Science serves two sets of purposes--the understanding of the rules and principles regulating the natural patterning of reality, and the construction of alternative realities that serves to extend biological survival on earth. While the first objective may seem apparent to most people, the second object may appear to have ideological implications that are more opaque and objectionable.

Science creates new knowledge in the world. It is knowledge with a certain empirical, ontological status in the world that makes it vital to the construction of a realistic view of the world. Knowledge is socially invested and distributed, and its possession and mastery creates a sense of responsibility in the world to use such knowledge wisely, appropriately and nondestructively.

The conventional view of science has been one of disinterested inquiry. It is not known when such a viewpoint arose exactly in the history of knowledge, but it probably arose at about the same time that the notion of a bureaucratic technocracy in service of a secular state arose. The result has systematically been the same--great minds bent to small tasks, tasks ultimately defined by even smaller bureaucratic mentalities.

The important lessons of the Twentieth Century were, I believe, that knowledge creates responsibility, and those who forget the lessons of history are bound to repeat them. The Twentieth Century witnessed much progress and even more carnage--carnage often perpetrated by means of science or in the name of science but without any net positive benefit.

At the rise of the 21^st Century, we bear witness once again to the basic brutalities of humankind, in the form of a global terrorism that commonly employs the exotic instruments of science in service of a medieval, fanatical faith. Surely, the wonderful power to create can be twisted into an evil power to destroy.

Science cannot remain forever beyond the purview of its own moral dilemmas in the world. Science cannot claim always a stance as objective "disinterested inquiry" as in such a mode it abnegates the sense of responsibility that it's knowledge entails, and makes science the handmaiden of whatever private interest or destructive wanton entity in the world that would wield and harness its power for aggrandizement and the achievement of purely selfish and violent motives.

The vision of science is limited if science serves, as purely disinterested inquiry, narrow ideological interests. It is quite evident today in Academia of the developed world that scientists are not fulfilling the potential of their fields in almost any form or fashion, as long as funding priorities and social paradigmatics serve to channel the interests of scientists to narrow, specialized problems and concerns, at the expense of dealing with issues that are basic, fundamental and in the larger sense more important.

Scientists must be taught and learn to embrace, as a fundamental part of their role and status in the world, a basic meta-ethical set of principles that govern the use and employment of scientific knowledge in the world. This scientific meta-ethics would extend as a basic legal and professional paradigm to embrace all fields of scientific inquiry and engineering, and would involve a clear vision of the positive role that science can and must play in the world if the world is to be salvaged from the brink of global catastrophe and mass extinction. The basis of such meta-ethics, I would claim, would represent fundamentally non-violent views and behaviors towards the world. In this general conception of non-violence, we must recognize the general human proclivity to violence, especially in organized forms. This would appear to direct the attention and efforts of scientific thinking and work towards problems that would allow a circumvention and redirection of these fundamental human tendencies in ways that are at least innocuous if not constructive. In this we may define certain basic systems of rights & responsibilities:

1. Biological rights & responsibilities: Human have gained the upper hand over all living systems, and thus it is imperative that humans learn to exercise restraint and responsibility toward such systems in every instance of its expression. Humans do not own living systems though they frequently control their fate. The human privilege to bulldoze natural habitat is not one that is easily justifiable in any kind of moral framework that takes into account the right of other kinds of life forms to occupy their place on the earth. All living systems have basic rights to continue to live in an unhindered fashion, and to evolve in terms of natural selection as much as possible. Our responsibilities extend, I believe, to a sense of earthbound meta-ethics that defines for us a role of stewardship of living systems through our cultural selection practices.

