INTRODUCTION

Systems philosophy, or the philosophy of systems, was first defined by Ludwig von Bertalanffy as the "reorientation of thought and world view ensuing from the introduction of "system" as a new scientific paradigm" (1968: xxi) which he contrasts with the "analytic, mechanistic, one-way causal paradigm of classical science" (ibid.) He refers to the General System Theory as a new paradigm from a Kuhnian perspective or as a new philosophy of nature, as an "organismic outlook of the 'word as a great organization.'"

1. Systems Ontology asks the question of what "systems" mean and how are they realized at different levels of the observation of the world. He idenfifies real systems as those inferrable from observation with an objective existence independent of the observer, compared to conceptual systems that are symbolic constructs, of which abstracted systems are a subclass of conceptual systems with some degree of correspondence to real systems.

2. Systems Epistemology is the organization of knowledge arising from the investigation of wholes and of systems, requiring "new categories of interaction, transaction, organization, teleology, etc., with many problems arising for epistemology, mathematical models and techniques."(1969: xxii) Percepts are not merely reflections of "real things"(themselves of ambiguous metaphysical status.) and knowledge or concepts are not merely approximations of either "Truth" or "Reality." The interaction between knower and what is known, is ultimately dependent upon many factors of culture, language, psychology, biology, and the fundamental interdependence of observer and observation, even in physics, requires a "something more" philsophy of "perspective" versus a "nothing-but" physics-based analytical reductionism.

3. Systems Value Philosophy or systems-based normative ethics or humanistic meat-ethics concerns the reevaluation and redefinition of the human being as principal "knower" in relations between people as knowers and the world or reality as the principle object and objective of our knowledge. The image of humankind in a hierarchical world of organized wholes becomes different, with different moral implications, from that of the analytical dissection. "Rather, the world of symbols, values, social entities and cultures is something very 'real'; and its embeddedness in a cosmic order of hierarchies is apt to bridge the opposition of C.P. Snow's 'Two Cultures' of science and the humanities…"(1969: xxiii)

Systems philosophy is further defined as the study of the development of systems emphasizing design and the analysis of root causes, and characterized by the introduction of general principles and dealing with many metaphysical questions relating to cognitive science, intelligence, complex systems and cybernetics. Systems philosophy is considered a form of systems thinking in systems science, founded by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and alternatively called General System Theory. He categorized three domains of systemics or the science of systems (the emerging field of the scientific study of holistic systems):

Bela H. Banathy later modified this to a fourfold model including:1 philosophy, 2. Science, which together constitute the knowledge of systems, 3. Methodology, and 4. the Action of systems, which includes methodology of application of systems.

According to systems philosophy, there are no systems in nature because nature cannot describe itself. Conceptual systems are developed as systems models for accurately describing and explaining the human environment. Any system model has therefore an arbitrary conceptual boundary for purposes of analysis and comprehension. Arbitrariness of conceptual models of systems implies no previous dependency of the model, with the assumption that natural reality is objective and a priori to our observation of its pattern, however biased by our subjectivity.

Systems are thus defined by arbitrary identification of elements or terms and definitions referring to things in reality (measures, descriptors), relationships between elements, wholes and rules associated with systems describing how relationships between elements occur and function as wholes. Change any element, boundary or rule in a system and a new system is produced.

There are key problems dealing with fundamental structures and processes of space-time and gravitation, with the macro-scale organization of matter and energy in the universe as possibly a complex metastate system, with the proto-genesis of living systems, and the rise of multiple intelligent systems and alternative life forms in the universe, that require some degree of resolution and clarity of understanding from a systems perspective.

These general problems are not unrelated to one another nor to the more general concern of providing a common systems framework that would be sufficient for explanatory understanding of a wide range of natural phenomena in the world within the common aegis of central theory.

These kinds of problems are also not unrelated to concerns of human adaptation and survival within the next few decades. It can be said that general systems as knowledge systems are human centered and human derived, and our comprehension and conception of the natural word, upon whatever level our attention may focus, relates directly to our capacity to adapt, survive and construct new alternative systems in the world. The problem of general systems as a framework for the explanation of natural organization and pattern phenomena in our shared world ultimately cannot be separated from the general problem of human systems of knowledge and organization in that world.[1]

One problem of our knowledge systems seems to be that until know, most human knowledge systems remain defined and constrained more by our own ignorance of what we do not really know for certain, than by our understanding that is relatively certain in our knowledge. In other words, what we think we know is often a prejudice based upon what we do not yet really know, and may never know for certain.

"Systems" is a grand philosophical metaphor really for the human organization of reality. Simply put, natural reality is organized, sine qua non, as systems upon systems upon systems, and systems of systems of systems, as we know and understand this to be. Nowhere may we observe natural phenomena without observing the cause, consequence and action of systems, large and small, by themselves and interacting with other systems, in a manner truly independent of our own knowledge that we bring to the observation and interpretation.

Though we are hard pressed to explain scientifically how or why these systems came into being, especially in the first place, we need invoke no sense of arbitrary or deliberate intervention or creation--systems by their own definition may be accounted for as fully stochastic, statistical phenomena that arise as the consequence of the chance concatenation of complex factors.[2] To posit any other sense of order to natural phenomena, to posit some sense of predetermination to physical event structure, is to create ideological explanations and knowledge systems that remain incontestably true, that cannot be demonstrated true or false one way or another. The assumption of a priori randomness is tantamount to stating "in the beginning, all other things being equal…"

Everywhere nature is encountered, from the very small to the very very large, it is found to occur in terms best described as "systems" of one kind or another, all interacting. There are different kinds of systems that happen, perhaps infinite. The most remarkable, and for many, incredible, thing, is that systems, wherever they are found, are all "self-organizing" and the product of the chance concatenation of relations and interactions that give rise to superorganic or emergent properties, by which systems become identified and characterized. So stable are some of these kinds of systems, like cells or atoms, that other systems become composed of them upon another level, like organisms or molecules, and all this wonderful and wonderfully ordered organization is ultimately the chance by-product of randomly occurring events.[3]

Though systems ultimately arise from randomly occurring patterns, the patterning produced by systems is anything but randomly occurring. Systems vary greatly to the extent that their patterning may be said to be random or deterministic.

General system science is the objective study of systems in nature and reality, in whatever manifestation they may occur, in order to discover the underlying properties and causes that serve to explain the behavior, origin and outcome of these systems as well as their developmental trajectories over the course of time. The laws of thermodynamics are really fundamental systems-based principles applied to the mechanical behavior of all physical systems in relation to heat and energy. The universality of these principles to all physical systems reflects directly the universality and universal applicability of systems principles, but systems principles comprehend a far broader range of behavior and pattern in reality than merely those explained by thermodynamics.[4]

No system occurs in isolation or a vacuum. No system occurs spontaneously by itself without being based upon prior factors. All systems that occur happen within a metasystems context of their occurrence in complex interaction and relationship with other systems, whether these systems are contemporaneous or whether they came before in time.

There is a logical coerciveness about the temporal relationship between systems. For one system to influence another, there must be a time-line of cause and effect between the two systems. This time-line is sometimes cyclical and periodic, sometimes recurrent, and sometimes not. Indeed, systems are remarkable for their periodicities of relationship to a larger environment, almost always involving other systems.

It is the random event, the event that happens entirely by chance, that is non-recurring and non-periodic, that then becomes of greater interest. What is unique and different about any given system that occurs is precisely what is random and variable about that system and that kind of system. And we know that in some measure or another all systems are underdetermined in the sense that they have have unique characteristics and variabilities of patterning not shared by any other system. This uniqueness of pattern is a function of the multi-factorial variabilility of that pattern.

From a scientific standpoint our universe and our reality may be said to be a single huge "metasystem" or a systems based framework of the partial integration and articulation of all systems that occur in reality or that may occur in reality. We do not yet know the boundaries of all that may occur as systems in our collective reality.[5]

In dealing with physical systems, I have put forward a theory of the dynamic state universe that is at fundamental odds with the predominant contemporary paradigm of the Gamowian Big Bang, and that is based upon the notion of quintessential energy underlying the dynamic structure of space-time and the organization of the atom. I've found too many logical inconsistencies and contradictions in Big Bang thinking to accept it as a reasonable or even parsimonious view of our cosmos and its cosmogony. The proton appears to be a vary stable entity in the universe, the building block of matter, but it appropriately and universally appears to lead a double life, switching as part of a nucleonic pair with its partner neutron--if charge is the only thing separating a neutron from a proton, then we must ask serious questions about the identity of either or both. To say that all protons were created in the "instant" soon after the Big Bang is to avoid searching for alternate reasonable explanations for how so many protons, the constituent ingredient of omnipresent hydrogen and helium gas and the building block of all matter, could be made at once, in an almost singular instant, to be blasted in the following instants more or less evenly across the entire universe.

I've argued that new protons are probably being continuously produced in prodigious quantities in the bowels of our sun, and in all other stars, and these protons are shed off in the form of solar wind into the surrounding regions, to the tune of 11 percent of the volume of the Sun per Earth year, for the entire life of the Sun which is presumably around 10 billion years. I have assumed that the universe is probably far larger and far older than anyone seems to want to give it credit for. We can currently peer back more than 14 billion light-years in any direction from our earth's vantage point, and though we are reaching now with the resolution of our newest telescopes a breadth and depth of space-time that makes for an observational sphere some 28-30 billion light-years in diameter, we assume that we are getting closer and closer to the original Big Bang itself. The quantity and shear mass and volume of the matter contained within this observational sphere is so vast that it is virtually incomprehensible, and, by deduction, we can conclude that the inferrable sphere of the universe based upon our observation is probably far larger than this, and hence encompassing an even greater volume and mass of matter.

If the matter beneath our feet, in the core of our own earth, as well as in all the other planets, could only have been produced within the forges of stars like our sun long since extinct, and if these forges were long lived, and possibly smaller on average than they are today, then we can conclude by another route of deduction that the universe had a beginning stretching back at least ten's of billions of years before our own Sun's beginning, and that the rocks beneath our feet are made of atoms far older than we may even want to imagine, during some previous star's lifetime. We are talking about a universe at least twice as large and twice as old as current Big Bang theorists hypothesize, and possibly many times older and larger based upon logical inductive inference.

And to try to go back to some kind of very early state of the universe, when the first pristine matter was being formed, I have hypothesized the regular occurrence in space-time of areas of convergence, simulating strong gravitational forces, like a cyclone of space-time, that results in becoming a "white-source" (possibly Quasars) that produces prodigous quantities of light energy and hydrogen nuclei simultaneously and spontaneously.

I would suggest the possibility that the universe may be growing steadily and exponentially in space-time and that the common size and number of celestial objects in the remote beginnings were far smaller and fewer than what they have become, and that the number of larger objects is increasing as time goes by. By this hypothetical dynamic state universe, new hydrogen and new matter is being produced regularly and in prodigious and increasing quantities in the universe, based upon an infinite supply of fundamental energy. Infinite growth of new matter in an infinite universe would still entail the universe remaining infinitely "empty."

In terms of living or biological systems, we must ask what were the most probable proto-biotic conditions that gave rise eventually, against the odds, to the first "protokaryote" and resulting in a steady process of simple binary reproduction that resulted eventually in the evolutionary differentiation of all extant life forms we find today or in the fossil record, and that has had a steady transforming influence on its metabiotic context of the earth's biosphere? We must ask now, on the verge of discovery in space both within and outside our solar system, how common might life really be in our galaxy, and might there not alternative pathways of development that such life might follow? We may furthermore speak of ecological successionary evolution and taxonomic cycling and replacement of biotic systems?

In terms of intelligent life, like ourselves, we must ask whether if our kind of symbolic intelligence would be the norm or standard by which to compare and evaluate alien forms of intelligence. Would the evolution of such intelligence be so rare that the emergence of intelligent civilization in the universe reamins so far apart and remote from one another that there would be no hope of ever achieving contact, much less consistent communication, between civilizations and intelligent species?

Humankind still quests for a science of humankind, and a scientific understanding of humanity and inhumanity. It seems that we can have a kind of human science if we are willing to relax our standards of predictability and parsimony somewhat, and learn to deal with the complexity inherent to human level systems, with its arbitrariness of structure, its willfulness, and its contradictoriness, without being able to result to formulaic or monothetic solutions.[6]

As our knowledge of topics and of the reality of our world grows and improves, as we progress in our sciences, we have become able to apply our knowledge to systems in new ways that did not previously exist, thus inventing and discovering new possibilities, and creating new realities as a result. Once original solutions to basic problems are achieved, functional streamlining of systems follows steadily and at an accelerating pace. Manned flight was but a fiction more than a fact not a hundred years ago. Once the principles of the air-foil and lift and drag were worked out, flight became easily achieved and our means of flight developed rapidly with the decades. Computing was a possibility achieved with the cryptographic and decryption efforts of World War II. Now supercomputing potential is available in the palms of people's hands.

We cannot know nor ever preclude all that may be possible or not. Our vision of our world, and our undestanding of how it works, is bound to change as we learn more and invent more solutions to the problems that confront us in our quest for understanding.

It is clear, as well, and this is perhaps the main point of this work, that knowledge, particularly realistic scientific knowledge, is critical and paramount to successful human adaptation and survival in the world. We long ago left behind the paradise and ignorance of a completely natural state of being, unmuddled as yet by our own sense of order and deliberate purpose. We have increasingly taken onto ourselves godlike powers to willfully and arbitrarily manipulate, constuct and destroy our world, including ourselves and each other within it. We seek new knowledge because we cannot now do otherwise, for new knowledge offers us the promise of long-term adaptation and survival as well as the possiblity for mass destruction of our world.

To refuse or deny such knowledge is to commit ultimately an act of treason against our own sense of humanity and our hisory. For with new knowledge comes the inevitable attendant responsibilities to act according to the dictates and conclusions that our knowledge entails, in a reasonable and rational manner. To do otherwise constitutes a form of criminal neglect against the promise of our future shared civilization.

Thus, in seeking to bring systems into the fold of science, and science into the realm of systems-thinking, I have sought not to dichotomize the world for which it is intended, and, somewhat like eastern religious and socio-political philosophies, not to separate the preaching from the practice. Pure and applied problems and approaches go hand-in-hand and not only entail but necessitate one another. There are central problems that confront contemporary humankind in terms of their future adaptation and survival and we as human beings can not much longer afford to ignore or avoid asking or seeking solutions to these kinds of problems. Problems informing pure theoretical and methodological concerns in natural systems and metasystems research inform as well as are informed by related problems of alternative application that address central concerns of human adaptation, both upon earth and beyond.

If humankind is to achieve its destiny, the promise of its higher-order symbolic intelligence and the possibilities of its advanced civilization, not just in weaponry, but in values, then we must reach for the stars, and in the process, learn how to survive and adapt to a life that is lived in space, beyond the gravitational and geo-ecological boundaries of the earth. And we must take the lessons that we learn from our ventures into space and reapply these back upon earth in the redefinition of our relationship with our native, home planet. There are to be found in space too many examples of dead planets and so far, only a single example of a living one.

Humans have collectively earned the responsibility for stewardship on earth of the biosphere, by the rampant and rapacious squandering of so many of earth's finite and precious resources, for the protection and conservation of all life forms that are extant on earth, and have the responsibility for carrying this life into space in a sustainable manner. We are talking of a space ark that would carry life to far-away places.

An important part of scientific investigation is the discovery of universal laws and precepts that govern fundamental relations in the world. Most of this deals of course with physical systems and is the purview therefore of one form of physics or another. Philosophy is no longer looked at as being a significant contributor to the dialogue about the structure of physical reality, and there is thus a sense of living in a kind of dichotomous world in which physical worldview and metaphysical worldview operate in separate and non-congruent spheres, or, as C.P. Snow, wrote, "Cultures." It is perhaps true that physicists may need philosophers, objective philosophers, for world vision at least as much as philosophers may need physicists to retain a sense of objectivity.

Theories once received as generally universal will in time become embedded in emerging frameworks of knowledge as "special covering law models," and new candidates to claim the title of universality will emerge from the woodwork. This is to be expected as a normal pattern of the history of development of ideas and new knowledge, particularly in sciences where there is some sense of a track-record of intellectual achievements, a working comparative baseline and hence of definitive sense of progress achieved in the long run.

Universal systems theory may effectively bridge the gulf between "blind" physicists and "crippled" philosophers. It may serve to revitalize the role of philosophy for science, and to simultaneously open the minds of scientists who are otherwise bound to rather narrow sets of purposes in the world. If events in the physical world appear to organize themselves in terms that are describable as systems, and if "systems" are good to think about "things" that lend themselves wonderfully to abstract elaboration and reason, then they may provide just the common ground that is needed to effect some kind of amnesty and remarriage between the physics and philosophy, and in a larger sense, between mind and body and in an academic sense the sciences and the humanities.

