Natural Systems Theory

by Hugh M. Lewis

http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/

Part IV: Anthropological Systems Theory

Human or anthropological systems are a special kind of biological system. There exist other forms of life that have apparent intelligence comparable to human brains--dolphins have brains larger than people, and in some ways, far more complex. But it appears that dolphins have not elaborated a kind of culture that has resulted in dolphin civilization. We find very primitive, rudimentary forms of cultural learning among primate populations, and we find some sense of primary cultural process among many other species of animal.

Human intelligence has led to the formation of human cultures and human civilization as a level of organization of behavior and "minds" (knowledge) that represents a level of systems stratification essentially beyond that of any living system we yet know of. Only Chimpanzees appear to approach or emulate human intelligence on very basic and primitive levels, though we should be careful to compare and contrast two distinctive kinds of noetic function and identity between people and chimps.

Humankind at least appears to be unique in the universe for its capacity for culture and intelligent civilization, for its level of abstract self-awareness and its capacity for the symbolic articulation of knowledge about and in the world. If and when we encounter or contact other possible extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations in the universe, then this level of systems theory, like biological systems theory, will have to be substantially revised and expanded to accommodate our empirical and theoretical understanding of these new systems. We will then have to revise the name to something perhaps like "native intelligent systems" or "natural intelligence systems."

Before those circumstances and events arise, it remains appropriate to name such systems by their single biological represenative as "anthropological systems theory" and this is in part because, though a large and complex brain is a central part of this system, there are other distinctly anthropological traits that are part of an anthropological complex underlying the capacity for human culture and civilization, as we know these things. Bipedalism, hand-eye coordination, opposable thumb and remarkable manual dexterity to pick up and manipulate very smal or very fine objects, and a pharyn-lingual complex that permits the articulation of complexly modulated sound patterns, prolonged post-partum infant dependency and delayed development of the organism beyond the womb, appear to be critical components of a unique system developed as a consequence of hominid evolution, giving rise and underlying human cultural traits and properties, and the rise of human civilizational complexes and processes.

The anthropological system is one that involves the interrelationships between all of these components, centrally controlled by the human brain. It is clear, as well, that human social organization and environmental acquisition relating to enculturation and socialization have played a critical role in the evolutionary development of Homo sapiens. Delayed post-partum development, particularly of the brain and speech, entailed that humans had to meet an extra requirement of learning from the environment, a pattern of learning that becomes ingrained and organically incorporated into the organism. It was not just from a natural environment, but from a human mediated social environment.

It is very possible that any extraterrestrial intelligence we encounter that has developed some kind of cultural civilization will have developed what might be called parallel or analogical trait complexes, though the form and exact nature of the components of these alien systems might be radically different than the key anthropological trait complex. It is for this reason that, until alien civilization is contacted and explored, anthropological systems theory remains an appropriate appellation to confer upon this level of natural systems organization.

One of the key defining properties of this anthropological trait complex is the capacity to create alternative working systems that did not previoiusly exist, including systems of symbolic expression and communication. The capacity for the symbolic organization of worldview, for "knowledge" as a kind of system existing separately from the world about which it refers or implies, is critical to the definition of anthropological systems. This knowledge is explicit, unlike natural knowledge that might be ascribed to a cat or a dog or a racoon, which would be tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is in a sense knowledge that is tacitly self-referential through the process of iconographic symbolic presentation. There exists an arbitrariness and artificiality of explicit knowledge that does not obtain for tacit natural knowledge, and it is in fact an artificial system of constructed knowledge that renders the implicit explicit, indexical within a larger framework of understanding, and self-referential.

Humanity is collectively constituted by a single species--gene flow among human subpopulations has been relatively rapid and has occurred for many successive generations on regional and global scales. This single species maintains one of the greatest biomasses on earth and is the greatest consumer of natural resources; thus its growth has put a strain and stress on almost every biome and biological region on earth, in numerous ways, whether direct or indirect, and the kind of adaptational equilibrium achieved by Homo sapiens is complex and complexly mediated by many artificial and artifactual inventions. We can legitimate speak of global circumscription of the human species, on an earth in which, for the past ten thousand years, there is probably no realm or local natural environment that has not been critically interferred with and disturbed by increasing human activity and involvement.

It is becoming increasingly imperative that we rapidly come to terms with the systems of our own creation, their biological consequences and their long-term state-path trajectories in the world. We can ill afford to maintain ultimately arbitrary systems that prove in the long term self-destructive or bio-destructive without being able to at least substantially repair the damage to ecosystems caused by this patterning of human social and cultural development.

Human systems on one hand, constituted by a single kind of animal form, are relatively basic. On the other hand, in terms of their complexity and size, and in terms of the complexity of the human mind and of human cultural and knowledge systems, the outcome of an extended process of evolutionary elaboration of a distinctive hominid trait-complex, a system of interrelated phenotypical trait patterns, human systems haver emerged in time extremely vast and varied on earth.

