by Hugh M. Lewis

This work is about science, and is done in a scientific manner. Meta-systems is about scientific worldview, and about the articulation of science in the world. It is about scientific knowledge and its organization, and about the natural systems that such knowledge represents and seeks to comprehend. It is also about the kinds of human engineered systems that are the result of scientific understanding and application to real problems.

Science is about shared knowledge and collective understanding that holds us to a coherent, honest vision of reality as the ultimate touchstone for truth, independent of our own judgments and values. Thus, our measures and our conclusions are derived as independently as possible from the information we can distill from the patterning found in nature itself.

Science is ultimately about asking questions of the unknown. Religious ideology does not question the unknown. It only tries to fill in the unknown with answers derived from the great depths of the human unconscious. Science begins with a question about something unknown, and though it may have no immediate answers, it seeks solutions to the problem posed by the unknown until it derives some kind of answer that makes sense. The problem is that science remains essentially a question asking endeavor, and not an answer giving activity. Hence, whatever answers are yielded from this exploration are at best partial and incomplete, bound to be questioned once again.

Questions without final answers are often difficult to ask and accept. Confrontation with the unknown involves a degree of inherent uncertainty that can translate into a tremendous amount of existential insecurity. It is especially problematic when science must proceed with the recognition that there are some kinds of questions that are ultimately unanswerable, hence unknowable in some absolute sense. Not every person is cut out to be a scientist, and science cannot provide all the answers that human beings need to make sense and cope with their world.

But it is increasingly the case that the world cannot now proceed without the help of science. We owe to science an increasing debt of gratitude, whatever our religious or ideological points of view. We can choose to believe in creationism, but we must acknowledge the role that the theory of evolution plays in our everyday life in the production of new medical therapies for our diseases and illness.

Science has marked its pathway of progress not with the prospects of what it might achieve, but with a clearer sense of where it has come from. Along the way has been an increasing number of little successes, such that no one now can honestly deny the value and important role that science has come to play in our world, whatever our worldview.

Meta-systems science proceeds paradoxically from the standpoint that scientific theory depends upon worldview in critical ways. There is a meta-logical perspective that suggests that the answers we get depend critically on the kinds of questions we pose, and that there may be a method and a way of asking questions that helps to prestructure the kinds of answers we get, even in seemingly objective experiments in which results are yielded relatively independently of our observations or constructions. This is perhaps easier to understand if we realize that our questions are invariably prestructured by our own points of view, by our own knowledge systems and worldview. They thus have unconscious motivations, a sense of history, a foundation, whether we realize it or not. The problem and the challenge, anthropologically and scientifically, is that most of the time these foundations for our questions are invisible and transparent to us. They derive from the cultural depths of knowledge and values that we share in from birth to death, and cannot escape from even in madness or the oblivion of drugs.

The point of departure for meta-systems science therefore is to seek to make explicit what largely remains implicit in the background of our scientific question asking and answering. Success in such an endeavor leads to a greater degree of understanding and hence control over a set of variables in our scientific theory construction and testing processes that largely remain otherwise left to chance and blind serendipity. This has several outcomes in terms of comprehensiveness, operational systematicity, and applied strategies and designs in the articulation of science to our world and worldview in a coordinated manner.

This work proceeds from the perspective that scientific reality is objective and is a priori to our conception of it, and that this reality is innately unified as a single comprehensive system. On the other hand, we cannot directly know this reality except via our knowledge systems that are not a priori except in a strictly abstract sense. We are thus left on the horns of a fundamental existential and epistemological conundrum that it is the challenge of science to resolve.

There are many implications and presumptions that arise from this initial leap of faith that are explored in the introduction. Reality at every level at which it is examined in the sciences is super complex and only partially understood. For all the progress that science has made in the last century, and in the last decades especially, there are as many more basic questions yet to be sufficiently addressed. This work here purports a kind of unity and comprehensive understanding of the sciences that should be accepted only with a strong cautionary proviso that the full story has not yet been rendered.