The problems of modern worldview have developed in large part because the scientists and the philosophers quit talking with one another, and could find no common ground any longer to communicate. The former were alleged to be "value free" or at least "neutral" on the topic of values, while the latter were confined to a prison of values, from which there could be no escape, except perhaps through nihilism. I think there is hope for a renewal of a contract between science and philosophy when we can have a truly secular worldview in which values are important but ultimately unnecessary if we are to understand and comprehend reality. Secretly, scientists were loath to let go of religion, or a default resort to an explanation "by God." when all else might fail. Philosophers, the original atheists and secularists of the world, were put into a prison by "God fearing" theists. Whatever the case may have been, it is clear that hope for a unified and unitary worldview can only best be restored when and if scientists and philosophers resume a meaningful dialog on meaningful issues that transcend questions of value.

We may begin by asserting that in the structure of reality, all event structures are organized as systems, or as parts of systems, or as the product of systems or their parts. Therefore, all events may be accounted for in terms of the systems that they are a part of. Any explanation of natural event structure we may make, if the event structure demonstrates a sense of order and determination, must be found a relevant and relative systems framework that is appropriate to its explanation.

The happy reunion of philosophy and science in terms of universal systems theory would be productive of new models and potential experiments in answering key questions and problem areas of science that may only be approachable through a systems-based methodology. Key questions at all levels of the natural and human sciences might be thus reframed and reformulated in a productive manner. Potentially, any problem set can be recast from a systems based perspective, but the application of such a framework allows us to go after especially complex and central problem sets that have been key issues in general theoretical development.

Natural philosophy, as I develop it, deals primarily with what can be called objective physical reality--this is the "hard" reality of the senses that lies beyond the reach of our own subjective attitudes and knowledge that reflect and represent this reality. This reality also extends beyond socially constructed and shared systems of knowledge representation and belief, including especially ideologies and other symbologies by which people organize their view of the world. Natural philosophy is therefore a central concern of science, and science at least in theory should be a primary concern of natural philosophy.

The trick and dilemma of natural philosophy is to get beyond the anthropological relativity of our own knowledge systems in relation to objective reality. In essence, reality is held to be a-priori structured by rules and principles that are only derivable from observation in relation to reason. Both observation and reason tend to be conditioned by the language and knowledge systems within which these are framed. Therefore, these limits will present forms of bias about objective reality that must be overcome.

It can be said that natural philosophy is a philosophy about science or of science, both in terms of its praxis and knowledge systems, as well as in terms of its principle subject matter, which is the patterning and order of natural phenomena at all levels that this is encountered through observation and experimentation.

At the same time, a claim can be made that natural philosophy comprehends more than merely scientific knowledge. All forms of knowledge, to the extent that they are themselves natural systems, or at least reflect cultural realities that occur as natural systems, can be said to be of interest in some manner to natural philosophy. Natural philosophy therefore exhibits a comprehensiveness of perspective and interest in a wider world that transcends the mundane and common place, and this makes it potentially a very powerful and useful perspective to maintain.

A key aspect of the development of natural philosophy is the rational justification of a naturalistic approach to human experience, whether this is understood in subjective or objective form. Such a naturalistic approach to the experience of reality is to be contrasted with other possible and more conventional kinds of approaches, especially religious or ideological claims to fundamental truths.

An important consideration in this regard is what can be considered to be the ontological status of "truth" within a naturalistic framework, versus some other "idealist" perspective. Truth in the former sense is something that remains implicit to, tacit to or latent within the order of the patterning that is observed in nature, but is nowhere obvious or directly manifest in the observation or the thing observed itself. It is to be equated with "scientific truth," although the latter is based primarily upon empirical and inductive elucidation and experimentation. Such truth reflects a kind of conceptual system, or a metaphysic and an epistemology, about the way the world works independently of our own involvement or influence within it. Though all knowledge is humanly constructed and therefore there is no such thing as truth that is independent of our involvement in its construction, there remains a sense that, though we were not present in the universe to observe and make sense of the world, the world would still continue on in its manner independently of ourselves or what we can bring to our understanding of it.

Scientific method and theory is founded upon this basic presupposition that allows ourselves to escape the solipsism of our own anthropological relativity of knowledge. It is our capacity to experience life in a vicarious sense, to possibly realize what a cow or a crow might be thinking or feeling, to recognize that a mouse or even an earthworm may have its own separate and autonomous view of the world that is not entirely robotic or merely spontaneous, but reflects some limited amount of conscious awareness in the world, that provides us the mentality by which to seek and define what we can call scientific truth. It follows that truth is always relative to our understanding of it and can never be known in a complete or absolute sense.

The human brain is a sense making organ, and the kind of sense it makes of the world is symbolic and uniquely human.

In the Western tradition, precedents for a natural philosophy may be found in Aristotle and later in Francis Bacon. Numerous others have made contributions to a philosophy of nature. It is interesting that Bacon found Aristotle mostly wanting and wrong in his ideas, and it is true that most of Bacon's philosophy is found wanting and wrong in very similar ways. Any modern natural philosophy must take fully into account the role and function of scientific knowledge in the world, and how this has shaped our modern worldview at many different levels of knowledge integration.

We no longer expect to be bled if we are ill with fever, and we no longer find the sun spinning around the earth. Science has provided us realistic answers and solutions about the world, about how it works and why, that any previous philosophy failed to provide. There was no way that philosophy, if left alone without some empirical framework for the testing and evaluation of ideas, could have been sufficient to the task of understanding and giving a sense of order to nature as we human beings encounter it. And yet, science by itself, without philosophy, stands as conceptually weak and narrow minded--incapable of seeing beyond the narrow bounds of any particular data set to the shared realities beyond.

Science has not destroyed philosophy. It has only created a new intellectual niche within which philosophy must define itself. Philosophical systems of conception are separate from and interdependent with empirical frames of knowledge, or what we might call taxonomic or classificatory systems upon which descriptions of reality are mounted. Albert Einstein in his own autobiographical script, distinguishes between systems of pure conception or abstraction and systems of empirical reality. Of course, the former system of abstraction cannot at any point be contradicted by the latter system, and to be most successful, must permit at some point the augmentation of the latter system.

It follows that while we learn more and more about reality from our experimentation and experiences, our conceptual systems will undergo rapid revision and reorientation. This is the course of routine-operational or "normal" science that bites off small, small pieces of reality to chew at any one time. Of course, there are also those rare but much more dramatic moments of scientific history when entirely new conceptual systems concerning an area of knowlede comes to take the place of whatever knowledge systems occurred before. This replacement of the old school by the new way of thinking is a way of professionally signaling a weather change in a discipline, or what Kuhn has called a scientific revolution or at least a major paradigm shift. A new way of explaining relations between things may provide a platform for an entirely new way of seeing and thinking about the facts within a system.

Theory and evidence of symbolic interactionism strongly suggests that revolutionary perspectives by definition cannot come from the center or common ground of a routine science, but must only emerge from the periphery or margins of the system, by groups or individuals by whose social situation experience some degree of isolation, alienation and alternation from the normal or received view of reality. Those who occupy the center of a field of science and participate in its normal articulation are by social definition unable to entertain alternative points of view that would permit the development of new modes of conceptual thinking and operational procedures to emerge from the "rank and file."

We may say therefore that the system as it has been created in a certain dominant idiom, will not be capable in the final analysis of resolving the problems and contradictions that arise because of its attachment to this idiom, and must eventually fall by the wayside to be replaced like decaying carcasses with new idioms of science.

Natural philosophy as I have sought to develop this emanates from a systems theoretic perspective that rose to a peak of popularity in the 1970's in various disciplines and then waned afterward with what can be called a "post-structuralist" phase, especially as this applied in the humanities and the social sciences. Hence, natural philosophy seeks to secure the metaphysical and epistemological underpinnings of natural systems theory.

I believe that natural systems theory remains the most appropriate model for the articulation of the sciences in general as a comprehensive theoretical approach, and is therefore necessary for the development of an adequate and competent worldview that can be called fully scientific. First, it is a holistic approach that permits a broad complementarity of analytical perspectives. Secondly, it presupposes the analysis of pattern and structure from the data such that "structure" can be at least statistically derived, which structure should result in the development of a rule-based paradigm of understanding governing the relations of the hypothetical "system" in question.

This derivation is both inductive and deductive, or what might be referred to as historically abductive, in that it depends both upon the capacity to infer order and pattern from phenomena, and also that it superimposes constructed symbolic frames of reference upon this pattern, which becomes then tested (post-historically, if need be) for goodness of fit. A systems approach therefore allows for a greater deal of flexibility as well as specification in the articulation of knowledge. Because anything and everything may be a system or at least a part of some system, and because all systems are at least hypothetically and indirectly related to one another, the contextual development of the understanding of the natural surroundings of the system is equal in importance and explanatory power to an understanding of the system itself in terms of any possible internal dynamics.

Systems science is therefore a kind of mechanics, statics and dynamics of naturally occurring phenomena, at whatever level these phenomena may occur upon. The wonderful aspect of our reality from A to Z is that it demonstrates, without exception, an amazing and always beautiful patterning of order and regularity that in its complexity defies simplistic explanation and in its simplicity defies complex description. The paradox of natural ordering is that it is on one hand chaotic and on the other always ordered and these two contraposed tendencies interpenetrate on another on every level and in almost every manifestation of its patterning.

The study of systems really becomes a study of systematics, or what can be called dynamic change within systems that demonstrate some form of transformational order.

Natural philosophy is a form of general thinking that deals with the relations of the natural world, and the relations of humankind within this natural world. The basis for a natural philosophy is the acceptance of ordered pattern in reality that is independent of our own awareness of this order, and yet which also underlies our awareness and sense of order. Natural sets and classes occur as a result of this patterning that embody the structural relations contained within and between them, and these sets constitute the statistically derivable basis for an objective knowledge and understanding of human reality upon which we depend in order to have a realistic view of the world.

Anthropological relativity of knowledge creates an inherent degree of uncertainty that we bring to our knowledge systems, and presents a basic kind of constraint to the articulation and progress these systems achieve. We cannot escape in our knowledge systems this horizon of relativity, but we can through deductive inference and careful observation both expand this horizon and also gain some degree of visibility of form and pattern of the otherwise unknown beyond.

Natural philosophy situates all human knowledge systems in the anthropological and natural substrata of human reality, and seeks to explain its constructive, integrative and adaptive functions in this reality, primarily in terms of its symbolic structure and design. Human reality can therefore be said to constitute a subset of the larger natural world, or what can be called physical reality. It is therefore a part of this larger reality, and not effectively separable from it.[7]

I put forth the claim that a natural philosophy underlies and justifies natural systems theory and metasystems science. Natural philosophy provides the symbolic integration and rationalization for the conduct of these approaches to reality. Unlike other philosophical systems, natural philosophy arises from a claim about the ontological status of meaning and being as these are constituted in an objectively real framework of reality that is at least inferentially non-human in its independent patterning and underlying sense of order. Natural philosophy thus constitutes a form of logical empiricism and inductivism about reality that combines as well a statement about the non-arbitrary nature of a certain class of knowledge, namely that expressed in mathematical relationships and processes, as being non-relative to the human knower and also essentially non-real in physical reality.

Natural philosophy is rooted to a naturalistic conception of reality as existing "out there" independent of our ability to apprehend or comprehend it. In fact, our ability to understand reality depends critically upon the innate ordering of processes and relationships in external reality, as this sense of order both underlies our own sense-making capabilities, and provides as well the primary reference points by which we can make sense of the world in a non-arbitrary manner.

Natural patterning in physical reality occurs independently and separately from the hman experience or apprehension of this pattern.

All patterning in reality forms natural orders of relationship that can be apperceptively apprehended and comprehended in some logical manner.

This ordering of natural patterning is stratified upon many different levels that are capable of being hierarchically organized.

The apprehension of logical ordering of natural patterning coheres in the form of human knowledge systems that represent the order in the form of testable, theoretical models.

In general, valid theoretical comprehension of such patterning will permit an organization of this patterning upon their respective levels in such as manner as to make the theoretical underpinnings implicit to the resulting taxonomy, and to enable predictions or conclusive statements to be made that subsequently prove to be true.

Natural patterning itself will always tend to be underdetermined in character, hence complex and historically chaotic in its state-path trajectories and development.

The human mind and human thought is also a natural system that arose within an evolutionary context as a complex set of trait adaptations to survival.

The human mind and human thought, being based upon cellular interactions in the brain, therefore follows natural ordering processes that constitutes a system capable of being logically understood and explained in all its phases in terms of a knowledge system.

All meaning and being are constructed symbolically and behaviorally in human reality.

All meaning and being in human reality can be said to be constructed in complex ways.

1. It is socially constructed: it is situated and made real in social relations and interactions.

2. It is psychologically constructed: it is subjectively embodied and rationalized in terms of personal experience and interests.

3. It is linguistically constructed: it is encoded, expressed and evaluated in terms that are primarily linguistic.

4. It is culturally constructed: it is sanctioned by implicit and explicit norms of belief and behavior.

All meaning and being in human reality becomes epistemologically constructed in the form of knowledge systems that have several possible functions in the mediation of reality.

Science has an interest in constructing objective-based systems of knowledge that serve to explain and fully account for the natural patterning that is observable in human reality.

Human reality defines a subset of physical reality and the limits of our knowledge systems. Scientifically defined knowledge systems permit us to make inferential statements about the larger physical reality in a manner that is directly unavailable to our normal ways of knowing, thus permitting an expansion of our systems of knowledge and a broadening as well as an intensification of the range of experience that is comprehended in human reality.

Natural philosophy can be said to be a system of thought about physical reality that underlies and accounts for natural systems theory. The basis for natural philosophy is the notion that all of reality, however experienced, is unified and integral to itself. It essentially exists independently of any individual's experience of it, though it universally incorporates all individuals' possible experiences within it. It is all containing of, not contained by, the structure of thought itself. Thought is a by-product of its patterning and its structure. Thought is epigenetic to the development of natural order in reality, and yet our only means of apperceptively apprehending reality or its structure is by means of our thought and the sense of conscious awareness that we bring to the essential experience of reality.

This imposes a basic constraint upon our knowledge and ability to know reality, and this constraint I have termed the anthropological relativity of human knowledge, whatever form or variety it takes. Natural philosophy therefore shares this basic sense of relativity, and even directly identifies it in a cogent manner, but the reference points of natural philosophy are not in the processes of thought or the conceptual models that are built up by means of thought, but the presumed reality to which this thought gains validity or otherwise.

From this standpoint, we can claim that even human thinking is a natural process that is a product of brain function and communication within a culturally carpentered environment. The understanding of the patterning and order of knowledge therefore requires a naturalistic description of knowledges as these are situated, organized and articulated in reality. Knowledge has been an historical and to a great extent a trans-cultural achievement of humankind that was built up over years of trial and error. It thus constitutes a special kind of noetic construction of reality, a part of what can be called a larger system of worldview.

The worldview contained within much of knowledge can be said to be intrinsic and implicit to the knowledge in its noetic organization. Such knowledge implies relational order to a larger system of ideas that is at once both integrated and yet underdetermined. We can say that natural knowledge systems that are not deliberately set under a single ideological umbrella tend to be mostly self-organized. The degree to which such self-organization occurs in knowledge systems can be remarkable given the fact that at no point in the development of such systems was it ever cleary an intentional affair on the part of some single individual.

This integration links the cognitive world, otherwise solipsistic and psychologically relative, to the larger social order of shared and variegated constructs. This process can be said to underlie and form the basis of cultural integration of reality. If we are to seek cultural integration in terms of shared systems of belief and behavior, systems that are internally integrated, then we must see these systems as having a cultural basis and process in reality.

The internal integration of knowledge systems can be found clearly evident in semantics and linguistic patterns within a shared and common language pattern. It makes possible what has been referred to as the remarkable phenomenon of native speaker intuition and it is the basis for the achievement of common sense, knowledge and consensual meanings in society. How a society arrives at such agreement of meaning structures, even of the terms themselves, is not fully explained except in the sense that it was achieved through many generations of communicative exercise and change.

The other facet of this aspect of integration is that the meanings and words that express them are a part of a complex but extremely flexible and capable symbolic system that appears to be intrinsic to human consciousness, albeit as a process that is essentially acquired. Symbolisms make possible therefore both agreement and disagreement, and ameliorates the sense of contradiction that may arise between different interpretations of the same events or experiences. In fact, the symbolic function of language and meaning makes complete or perfect agreement not only unnecessary, but probably undesirable as well. Symbolisms can be said to have therefore a nonspecialized or general function of description of reality without resort to the factual unpacking of a detail accounting of that reality. It is therefore acceptable that not everyone in the world sees the same color patterns in order to share the same terms for what they do see.