2. Human rights & responsibilities: Human beings have succeeded evolutionarily in a manner that has made them the single dominant mono-species of the earth. Humans, including especially scientists, have an ethical obligation to try to create social systems on earth that realize more directly fundamental rights of all peoples. We can seek to modify the paradigm of human rights in keeping with scientific progress and the development of civilization. For instance, it is difficult not to conceive of human health as a basic right that does not need to be bartered for by the medical industry. At the same time, it is clear that a revised record of human rights in the 21^st Century must include a complementary statement as well of basic human responsibilities that all people must share. Sense of basic human responsibilities stems from the criteria of allowing the freedom and rights of others, over the promotion of one's own freedom and interests in the world.

3. I would add to these basic moral strictures that would serve to govern the behavior and belief systems of scientists in the world, a third set of strictures that concern the development and realization of alternative applied systems in the world. There is a sense that if a new form of technology, invention or device becomes possible abstractly and hypothetically, and can be carried forward experimentally to a successful demonstration, as was the atom bomb at the end of WWII, then its development will be teleologically inevitable. I do not know if it is realistic to impose a kind of blanket stricture upon all good scientists that they cannot be directly involved in the realization of destructive weapons or technologies that can be used for destructive purposes. Often, in defense of what is good in the world, we must have at our disposal certain kinds of destructive technologies. On the other hand, there is a clear sense that if certain kinds of positive, constructive technologies can be developed, in lieu or alongside of destructive technologies, then it becomes a moral obligation of those scientists and engineers so involved in whatever phases of such production, to see that alternative constructive systems are also developed in equal measure, at least as a counterbalance to such destructiveness.

Meta-systems science is a form of applied metaphysics that is involved in heuristic problem solving through the use of hypothetical models concerning reality. The kinds of problems that meta-systems science seeks to solve are generally scientific at basic theoretical and applied levels. The basis of a meta-ystems approach is that, in reality, all systems are interconnected and stratified at multiple levels, hence any solutions created by problems of such systems must seek to comprehend these interconnections and the basic dynamics involved in each level in a systematic manner. Meta-systems science therefore seek an undichotomized, synthetic view of reality--a worldview based in science that is satisfactory for a sane vision of the world, and that provides a template for appropriate and ethnical behavioral response to basic problems in the world.

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It is evident as well that the human race is running out of time in a global sense. No one worth his/her intellectual weight will seriously question the facts or likely outcomes of global warming, loss of global biodiversity, destruction of natural ecosystems and bio-geophysical systems, global human overpopulation, increasing and increasingly closed stratification, and increasing incidence and potential for human destructive violence, manifest in many forms and at many levels. At the same time, it is clearly the case that a global capitalist system has emerged that is entrenched to a particular fossil-fuel platform for civilization that can be counted as the primary culprit in the main dilemmas of the 21^st Century.

Where does the responsibility of the scientist for his knowledge begin and end in the world, and how do we define the professional meta-ethics that can be said to be applicable to all scientists. It is evident that dispossessed and underemployed scientists of the former Soviet Union can be purchased a dime a dozen in tyrannical causes to produce exotic weapons of mass destruction. Certainly, a sense of meta-ethical commitment to ones profession falls far short of the challenge of feeding one's family and oneself in a cold and impersonal world. On the other hand, we have privileged western medical doctors who allegedly abide by the Hippocratic oath, and yet who seem primarily engaged in making as much money as possible, even if it means reneging their responsibility to heal the sick and the suffering.

I guess it should go without saying that scientists are not saints--they are known for their brains, and not their hearts. And yet, by the same token, scientists all share, at least implicitly, as a matter of community and a sense of professional identity, in a worldview and a system of symbolic integration of reality that has consequences in the everyday world at almost every turn of the screw.

I wish to end this note in a return to a fundamental sense of how religion can be related to a meta-scientific view of the world. Einstein struggled his life with these basic philosophical and moral issues, arguing that without religion, science is crippled, and without science, religion is blind. Meta-science is not religion, and it is not anti-religion. It is counter-ideological in a basic sense. If we can say that God played dice with the universe, we can then also say that we cannot know the reasons for God's actions in our reality, for why the bad is always in equal measure to the good. It is an essential aspect of the unknowable structure of reality, and this is how it should be.