The human brain, in situ of its cultural and civilizational context, capable of realizing the mind, the emergent set of properties of the integration of the brain in social communication with other brains. The human mind, itself is capable of self-awareness and of imagination of alternative realites, is founded upon the integration of an organ but barely 3 pounds in mass, an organ that remains, by far, the most complicated thing we know of in the entire universe, with its trillions of neural network connections.

The object of human systems theory is the development of a comprehensive and unified framework concerning the development of human system, and the sufficient explanation for their patterning. This is based upon the proposition that human systems constitute something, if not unique in the universe, then certainly quite unusual and extremely rare, and the enlarged capacity of the human brain, combined with a unique anthropomorphic trait complex, has resulted in the formation of alternative real systems that are the artificial product of human invention and imagination, and that did not exist previously in the natural world. Such systems therefore constitute an entire strata which connects to natural systems, and that also bridges over to the theory of alternative systems.

Human systems theory can never achieve the degree of coherence and parsimony found in physical systems theory. Human systems are multi-factorial and therefore highly underdetermined developmentally in their hypercomplex states. For human systems especially, it is a problem of language--of having the terms and definitions suitable for such extreme complexity--as well as of logic. Outcomes in the historical development of human systems cannot follow predictable pathways.

The main consequence of this is that achievement of a comprehensive human systems theory must compromise itself paradigmatically, and can at best be poly-paradigmatic and thereby metaparadigmatic rather than merely a single comprehensive and singularly coherent explanation of such systems. It must thus borrow insight, information and frameworks from multiple sources and disciplines of study of human patterning, and it must forge what is at best a kind of explanatory framework that permits and has lattitude for multiple alternative hypothesis and theories of the same sets of phenomena, cast from different theoretical points of view and in terms of different words and languages defining these alternative perspectives.

These alternative human-made sytems may be said in a loose sense to be intelligent systems, at least in that they are the product of human intelligence, and thus incorporate intentional design in their patterning. We refer to the overall patterning of these systems in a social sense to be "civilizations"--what Alfred Kroeber referred to as the style patterning that is the product of human genius.

The question remains unanswered whether or not there are other intelligent civilizations in the universe that are not human in origin, but that are  the product of the evolutionary development of other alien life-forms. It is certainly the case that alien intelligence is a possibility--if it could arise on earth, then certainly it can under the right circumstances arise upon any planet. It is expected though that this outcome is extremly unlikely from a simple stochastic standpoint, hence, the development of alternative intelligent civilization elsewhere in the universe is highly unlikely, or extremely rare and thus such civilizations much be very few and very, very far between.

It almost goes without saying that any contact with especially advanced forms of alien civilizations will be revolutionary upon multiple levels of our knowledge and understanding of reality. It may even be symbolically destructive of our own anthropomorphic sense of civilization if such alternative systems are extremely powerful and more highly developed than our own. It is also more than likely that we would eventually meet alien intelligence, because in their shared state of curiosity they would be attempting to make contact with other alternative civilizations like ourselves. The main obstacles to be overcome in this matter are the vast depths of space-time probably involved in such long-range communication, and the highly advanced state of technological development probably required to over come such distances, if this is indeed even possible given fundamental limitations such as the speed of light. Civilizations may well go extinct before they have the chance of having their signals received by distant targets.

But such contact must be necessary if we are to push a metaparadigmatic perspective of alternative intelligent systems, or civilizations to a new level that we might refer to them as been truly "universal" in application. In the patient meantime, we must content ourselves with  the conceit that our human civilization is quite alone in a vast and mostly empty universe, and that we may be, if not the only life forms, one of the most advanced ever produced. As far as we know now, and may ever know, it is only human beings who have the capacity for realizing their own predicament, uniqueness and solitariness in the universe, and for transcending ultimately the constraints of nature that exist for all other known forms of life we are familiar with. The knowledge that we may or may not be alone in the universe, or that this might even matter, is ours alone to struggle and experience. Dogs, cats, cattle, birds, fish--these creatures and all others we know of are ultimately the subjects of their own making in the world, a part of the world and nothing more. They lack the sentience that makes our own human systems interesting, transcendent and special.

Anthropological, or human-type systems, have their basis in the organization and function of the complex brain and associated nervous system, along with certain distinctively hominid physical characteristics, including bipedality, fully opposable thumb and extraordinary manual dexterity, extended post-partum dependency and development, and a pharyngeal systems capable of full language production.

We cannot distinguish such systems as separate from other biological systems unless we do so on the basis of a comparison of the human brain and its physiological functions with the nervous systems of other kinds of animals. The fundamental functions of a canine brain are quite similar to that of the human brain, and in many ways can be said to be homologous structures within an evolutionary framework. Even more alike are Chimpanzee, Gorilla and human brains, each kind of which appears to be capable of similar levels of complex thought, logic and communication. If the human brain is different from these other biological forms, it is so more by size and degree of complex integration than it is necessarily by any kinds of qualitative differences. Only the expansion and enlargement of the areas of the frontal cortex in the human brain suggest the development of more complex processing that is associated with emotion, reason, imagination, etc.