This is clearly evident for instance, among Jetty informants who reported certain colors, like orange, violet and brown, somewhat ambiguously. It was not that they were not all seeing approximately the same sets of wavelengths or combinations of colors. It was that they were interpreting what they were seeing in different ways, though they could be said to have a remarkably high degree of cultural consonance and coherence otherwise. In this instance, we cannot clearly separate the perception of the color category that leads to its naming or identification, from the conception of the category itself that relates it primarily to other colors as well as to other things that are similarly colored. The perception of color is therefore critically prestructured by the conceptual system within which its semantic and associational values are made coordinate and meaningful in the lifeworld of the informant.

This is referred to in the literature as perceptual constancy of form. I believe that in human consciousness at least that there are no truly naïve or directly apprehended sense perceptions that are not on some level unconsciously or consciously "prestructured" by experience and mental organization of phenomena. Indeed, it is almost imperative that experience is thus prestructured by the mind, else the multiplicity of signals would produce so much noise and chaos that the individual's cognitive machinery would quickly breakdown.

This is clearly evidenced, for example, in second language acquisition and in situations of crossing language boundaries without fluency in a foreign language. Reception of sound signals in a foreign language is perceptible only as noise and chaos that has no significance to the listener. Native speaker intution, or what might be better called as second listener apprehension, is made possible only by the reflexive comprehension of the signals in the semantic structures and realities that are symbolized and deposited in the language itself.

It is almost equally true in instances of culture shock in which an individual is immersed existentially in a foreign cultural pattern where everyday behaviors and ways of doing things are completely misunderstood upon a basic level. Perceptual experience at all levels is normally ordered by cognitive and symbolic frames of reference. Much of this prestructuring occurs subconsciously and reflexively. In other words, it is automatic to expertise and experience that permits fluency of perceptual recognition and appropriate or adaptive behavioral response.

Where achievement and the possibility of integration occurs can be said to rest upon the stability of "natural classes" and forms that are basic and almost universally shared across cultural boundaries, and in the degree of shared cognitive and symbolic prestructures that are superimposed upon the organization of reality.

The first set of "natural classes" can be said to be rooted in the basic patterns and differences that are frequently observed in the natural ordering of the world. In this case, zoomorphic or botannical forms are much more basic and clearly recognizeable than those that are culturally constructed. I would refer to these natural classes as the universal ground of human experience that forms the substrate of meaning and that makes possible the inter-translation between languages and the meaning systems they encode and express.

The second form of shared symbolic and cognitive constructs can be said to be those basic or derivative schema or models that chunk experience into meaningful categories and that predetermine to some degree the ordered relationships between categories. These forms of internalized constructs are mostly cultural in origin, and tend to vary considerably and widely across cultural boundaries, although there remains a large degree of overlap and common ground in cultural cognitive constructs, that are shared by many different kinds of people.

Knowledge in general, or knowledges in a more specific or applied sense, are thus to be seen as constituting symbolic language systems that have both internalized and external frames of reference, that are culturally shared and transmitted, and that probably have some kind of cognitive function, usually integrative, intermediative or adaptive, in society. We can refer to residual archaic, anachronistic or vestigial knowledge systems that had some former function but have lost their sense of vital purpose in the existing social order. Knowledge systems are said to be integrating of reality as much as they are integrated in and to reality. Knowledge systems are not separate from this reality, but form a basic part of reality and exist in reality. The independence of knowledge from its objective reference in reality is a function both of the arbitrariness of language and its symbolic displacement, and this independence is really only indirect and relative to what is known or expressed as knowledge. Knowledge has a psychological substrate, but it has a social integration and function. Knowledge that does not exist socially as part of the world is knowledge that is doomed for extinction.

Civilized humanity is a humankind whose psychology is socially constituted by means of the social integration of knowledge systems in the form of subjective plausibility structures. A psyche that is socially constituted is one in which the knowledge systems upon which it is organized is historically built up and transmitted through cultural patterning, through interpersonal relations involving sharing and reciprocity. We can refer to this as collective consciousness and collective representations of reality. This is not to say that primitive or primordial peoples did not have psychology that was socially constituted, as a clear case for less individual variation of pattern can be made for such cultural systems compared to more heterogenous and sophisticated social systems, only that the basis for this social constitution of their shared mental framework of knowledge invariably had a basic naturalistic focus that was reflected also in an animistic system of belief. This is reflective of societies that tend to be socially acephalous and relatively unstratified internally at least.

A naturalistic accounting of knowledge systems underlying natural philosophy can be said to be anthropologically situated in the cross-cultural and ethnographic and historical record of humankind. We can even infer it in human archaeological and prehistoric records in the form of organized behavior that produced systematic patterns of artifact assemblies. It is tied to the symbolic organization and function of human language and the meaning systems that it articulates. We can therefore understand its principle constraints of knowledge in terms of the anthropological relativity of meaning as this is constructed in human social reality.

We cannot clearly separate the meaning system from the linguistic system that is used to encode and express meaning. Many meanings would be fundamentally unavailable upon at least a conceptual level if there were no kind of language with which to encode these systems. Language not only facilitates the expression of meaning, but makes meaning possible in any linguistic sense. For example, attempt to think a thought without the use of a the silent language of the mind. It is the reflexive connection of linguistic encoding that precipitates meaningful experience in an organized manner. Language also situates meaning and its construction clearly in a social process and praxis, as language itself is constructed socially through communication and interchange.

Knowledge can therefore be defined as a set of statements in reference to reality, or to some alleged aspect of reality, that is symbolically encoded and functions to mediate and express relationship in reality. Knowledge is based upon facts, statements that point directly to reality in terms of objects, events or processes found to be true in perceived experience, and upon ideas, statements about relational patterns that tie together objects, events and processes along with abstract constructs or symbols that may summarize or stand in place of such experience.

Knowledge coheres into systems of meaning that tend to be symbolically integrated upon a number of different levels simultaneously. It entails that all knowledge is symbolic in character. Received knowledge always functions symbolically and is articulated in the form of symbolism. Knowledge must achieve some minimal sense of coherence within such a symbolic system, which constitutes a kind of implicit or background context for the framing and grounding of knowledge as an ordered, patterned, set of relationships that are capable of being summarized. Knowledge cannot therefore be a loose, odd assortment of facts and ideas that bear no underlying relationship to one another. Knowledge systems therefore can be said to have an underlying sense of order that is implicit to its relational and definitional patterning, and this constitutes the structure of a knowledge system that makes its patterning informationally interesting and predictive.

We can distinguish scientific knowledge systems from all others on the basis of the degree to which these systems utilize the primary constructs of perceptual experience, either directly or indirectly through logically constrained relationships, as the basis for their evaluation and validation. Other systems do not necessarily hold to this stricture so strongly, if at all.

A naturalistic description of knowledge is important to a natural philosophy of reality, because this reality is invariably always "human reality" and because philosophy itself is a special kind of knowledge system with its own functions and forms. We are in other words attempting to get at a relatively unbiased understanding of what a natural philosophy might be in terms of the structure of its own patterning.

Natural reality can be said to be ordered in an a priori sense. This ordering is entirely stochastic, chaotic and self-organizational. But as ordering, it is a rule-based process that means that its sense of order can be made available to our understanding and awareness. Its ordering is independent of our awareness, in fact our awareness depends ultimately upon its sense of ordering in reality.

We, as human beings, are a part of this natural process. We cannot know our larger reality or our place within this larger natural order, except via the vehicle of our own thought structures, and this leaves us with a kind of object-subject dilemma about the structure of reality, or rather, the structure of our knowledge about this reality.

Conceptual systems in human thought share certain affinities and limitations regardless of the field and the differences of framing that occur between these different areas. All conceptual systems are, as knowledge systems, subject to certain ambiguous constraints that are a part of their linguistic and symbolic encoding, and their cultural and social construction.

Conceptual systems in their own right can be powerful tools that can bring theoretical insight and understanding to general problem sets. When coupled with imagination, insight and openness, they can lead to discoveries and understanding of structure underlying the pattern of reality. The role of conceptual development of systems in scientific thought and praxis is not fully appreciated or valued for its potential. Instead, emphasis is placed upon middle-range theory and the development of on the ground, empirical research constructs.

Natural process can be said to be ordered in an entropic manner, which means that all ordered systems in the long run tend toward a state of disorder. Directive inputs of energy are required to drive a disordered system toward greater order, or to maintain a sense of order about a system in spite of the natural tendencies towards disorganization. Order and disorder are relative to one another as complementary and contrastive states. Sense of order or disorder is a residuum of our awareness or consciousness that is based upon the recognition of the pattern contained in the natural processes that we experience.

Natural philosophy constitutes the basis for natural scientific theory and method as a system of conceptualization and knowledge organization. Natural philosophy forms the critical framework for the rationalization and articulation of the sciences, as well as for their symbolic integration. The world, in spite of its scientific advances, has largely gone without a well defined natural philosophy or system of thought that serves to explain its larger relationship to the world.

Natural philosophy is rooted to the proposition that basic rules governing the order of patterning in the universe are implicit to this patterning and define its structure in a repetitive and transformative sense. Based upon these rules, there is a tendency for natural patterning of phenomena to form organized sets and systematic relations that becomes the basis for what can be called a natural taxonomy. This natural taxonomy can be said to have a material basis in the countable, frequency related data that it seeks to describe and organize. This natural taxonomy can be considered, to the extent that it accurately and realistically represents the patterning found in the data, to be relatively non-arbitrary and forms the basis for scientific knowledge organization and data analysis.

Natural taxonomy leads to the problem of hierarchy of relations within the taxonomy that is separated on distinct levels reflecting the stratification of natural systems upon different levels or orders of organization.

I distinguish three levels of articulation of natural philosophy: general conceptual systems, intermediary cognitive-cultural models, and specific informational constructs and methods.

At the same time, natural philosophy is not a completely in or exclusively objectivist accounting of the world. The second part of its general agenda is the accounting for the subjective and relativistic aspects of philosophy and human knowledge in general as sytems of knowing and communication that are constructed in social contexts. This invites philological and structural critique of such knowledge systems. All natural systems theory must founder upon the rocks of anthropological relativity.

The aim of natural systems theory is to embrace both sets of terms in this dialectic between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities, and to attempt to create a new paradigm that will move beyond these camps.

It is fitting that this perspective should have arisen out of anthropological inquiry and the social sciences in general, as the social sciences have always had a foot in both cultures and though being straddled betwixt and between has been an unenviable position entailing a lot of divisiveness and internal conflict within departments, mastery of both sets of issues allows us the means of transcending the differences and reconciling them in a new synthesis concerning human knowledge and its articulation.

There are aspects of knowledge systems that natural philosophy must deal with that are conventionally construed as "unnatural." This would include abstract systems as represented by mathematics, on one hand, which can be said to be a priori true as noumenal realities in a Platonic sense. It would also include what can be called artificial systems that are the product of human imagination and industry, and that had no previous existence in the natural scheme of things before human beings invented and created them. We might include a third class of what can be construed as "non-natural systems" but this would be a vague and all inclusive kind of catch-all category describing any unknown system that might be found to occur in reality that can be said to be the result of some intelligent agency that is separate from the stochastic and normal ordering of relations in reality.

In general, and in a strict sense, all systems can be considered to be "natural systems" even if they are technically not so. Artificial systems that are the product of human fabrication remain a product of a very natural system of order. Thus we can claim that cultures and the pot-sherds that represent them in the ground constitute a kind of natural patterning or class of natural phenomena that can be described in a naturalistic manner. Because some human agency intervened in the constitution of this patterning does not change the assessment in the slightest.

Similarly, I believe that abstract mathematical and logical systems are purely the product of human intelligence, or the functioning capacity of the human brain, and thus can be also described in a naturalistic fashion. The difference therefore between natural and non-natural systems can be said to be the fact of intermediation of some form of deliberate intelligence, implying a kind of arbitrary determinism that affects the outcomes and shapes the end-products, regardless whether the intelligent agency itself stemmed from some natural process. Otherwise, nonnatural systems can be considered only as a special subclass of natural systems, and this is the manner that I have chosen to treat them in the development of my theory.

Human history reveals at every complex turn of events how true it is that natural forces and patterns influence in unintentional ways the best laid plans of mice and men. Specific outcomes of complex historical event structures are never clearly predictable or even completely understandable. And so it is with all of the natural world as well.

The interesting thing about the natural world is that so much order does exist in it, in spite of the disorder that occurs throughout. Order and chaos hinge in the dialectic of the world like the symbols of yin and yang that turn forever about itself. There appears to be nothing that occurs in the universe that is fully determined as a system, and yet at the same time, there appears to be nothing that is also fully undetermined. Even our concept of what "nothing" really is begs a question when it comes to the most fundamental forces and properties of our physical universe. We are as a consequence of these same processes, and our ability to think about the world naturalistically or philosophically arises out of the fact of our being situated wholly and materially within the world. We therefore come to share in the same forces and patterning as the world around us and that made us and flows through us, and we share the same basic kinds of constraints and limitations.

The desire to step beyond the bounds of the dialectic that informs the differences between the knowledge cultures of the sciences and the humanities stems from the requirement within anthropological inquiry to regain its lost sense of middle ground. Cultural anthropology in particular has lost its center of balance as a unique and deserving discipline largely because of the divisive tendencies that pull at it from both directions of the sciences and the humanities, making it difficult for its practitioners and professionals to straddle the ground between. It seems then that the lessons learned in these systematic efforts at reconciliation and discovery of common ground can be applied fruitfully and productively to many different disciplinary areas of inquiry--softening up somewhat the hard sciences, and at the same time, stiffening up the softer sciences and humanities with some sense of empirical spinal column.

The goals of natural philosophy are ambitious and manifold. We can concisely state a few of these goals:

1. To offer a system of natural logic and reasoning that is anthropologically realistic and suitable to the tasks of solving real world problem sets. This natural logic would embrace both pragmatic, philological and linguistic accounts of reasoning and human cognitive patterning, as well as an accounting of human symbolization and symbolic logic as systems of knowledge construction and application.

2. To offer renewed and vigorous scope for philosophically driven inquiry in virtually all fields of knowledge inquiry and application, in both the sciences and the humanities with the aim of developing a "metathetical" platform of the integration of such knowledge and of understanding the natural patterning of distribution of such knowledge between and across different domains of inquiry.

3. To offer a metaethical foundation for human attitudes, values and actions that provide a panhuman frame of reference for ordering our relations with the larger world, including, and perhaps most importantly, with the natural world that lies before and beyond our own constructions and destructiveness.

4. To offer a metaphysical view of reality that is coordinate between the sciences and the humanities, and that serves to provide a comprehensive system of worldview, symbolically ordered, by which we make sense of natural and nonnatural relations with the world.

5. To offer a revised natural epistemology of human knowledge systems, particularly as these are constrained by various forms of anthropological and non-anthropological relativities, and that serves to effectively transcend the sense of dichotomies that have affected and informed traditional use of epistemology in Western Philosophy especially.

6. To offer the foundation for a set of aesthetic principles rooted in the natural patterning of reality and in its appreciation, encompassing both emotional and subjective responses as well as rational and relatively objective reactions to such patterning. The aim of such a natural aesthetic would be the incorporation of such principles into the patterning of everyday life, and its transformational consequences upon our current state of the world in alternative ways.

7. To offer an ontological accounting of natural reality both from a human and a non-human frame of reference, which accounting includes questions of fundamental meaning, origins, determinancy, etc.

8. To offer a means of hermeneutically evaluating and critically deconstructing symbolic and ideological systems of knowledge, situating them as social constructions in relation to a larger cultural praxis. At some point, natural philosophy must deal centrally with the problem of human culture and cognition, its definition, dynamics and determinations.

9. To offer a natural heuristic as a means of applying knowledge to real world problem sets and to devising new strategies and designs that work towards some long term goal structures. This entails the problem of defining what these goal structures may be and how they can best be met.

10. To offer a means by which diverse knowledge systems and different methods of inquiry can be intermediated and reconciled within a larger framework of understanding and operation that is non-exclusive and effective. A part of this last goal is to provide a context for the development of a uniquely comprehensive system of inquiry that both incorporates and complements all other forms or areas of inquiry.

These goals indeed lay an entire array of philosophical concerns at the doorstep of natural systems theory and metasystems science.

1. Multivariate causation or determination. Systems are multiply or complexly determined. No single factor is the complete determinant of a system, but it is determined by a number of interrelated factors. Correlational factor analysis is a means of analyzing the variable distribution and relationship of multiple determinants within systems. We may distinguish primary and key determinants that may affect the behavior of the system in some critical manner.

