more comprehensive text concurrently with these others, entitled Advanced Systems, but it has not yet taken final form. I pull no punches in these essays, and do not strive to minimize potential controversy. I see the paradigmatic structure of scientific knowledge and our collective sense of scientific reality as a large obstacle of a collective imagination, a symbolic structure of scientific mind that has set itself around certain anchors. I do not offer natural systems theory, as I have constructed this in my lonely writer's garret, as the truth or bottom line about our shared reality or about science, but only as an alternative perspective, and hopefully, an antidote to the invisible constraints of the paradigmatic structure of conventional scientific knowledge.

These essays were intended to be brief and to the point to meet both the possibility of a wider more general readership as well as to reach the attentive minds of a more selective audience where such esoteric ideas and knowledge are the stuff of everyday discussion and sleepless speculation, and where these ideas might have the greatest impact. My intention has been one of conciseness and definitional precision for the purpose of reducing communicative ambiguity as much as possible. I have decided that plain science, in plain and basic terms, serves the purpose of science well whether we are amateurs or professionals.

It is my belief that the current knowledge revolution has required an unmet need for cross-disciplinary integration that has yet to be achieved, and that entirely new methods and systems are the potential outcome of these possible developments in integration. Not only are the sciences theoretically open-ended, but the potential for dramatic new technological applications are in the offing as well. I have found the framework of meta-systems science and natural systems theory to be highly productive on a number of levels, and the heuristic creativity they offer to the imagination is almost unlimited. Science, ultimately, is the critical difference between the imagined and the real, or, as is said, proof is in the pudding.

Therefore, anyone claiming that the sciences have reached their zenith in explaining all non-trivial points of interest about reality, and that only minor "puzzle-type" problems remain, are bound to be sorely disappointed in the future by the usurpation of now sacrosanct paradigms and by the discovery of new realities and new levels of reality that lie, for the time being, just beyond the grasp of our imagination. I am of the professional opinion that systems based orientations will play an increasing role in the articulation of science, and that computational modeling, simulation and research techniques will increasingly engender a basic methodological reorientation of scientific praxis in a broad range of problem solving fields. For the first time, we are able to take in a realistic and productive manner the thornier side of science, and that is the inherent complexity of natural systems at whatever level we encounter them. I am also of the opinion that the progress of science has been obstructed for many years now as a consequence of biased structural patterns that are rooted in academic institutions, by government driven funding, and by self-serving capitalist interests that have all in their own selective ways hindered the open approach to truth and reality, to free thought and inquisitiveness, and to the development of alternative approaches to understanding reality. Perhaps such interference and conservative inertia is to be expected from self-serving human systems, but to continue to carry these agendas into the 21st century is not only anachronistic, but increasingly destructive of possible futures we may achieve.