It is possible to look upon the brain as the final biological frontier, if one does not consider the challenges of alien life forms. But understanding of the physiology and functioning of the brain is only the beginning of a scientific basis for understanding of human informational patterning and human systems that are the concern of the psychological and social sciences. While the brain may be the basis for a human science, the brain is only a central part of a larger system of informational patterning that includes human language, human conceptual systems, human information systems, symbolization, complex self-motivated behavior patterns, and social relational and communicational systems.

These form a complex of informational patterns and facets of human reality that are critical to the description of anthropological systems in general and cannot be dispensed with or analytically reduced in terms of mere brain or body function. To put this issue another way, it can be said that while the brain is centrally important in making possible all informational functioning and patterns in human systems, it is the brain that is understood only in its anthropological context and development, that achieves its degree of dynamic function and super-biological informational patterning and processing.

A brain that exists in social isolation is of not much use, and, even worse, may end up being a dysfunctional or diseased brain. A brain that is functioning within an organic and environmental context that achieves a high level of integration is one that is capable of achieving remarkable feats of creative, productive and intellectual prowess. In this sense at least, the brain is not that much different from a digital computer, regardless of the design differences. For both forms of complex information processing, the same general input-output feedback loop holds. We say "junk in, then junk out." What is the mechanism of the brain that processes the junk, and how do we arrive at the defintion in a formal and scientific sense of what the junk is in the first place.

The description of the brain is prerequisite but not sufficient to the description or theoretical explanation of human language, social institutions and processes, human psychology, symbolization, human behavior or any other facet of human reality. There has been significant progress in the interdisiciplinary fields of the cognitive sciences that relates artificial intelligence and robotic automation to psychological, linguistic and philosophical models of human cognitive functioning and the organization of knowledge. In terms of the organization of knowledge, we are striving for what can be called the natural order and organization of information as this occurs in the brain and becomes processed via the brain and its auxiliary organs. This can be contraposed to what can be called an arbitrary order of knowledge and information that is based primarily upon abstract or culturally defined concepts. There is an exciting convergence of various disciplines to the central issues of understanding the human brain and its central role and function in the articulation of human reality. With new imagining techniques in vivo, we are no longer confined to the placement of electrodes and the diagnostic study of traumatic aphasias.

Whatever aspect or discipline of the human sciences with which we are concerned, the study of the brain remains a central core component of any such study. We can expect that the full and complete explanation of human brain-mind function will lead to a clearer understanding of the complexities of human social and psychological realities.

In the analysis of human systems, we may again distinguish several levels of human informational patterning. These sublevels include:

1. The individual, including the cognitive, symbolic, emotional, subjective and mental functioning involving one way or another brain function.

2. The social group, involving dynamic communication and interaction between different individuals, organization of belief and behavior in cultural systems that can be said to be institutionally enduring.

3. The inter-group context, which involves exchange and interctive relationships between different groups, or between different individuals of different groups, and leading to complex historical and social formations of intergroup relations.

At this late stage in our hominid evolutionary development, it is not always clear which should come first and which follow in our analysis. We are left with a hen and egg kind of dilemma, and realize that we are dealing with conjunctive rather thant disjunctive sets of information framed between these three different levels.

The patterning that is characteristic of all human behavior is distinct to our species and unique in our universe. The closest we find in terms of interspecific behavior is the behavior of primates, particularly Chimpanzees and Gorillas, under captive conditions in which there has been intensive socialization and experimentation conducted, and the behavior can be attributed to deep level interspecific acculturation or cross-over from human to broader non-human primate systems. Naturalistic observation of feral primate communities with minimal human contact has demonstrated primitive forms of cultural patterning, and variation of this pattern among different groups, including and not limited to the use of tools and techniques in food getting and habitation and in terms of social and cultural organization and behavior. This appears especially to be the case among communities of Chimpanzees of both Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus types.

Intelligent forms of behavior and accompanying patterns of social organization can be described for many kinds of animals, particularly among social mammals that have relatively large brains and that have certain ecotropic adaptations that dispose them to complex and cooperative social relations. Social intelligence appears to occur even in animal systems that lack significant brain development or individually identifiable features of human-like intelligence. Mostly, these alternative animal based systems can be said to be similar and analogous in some limited forms to human-based systems, but they are strictly speaking non-homologous to human systems. In all cases, such systems can be construed as the consequence of evolutionary adaptation to certain eco-trophic profiles that demand complex social adaptations and patterns of interaction. Similarly, it must be construed that human systems arose evolutionarily as a consequence of the social requirement for adaptation in varying environmental circumstances demanding cooperative and possibly competitive social arrangements

The typical behavioral patterning of human systems, particulary in a wide range of possible circumstances and under widely varying conditions, is incredibly complex, and it its patterning appears to be both organized in a systematic manner, and structured by limiting factors and primary determinants that underlie and belie its complexity. Even apparently disordered or disruptive human behavior can be seen from the standpoint of its underlying structure and sense of organization.  There is an astounding and sublime simplicity to the structure of human behavior, constrained by key anthropological variables