2. Control mechanisms. Systems can be said to be governed by mechanisms of control, which may or may not be the same as determinants of a system. Control factors are constraints that govern the operation of the system, often by setting limits and introducing feedback that regulates the system on a basic level. A mechanism can be said to be any set of relationships between factors that result in a form of automatic or self-inducible pattern of response, which pattern is usually highly coordinate and predictable. This entails some kind of cyclical process, or a recurrent patterning.

3. Contextual determinants. All systems can be said to be contextually determined. In a physical sense, all systems are thermodynamic and entropic in an ambient set of surroundings. In a behavioral sense, all systems occur in relationship to larger sets of factors and frameworks that affect and constrain the behavior of these systems. Contextually variation may affect the outcomes of behavior of systems in terms of their state-path trajectories.

These are important dimensions of systems theory because they permit some form of systematic interpretation to proceed at alternative levels of integration in a manner that is consonant with scientific investigation and theory into these systems.

It remains an open question as to what other kinds of constraints or critical factors may affect systems in a general sense. A general definition of a system encompasses a very broad range of fundamentally different kinds of systems, the design features of which may not all be identical. All systems can be said to be derivative, to the extent that we have not yet defined well what the most fundamental system is. Chemical systems can be said to be fundamental to biological constructs and systems, and hence all biological processes may be fundamentally reducible to chemical relationships and the terms between them. At the same time, it is clear that biological processes embraces a broader range of properties than are explanable in chemical terms. Relative to more basic atomic or subatomic systems, we may say that chemical systems are by contrast derivative. It appears possible that we cannot ultimate specify an absolutely fundamental system in reality, therefore all systems can be said to be relatively derivative on some level or another.

Just how derivative systems are is an important consideration, as the number of emergent properties of derivative systems must increase with increasing levels and orders of complexity that are associated with such systems.

Systems philosophy is the starting point for the abstract understanding of general systems. General system theory originally was primarily a form of applied ontological and metaphysical philosophy. As such it sought to cover in what can be considered rational terms explanation for a wide range of patterns and event structures in reality that were otherwise unaccounted for particularly in terms of the relationships and relational patterns occuring between things.[8]

General systems theory involved the attempt to explain within a single theoretical construct similar event structures and patterns that can be found in totally unrelated and totally different sets of events in the universe.

The primary object of general system theory as this had been developed by Von Bertalanffy was to explain the central processes by which many different kinds of systems achieved an "equi-final" state, even if from a range of alternative initial start states, and to explain the general relations between the system and its environment that can account for such behavior. Von Bertalanffy then attempted to look at a range of different kinds of systems, to demonstrate the operation of similar principles in each case. Being a biologist, Von Bertalanffy developed best and most his case in regard to biological organisms, but he also demonstrated great insight into physical system phenomena, as well as, especially, into human systems.

General system theory tends to adopt a synthetic and holistic point of view of the system as a whole, compared to conventional scientific approaches that tend to look analytically at particular systems or kinds of systems and to see these in terms of the relationships and interactions occurring between the parts. In general, we can say that most disciplines of science are concerned with rather narrow theoretical frameworks that pertain only to a certain level or range of phenomena that are manipulated with a specialized methodology. In contrast, a general systems perspective tends to deal much more generally and broadly with the systems dynamics characteristic of many different kinds of systems at many different levels of articulation and stratificaiton in nature.

To adopt a strong or exclusive systems perspective upon reality may seem somewhat mechanistic, overly rationalistic. The hypostatization of systems, the somewhat simplistic modeling of systems that are in real form super-complex, tends toward models of systems that are spatialized diagrams of feedback mechanisms, synchronous relations and structures that in general do not have a developmental history. This is a received and somewhat stereotyped notion of "systems."

General systems philosophy concerns the investigation and exploration of the structure of implication represented by the General Systems Model and general systems thinking, how this model relates to the world, and to our views of the world. It concerns particularly how a systems perspective relates with a scientific worldview and approach--it concerns both the differences and similarities of perspective.

Worldview provides humankind a sense of order, and hopefully, purpose, in the world. How we relate to our world is critically conditioned by, and in turn, conditions how we see and understand the world. Scientific worldview is the predominant perspective of Homo modernus, but this worldview is neither complete nor beyond skepticism, nor is it necessarily less ideological or self-serving at times than other kinds of worldview that we may hold. The limitations of scientific worldview have as much to do with how we understand the large and the small of the world as it does with whether we accept that world to be ordered by a God or other supreme Being. In fact, the critical limitations of received and traditional scientific worldview, at least in as much as how this becomes taught in schools in introductory science courses, has as much to do with its own methodological and philosophical shortcomings as it does have to do with questions religious or otherwise in nature.

General systems philosophy extends from natural philosophy, that can be said to be a query in reason in to how nature works, organizes itself, and produces the kinds of patterning and changes that we experience in the natural world. Natural philosophy as an important concern with someone involved in science has largely been eclipsed by the academic specializations of alternative fields of scientific inquiry, and by the development and emergence of many disparate and hybridized fields of scientific inquiry based as these have been upon a clearly defined set of empirical methods, techniques, tools and a sense of scientific methodology, all rooted in the elaboration of knowledge that was relatively domain specific. Modern scientists, of whatever flavor or ilk, narrowed their worldview through academic disciplinary fieldglasses, reinforced by linguistic styles and conventions specific to the academic subcultures of which they were bred.

Natural system theory is based upon a framework of thinking about the organizational patterning of nature, partly chaotic and partly non-random, that may be called general systems philosophy. General systems philosophy allows us a means of getting outside of the vehicle in which we are riding. It permits a "system" for thinking about systems, of which we ourselves are a part. Scientists used to be called natural philosophers, until a parting of the two Cultures, and the loss of the importance of philosophy to scientists preoccupied with techniques of empirical research and discovery. We have returned to a philosophy of science, and in a sense, a history of science, but this is only after the fact of the differentiation of our minds between the sciences and the humanities. The return to a philosophy of general systems came about paradoxically as a consequence of a very scientific concern with how we know what we know, and what influence this fact and factificity of knowing may have upon our knowledge systems and our ability to know anything truly objective in the first place.

It is not surprising therefore that the critical weakness of the sciences has been in the modern era its inability to "think outside of the proverbial rock box" that it has placed itself in with its analytical preoccupation with details that some humanist psychologists have referred to as compulsive. Lacking adequate development in natural philosophical foundations that are realistic and reasonable, scientific theories, especially of the very large or the extremely small, that arise on the edges of our rapidly expanding horizon to see clearly, tend to break down in unquestioned fallacies of informal logic. Such theories tend take on ideological ramifications that has been somewhat perjoratively referred to as "paradigmatic" in the Kuhnian sense.[9]

General systems philosophy deals with the pattern of order and disorder in nature, at all levels. It draws no arbitrary boundaries around aspects or levels of nature that nature has not itself drawn, neither does it draw boundaries between domains or disciplines of knowledge or information about that patterning. In fact, it is most interested in how nature integrates itself upon all levels.

General systems philosophy and natural systems theory has an objective approach to knowledge and physical reality--all physical systems are defacto real systems. They exist in the world, as part of the world, separate from either our perception or awareness of their existence. They would exist without us, even if there were no one there to see or think about them as such. Reality therefore has an objective foundation independent of our knowledge, and yet that is available only through our knowledge.

General systems philosophy is concerned with how the particular is part of the whole, and how each system, though unique and finite, is part of a larger field of possibilities and instances that is possibly infinite and unending. The problem of integration, the concommitant problem of differentiation, and the problem of event order, complementariness, precedence and causal predetermination, and contemporaneousness, are all part of the concern of a general systems philosophy, as well also as the problems of self-organization, anti-entropy, change and stratification in physical systems.

In particular, general systems philosophy may be said to have the following sets of primary concerns:

1. How does nature organize itself in the form of self-sustaining and self-organizing systems, and how do these systems co-occur in larger metasystem frameworks?

2. How does the General System Model apply to different orders and levels of natural systems stratification, and what do different kinds of systems, of different scales and orders, have in common, and why?

3. How are the emergent properties, the apparent superoganic syergism that is the function of systems integration, sustained and how do such systems achieve equifinality of common equilibria states regardless of their original start conditions?

There are fundamental differences of perspective and implication between what can be called the received and now traditional view of Science, and the view of the world through the lense of a General Systems framework, and these differences are critically important. Scientists prioritize analytical methods whereas Systems philosophers have as a priority holism of perspective, focusing on the process of relational integration and systems as whole instances. Scientists focus on the particular case, whereas Systems scientists seek to see the general class as demonstrated by the particular system.

It is difficult for the traditional scientist to think beyond the horizon presented by the empirical data. Scientific theory stops at the edge of empirical observation, and yet systems theory extends beyond into the realm of the unobserved. The dilemma of the systems theorist is to accept the universality of systems models, and to be able to apply these models faithfully and unequivocally, even if the empirical data is not available or insufficient to the task.

It makes sense therefore to distinguish what we can call "general systems" or a single case of "a general system" from what may be referred to as specific or "particular systems" as in "this particular system." All real systems may be said to be both a particular system, and at the same time, a general system of a particular type, kind or level of integration.[10]

Systems theory, first and foremost, if it is about anything of relevance in the world, is in the last analysis about clear and unmuddled thinking in clear terms about the world. Creating unmuddled models is of course something easier said than done, and this is what separates mere thinking or even "theory" from the true scientific knowledge that underlies our vision and understanding of the world. I must contrast here systems thinking with a form of shared thought process that, for want of a better term, I must call ideological or "paradigmatic thinking" that in a sense is a form of thinking in terms of conventions, accepted standards, norms, primes, presuppositions and ideas that are themselves left largely unquestioned in their deployment about the world.

The problem of paradigmatic thinking is directly tied to the social construction of knowledge, and its symbolic functioning in the integration of reality, especially upon a social level. This problem appears very acute for instance in some fields of the humanities, history, and even philosophy itself, in which a perspective upon reality defined by some ideological framework can become a substitute for reality itself. In history, we must wade through the misinformation, the constructed fictions, and find whatever few facts actually exist in order to get to the bottom of any story, and even then, most human stories seem to be bottomless. The risk of ideological thinking in science may seem less acute or obvious to people, but this is perhaps its greatest danger--knowledge that is passed along as true and fact-based when in "fact" there is no real basis for such knowledge at all.

Modern scientists who pride themselves on their empirical track-records and careful analysis are loathe to admit that they may share the same foibles of misguided thinking that their predecessors suffered from in what now seem obvious and sometimes contrite ways. Modern science in all its wonderful successes is supposed to have move beyond the paradigmatic straight-jackets of convention and symbolic construction that marked the premature sciences. I find this to be true in a limited sense, but even less true in a grander sense. There is an arrogance and received cockiness in modern scientific that is a dangerous commodity and characteristic that was lacking in the founding fathers, and this is dangerous. The truth is that we remain at least as susceptible, if not more prone, to the foibles of our own restrictive thought processes as our ancestors were in by-gone ages. While our knowledge has advanced, our human proclivities to prejudice and ignorance remain about the same, if not slightly exaggerated, in relation to the complexities of the modern world.

My experience in the observation of different kinds of science and scientists leads me to conclude that those involved in the "harder" sciences, more closely tied to data, data-analysis techniques and material artifacts, tend in general to be more rigid in thinking and, somewhat paradoxically, more prone to confused and somewhat spurious thinking on the softer side of things that comes from not thinking a problem through to its real primes, or past it data-analogues. On the other hand, those steeped in the "soft" social sciences, often appear to have well developed critical and synthetic thinking skills. I call this data-boundness of theory and thought, and American anthropology has been a great forum for watching this process play out as those physical and material people who jump on deterministic bandwagons while those "cultural" and social people, who deal with complex data types that increasing talk back and out, point out the relativistic warning signs in deep and rocky waters. As often as not Anthropology departments are veritable daily battle-fields over these kinds of fundamental ideological cleavages of perspective. Training, cultural and social milieu, structuration, socialization and professionalization, personal preferences and personality differences, all seem to play a role in this kind of paradigmatic process.[11]

I would say that whereas a field like Anthropology, a bad marriage of opposites in many ways, seems to inherently resist any form or even suggestion of paradigmatic unification of perspective, the opposite seems to be the case in the physical sciences where there seems almost a kind of blind conformism and push towards paradigmatic communitas and unification. And herein seems to lie the real danger, the risk of the kind of paradigmatic unification around a body of basically unproven ideas, or "covering law models" asserted and widely received to be "universal," but leading to a "scientific revolution" from the fringes that eventually results in a revisioning of that science's worldview. It is my impression that this is more the case than we realize or may be willing to admit, steeped as many of us already are and have been in preconceived frameworks, committed to certain ways and models however implicit they may or may not be.[12]

The difference in approaches therefore that exist between the conventional worldview of the sciences, anchored as these are to the academic bedrock of all legitimate knowledge, and an alternative systems based perspective, is the difference that Niels Bohr emphasized in the 1920's and 1930's between what he called "direct causality" on one hand and "complementarity" on the other. Conventional scientists are implicitly bound to a worldview that is based upon direct causality, a one-way history of event structures. Something happened, causing something else to happen. It makes more sense from this framework to look for something like a Big Bang model to explain all that came after, even if it doesn't make much sense then to ask what was before or around the cosmic egg. We have a mechanism to which we can attach causal explanation for actual events. Such a framework resists the notion of looking at things in terms of systems, in which events may be recurrent or cyclical as part of the functioning of the system, and in which indirect causality, rather than direct causality, may play a large role in what happens, how, and what are the outcomes.

To go after, for instance, a systems based model of cosmology, if we wish to take seriously the proposition that all nature organizes itself in terms of systems, runs fundamentally against our received preferences and points of view that would seek more direct causal models by which to explain historical event structures. Systems in this perspective are fundamentally "a-historical" in being long-lived and stable structures. They represent functional, rather than historical, kinds of explanation. And the sense of history the emphasis upon systems leads to is often messy and complex to say the least.

Scientists conventionally have sought out historical based explanations for event structures. It is a empirical "factual" history of definite causes and immediate effects, as much as possible. Systems science offers instead explanation not by historical causality, but by logical consistency and necessity. Models of systems, at whatever level or kind, are largely a historical models, except in a developmental perspective. Explanations for their origins are generally not coaxed in terms of specific events of natural history, but in terms of processes, patterns, or relational structures that we may infer, or rather project, onto the patterning that we see. At this level at least therefore there is something inherently muddles about systems-based frameworks as theoretical explanation, and it is this messiness that I think scientists have been trained to feel uncomfortable when a methodological premium is placed upon certainty of event structure. [13]

I offer this work not so much as a resolution or anti-dote to this kind of daily social articulation of science, much of which becomes political to the extent that funding, prestige and power come to adhere to certain professors and certain lines of thinking, versus others. Rather, I think that a "universal systems paradigm" provides an alternative escape route to paradigmatic closure around conventional sets of ideas, and the sense of selective commitment that comes with such normative closure. It may seem like something of an oxymoron then to speak of a "paradigm of universal systems" if such a paradigm is supposed to be at least a-paradigmatic if not completely counter-paradigmatic, in the conventional sense. Of course, there are paradigms and then there are

The framework of natural systems adopts an objective view of reality that constitutes the basis for science. If a tree fell crashing in the forest, then by the definition of sound in science, it made a sound, whether anyone was there to hear it or not. Science depends importantly on this kind of objective presupposition about physical reality--that it exists in an a-priori sense before our experience or phenomenological awareness or observation of it. This allows us for instance to make valid and accurate deductions about phenomena not immediate and remote to our experience, which we cannot see, but which we can logically infer from what information we do have.[14]

We can say that truth is the objective structure underlying and logically accounting for natural systems, which patterning can be presumed to occur regardless of whether it is being observed or not. It is clear that the universe in its own intrinsic state does not know or see itself. It is self-unaware as a system. We bring to our experience of the universe this sense of awareness and design. We can say in a simple way that the pattern of reality exists independently of our observation of it, regardless of our understanding or awareness of this patterning, whether we call it a "system" or by some other term. The dilemma is that we must filter this knowledge through our symbolic lense of perception and apprehension. The structure of reality is a priori to our experience of reality, and our experience of reality may be in fact dependent upon the a priori structure of reality, but ultimately it remains beyond our grasp, in and of itself, in an "unfiltered" sense.

We may say, in a more formal manner, that all real systems occur in reality such that they have some physical manifestation and substantial, observable basis in reality,whether they are perceived or not. For most such systems that we know of, such systems can be first characterized by the organization and transaction of energy, and this organization and transaction is said to be dynamic, ever changing, in fluctuation, and carrying some kind of implicit information in its design or organizational pattern, which can be said to be a non-random sense of order in event structures and patterning.