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This brief work has been undertaken within an accelerated and abbreviated time frame. Its intention, as a first rough draft, is to highlight the main points of meta-systems science and natural systems theory as these have developed so far. Most topics touched upon in this work remain relatively incomplete and underdeveloped. Though the text has been framed in the form of general statements, this has been done so as a matter of coherence, and not as a final indictment on the nature and structure of reality at any level. They are designed to ask questions by the presentation of alternative explanations. They are not about final statements and finished theories of science. They serve as points of departure for further exploration of a newly emerging frame of reference for understanding science and its role in the contemporary world, and for projecting its purpose in the future. This fulfills the second purpose of meta-systems science and natural systems theory, that it is an exploration and a reconnaissance of unexplored and unknown domains of possible knowledge, rather than just another textbook rehash of conventional and conventionalized knowledge.

It is clear that whatever the contradictions inherent to the conceptualization of scientific knowledge and to its everyday articulation in a wide variety of social and technological contexts, science remains foremost a shared field of activity. This aspect of sharing is important for understanding the culture of science, and its possible basis as a meta-culture of shared belief and behavior that is good for all humankind. As a cultural reality, it has been a relatively recent phenomena in the history and archaeology of humankind--it has emerged more by default than by deliberate social planning. It frequently came about in spite of a great deal of social resistance and repressive influence. It emerged as a common reference point and alternative worldview, primarily because it works when it is true and realistic, and eventually disposes of itself ideologically when it proves incorrect and false.

It has only been in the last century, and in the last few decades especially, that the role of science and its place in our lives have risen to a level of preeminent importance. It has done so by its steady history of achievement by which we define standards of progress.

Social and ideological resistance remains in many quarters, and resurges frequently disguised in various forms of religious ideology or other structural-symbolic activity. It is perhaps a natural and expected response to change that happens so rapidly in the world that social and symbolic systems, normally conservative and tradition bound, cannot keep up or maintain a sense of comprehensive symbolic equilibrium so necessary to our normal reality testing of experience and sense of coherence in our everyday lives and our shared world.

To adopt a fully scientific point of view often requires that we at least implicitly abandon, call into critical question, or give up contradictory symbolic ideas about how reality functions. For this reason alone, biology remains taught in many nations of the world without the benefit of its central articulating theory of evolution, because evolutionary theory conflicts with fundamental religious doctrine and mythologies about creation and the place of a deity in the grand scheme of things.

It is also increasingly the case that science as a diverse organic community of scholars has developed a great deal of its own internal inertia and friction in its articulation. Lost is the vision of the inventor from a white rural background with the 3^rd grade education: gained is a stereotype of a "poly-ethnic" scientist in a monkey suite in an unpublicized international board meeting in a plush room in a plusher building, deciding where to invest the next billion dollars of research money. Whether it is the comandering and corruption associated with grant funding and the monopolization of always scarce research resources, or whether it is the competitive exclusion of new ideas and innovative thinkers from the ranks of the tried and true academic alpha-authorities, the social articulation and praxis of science is fraught with its own sense of contradiction and ideological obfuscation that serves to blind it to its own cultural realities and cripple it in its purpose of achieving greater progress. There can even be made a clear case for the surreptitious importation or symbolic "smuggling" of religious ideologies and mythologies back into the worldview of science, particular at its furthest edges of observation and its boundaries of knowledge where only uncertainty and unknown prevails and few facts can be found. The desire to find ultimate beginnings and fundamental unities in our reality often prompts us to impose, even unconsciously, a religious symbology coaxed in scientific terms.

Not to be accused of attempting to impose an irreligious scientific worldview, it is quite the opposite case. Science, whatever the area of specialization, cannot forever rest upon its laurels as disinterested inquiry in service of whatever agency has the means to employ a scientific technocracy. Scientific ethics not only transcends ideological realities, but can define for itself a workable normative and meta-ethical framework, including a deep seated respect for the eternal verities of the universe. The philosophical Einstein sought his whole lifetime for a deeper connection between science and religion, and refused to accept the notion that "God played dice with the Universe." Even though I accept the postulate that the Universe was probably, ultimately a relativistic dice game, this makes our appreciation and symbolic sense of unity and integration of reality no less religiously profound, existentially faithful or aesthetically sublime than if we believed in either a pantheon of animistic spirits or in a single omnipotent and omniscient creator.