Human systems can be characterized by the following basic features

1. Tendency towards increasing social stratification, particularly as a consequence of population growth and socio-environmental circumscription.
2. Tendency towards iso-clinal cultural differentiation, expressed in terms of material artifacts, as a function of stylistic elaboration and varying adaptation that is measured in basic terms of distance of time and place.
3. Human language that is symbolic in structural patterning and that is a function of the adaptive articulation of a uniquely anthropomorphic trait complex.
4. Human cognition and behavioral psychology that is symbolically structured and that achieves complex problem solving and apperceptive self-recognition as well as regulation of behavior through advanced cerebral control structures.

Anthropological Systems Theory

Anthropological systems are artificial systems in the sense that they are the product of human creation and constructive activity. They are thus ultimately and critically arbitrary systems, though they are rooted  in what can be considered to be non-arbitrary fundamental constraints of human nature. Anthropological systems are ultimately and fundamentally human-made systems, though the fact of their contrivance, their invention and construction, is often disguised and hidden from view by means of symbolic ideology and symbolic fallacy that attributes supernatural or natural origins to things anthropological. One would even say that one's feelings, one's moods, one's sense of self, one's sense of being, one's sexuality, one's manner of thinking, one's values of what is important, or not, are all anthropological constructions of our ego-identity and social reality.

Anthropological systems stem from an understanding of the emergence of a level of natural information pattern that can be defined ultimately as cultural. I would include in these systems potential "non human" kinds of systems that would probably have similar cultural patterns and features from at least a structural framework.

Anthropological systems emerged from the landscape of the African plains and forests to somehow be capable of systematically beating the odds against evolutionary constraints. Exactly how it did so remains still a mystery, though we understand in better detail now the early record of hominid emergence than ever before.

What is most remarkable I think about this record is its degree of continuity of development for the past four million years at least. With but few noteworthy exceptions, we see largely a single line of allopatric phylogeny of the hominid descent from probably 5 to 6 million years before. We find the early radiative adaption and dispersion of Homo erectus throughout the Old World, from Africa across to the furthest reaches of Asia. Their tools appeared to have been in the first phase fairly primitive chopper-tools, simple river cobbles that are split and broken into well defined edges capable of doing basic work in cutting, and smashing. Limited evidence suggests the presence of oddly defined Archaic Homo saipiens in many of the same regions 1 to 2 hundred thousand years ago, and then a second or possibly third radiative explosion of modern Homo sapiens sapiens from what seems to be the perennial African homeland, probably commencing 70 to 60 thousand years B.P. and eventually crossing over to the New World within the last 30,000 years. The last million years especially bore witness to what can be considered overall as a unilineal line of hominid development that witnessed the enlargement mainly of human cerebral capacity to their present day proportions and the rise of the associated basic culture complexes--the discovery of fire, use of refined stone working tools, clothing, shelters, and probably some early form of language.

The understanding of human systems stems from an appreciation of the unique role that the human brain and related complex of bio-behavioral traits have played in the development of symbolic culture and human civilization. These are understood universally to be the unique hallmarks of human patterning, the integration of which cannot be fully explained in terms of biological systems theory alone. There occurs in interaction, communication and cultural transmission, both vertically and horizontally, the possibility for an entirely new level of informational patterning and for behavioral response to the environment that cannot be accounted for by biological factors alone. The human brain is of course a complex cellular organ, and the human nervous and sensory systems are of course extremely complex and sensitive systems that connect to the brain. It is apparent that human brain pattern, when tied to constructed environmental contexts, achieves a higher order intelligent functioning.

Human systems theory stratifies into three levels. These levels are the individual, the intermediate group, and the larger social system that ultimately comprises the entire human species. Again, similar processes of systemic stratification and multi-level integration appear to occur with human systems as with more basic biological and physical systems, in terms of psychological, cultural and larger sociological patterns. It furthermore is important to construe these within an historical framework of the past that informs the world in detail and explains how it is that our world came to be as it currently is.

Human systems theory is derived from anthropological theory of human systems in general. A human system can be any system that is socially constituted (including a society of one person) that has achieved some level of structural-functional and cultural integration such that it confers upon its members a separate and distinctive sense of identity that is shared. This sharing tends to occur in many different levels of interaction and communication, and commonly involves the development of unique social dialects and isolects of a language, as well as common patterns of symbolic-behavioral response. Material environment will also be shaped and shared along particular and distinct design motifs. Social customs, institutions and traditions emerge that serve to further integrate people into such systems and to perpetuate and replicate the cultural patterns that have been developed in such contexts.