All knowledge is defacto human knowledge. We cannot escape this imperative of our own humanness. Unlike any other life-form on earth, we live beguiled by world openness, by the unfinished state of the symbolic awareness of our world, and by the imagination of other possible worlds.

Of course, the problems only begin here. All we really have is our own experience and our own knowledge to validate our experience--if we did not exist, no tree in the forest would exist. Therefore, the anthropological relativity of our knowledge poses a fundamental problem and paradox about the status of objective knowledge in reality. However objective we pretend our knowledge and awareness of reality to be, and however objective it really may be, does not preclude the subjective relativism of our knowledge and awareness of the event, and the dependency of our knowledge upon the state of our awareness. This plays upon all our knowledge, but becomes especially problematic when it comes to theorization and hypothesizing that is based upon presuppositions that may be untestable, and even unquestioned, or implicit to our knowledge in an indefinite and non-explicit way.

We may state a basic hypothesis of the anthropological relativity of all knowledge about systems, or about anything real. All knowledge is humanly constructed and organized through the filters of human conscious and understanding, including processes of perception, memory, rational cognition, emotion and associated behavior. The anthropological relativity of our knowledge precludes the possibility of our absolute understanding of reality in a completely non-arbitrary and "objective" manner (i.e., in a truly non-anthropological manner.)

The conclusion therefore is that though real systems, the non-random patterning of event structures in the phenomenological flow of our experience, have an objective basis in the world independent and a priori to our experience of them, our ability to know and fully understand this patterning in an objective manner is critically constrained and limited by the anthropological biases that symbolically prestructure of our knowledge and our capacity for knowing, or even how we experience and perceive the world. We can know the truth, but not the whole truth, in a non-relative and unequivocal manner.

This strong claim for the anthropological relativity of our knowledge is not to assert that everything is but a product of our imaginations, and all knowledge is equally imaginary and therefore subjectively solipsistic and non-objective. This extreme view is absurd and useless. No science would be possible if such were the case or if every one listened to such a fool and believed it. But imagination does definitely play a part, even in science, and without it science would be sterile and probably non-productive. It is only to assert that from a philosophical standpoint the anthropological relativism of our own knowledge, even scientific knowledge, poses a very real and very difficult paradox that is difficult if not impossible to entirely reconcile. Theory, remains in the final analysis, a symbolic interpretation that at some point must leave the facts behind. In this sense, even the facts themselves may be more hypothetical than real.

The anthropological relativity of human knowledge becomes one of the chief concerns that a contemporary philosophy, particularly a philosophy of science and a philosophy of systems that itself strives to be scientific and systematic, must effectively deal with. This is especially the case if we are to hope for a fruitful reunion of philosophy and science and a revitalization of a natural philosophy in the mind and life of science.[15]

What we are really after in any and all science is gaining a more realistic view of the world, with the idea that the true world is that which is most realistic, whether it agrees with our preconceived knowledge frameworks or beliefs or otherwise. In other words, science is predicated upon a realistic worldview that is relatively independent of our arbitrary knowledge of the world, if not completely free of our limited capacities for knowing the world. It does this by putting stock in knowledge that is publically, or at least, inter-subjectively available in an independent sense. Hence, science's preoccupation with consensus.

I would assert therefore, and in a more formal manner, that the primary purpose of science is the systematic construction of a more realistic and objective (realism and objectivity being regarded here as somewhat interchangeable and even synonymous) worldview, one unprejudiced by the symbolic constructions we are prone to. This worldview is comprehensive, systematic, and relatively independent of our own capacity or willingness to accept or believe or even share in such a worldview. It exists as a all-encompassing counter-point to whatever else we may think or believe or wish to think about or see in the world.

We know from our own history that we can look at the sun and the moon and the stars in the night sky and see these things in many different ways. At one time it was commonly accepted that the earth was large but flat, and the sun and moon chased each other around in spheres high up in the firmament, around the earth. This view accurately accounted for what was observed--in fact, based on everyday observation alone it is the most straight-forward and "parsimonious" description of what is experienced. But we know it is wrong, not because of any internal inconsistencies of argument, but because it does not accord with the objective facts and realities of the matter as established through scientific experimentation, observation and calculation--i.e., scientific method.

The correct, more realistic, and most scientific explanation of the behavior of the sun and moon in the earth's sky is not one that people would normally arrive at based upon their own daily experience of these events by themselves. It is rather a bit of a detective story, a mystery the clues of which had to be gradually uncovered before the truth can be revealed. As in all other things in reality, appearances usually are deceiving, not because they are anything other than what they are, but because we project upon them our own symbolic understanding, and in the process, misread their meaning utterly.[16]

So, perhaps I've been beating around the bush, but what is the starting point for a sort of systems-based philosophy of science, or a scientific philosophy of science? I think there are many starting points possible, but like the first cut on the rough uncarved block, the first word makes a critical difference in setting everything else that follows.

I wish to start by way of a digression on the fundamentals of human symbolization, as this is what I regard as the scientific basis of human knowledge and thus of philosophical systems in the first place. At the outset, I can say that naming is a fundamental process of human symbolization, and the foundation for knowledge. The function of naming, particularly in an accurate manner, and of definition, which is the explicit elaboration of the meaning or meanings of a name, as this occurs in knowledge, is a fundamental function of scientific activity and methodology, at least as important as measurement and mathematical calculation. I would even argue that as a basic function it comes before measurement and calculation, and these latter processes are in fact derivative and restrictive forms of the naming process itself.

The trick in scientific understanding, in description and explanation, is in fitting our names, the words by which we identify meaning, with the things, events or actions, that they are meant to stand for or, as they say in symbology, "represent." The discrepancy between the events we experience and the relations we perceive and the names we give to these things is the difference between an objective science and a science that is anthropologically relative to a preconceived system of language and knowledge. The parallax between the deed and the word, so to speak, is the distance science must make up in the formulation of an objective view of the world.

It is this naming function that is overlooked in scientific philosophy, largely, and that serves in systematic form to make fields like the social sciences and psychology a 'science' when and if they are based upon empirical observation and experimental validation, even if few mathematical formulas apply in any direct sense to the description or explanation of phenomena. The naming function plays an especially important role in Biology, and more than just in theoretical development or in the classification of living systems. Naming gives us a theoretical hook on complex systems, and their properties, in reality, when no amount or kind of counting might suffice.

All things get named. Naming is the basis of the symbolic structure of all human language and all human systems of symbolization. And names are used for more than just "things"--relations, patterns, states, conditions, feelings, beliefs, ideas, each, in receiving a name, takes on a reified form as a symbol, as something that is real in the world, even if it is really just a figment of one's imagination that is evoked by the saying of the word. We may say that names are the prototypical construct and symbolism of language, and of human meaning in general. Without language of some kind we would be at a loss to even think clearly about the world and about relationships within it--sure we would dream bright and vibrant dreams yet, but they would be wordless dreams. It is difficult to say how much memory function is controlled or managed or effected by language, but certainly naming must facilitate organization, "cataloging," indexing and recall of experience. Of course, this implies a relativistic argument about language on a very basic level--surely all human languages are equally sufficient and competent in their capacity for describing and naming the world, but it is language of any form that is necessary for the organization of human experience in the manner that we have come to think about such experience.

Certain general precepts about scientific worldview and methodology emerge from the working through of the ideas embodied in this text. They suggest some of the following aspects.

1. In general, natural systems stratify at different levels of informational patterning. This stratification of natural informational patterning is inherent and intrinsic to the epiphenomenal patterning of the phenomena itself. It is always implicit to this patterning. We can call natural information therefore "self-organizing" pattern that is minimally non-random.

Our intelligence is evident in our ability to intuitively grasp the suggestion of this patterning and then to try to make sense of it in ways that yields results. Our science comes into play when we derive conceptual models that simplify our understanding of this patterning. Such models should meet two sets of criteria:

a. They are ultimately derived from and refer to perception-based observations of phenomenal patterns discovered in nature that are somehow measurable.

b. They ultimately lead to logical arguments that allow us to predict experimental results or other phenomenal patterns with a good probability of success.

2. Ultimately, scientific explanation is about natural determinism, or about trying to explain why and how things happen in a way that is causal. Underlying this presupposition is the notion that all phenomenal patterning occurring in reality is ultimately the result of some set of causes that sufficiently account for what happens. Causal explanation in general addresses the problem of why things change in certain ways.

3. Causal relationships occurring at one order or level are not necessarily reducible to explanations or terms apparent at other levels at least not in any direct sense. Such reductionism and confusion of orders of explanation and analysis is common in our scientific explanation.

4. There are few, if any, real prime movers in natural systems at any level. Informational patterning tends to be complex at all levels, and the understanding of how such patterning is produced usually entails construal of causal relationships within a nonlinear control system that develops historically over time.

Frequently it is the case that in a complex environment, there is more than one set of solutions to a single problem. Nature explores multiple pathways that interconnect at numerous points, suggesting that our scientific solutions are likely to become increasingly sophisticated and complex.

5. Scientific answers derive from a kind of universal null hypothesis of the assumption of the essential randomness of the natural order and of the statistical-based or stochastic determinism of our causal explanations. In other words, we can say as strict scientists that God played dice with the universe, and we, as scientists, must accept this kind of answer at whatever level we are working on.

This leads to a kind of fundamental statistical based worldview of science that sees the occurrence of everything as a game of chance. Determinism is a probability or relative certainty theory that is derived from this cosmic lottery.

It has become common place in biological thinking that rather simple and classic experiments (like Miller's chemical-evolution experiment) demonstrate clearly that life can be accounted for fully by our hypothesizing random and chance occurrences. This is in spite of a rather sublime urge to view the "miracle" of life as something irreducible and beyond mere chance alone.

Similarly, the hypothization that all of life evolved on the basis of mechanisms that were controlled by chance alone has been another radical departure in our conceptual organization of collective worldview. I propose in this work a physical theory that suggests a similar kind of game of chance has occurred and probably continues to occur in the origins of physical matter and energy. It suggests that any model that looks for the giant hand of a cosmic being is misguided and ultimately unscientific.

6. Even in science, models are often proposed and developed that gain acceptance and legitimacy independent of their scientific value. In general, science becomes a-scientific inquiry when evidence is reinterpreted to fit old models, instead of new models being devised or old models being revised to fit new forms of evidence. Contradictory evidence can be ignored or even swept under the carpet of scientific method. In general such conditions suggest that the underlying theories and constructions are probably erroneous in an unmodified state.

This last precept relates science to a special class of understanding that is different from other forms of thinking and inquiry. Strict science is not philosophy or meta-physics. We cannot derive complete answers without some observations being made. It is not religion that is experienced in an ecstatic dream. It is not merely the vision of an artist on a canvas or the literary concoction of a writer on paper. Neither is it ideology that can be turned into a technocratic priesthood, bureaucratized, managed, funded, and otherwise "structurated" from above.

Clear and honest science stems from a collective worldview that is objectively rooted in perception based measurement. In general, it requires some form of systematic measurement being made upon observations of physical phenomena. It means that however overspecialized it may become in its practice, its central courtroom remains a public forum with an independent sense of history.

A "system," especially one we call "general" implying a class of related systems, is a hypothetical construct, embodying a theory, about a set of related event structures that occur upon some level of reality. Such sets are of phenomenal event structures are observed to occur upon many levels and in many contexts of the world, and can be ascribed a certain level of regularity and consistency of basic pattern that we define as "structural" and that can be at least partially explained in terms of logical consequences of causality and relativity of temporally organized phenomenal events.

There are different kinds and forms of system. A "real" system has reference to event structures and things that have some form of objective, physical manifestation in the real world, subject to the constraints of that world. An "abstract" system is one that exists as an ideational set of abstractions, of principles, that cohere in the minds of humankind, in the main, and possibly in the minds of other intelligent beings. A "natural" system (versus an artificial or "human-made" one) is one that occurs naturally in the world, before and beside the human construction or even observation of such a set of events.

It follows that as a set of ideas, a certain amount of knowledge, a model, a theoretical construct or system of conceptualization, a "system" as a scientific representation of something, something real, natural or artificial, is neither ever complete nor perfect in that function of symbolic representation. It is a model, abstracted, reified, simplified and reduced in structural terms. If follows that such a system is never sufficient in its project or requirements of representation. A system as a conceptual model thus represents a set of real event structures, with some objective physical manifestation, amenable to scientific observation, measurement, calculation and hence manipulation, that is reduced, simplified, abstracted, that makes a claim to a certain kind and amount of truth value.

Human-based systems of knowledge about the world are possible because event structures occur and regularly or otherwise recur throughout the universe, in the basic fabric of physical reality, that are amenable to our observation, recording, our logical representation, conclusion and prediction. Without this regularity that underlies all known event structures in the universe, we would have no possible knowledge that could be called "systematic" (i.e., scientific.) Scientific knowledge of the world is systematic, and it has become progressively systematic as time has gone by, as we discover and refine our models and conceptual representations of what we experience in the world to be more in accord, more consonant to the "facts" whether these are derived by direct or indirect observation or the rational conclusions obtained by logical deduction, abduction or induction from observable facts.

Systems are ascribed to such patterns of events by being observed through time, across space, and to be seen to exhibit both dynamic developmental and static structural patterns. The language we use to describe naturally occurring phenomena, particularly the language of our sciences, which in its most abstract sense is mathematical, tends to an analytical orientation of our understanding and knowledge of event structures which itself tends to be isolating, focusing on the discrete and the particular, as well as upon the differences between events or things of events.

Taxonomy is a system of naming and classification that has implicit to its order a certain theoretical understanding of the relationships of similarity and difference that occur between things and different kinds of things in the world. Taxonomies are based upon and imply certain theories of world knowledge about how things in the world are articulated and related to one another. Such taxonomies thus embody a worldview. Taxonomies tend to be systematic in the sense that they employ rules governing the naming of members of classes, which naming serves as indexical markers separating and relating different sets.

Systems philosophy can be said to embody a systems worldview. We seek to define a world systematically in terms of how it is organized upon multiple levels into different kinds of systems. As such, we are interested in the possibilities of classifying the world, and the things of the world, in terms of the kinds of systems that they are a part of and that constitute them in the world.

How can we organize and classify systems? Several schemes of such classification have emerged in the course of the development of systems thinking, but what is sought is a central system of classification that is rule based and consistent in its application across a wide range of system. We seek a single classification system that can effectively account for all possible kinds of systems that may be found to occur or possibly occur in some form.

All systems that may exist in reality can be called "real systems." All real systems are first and foremost physical systems, and in general physical systems may be defined by energy transactions and constraints of time and space. We are coming to increasingly recognize levels of physical articulation of systems where the constraints of time and space that we usually apply appear to occur in a relativistic manner that defies conventional description. Biological systems may be said to be a subset of physical systems, and as far as we yet know, only exist on the earth. The likelihood is that in all probability similar biological systems will eventually be discovered, knock on wood, in distant solar systems and may prove quite common in the universe, though we cannot guess the expectable frequency of such an occurrence.

Human systems in turn are a subset of biological systems, and appear to have occurred only once in four billion years of evolution of life on earth. It is therefore thought that it is highly unlikely that we will initiate contact with distant forms of intelligent life, unless we are first contacted by them. It is highly likely that intelligent life forms are very rare and few and far between in the universe--essentially isolated from one another.

We may define abstract systems as systems of design that are implicit to the organization of real systems at whatever level they may occur, or that are explicit to the organization of possible systems that may occur. The phenomenon of abstract systems is interesting and unusual, and poses some paradoxical problems about knowledge and systems theory that deserve treatment beyond the challenges of natural systems.

Real systems can be divided into natural and alternative systems, and can be distinguished from non-real systems or imaginary systems that have no basis in physical reality. Natural systems can be said to be those self-organizing real systems that may be ultimately explained through stochastic origination without any predetermination of pattern or structure. Most physical systems are natural systems, except human cultural and applied systems that are the product of human design and intentionality structures. These are a special class of "alternative" systems.

One of the goals of a universal systems framework is the development of a comprehensive taxonomy of systems, by which systems of every type and conceivable kind can be systematically categorized and compared to all other systems by means of such a taxonomic framework. The categorization of systems is a formal undertaking that permits us to organize formal knowledge in a way that may be said to be ultimately functional to the extent that it replicates the systems patterning of the real world.

Systems thinking demands a form of logic and a rigor of application of logical values in the description and explanation of behavior of systems. Systems logic is in a sense integral to the knowledge of systems and about systems--it is difficult if not impossible to separate what we think about and how we think when it comes to systems. Conventional positivistic logic was conceived as an idiom for scientific thinking and theoretization. Whether science in fact unfolds in the formal sense of empirical positivism remains somewhat questionable and dubious, but there is a sense that we can formally define theory and theoretization in a manner that might facilitate both production of insight and logical rigor to our knowledge and idea systems.