A key insight emerging from this work is that there is indeed a critical perspective and future role for science, not just in research and technological development, but in social planning and in defining key ethical, normative and moral issues relevant in an ultimate way to humankind's role and functioning on earth. It does not compromise sound scientific method to frame its objective procedures within a larger symbolic universe of purposive and symbolically unified knowledge. Scientific praxis and culture becomes so framed regardless of whether or not scientists themselves, as young bright eyed, idealistic college students, are taught to systematically and surreptitiously abnegate their own sense of responsibility to the ideological purposes to which science can be normally put.

A basic issue in this regard is a critical epistemological stance that science is involved with objective description only, and cannot make untestible or unfalsifiable statements that are prescriptive or morally didactic about the world. Such a dichotomization of how scientific activity should be framed and learning proceed to application is I believe a naïve and somewhat spurious analysis of the complex realities actually involved in scientific culture and its articulation in terms of possible technological application and development. There is a sense that science can make rational strategic and moral judgments about social and biological issues that affect the historical development of humankind in critical ways, and these kinds of judgments do not necessarily fall outside the purview of normal scientific practice.

While such an issue is less obvious in a chemistry lab or a nuclear particle accelerator, it clearly comes to the foreground in the practice of medical sciences, that have as their principle goal the alleviation of human suffering and the curing of disease. These issues are particularly evident and therefore most controversial in relation to the human social and psychological sciences, where what point of view we adopt, however implicitly, can tremendously affect our adoption of methods and conclusions derived.

In this we must recognize the interrelation of several facets of all human knowledge, whether this is construed as scientific, ideological, religious or in some other form. All knowledge is symbolic. All knowledge exists within a social framework of normal articulation, and defines some form of cultural pattern about its function and effects. All knowledge is historically contextualized and bound, and anthropologically articulated, no matter how abstract or artificial, concrete and natural. All knowledge is on some level or another interconnected, even if such interconnections remain implicit and unelaborated. All knowledge must be "textualized" in some form of storage mechanism and available for broad-based and vertical dissemination. It must be communicable or else it represents a form of idiosyncratic subjectivity that is barren and confined the dream realm of imaginative fantasy. All knowledge is therefore also organized in some explicit/implicit manner upon a shared noetic landscape. These constraints upon all human knowledge, and hence upon all scientific knowledge as a sub realm, result in basic patterns and contradictions in the articulation and practice of knowledge in many ways and upon many levels. There is not one discipline or sub-discipline of scientific expertise where these same basic sets of constraints do not hold and critically influence the outcomes of our learning and knowledge acquisition and organization activities.

The dragon of anthropological relativity of knowledge rears its head once again. All knowledge is relative to the human knower and the thing being known. As human beings we cannot step outside the realm and influence of our own knowledge systems to claim completely and absolute objectivity. Relativity is an inherent aspect of all knowledge of all forms and kinds. Ultimately, all forms of relativity are classifiable under a general framework of anthropological relativity, from that of the physical relativity of electrons and subatomic particles, to the cultural relativities of human belief and behavior, to the ideological and paradigmatic relativities of alternative symbology and even scientific theories themselves.

Anthropological relativity is the basis for all parallax and uncertainty inherent to our knowledge and information systems, because this knowledge is intrinsic to a universe that is fundamentally entropy and subjectively solipsistic in certain inherently ambiguous ways. We are the knowers, the doers, the shapers, of all our sciences and all our other ways of knowing reality. Though we cannot escape the antinomalities of anthropological relativity, we can learn to control it and account for it in ways that are objectively acceptable to the standards of science. The resurrection of the dragon of relativity does not spell the death of God, it only entails a re-envisioning of the role of the divine in a more realistic view of the world. In this we can find the solace of hope, purpose, reason and divine inspiration, just as we can look to the natural order and patterning of reality to find a sense of beauty, sublime meaning and moral value.

Whatever or however class issues of global capitalism may translate into the structuring of grant and research opportunities, in terms of status mongering, opportunities for publishing or even open discussion, o academic discrimination and paradigmatic closure, science as a theoretical construct remains a part of the public domain, open to everyman, woman and child, available to all people equally at least in theory. I dedicate this work to my mom, my wife and my daughter, who have been the only people of my life of any lasting and permanent value.