Human social systems tend towards incredible complexity in an historical sense because the extension of human sociability is that social groups tend toward interrelation into larger and larger systems, and that no group or individual remains forever or always in social isolation. Thus I believe it is a clear proclivity that in general human systems are interconnected, and these connections constitute the basis for the further integration of such systems in ever larger structural patterns. There has been of course many exceptions to this general trend--isolated island, forest and mountain groups that maintain little or no contact with outsiders. Frequently, individual people may pass between different or distant groups while the groups themselves maintain fairly rigid or even hostile boundaries between one another. People tend to have a very natural proclivity, when this capacity is not repressed or  arrested by psychological and behavioral rigidity and dependency, to be quite culturally flexible. The wide variation of pattern of natural, traditional cultural patterns in the ethnographic world attests to the inherent flexibility and openness of the individual human and to their fundamental plasticity that is tied to environmental adaptation. If this pattern were biologically preprogrammed, either as memes or as social genes, then it is likely that we would see a rather monothetic and monotypical formation of culture worldwide, rather than almost infinite variation.

In general, whenever acculturative contact arises, there is a trend for a sense of dynamic exchange to take place that leads to rapid alterations and changes of one or more groups at different levels. Social contact between very different groups can stimulate radical changes that can be both destructive and constructive.

Conceptual and Symbolic Systems

The central definition of culture in the explanation of human reality brings us directly to the question of symbol and symbolisms, which can be said to be both the basic vessel and vehicle of cultural transmission and expression of its pattern. The value of any symbolism is its internalized, subjective reverberation of meaning in the lives of the culture bearer. This meaning itself is polygenic and multiply determined. It is multifaceted and has many dimensions of contrast and relation. The symbolic function of any device or even material object, is separate from and independent of the pragmatic function of that device or object, though it can be said that the symbolic function always comprehends and contextualizes its pragmatic function in a larger sphere of meaning that interrelates it to other forms of symbolism.

It can be demonstrated therefore that symbols and symbolisms do not exist as discrete and isolated entities with a specific set of functions. They are always a part of a larger system of symbolization and meaning that comprehends many different kinds of functions and forms (whether these are pragmatic or expressive or social or material  or textual or abstract or iconographic) Symbols thus have an inherent effect of relating us to the world of which they are a apart and from which they derive their significance and value. They tie object, and the experience of that object, to a larger framework of order and value in our symbolic universe.

At the same time, they have the effect of concretizing or precipitating that larger sense of order in the embodiment and experience of the object. This effect is never complete or total, nor is it a permanent effect. It is one that must be reiterated time and again in ritual form for its renewal and revitalization to occur. The national flag is a common political symbol of the modern world that is a clear cut example of this aspect of symbolization. Most symbols can be said to be partial symbols  in that their symbolic function is more diffuse and less focused than a special purpose symbol like a flag. It is hard to see a hammer as a symbol, though in the hands of a carpenter who is quite capable it can take on a symbolic function that is shared with its pragmatic value for driving nails. If we append a hammer to a flag, as a symbol of the proletariat, of industry, of Homo faber, then its symbolic function that can be said to be intrinsic to the hammer and its history takes on a more focal and specific role.

We can see that any symbolic or any symbolic function of a device is fundamentally communicative--this is the transmissive aspect of the cultural content and integrative function of symbolism. Symbols and symbolization therefore serve to unite cultural reality into a coherent system of meaning and function. It is the mechanism for achieving cultural integration. The communicative function of symbolism is important to understanding its role in maintaining social order and in the organization of social relations and resources. As is usual with most communication systems, their efficacy and purpose become most evident in cases of error or contradiction, when symbols as communicative devices break down or come into conflict with one another upon basic levels of their articulation. If an old regime is overturned, so too must the old statues and other icons of that regime either be overturned, or else appropriated symbolically to the services of the new regime. It would be seen as inappropriate by citizens of a country to hoist a foreign flag, particularly that of a country considered hostile or a threat, in place of its own flag. This is what happens when one nation is defeated by another nation.

Similarly, in our country, flag burning always raises more than an eye-brow, it is considered sacrireligious and unpatriotic by many people, though others would content it is only an exercise in one's freedom of expression. It does point up that communication is society serves an important function and is in itself of some social value as a resource. Burning the flag becomes more therefore than just a demonstration of freedom of expression. It becomes a communicative and symbolic enactment of contradiction and in an implicit sense,  of denial, of the dominant social order. It becomes an insult and a way of doing indirect violence to the country and the reality that the flag represents.

Cultural-Cognitive Integration

The basis of cultural integration can be said to be symbolic-cognitive integration of the informational patterns, or knowledge, that is represented and subjectively embodies that cultural reality. It follows that the breakdown of cultural order can lead to symbolic-cognitive dissonance and disintegration, and, vice versa, the breakdown of cognitive-symbolic order can lead to and signal the loss of cultural integrity. This process is invariably accompanied by the increased noise and sense of contradiction that is embodied in such systems in the first place. Because part of the function of symbol systems is the mediation between contradictory or otherwise incompatible or contraposed realities, the fact or state of contradiction is normally disguised when symbol systems are effectively integrated and functionally adaptive. We say that such symbolisms can be ideologically resolved and this is usually sufficient in itself. When symbol systems can no longer resolve internal contradictions they are intended to mediate, they can be said to be relatively dysfunctional. Sense of contradiction then becomes exposed and self-evident and the symbol systems designed to ideologically cover them no longer sufficient.