When we use the term "system" applied to something a lot get couched in such a label that is implicit and the prestructures our models by certain expecations of order and outcome. Systems logic is, I believe, first and foremost, holistic logic. It is a logic that applies to whole things as things, rather than in analytical terms of the relationships and interactiosn between the parts or components of the thing. These relations are subsumed by the term "system" that implies a whole thing working together under "normal" conditions of operation.

The function of systems at different analytical and operational levels, though of the same system, are logically separate to the degree that the functioning of one level facilitates and makes possible the functioning of a higher or lower level. We can speak of a kind of inter-level systems integration. To the degree that normal operation of a system becomes interferred with upon alternative levels, then we cannot maintain a clear sesne of logical analytical boundary between these levels.

Systems logic can be defined upon several levels of generality and application--on a lower level we can understand that computational logic and theory that informs most digital information processing systems constitute a kind of applied systems logic. On a more general level we can understand how information theory, communication theory, thermodynamics, non-linear dynamics and control theory informs our understanding of systems.

Natural systems are semi-determined systems, which means that logic relations apply not completely, but in a partial manner, to the description os systems states and the explanation of changes to such states. It is clear that we can understand random variability in systems to be a kind of noise, or entropy, in systems. The point of any system is self-organiational change to a system that is noise reducing and order maintaining over a period of time. A system must be stable under a range of presenting conditions, and this stability carries with it predictable or at least expectable outcomes.

Supercomplex systems have an almost infinite number of transition points of articulation, or rather gradients of variation. There are too many points to model, even with advanced supercomputing capabilities. Supercomplex systems might include the human brain, language, symbolic knowledge systems, a hurricane, and the biosphere.

Logical relationships apply to all systems, though systems logic that governs all systems is non-dichotomous and continuous logic. It is non-linear logic:

An effect or set of effects may be the indirect consequence of a series of causes.

Random factors are independent variables that effect a system stochastically and chaotically.

All finite systems are in an exact sense unique because they are variable in terms of multiple factors.

Metasystems contexts are composed of the pattern of interaction between multiple systems at multiple levels.

The cosmos, a forest and a conversation between two lovers share in commong a similar metasystems context.

Logic in systems thinking is non-linear in the flow of control and hence dynamic in terms of outcomes. A two-value system doesn't apply in a systems framework. Systems logic follows not only multiple values, but multiple values interrelated and interdependent upon one another with the result of enormous complexity of outcome. Logic in systems is constrained, relative to the context in which the systems articulate as well as to the dynamic state and state-path trajectory of the system. Values in outcomes can be weighted heuristically by probabilities of occurrence. Not all outcomes are equally likely in a given scenario, but the variability of what outcomes occur are impossible to completely account for under any circumstance. The system can be said thus to follow a built in complex logical calculus of its own creation, and this calculus, incalculable by even sophisticated human standards, is tied to the synergistic patterning, holistic behavior and developmental state-path trajectory of the system as a whole.

Sub-cellular systems, for instance, appear to be complexly mediated by macroscopic organic compounds that function as enzymes making possible, facilitating and regulating numerous chemical reactions. Covalent bonding patterns of complex molecules are altered by hydrogen bonding of these enzymes, leading to regulation of resulting chemical reactions. The kind of complex logical calculus, often mediated by hormones in the case of complex organisms, may be said to be hyper-conditional and regulation depends upon relative presence/absence of necessary protein molecular structures of the right configuration.

It is often the case, particularly with certain forms of extensive derivative systems, that extremely complex possibilities and patterns derive from relative few and simple primes that occur in a limited number of relationships to one another, but these primes, being reiterated countless times over multiple simultaneously cooccurring instances, result in an effective infinitude of possible limited outcomes.

The logic of systems is organizational logic that may be referred to as structural logic and that governs the behavior of the system as a system. Internal and external relations and interactions of the system or of any part of the system are constrained by this structural logic--the system responds as a relative whole to its environment, the behavior of aspects and parts of the system are subordinate to its structural logic.

The degree to which this is true, to which the system as a whole achieves integration and can be said to be structurally determined, can be said to be the measure of the coherence of the system from an internal standpoint. The more coherent the system, the more determined and bound are its parts to the function of the whole, and, in theory at least, the more its developmental state-path trajectory, its developmental outcomes, are made certain. We may compare systems, similar or even quite different kinds of systems, by their net measures of coherence.

Systems pay a heavy price for relative integral structural coherence, and this is in terms of the capacity of the system as such to adjust itself effectively to environmental shifts and variables.

The structural logic underlying the organization and development of any system that occurs in the real world can be said to be the informational rule-base, the implicit rules, that govern or control the behavior of the system under varying and shifting circumstances. It is these rules that we, as scientists, and especially as systems scientists, seek to understand when we study a particular kind of system, and seek to generalize about and from when we seek to devise and more deeply understand the fundamental processes of nature.

We know that all real systems have physical manifestation and are thereby subject to the constraints of thermodynamics and involve the discrete, discontinous and sometimes continuous exchange of energy--energy transactions, which, in most physical systems tend to be discrete, and to follow cyclical pathways. A sense of integration embedded in such organization and implicit information of such systems is analogous to the sense of intelligence we find embedded in a micro-chip of a computing system, and that we can deduce to occur in the inner workings of the human brain.

Organization in systems, for their development and maintenance, require work, and work requires the accumulation and efficient utilization of energy in a purposive and non-random manner. Systems could not occur or develop without work being accomplished in the process. It is inviolably true that any real system can only be possible is work is done and if there is a sufficient supply of energy available for utilization in the work needing to be done--this entails that for any real system a discrete accounting can be made that keeps track of energy exchanges and that allows us to describe the system in terms that are mathematically analytical and logically infallible.

The logic of a general or applied metasystems approach, and of natural systems theory, is in a sense inexorable. If one accepts its primes, then one cannot but help follow it to its nth-conclusions as a kind of knowledge system. It is not merely a logic of propositions, but a human based intuitive and creative logic that leads to the testing of alternative propositions and the proposal of new possibilities. It is furthermore a form of symbolic logic, or reasoning that is tied to the symbolic representation, particularly through language, of reality. It is a logic that is unconstrained by prior knowledge or preconceptions, at least not in any relativistic sense. From this standpoint, systems are systems, and all things in reality cohere into systems that can be understood and explained as such. Thus in such an approach there is little direct prior attachment to the signification or implications of knowledge.

The logic that is inherent to a metasystems approach could be said to be inherently metalogical. It is in a sense a logic of logic, but it is also a kind of grand and natural alternative logic that permits us to step beyond, at least in theory and imagination, the boundaries of classical logical systems, to entertain and construct alternative possibilities in the world. The investigation of alternative possibilities comes before and is a prerequisite to the discovery of new knowledge about the world. It is a systematic methodology that entails distinguishing analytically between what is possible and what proves impossible.

The logic of the metasystem is that any system requires work to build and maintain, hence systems must conform to basic laws of thermodynamics and usually must operate within certain margins of efficiency or limits of tolerance. All systems are imperfect in the sense that they adhere to the laws of thermodynamics, and all systems, as situations bound within a space-time continuum, are marked by phases of beginning, growth, maturation and decline and final demise as such. All systems can be said to be composite and therefore intrinsically heterogeneous.

The inherent heterogeneity of all metasystems, indeed of all systems possible in nature, if we accept as true the infinite reducibility of nature, adds a dimension of complexity to our understanding of metasystems in general. Metasystems are inherently complex systems, and as such they tend to have other characteristics such as undetermined and non-linear dynamic character. Non-linear dynamics makes the mathematical modeling of such systems super-difficult, but the stochastic chaos usually allows us to simplify our understanding of such systems heuristically on the basis of a few key or composite variables, which form the basis for theoretical discussion and hypothesis formulation in regard to such systems when little is known in detail about them.

The logic of metasystems thus tests the limits of our own knowledge, and seeks to extend these limits to regions otherwise unknown in a systematic manner. We follow its operational methodologies and heuristic problem solving or knowledge engineering strategies in order to develop more realistic and more accurate representations and propositional frameworks about metasystems. As a meta-logic, the logic of metasystems thus becomes a logical form that is self-correcting, a kind of learning system that is capable of testing its own premises and propositions of reality and thereby modifying its propositions in keeping with reality.

The logic of the metasystem becomes ultimately the logic of the system of systems, and in the largest context of all, systems gain their sense of purpose and function in relation to the larger meta-systemic framework in which they are situated in terms of their articulation and achieved integration.

The logic of the metasystem also entails that, because the metasystem is a knowledge-based framework, it is a human system first and foremost, and is relative to a human kind of logic, or what I would call "symbologic." Thus metasystems are primarily human systems of knowledge and it is important to understand therefore the implications of this human dimension in metasystems. We can be referring therefore to eidetic physical structures in reality, say the system composed by a hydrogen atom, but we must in the process take into account in an explicit manner the point of view of the human observer, and more importantly, the human inferer, in the understanding of such a physical system, much less the application of such a system to other kinds of systems.

The metasystem can be seen not just as an ideological or programmatic framework but also in a more general sense as a symbolic framework, and indeed it is so because all human knowledge is by design symbolically structured and articulated as a dialectic, or an on going problem solving, question asking, adaptational strategy that is based upon knowledge representation. The symbolic aspects of a metasystems approach and its implications for reality need to be made more explicit. We must see these symbolic dimensions as not just ideological frameworks for defining a particular viewpoint of the world and reality, but as the fundamental way in which we construe reality, psychologically, socially, culturally and linguistically, as well as how this reality becomes organized and shaped through our knowledge systems and experience. It is clear that our knowledge shapes our experience of the world as much as our experience shapes how we think about and come to know and relate to the world. There is a sense that the articulation of metasystems integration will come to reflect and be reflected in the symbolic integration of human knowledge and in symbolic representations. On a global scale we can talk about the emergence of a global culture, or meta-culture, that would be a product of this dialectical process and its development. There is furthermore a sense that, because symbolic structure is how knowledge shapes and becomes shaped experientially, that the metasystem becomes the medium as well as the message and the meaning. In other words, we should look to this form of metasystems integration not just in terms of shared knowledge structures, common consensus and agreement on basic facts and ideas about reality, but in terms of how we come to cognitive see and think about the world in a fundamental way.

The inherent symbolic divisiveness and the natural tendency towards symbolic dialectological differentiation that has been pervasive in human history and probably throughout most of its prehistory, is contrary to a fundamental trend suggested by metasystems integration toward the achievement of a common symbolic foundation and framework that is flexible and adaptable enough to work for most if not all people in the world regardless of their other cultural and historical differences. I see an effective metasystems framework as capable, perhaps for the first time in human history, of overcoming the basic cleavages and deep-seated divisiveness that is a product of cultural and symbolic differences between different human societies and cultural systems. I do not see this as being particularly or exclusively religious or scientific in orientation or result, but as a symbolic framework that is larger than this and inclusive of these frameworks in alternative senses. Metasystems as a framework offers a comprehensive enough symbolic platform to reconcile philosophically religion and science, as well as different ethnocultural orientations, all in a systematic manner.

The symbolic dimensionality of a metasystems framework rests upon the anthropological relativity of all human knowledge, and recognition of the basic manner in which this knowledge is universally structured and culturally conditioned. It becomes only by means of such a framework that the conception of anthropological relativity and symbolic structuration of knowledge can be most clearly objectified and to some extent, "controlled for" in our accounting of the effect that the knower brings to the thing that is being known as well as to the "relative" state of knowledge of the world. In other words, it provides us a means of stepping outside of the ideological circle of knowledge in order to reflect upon knowledge as an ideological system. It is this that leads us to the role of the anthropology of knowledge and cultural constructivism in understanding the articulation of knowledge and its principle evolutionary function in human adaptation.

There is a sense that the strategic point of view of the outside-inside observer that is possible through an anthropological paradigm of knowledge has been critical to the development of a metasystems approach as well as to the development of natural systems theory at all levels of its articulation. It is only by stepping beyond the ideological-behavioral frameworks of knowledge systems that we can evaluate these systems critically and in a neutral and objective manner. Intellectual development in the anthropology of knowledge forces this kind of exceptional orientation and positioning in the world of knowledge.

To the extent that the metasystem is a knowledge based system that depends upon the transmission, articulation and modification of knowledge in the world, we can say that a central concern of a metasystems approach is in the symbolic acquisition of new forms and functions of knowledge systems, and indeed the development of new knowledge systems themselves. And this concern centrally falls upon the problem of human development, and especially upon the problem of education and knowledge acquisition. Education and its redesign within a metasystems framework has been identified as a central and probably pivotal component of an applied metasystems strategy.

The model of conventional scientific methodology relies mainly upon causal explanation--or what might be better called deterministic reasoning. Something happens, that causes some set of predictable consequences. This is the standard approach in analytical science, to seek deducible causes for observable effects.

The point of departure in systems theory is that causality in systems is usually complex, multi-dimensional, reciprocal and relational, making it difficult if not impossible to explain the behavior or emergent properties of systems based upon direct causality. The notion of complementarity implicit to the functioning and structural relationships of systems, is something that is not well received or accommodated within a standard framework of scientific methodology.

The point is though that most natural systems demonstrate complementarity in their relational patterning and dynamic behavior, within which it is very difficult if not wholly impossible to attribute definite causal determinism to any particular relationship. It can be reasonably argued that even causality itself is really a unidimensional and somewhat restricted view of what really are complementary relationships that occur, and it can be demonstrated in physical chemistry for instance that chemical reactions that demonstrate near "perfect" causality in principle, turn out to be much more discretely complex two-way interactions in reality. It follows that in complex systems especially, attributions of discrete unidirectional causality disguise continuous two-way interactions and are often as not arbitrary attributions superimposed upon the data.

This is not to discount completely the value of causality in explanation, particularly where an appeal to logical argument and analysis is necessary, but to rely upon causality in scientific method exclusively without paying heed to the role of complementary relationships is to short-change science or an understanding of what really happens. There is of course the appeal of simplicity and parsimony that makes causal explanations most attractive. The appeal of causal explanations, especially "prime mover" explanations, and the appeal to such explanations, is based upon the simplicity of such accounts and the criticism of systems explanation that they run quickly to unmanageable degrees of complexity.

We may say in a formal sense that there is no system, or no explanation of a system, that does not involve the elaboration of complementary relationships between parts of a whole, in terms of their interactive dynamics. These complementary relationships embody in a discrete sense multiple causal interactions.

We normally understand operational systems as either networks or as circular frameworks, and sometimes a mixture of both. We do not see in systems functioning uni-linear causality, in which part A affects part B, in turn affecting part C. We of course are inclined by "common sense" reinforced by "common knowledge" towards a more direct, causal view of reality--strike a match, we get fire. Hit a hammer on the nail head, we drive the nail into the wood. We are not normally inclined to viewing the match stick or the hammer, nail and wood as a part of a larger framework or system of relations in which things are accomplished, hopefully in an organized manner. There is good reason for this--everyday logic underlying common sense demands simple explanations for otherwise complex problems, and there is little left-over for the elaboration of complex explanations entailed by looking at everything as a Hen & Egg kind of problem. But scientific explanation, in spite of a rule of parsimony, cannot rest satisfied with simple explanations to complex realities, especially if the appeal is primarily to "common sense" which is meant a kind of folk ethno-logic.

Fortunately, we have early precedents for a call to a basic shift in cognitive styles of scientific worldview and praxis. This call was issued by none other than Niels Bohr in his article "Natural Philosophy and Human Cultures" (in Nature, Feb 18, 1939: pg. 268-272), when he noted that traditional causal explanation, rooted in the precept that causal behavior was independent of the means of observation, could not account for subatomic phenomena he had discovered, and that a new model of complementarity: "Information regarding the behaviour of an atomic object obtained under definite experimental conditions, may, however, according to a terminology often used in atomic physics, be adequately characterized as complementary to any information about the same object obtained by some other experimental arrangement excluding the fulfillment of the first condition." (ibid, page 269) He goes on to relate this concern to the study of human psychology, as well as to the study of human culture, where he notes a critical dilemma of understanding between "instinct" and "reason." He offers complementarity as a reasonable solution to this kind of dilemma.