It is the case that critical systems of knowledge, including forms of science, seek deliberately to expose the contradictions contained within symbol systems in order to better understand the realities that are then exposed, and to at least temporarily or relatively expose the false realities that are the product of symbolic construction of reality. It is normal and expected therefore that these kinds of systems of knowledge seek to stand apart and alienate themselves from the everyday affairs of human society. It is also the case though that normal society does not function well if it is disinvested of its mythologies upon which its sense of symbolic order and cultural integration depend. The social sciences provide a poor substitute for the symbolic consonance such systems provide, and no one can be perennially comfortable living only with a sense of contradiction.

The intensive and extensive study of knowledge systems as these are culturally situated and symbolically articulated, reveals that their coherence and effectiveness depends upon achieving and maintaining a degree of integration between culturally received forms of belief and behavior and cognitive models and maps--those symbolic meanings that are articulated  through language and thought. This integration can be said to be brain based, and knowledge systems are culturally dependent upon the context in which they are situated and articulated. The variegation of patterning between different knowledge systems is clear evidence of the difference in mental template organization that people psychologically achieve. This template patterning must be seen as a constraint of the hardwiring and functional patterning of the brain. Simply put, brains must achieve a certain consensus of its patterning within a shared  cultural context in order to achieve the degree of socio-cultural integration required. The medium for this process to occur is largely  through language and behavior, as well as the carpentered symbolic manifestations of the environment. Evidence from symbolic framing reveals how much meaning structures are culturally variable and rooted to different patterning of mental and psychological function. It is the wonderful plasticity of the brain, a by-product of its enormous complexity, that allows it to achieve so a broad range of variable patterning.

If we compare, for instance, the knowledge structuration of a system such as mathematics with that of a natural language, we will see that both systems will utilize many of the same and common pathways, and that the underlying kind of semantic structures and logical relations may be fundamentally  similar and differ only in their details and consequences. Learning multiple languages permits the brain a plasticity  and multi-modality that intensive orientation within one language system lacks.

Language systems are important in this process of integration as mediational and communicational devices. They can be said to both mediate and to symbolically encode and concretize reality through expression. All knowledge systems are ultimately based  upon and depend upon the language systems from which they are derived. Learning a new kind of knowledge system requires preparation by learning the language system that defines that knowledge system and its rules of articulation and framing.

From a semantic standpoint, we can make a strong claim for the linguistic relativity of meaning structures, though this by no means connotes a form of linguistic determinancy. Without development and learning of the language, the meaning system that is  embodied by and in terms of that language, and the larger cultural reality that lies behind that language, will be unavailable to the stranger. This is not to say that the structural patterns of overt behaviors cannot thereby be understood or studied.

Often language serves as much to obfuscate and rationalize reality as much as it is meant to express and reveal it. It is clear though, that language provides the vehicle by which the brain can organize itself, and, in times of relearning, reorganize itself to adapt to newer patterns of information received in the effective environment. Another way of looking at  this is to say that language structures and frames meaning systems, without which meaning systems would be incoherent, even schizophrenic. Language disorders are a chief  symptom of the development of mental pathology. This is a very human kind of trait that characterizes human intelligence for that of any other known animal or creature. Meaning systems, for their effective organization and function in the brain, depend upon their articulation in terms of some kind of language. Though the basic relationship between meaning and the term is arbitrary and symbolic, meanings that are arrived at usually by some form of  orginal implicit ollective agreement and social sanctioning and participation, we cannot have the one without the other, and it is the term that situates meaning within a social world, making it a phenomenon of social construction. We can therefore  say that the linguistic integration of culture and cognition is fundamentally social psychologically mediated.

Different knowledge cultures and cultural knowledges provide their own symbolic framing mechanisms within culturally defined behavioral settings, ritual contexts, and in terms of received expressions and meanings, that serve to reinforce every day in basic ways the symbolic coherence and sense of legitimate reality that these knowledge systems carry. This can be referred to as the symbolic embodiment and articulation of knowledge cultures in the everyday world in which they exist.

Achievement and learning of any knowledge system, especially to the point of mastery and expertise that is expected upon a professional level, requires years of investment in study and learning frameworks that are situated in language context and reinforced through social relations. Such mastery is not achieved overnight, in a week, or a month or even in a single year of instruction. Such learning cannot take place in isolation or even in the kind of alienation that is afforded by electronic communication. It is very much the case when were are talking about different kinds of knoweldge cultures that we can compare, for instance, the culture of physics with the culture of chemistry or microbiology, and that the consequences for each of these cultural-cognitive patterns in shaping worldview and relations is dramatic and fundamentally different. As scientific cultures, they all share a certain core of fundamental values and research priorities, just as they share a common language in terms of their  mother tongue. But from that point of a similar core of knowledge structure and values, the similarities diverge in ever greater ways and increasing degrees of difference. Knowledge is becoming so stratified and hypercoherent, that even subdisciplinary boundaries within broader fields are emerging as largely mutually exclusive cultural knowledge territories.

Past, Present & Future in Human MetaSystems Theory

Problems of the past, present and future provide a framework for understanding humanity within a natural systems framework. The question of the Past is a kind of problem that is rooted in our own natural history, of our origins, the rise of our culture and civilizations, and their larger social context. It serves to guide us in our understanding of human systems in general, as a form of mechanical and efficient explanation for the way things are at present, and what they had been like before. It provides a larger context within which to interpret and evaluate individuals and different groups in terms of their behavior and their greater symbolic significance in the world.

Human systems are distinguished in natural systems theory by the formation of complex social patterns based upon human language and cognitive functions that result in behavior patterns the occur independently of any genetic predetermination. It is not to say that genetic factors may not have some influence in such patterning upon a basic level, but this influence is both adulterated by the heavy effect of environmental conditioning, that is a function of the basic evolved dependency of the human being in its ontogenetic development upon a human-mediated environment, as well as by the pleiotropic and polymorphic expression of complex behavioral patterns and organic structures underlying these patterns. Human systems are characterized by the invention and transmission of new information, that is culturally encoded and linguistically expressed, and that is independent of any biological mechanism of information storage or reproduction, or of selection and adaptation. This characterization entails that human systems involve ultimately a resort to the study of event structures and developmental patterns upon a level that can be said to be constituted by a form of natural and cultural history. In this way all social interactions are understood within a dynamic continuum of time and place.

Human systems theory can therefore be properly characterized as a form of historical science, and upon this level that is characterized by the derivative complexity of the phenomena in question, it is virtually impossible to formulate an exceptionless and tightly worded set of equations or propositions about them that would account for all human event structures in a sufficient manner. It appears that the best that can be accomplished in this manner in a methodological sense is the accurate recording of time and date, and of the location of the event, and an objective description of the form of the event itself in as much detail as possible. In a theoretical sense, the best that  can be hoped for is a kind of historical paradigm of general rules that describe in a fairly clear manner, the main pattern of articulation of events. By paradigm, I am not referring to the Kuhnian paradigm with its theoretic, social and contructive components. Rather I refer to a kind of legal or lawyer's paradigm that governs a body of understanding and that roughly guides actions in certain fields or cases.

Social, psychological, cultural and other aspects of understanding of human systems are all contained within and referenced by the larger encompassing framework of human history, which is itself referenced within a framework of a natural history of the earth. By  history, I am referring to the study of events and their structures through time, and more broadly, to the structure of the past patterns of events and their underlying determiniations. Any particular group or society is by definition found within a larger context of relations between other people, between people and the environment, and among themselves. Psychological event structures, no matter how subjectively solipsistic and idiosyncratic they may be, area also contained within the same overarching framework.

At the same time, we must understand the pivotal role that has been played by the development of human civilization and culture as a noetic event structure. At the center of this informational event patterning has been the organization of the human brain around a unique anthropomorphic trait complex that includes language, manual dexterity, human sexuality and sociality, bipedalism as well as the particular features of the human mind itself. To understand the developmental and progressive aspects of the development of human system, we must first see how knowledge structures and socially encoded informational systems have come into being, and that have allowed the integration and acquisition of new knowledge and information in reality. Human society has achieved a number of important adaptive "breakthroughs" that have led human evolutionary development in the direction of greater symbolic, cultural and social dependency. These breakthroughs have included tool technology, fire, use of habitations and clothing, domestication of various plants and animals for a variety of uses, inventions of boats, wheels, power generation of various forms, etc. The accumulative consequences of these breakthroughs has been such that they have led to the rise of human civilizations as regional structures and, more recently, even as globally integrative social patterns.

Human, or anthropological systems, present something of an anthropocentric view of such systems, and this reflects the fundamental anthropological relativity of our scientific knowledge more than any other aspect of natural systems theory. We would be hard pressed at this point to rename this basic area of stratification in the natural world in a manner that would not reflect some kind of anthropocentric bias about how such systems  are organized and function. It will only be with the encounter of similar but alternative such systems, it seems now only through the discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence, that we will be able to escape this problem fo anthropological relativity. We can predict that the likelihood exists that other similar systems will eventually be found and will emerge in the universe. These systems arose on earth as stochastically as the rain that falls under the right conditions of humidity, temperature and vapor pressure. In other words, given the right sequences of events leading up to such developments, and given the right set of conditional event structures, the repeated emergence of similar alternative systems should become available.