He more succinctly elaborated his argument in another essay written in 1958, entitled "Causality & Complementarity", (from Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, by Niels Bohr, 1963 posthumous). "Far from restricting our efforts to put questions to nature in the form of experiments, the notion of complementarity simply characterizes the answers we can receive by such inquiry, whenever the interaction between the measuring instruments and the objects forms an integral part of the phenomena"

In general philosophical perspective, it is significant that, as regards analysis and synthesis in other fields of knowledge, we are confronted with situations reminding us of the situation in quantum physics. Thus, the integrity of living organisms and the characteristics of conscious individuals and human cultures present features of wholeness, the account of which implies a typical complementary mode of description.....the gradual development of an appropriate terminology for the description of the simpler situation in physical science indicates that we are not dealing with more or less vague analogies, but with clear examples of logical relations which, in different contexts, are met with in wider fields.

Thus we can understand that scientific explanation is in its own development forced to adopt the wider field of view and to take into account the relativity of the observer in all instances, as well as the possibility of alternative, complementary points of view and frames of reference in relation to the phenomena being described. What appears from a conventional standpoint as an insuperable dilemma, as a hen or egg kind of problem, becomes from a complementary perspective the natural holism of divergent frames of reference.

Causality can be inferred in systems--systems function, and make things happen. As a windmill works for instance, the wind turns the vanes of the wheel, which in turn powers a shaft, that in turn drives gears in turn empowering whatever mechanical equipment might be attached to these gears, or alternatively, an electric generator. In a simple diagram of such system, we can infer causality, but we can also see that this system runs on a continuous basis, as a system, as long as the wind turns with sufficient force and speed.

At the same time, we can always construe causal events in systems on the basis of the cyclical processes that can be said to recur in such systems on a regular and predictable basis. We can look at the same system and its behavior from multiple points of view, depending upon our frame of reference, and this multiplicity of frameworks is not mutually exclusive, but complementary to the problem set implicit to the system.

All knowledge that is or possibly becomes available to us is human knowledge--if other animals know, we cannot know what or how they know. This knowledge remains fundamentally unavailable to us. There is no knowledge that is not first prescreened and filtered through the mechanisms of human perception, cognition, memory, linguistic interpretation and active social construction. Thus there are certain built in constraints to our knowledge systems, namely and first that they are by definition human knowledge systems. This is the most general form of anthropological relativity that conditions and limits ultimately what, and how, we may know about the larger reality.

We must understand therefore that there are constraints inherent to our knowledge, of how we come to see and understand that world, that are built into our very condition as human beings, and this pre-structures what we may know and see in significant, even unknown ways.

We have developed alternative systems that have allowed us to systematically expand our knowledge base. We have developed instruments of perception, microscopes and telescopes, that allow us to see on scales never ever imagined to exist previously, and these instruments have broadened and deepened our field of view of reality by many orders of magnitude over what it was when we only had the vision of our bare eyes. Other kinds of systems have been developed to increase our knowledge of unknown realities in many other ways as well. All of these systems have broadened reality for us, and broadened our understanding of reality manifold.

But however powerful and enlightening our alternative systems may be, we must face a realization that all knowledge must ultimately be filtered through a human screen of consciousness, and this filter is far from perfect or being infallible, no matter how logical or well trained or informed we may presume ourselves or one another to be. It is most likely that there are some forms of knowledge, some domains of reality, that are for the most part permanently beyond the horizon of our understanding and comprehension, however remotely or indirectly it may be ascertained. Even the possibility of the existence of such unknown realities, containing what we may refer to as unknown systems, is itself even something that may be fundamentally uncertain. I suspect that we will reach our observational and inferential limits in understanding the fundamental processes of physical reality, for instance, in any decisive or certain manner, and that we will also reach certain grander limitations of our view of the larger universe. In fact I think we have already probably encountered such limitations even though we are hesitant to see them as insuperable boundaries to our knowledge and our science.

Two main points arise from this consideration of the fundamental anthropological relativity of all our knowledge systems, or possible knowledge systems. First, what we know, however much this may ultimately be, is always finite and always bound by the horizon of what we do not know--or of the fathomless unknown. We face a fundamental dilemma of trying to comprehend what may be ultimately infinite in terms that are by definition finite. Secondly, what we know is conditioned by the constraints of our knowledge, by how we know, and the act of knowing, which is never "pristine" as the "thing in itself" but always preconditioned by previous experience, by our own assessments, models, and patterns of perceptual recognition. It is not just that our knowledge is pre-selected and constrained in unconscious ways, but that our act of knowing reality, at whatever level, in whatever way, leads to our interaction upon some level with that reality. We bring not only our pre-understandings to our knowledge, but we bring it to what is known or possibly known by us.

These two sets of constraining conditions to human knowledge, that define the basis of anthropological relativity of knowledge, are mutually implicit to one another, and create a condition of ultimately never being certain of our knowledge, of what we really do known, in any non-relative manner. The only kind of knowledge that appears to transcend this dilemma is that encompassed by the logical relations, operations and terminologies of mathematics, the language of the "pure sciences." Pure mathematics does so by fact of its representation of ideal (i.e., non-real) realities that, by themselves, have no direct instantiation in the real world, but which are represented by many phenomenological instances that can be said to be applied forms. Even pure mathematics itself may ultimately be subject to these kinds of relativistic constraints, though we may not ever know for certain. Certain types of mathematical problems remain intransigent to solution.

One cannot over-stress the importance of understanding the role that anthropological relativity must play in our comprehension of the world, in all fields of knowledge, especially in relation to the sciences because it is in these areas of knowledge that objective/empirical claims to reality are regularly made but often without default consideration of possible anthropological constraints to such knowledge. The success of science has bred a certain attitude of hubris about what it knows and is capable of achieving, and in turn perhaps a blind eye to its own intrinsic limitations.

It is an important caveat to note as well that when we refer to anthropological relativity of knowledge, we are referring to a basic philosophical and cognitive condition intrinsic to our form of symbolic knowledge itself. We are not referring thereby, however implicitly, to more vulgar forms of humanistic relativism, the problems of cultural relativity or interpretive parallax, or the role of emotions and dispositions in our thinking, and so forth. We are referring to a fundamental condition, a basic statement about the limits, nature and structure of all human knowledge, however it may be expressed, interpreted or used in the world.

It is especially in the realm of systems theory and systems science that the question of the anthropological relativity of knowledge comes to greatest focus and therefore gains the greatest significance. This is because systems theory deals primarily with the complementarity of alternative frameworks of reference, especially dealing holistically with complex systems, as all natural systems really are, and this entails the adoption automatically of a relativistic approach to such understanding, consideration of the fundamental contextuality and conditions that constrain our knowledge of the world.

We have largely taken for granted the pan-human condition of the anthropological relativity of our knowledge because it remains normally invisible and transparent to us as a condition intrinsic to ourselves. We cannot see the outside of the room that we are looking out from in the first place. The idea that we can feasible step beyond the boundaries of our own knowledge worlds arises in a partial manner of inter-psychological or inter-cultural parallax when we do encounter and interact with people who have adopted fundamentally different frames of reference for their knowledge than our own. We gain a sense of relativization and objectification of the difference that we normally do not need to deal with when we deal only with collective precepts and assumptions that are considered to be globally shared and universally true. But we are not likely to be brought fully to the objective awarenesss of the limitations and structure of our own knowledge unless and until we encounter some form of alternative intelligence in the universe, that is capable of some form of intelligent knowledge and information transmission. It will only be then that we are fully awakened from the complacency of our own knowledge foundations, and provided a frame of reference that we have never experienced before. I will not presume to make any predictions at this time about the outcomes of such an encounter for our worldview and thus, for our world.

In nature, and in the larger sense of reality, everything is connected to everything else, whether directly or remotely and indirectly. One might be inclined to see reality as a vast "scale-free" network system. But everything is not connected to everything else in exactly the same way--in fact, the bulk of empirical evidence suggests that everything connects to everything else not just differently, but uniquely in an exact and discrete sense to each instance and circumstance of a thing in question.

Systems relativity is a basic condition of all human knowledge of reality that comes from several different sources at once, but meets in an somewhat inherently ambiguous middle ground. We may refer to forms of design relativity, structural relativity and relational relativity as alternative facets of expression of systems relativity, albeit from varying points of view.

No real system may occur in a total vacuum or complete isolation, and so all systems are interconnected to other systems. In fact, as we observe nature carefully, we come to realize increasingly that systems interconnect upon many different levels simultaneously.

Of course this is a rather simplistic "theory of everything" model, a bit of over-generalization about the structure of reality, but it provides a direct and dramatic entry into understanding the general problem of Systems Relativity--which can be described as a fundamental constraint upon our knowledge of reality in terms of our capacity, both inherent and external, to know or perceive the relations of things in a complete or even sufficient manner.

It will be demonstrated furthermore that science, in whatever form or methodology this takes, moves forward in a systematic manner by means of coming to terms with the general problems of systems relativity, in relation to a specific domain or area of knowledge, in the accounting for the determinancy of relationships between event structures. It does not do this necessarily in a deliberate way, but such underpinnings are implicit and inherent to all general or specific scientific methodologies.

The entire basis of a general systems framework, and of a scientific worldview and methodology based upon a general systems approach, is that of dealing centrally with the problem of systems relativity as this is found to occur phenomenally in natural event structures. Defining a general systems framework depends upon excoriating the relational patternings shared by most if not all systems, regardless of the differences occurring between systems. This cannot be done scientifically in either an empirical or a rational sense if a careful accounting of the differences that occur between systems cannot be made.

The challenge of science becomes describing how things are interconnected, with the understanding that though not everything is interconnected in the same way, some things are connected in similar ways to other things. Traditional science has come from a framework of magic that held to loose analogical relationships, a natural consequence of the dialectical and duality structure of human symbolic logic, and came in time to impose on explanation and its own rites of performance the more restrictive criteria of the demonstration of homological relationships between event structures. Homological relationships stipulate a condition of historical precedence and consequence, and of genetic relation and therefore some sense of causal dependency. This has been the emphasis of conventional science. Systems-based frameworks extend the framework upon a structural level to embrace the informational patterns of systems of all kinds, regardless of their level of articulation or form--thus otherwise unrelated kinds of systems from different levels of pattern organization, say a molecule and a cell and an organism, may be comparable mechanically or informationally on the basis of their patterning of organization of relations or the dynamic development of relational structures that occur in such different systems.

It has been a common observation and generalization that reality and nature has organized itself in certain ways, and the pattern of organization between many different systems tends to follow very similar principles of relation and organization, at least upon some level of analysis and generalization. Science depends for instance on the possibility of the precise measurement of the physical patterning of event structures.

The basis for all or any kind of information is fundamentally pattern organization that is non-random. It is observable that all real systems that occur are essentially working systems in the sense that their pattern organization is non-random (contains information) and operate against an overarching tendency towards randomization or disorder. Relational structures of whatever kind (and all things in reality are somehow interrelated) contain information if they are non-random in occurrence. Understanding significant information (i.e. non-random pattern) contained in event structures of reality is the basis for both a systems framework and doing so in a systematic, measurable manner is the basis of a scientific model of such event structures.

In our four-dimensional view of the universe, the physical manifestation of all event structures occur in both time and space, and it has been demonstrated that we ultimately cannot separate spatial from temporal modalities of organization. Non-random pattern occurs therefore both temporally and in spatial expression. We may say that all things real have some form of physical manifestation, and therefore all real systems are necessarily, first and foremost, physical systems the behavior of which can at least be described in physical terms.

From a physical standpoint, therefore, any real system may be described as an event structure that occurs in time and space and that exhibits some degree of non-random pattern in its occurrence, and especially if this non-random pattern endures over time and across space in a manner that makes its chance or stochastic probability extremely unlikely under conditions of spatial-temporal symmetry permanence.

The following points, forming a basic systems relativity paradigm, must be observed:

2. that non-random pattern or "organization" can endure in an improbable manner only if "work" is done.

3. from at least a thermo-dynamic perspective, mechanics of real systems determine that energy must be transported effectively with a minimal degree of efficiency from the environment into the system on a continuous basis.

4. no real system can be permanently or absolutely self-organizing, and therefore completely self-contained in an informational sense.

5. all real systems must be partially open to a larger environment of relationships that in part deterministically organize systems in a meta-systems context.

Furthermore, I would be inclined to put forward the proposition that, at least in the observable universe of physical reality, all energy transactions are in the final analysis absolutely equal--energy is always perfectly conserved--for any discrete amount of energy input into a system delimited in time-space, an exactly equal net amount of energy will be output from the same system, including the energy required for the pattern of organization (information) contained in the system. The fundamental equality of all energy exchange relationships in physical reality appears to be a universal property of all real systems and can be presumed to be a basic presupposition of the cosmological principle. In other words, physical reality in a total or universal sense may have no "leaks", even if limited "self-organized" physical systems are observed always to leak.

This sets up certain consequences for all systems, and we may identify laws of informational dynamics that reflect precisely the principles of thermodynamics:

1. It is impossible for instance, to squeeze more in total from a self-contained system than was originally put into a system, whether this is in terms of energy or information.

2. It is impossible to convert all energy in a self-contained system into informational organization.

3. There is no such thing as a permanently self-contained system. The long term trend of any self-contained system is towards increasing disorganization and loss of information.

Only ideal systems, those that exist only as abstractions, may be considered to be completely or totally self-organized and self-contained in an informational sense. All real systems are in fact at best only semi-self-contained. Science has its basis in the analysis and measurement of energy transactions in physical event structures that result in information and that can be considered in some sense to be minimally self-organizing as "systems." We have just pointed out, in a rather abtruse manner, scientific justification for why all systems are relative, in a physical sense at least.

There is more to the story than this, and this other side of the story has to do with the inherent informational ambiguity of real systems that affect our capacity to known in an absolutely certain sense a "system." All real systems may be said to be informationally dynamic, even only upon a structural level of description. They are subject to continuous fluctuation and alteration, and hence any attempt to impose a fixed or "absolute" frame of reference to such patterning must be construed as inherently arbitrary. The true difference between a scientific theory regarded as correct and true even if in a limited manner and a symbolic ideology or mythology is not the inherent structure of the reasoning processes or knowledge encompassed by either system of symbolic generalization, but the conditions and constraints imposed on the foundations of information systematically used to verify and validate such conceptual constructions. Ultimately, physical measurement of the patterning of real systems forms the basis for the former kind of construction, however indirectly derived, while no such system of constraints operates in the case of non-scientific ideologies or other symbolic systems. Of course this is not the whole story of what makes a body of knowledge and a methodology a science, or of what makes a science a systems-based framework of comprehension of reality, but it is only a beginning.

Universal systems relativity sounds like a oxymoron--that which is universal cannot be relative. But by this term I am referring to the universality of the condition systems relativity. All systems are different, indeed, particularistic and unique. The uniqueness of systems comes from several sources, namely their inherent complexity and variability, as well as their inherent heterogeneity of composition. The uniqueness of systems is also defined within a meta-systemic context that is always different and particular for each and every system that occurs. The differences between systems in a detailed sense does not preclude the grouping and generalization of systems on the basis of shared similarities and types.

In a formal sense, we may state universal systems relativity in this way: All systems, no matter their level of articulation, are relative to the meta-systems framework in which they occur, and each meta-system framework is unique to the system as it occurs. Similar systems in the same frameworks can be expected to follow the same kinds of rules and to respond in similar ways.

All systems as well, though they are functionally independent of their environment in a relative manner, nevertheless are in the long run dependent upon a stable range of environmental conditions for the stability of their developmental trajectory. We see this easily with plant systems like gardens--grow too many plants in too small a space, fail to feed them fertilizer or water them regularly, and one will see plants that are undersized and unproductive. The individual plant, as an internally separate and independent system, will continue to grow and pass through its stages of development, but in an abnormal and stunted manner.

Universal systems relativity states therefore, in a formal sense, that we ultimately cannot separate a system from the normal or natural meta-systemic context of the environment in which it occurs. All systems in other words come bound within a meta-systems context, and their behavior is critically determined by these meta-systems contexts.

It has been our own analytical presumption to stereotype systems as finite, delimited constructs that exist in some kind of ideal isolation from a natural world. We have approached most of science in this manner, and though it often entails great progress in specialized fields of knowledge and application, it comes at a cost of hyper-compartmentalization, generalization of knowledge to other problem sets, and capacity to deal with systems in naturalized settings.

It is not in our habit therefore of thinking about systems or representing systems in terms of a figure-ground relationship that interacts in significant ways with its meta-systemic context or environment. The fact that all systems are thus bound in such a gestalt-like frame has not precluded our pretension that they are isolatable and capable of being treated as isolated entities. Sometimes such analytical isolation is necessary, but more often than not it is simply misleading and oversimplifying of reality.