We know that biological systems are probably pretty rare in the universe, though in an infinite universe, thesesystems may themselves be infinite in number, though they are few and far between by our own standards. We can predict that for all the physical mass in the universe, only a very infinitesimal fraction of this mass at any one time will exist in the form of a living system. And we can also reasonably estimate that human-type systems are rare in biological history--after all, in the 3.5 billion year history of life on earth, they appear to have arisen only within less than a 3.5 million year framework, and the real evidence of human symbolic culture, primarily within the last 35 thousand years. The odds are probably pretty long indeed on the multiple, independent occurrence of intelligent, cultural constructing species of life within close proximity to one another in time and place. It is likely that if contact is to be made between different intelligent species in the universe, if this is what they can even be called, then it is mostly likely that the most advanced system will initiate and achieve discovery of other systems first. In our quest for alien intelligence and extra-terrestrial forms of life, if we do not receive some intelligent signal, then we can assume that the rarity value of human-type systems only increases with increasing time and space, and that we may after all be very near the top of the natural pyramid of systems, if not uniquely upon the top. The systems of life that we would encounter in such a case are likely to be those that have not yet evolved to higher forms of intelligent functioning, and which would probably be quite incapable of initiating contact with us.

On the other hand, if and when a different alien species initiates contact with us, we can assume almost by default that such a species will probably be more advanced in terms of its scientific civilization and possibly evolutionarily more intelligent than ourselves. We are then likely to find ourselves overmatched and outwitted, though I could not see why such a contest would have to lead to violence or be destructive unless such a species had imperial or colonial pretensions in mind. More likely, we are likely to find such  a species more curious and fascinated with us than we are with them anyway,  or at least there should be a reciprocal relationship of mutual interest and a desire to establish communication not only across species boundaries, but across the boundaries of totally different kinds of life-systems.

How exotic might cosmo-genic species be compared to species original to the earth system? There is some convincing reasons to suggest that such life-forms may not be too different after all from ourselves. Many examples of convergent evolution demonstrate functional stream-lining to standard forms that represent optimal adaptive solutions to particular contexts. It can be assumed that an intelligent creature would have large brains, and probably bilateral symmetry, such that the brains would be located in the head, and there would be sets of appendages, probably, like mammals, four in number, etc. There is reason to think as well that some form of sophisticated communication system based on sound would have been evolved, and that the creatures would be social like ourselves, etc. There is also reason to think that such a system would be carbon-based and would respire oxygen, etc., because there are chemical principles in organic chemistry that determine these to also be optimal kinds of solutions to problems of chemical energy requirements necessary for the metabolism of living systems.

The degree to which variation of pattern may be involved, and at what level, in the formation of different kinds of biological systems may depend as much upon the bio-geophysical substrate of the planet on which such forms take hold, as upon anything else. Also, it is clear that we do not clearly know the degree to which biological systems are stochastically and complexly underdetermined as systems. On a genetic level of organization, living systems in fact appear to be highly determined. Chaos occurs at each higher level, at the level of organismic systems and super-organic systems. Still, it is next to impossible to say in any definitive manner how much of the variation we encounter in life forms and patterns has been due purely to chance and how much to a kind of blind evolutionary problem solving that leads to a convergence of similar kinds of results.

We can in other words expect a broad convergence of form and function, composition and metabolism, of life that has undergone independent bio-genesis in other places of the universe. At the same time we can expect many particular divergences along certain trait lines, and this may even take some surprising and unexpected twists and turns of the evolutionary rope.

Whatever such creatures may look like, what will count will be the organization and functioning of their brains and their intelligence. In this, we must ask how much their cognitive processes will be like that of human beings, and how different may it all be. It cannot be though that the organization of brain function of such creatures would be similar or exactly like that of human beings, nor even the patterning of brain function follow the same neural pathways, etc. The critical issue, I believe, would be in what we might call the structure of thought of such creatures. Would their mental organization resemble ours in some ways and not in others? We would expect, out of necessity, that such a pattern of organization would be fundamentally symbolic as our own can be said to be, but this symbolic structure may not precisely match our own symbolic patterns of consciousness and knowledge organization.

We will not be able to describe human-type systems in any other way than by using our own anthropological examples until if and when we actually do encounter some alien form of intelligence in the universe. The best we can accomplish in the interim is to study the systems of other intelligent life forms on earth, like primates, cetaceans, and other mammals in particular that demonstrate some remarkable qualities of intelligence. This is at best a partial solution to the problem, because none of these other forms of life exhibit what can be called true language, culture or symbolic cognition. By "true" of course we are led back to the same basic conundrum of our own anthropological relativity, because whatever is considered "true" is done so only from implicit comparison to human language, culture and cognition.

We can assume that other human-type systems will resemble our own in some basic ways, and will probably be quite different from our own in many other, especially derivative respects. The model of human-type systems that we develop from an objective description of anthropological realities can be said to be more-or-less applicable to all human-type systems, to the extent that we are able to control the bias of the anthropological relativity of our own point of view. This anthropological relativity is not just a matter of an anthropocentric world-view and attitudes that overvalue our own constructions of reality. It is a matter that affects the very way we perceive and conceive of reality, and how we construct and do our sciences.