Meta-systems relativity also critically concerns the problem of our own knowledge and pre-understanding and preconceptions that we bring to systems. We impose even our own frameworks of seeing systems in their definition and perception of how they work. We need only point to a Ptolemaic way of looking at the sun and moon in relation to the earth and ourselves on the earth, as an example of how our own preconceptions, and ultimately, ignorance, can influence how we see and talk about things in the world. Acknowledging the relativity of systems, and attempting to objectify systems in a relativistic manner, brings us a step closer to understanding them in a less biased manner.

Universal systems relativity must be seen as a condition of our knowledge and capacity for knowing the real world, and for limiting our objective understanding of that world. We seek a more realistic vision of the world, and the systems that compose the world, in the naturalistic contexts in which they occur. To pretend that we have absolute knowledge, or that we have discovered "truths" about the world that are complete and final, is to simply maintain an ideological illusion of a closed world, that things are just so, and no other possible way, and that what we know is certain and admits of no doubt or critical uncertainty. This is of course not the best attitude by which to build a science or by which to achieve a better adaptation in the world.

A big part of systems philosophy is accounting for the ghost in the machine--for the emergent properties associated with systems integration. We cannot analytically explain this sense of synergism, as Aristotle observed that "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts." Examples of ghosts in machines are all living organisms, the organismic functioning and "vital spirit" of living, responding multi-cellular organisms, the bound mind of a human brain, the distinctive chemical properties of molecules. We might include in this some of the physical properties associated with atoms, for instance charge and mass, and possibly even the forms of energy we believe are fundamental. From a general systems standpoint, the solution is relatively obvious and simple--the more coherent and integrated a system, the more clear-cut are the emergent properties that can be associated with that system. Yet such an answer begs a genuine scientific and systematic solution to this kind of problem. What is clear is that nature is organized into systems upon every level at which it is examined, that it differentiates at different scales of size, and that different kinds of emergent and synergistic properties are associated with different kinds and levels of natural systems stratification.

Why nature organizes itself in the first place, and has become somewhat systematically stratified upon so many levels, is a problem in itself central to any adequate systems philosophy and begging solution as well. Stratification of nature seems to go hand-in-hand with its systems organization, and this organization and stratification appears in the main to be what can be called naturally self-organizing. In other words, we seek no causes of predetermination or arbitrary, remote causality in the patterned organization of systematic processes in nature.

As far fetched as this idea may seem, it embodies to basic truths that must be taken into account when dealing with natural systems--all systems have a history and an origin. They do not just magically or divinely pop into being, and they have not just always been as they are. Second, and perhaps more interesting, is the idea that all natural systems perform work, which Buckminster Fuller might have called anti-entropic in function, but one outcome of this work, whether or not intended, was that one system often produced two more systems, and so on and so forth. This idea will be explored in greater detail later.

Furthermore, we must understand that all systems are what can be called context bound and context dependent. They occur in metasystem frameworks, and their action, behavior and developmental state-paths cannot be adquately accounted for outside of this larger framework. And it follows that as the system is organized in certain ways by the framework, so to the framework itself is organized as a metasystem, in part by the systems it contains.

Upon any level of scientific investigation we may choose, whether we are dealing with molecular biology, astrophysics or cognitive psychology, we seek a comprehension and descriptive explanation of the systems that underly the patterning that we observe and deal with in our experiments and observations. Science is systems science, and scientists seek systematic explanation of events as systems--whether analytically in terms of the composition and action of the parts, or synthetically in terms of the interactions of components in the composition of the whole. A systems based philosophy of science and a science philosophy of systems are almost one and the same thing, or at least contrapuntal perspectives upon the same central metatheme. A systems-based orientation in science contextualizes the scientific method in a hypothetical-deductive and modeling-theoretic framework that allows generalizations to be both readily made and applied to a range of alternative contexts and cases.

A systems based approach is broader and more encompassing than a strictly conventional scientific approach, at least in principle. Direct causality, the object of most scientific research, becomes contextualized in a systems framework to the relational interactions and co-occurring possibilities that arise in integrated system. The event as a product or by-product of the behavior of a system, or set of systems, in their own metasystemic context, is critical to the comprehension of a systems-based approach. A systems based approach comprehends both analytical and synethic approaches to the understanding of phenomena, contextualizing the strictly analytical in the broader background of the general and synthetic. This is done in both a deliberate and an explicit manner. This is the value of a systems-based approach, rendering concrete and explicit what otherwise remains implicit and mainly abstract in the background of scientific research.

A systems philosophy is therefore first and foremost an objective philosophy, based upon the perceived realism and materialism of phenomenological event structures. Subjective elements are a part of this philosophical orientation, but this is contextualized within a larger and overarching empirical-rational framework of identifying objective and statistically relevant patterns.

Systems philosophy deals with the knowledge of systems, and the systematics of knowledge. It is derived from general system theory, and seeks a unification of knowledge and understanding of many different kinds of event patterns and structures in the world based upon systems models and structural representations. A structural representation is a simplified model purporting to show the main or key relationships that are primary or determinant in the articulation of any system.

All specific systems must have the following, which can be called a "cellular model of systems":

A boundary or boundary maintaining/mediating mechanisms that mediates relationships between the environmental context and the inner context of the system.

An inner context composed of essential components involved in dynamic interrelationship with one another, performing work that maintains the system as such.

A developmental life-cycle including a beginning, some set of intermediate states, and a final end-state.

A distinctive set of emergent properties associated with the index of integration.

A range or continuum of alternative states at any given state-stage of its developmental trajectory.

Nature as we encounter this may be said to abound with multiple complex systems. Every organism of every kind, insects, plants, animals, constitute complex systems that are in turn constituted by millions off units, systems called cells, that in turn are super-complex entities composed of complex and dynamically shaped macro-molecules. Organisms cohere into communities and populations with complex structures and relational patterns of interaction. This is just one level at which we encounter natural systems in the world. But it is by itself enough to demonstrate how completely the systems concept dominates the design of natural patterning at every level and in all instances.

Systems philosophy may be said to refer to the knowledge and related understanding pertaining to "systems" as these are alledged to occur in reality, or at least to be possible or imaginable. This understanding may be said to lead to the capacity to organize and deal with systems in a deliberate way, and to create new systems in the world or in the imagination of the world. We may say that systems philosophy is de facto a philosophy of science, for science is a system's based approach to knowledge, and scientific knowledge leads to the application and realization of systems in the world. Scientific knowledge and understanding may thus be said to be systematic and systems-based, and our approach and understanding of systems may be said to be knowledge that is fundamentally scientific in character. A systems philosophy may be said to both constitute an explicit philosophy of science and an implicit scientific philosophy, in a sense that a description and explanation of the general and theoretical may follow upon and be based empirically upon the observation of phenomenal event structures in an objective world.

Generally the term "general systems" may apply both to the complex sets of events being described, as well as to the language and conceptual representations that we use to describe and explain event structures. In other words, a "system" as a philosophical term incorporates a dual and ambivalent sense of identity--of being both the "thing" in the world being described, and the word or name used to describe the "thing." There is a sense of parallax between these dual sides of the use of the term "system" that must eventually be accounted for. This dilemma goes back to a fundamental dilemma of human knowledge and the language-based symbolic representation of the world upon which our knowledge is based and constructed. We suffer the fallacy of confusing the identity of the term with the thing, and at times interchanging the one for the other, or in place of the other. Systems thus are as much knowledge systems of symbolic representation of reality as they are of anything actually occurring or "real" in reality.

The fundamental structure of the physical reality may be said to be "systematic" in the sense that it hypothetically follows regular rules of order that induce a minimally deterministic pattern. Holding to a strict cosmological principle, the structure of the universe in the large and the long run is derivable from the reducible systematicity of the fundamental structure of reality, even if we might be able to say that in the largest sense there is no overarching sense of deterministic order.

We, human beings, are defined by our sentience, which is our capacity to see reality intellectually and ideationally, to imagine ourselves as other beings, and to imagine complex states of reality. We are sentient in a manner that we have discovered with no other known living organism, and that we can attribute in equal measure or similar quality with no other known form of brain function. Indeed the three pound human brain is possibly one of the most complex known systems in the universe, and the civilization, the social and cultural systems of human collective behavior this has given rise to may be some of the most elaborated and complicated kinds of systems that exist in the universe, barring the eventual discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

We, ourselves, in our sentience, may thus be considered a product of a complex system that is the result of the unique function of our highly evolved brains. Properties of mind that we refer to generally as "sentience" are indeed from a systems point of view the emergent synergisms of a complexly partitioned and stratified brain.

Metaphysics has usually been an abstruse concern with fundamental questions about the ultimate nature of reality and of abstractions like truth and of the ontological basis of knowledge itself. Of course, the kinds of questions and answers that I give to these basic issues relating to our worldview and its epistemological foundations is probably different from the point of view of any other philosopher or person on earth.

I have chosen in this chapter to briefly deal with metaphysical concerns as these might relate to deeper issues about metasystems and natural systems theory especially. I adopt a point of view that has been critically structured by an intellectual commitment to a natural systems theoretic perspective, and it is done with the intention of ferreting out the possible metaphysical implications of such a perspective, which appear to be many, deep and complex.

It would appear for instance, that all notions of causality in the physical universe, even in one that is mechanistically defined, are relative to the conceptual framework of the observer, and I would add, to the level of emergent properties associated with a particular system. In other words, what might be causal explanation on one level, would most assuredly be what can be called "complementary" explanation on some other level. We then broach a hen or egg dilemma, and it is only by stepping outside of the conundrum of the question of which came first can we see that both are complementary states to one another: the chicken lays the egg; the egg hatches the chicken.

If we see a system, we see a set of interacting parts that each plays a role in a larger framework. From the standpoint of the framework as a whole, the inter-functioning of the parts cannot be said to be causally determinative, but complementary to one another. We cannot describe any system in a reductionistic manner without invoking the state-properties and pathways that characterize and constitute that system, and these are derived non-reductionistically and holistically. If we seek in our explanation to reduce a system to a sum of the functioning of its parts, we then reach to another level of integration of reality at which level the system as a whole is no longer readily apparent in terms of its definable properties and processes.

At the same time, we cannot escape the terminological conundrums and philosophcial implicatures of the words we use to describe the holistic and synergistic or integrative properties of systems. We can refer to structure, organization, pattern, order, or "system" itself and realize that these names have residual implications and conceptual meanings that are abstract and only applied to natural phenomena in an interpretive and symbolic modality after the fact of their observation and occurrence in reality.

These are, in fact, technically speaking, philosophical kinds of questions that nevertheless have some real bearing to our modes of scientific thinking. Metaphysical systems can be said therefore to be centrally concerned with the philosophy of science. But even more than just one more philosophy of science, I believe metaphysical systems is also about the science of philosophy.

Philosophy was really the Greek grandparent of the modern sciences. Its placement in the humanities along side of history and literature and a concern for language is perhaps an unfortunate reflection of its archaic and generalistic nature. Modern philosophers have nevertheless made important contributions to scientific thought, particularly in the areas of logic and mathematics. To claim a scientific philosophy is to assert a kind of empirical orientation and ontological status for philosophical inquiry that goes a few steps beyond its traditional armchair approach to adopt research methodologies and heuristic problem-solving strategies that renders its conclusions relatively non-arbitrary and even, should I say it, falsifiable.[17]

Metaphysical systems, as it is dealt with within the context of natural systems theory, comprises that special class of knowledge systems that deal primarily with aspects of reality, and of our knowledge and relation to reality, that can be said to transcend any active physical presence or manifestation, and yet that, simultaneously, can be said to be somehow real or "true" in at least a knowledge sense. Metaphysical systems therefore have invariably a reflexive reference to knowledge about natural systems, and all natural systems theory, as theory, can be said to be fundamentally metaphysical in orientation and structure. We can therefore describe as metaphysical any knowledge system which makes general statements about reality, including the reality of that knowledge system itself.

Metaphysics has concerned primarily various philosophers, and frequently deals with a class of questions that may be beyond the purview of science to test or evaluate at all. The question of what is "truth" seems, from a western philosophical perspective, to be as equally important a question as that of "what is reality" in some ultimate or fundamental sense. It follows that the kinds of answers philosophers derive from these kinds of questions are different in character than the kinds of answers that scientists derive in more limited frameworks for similar kinds of questions. Scientists might be concerned for instance with the reality of a certain kind of fundamental structure, and they may seek the relative truth value of a certain kind of statement about some observable phenomenon in reality, but I do not know if they are so concerned with general statements about the nature of truth or of reality in the same way that philosopher's have been known to approach these problems. Philosophy has been grouped with the culture of the humanities instead of the sciences, though philosophers, beginning with the Greeks, and continuing up until the 20^th Century, have made basic and important contributions to the sciences, in mathematics, theory, and logic especially.[18]

Science can ask questions on a more general level about the nature of reality and the reality of nature than it normally does otherwise, if it has the conceptual and operational machinery to do so and to derive inferences from the models that are forthcoming from such investigation. At the same time, it seems to me that philosophy needs science even more in the modern age than the other way around. The relevance of philosophy to the modern world and to the understanding of reality will be only as sufficient and significant as it is able to interpret scientific knowledge and understanding to fit and fill out a larger and more general symbolic organization of reality. Philosophy must offer a coherent and consistent worldview and an apposite set of attitudes about reality, truth, humanity, ethics and meaning that reflects the world as this has been scientifically understood.

There is no less room or legitimacy for philosophical inquiry in the modern world than there seemed to be in the classical age of the Greeks. If science has failed at all in the modern world, it has been the failure for scientists to function effectively as natural philosophers in their education, training and practice as researchers. It is not necessary that they do so in their fields of interest, but it is important that they do so if they are to relate these narrowly defined specializations to a broader world and broader set of problems in the world than what is comprehended only by their expertise.

Philosophical problems primarily concern problems of knowledge, and what I would call the problem of the symbolic integration of knowledge, or of the experience that is represented by knowledge. The aim of such symbolic integration is the development of a comprehensive perspective upon the nature of reality that serves to resolve all sense of contradiction and ambiguity. Symbols have this capacity, at least in a limited and relativistic sense, and when we use such words as "Truth" or "Beauty" in some ideal upper case manner, we are implying a monothetic and absolute version of reality that can be at best only a symbolic construct. In this manner, "Truth" becomes a catchall symbol that stands for everything we might regard, or want to regard, as being true. The search for one, single, essential system of truth, even as a single statement, becomes a quest for the holy grail of western philosophy.

Scientists in general do not share this general problem or concern, for if they are interested in truth, it is always in a lower case and limited sense defined by their methods and data. It can be said therefore that metaphysical systems are primarily concerned with what can be called the symbolic truth-value or the ontological and epistemological status of knowledge systems in general.

The quest in metaphysical systems as this relates to natural philosophy and systems theory then is manifold:

1. Can there be said to be basic categories of knowledge that reflect natural and basic divisions or sets or states of things in reality.

b. What is the social distribution of knowledge and how does this knowledge become used for the construction of complex social realities.

2. Is it possible to define a metaphysical system that can be said to be "natural" in a manner thought of as at least relatively "non-arbitrary."

3. If such a system can be defined, then what would be the logical implications and consequences of applying this system to a larger framework of reality.

We might also ask in a related issue what kinds of approaches or alternative methods of inquiry exist that we might take to answering these fundamental questions about reality. Are these different methods of metaphysical inquiry mutually exclusive or are they any more or less valid or desirable than the others? We may see in these kinds of questions that art provides us a way of both seeing and thinking about reality in a basic and concrete sense, in a manner often very different from how we normally construe reality. It is a way of experiencing reality aesthetically that does not seek necessarily to explain or analyze the experience, rather primarily to phenomenologically present the experience upon a level that allows a direct perception based interpretation and reaction to it. The aesthetic response, especially that provoked by fine or exquisite art, is profoundly moving and enlightening at the same time. It can place a person to an exalted state of awareness and apprehension of reality that goes beyond words in its translation. This response too is typically non-didactic, necessarily so, and therefore as a communication device has no other function than its own communication. I would say we respond aesthetically to fine art in much the same manner that we respond to the beauty of nature, and these kinds of experiences have a common source in our deep connection to the natural world.

I do not necessarily offer any final answers or judgements to these basic metaphysical problems. I only seek to proffer alternative perspectives especially as these might relate to a justification and greater understanding of metasystems science and natural systems theory in particular. In this regard we can say that if philosophy must be relevant to the real world of today, to have any greater significance beyond the academic armchair, then it might best be so done in the manner of natural systems theory within a larger framework that does not divorce the deeper questions of the larger meanings about life from the everyday concerns of living and being in reality. There must be a means available, not esoteric, that allows us to tie these two sets of questions together in a manner that makes sense on both levels.

There are five basic sets of questions that mostly deeply concern meta-systems, each of these questions informing and guiding research at different levels of meta-systems stratification:

The answer to these kinds of questions is never straight-forward, and attempting to answer them results in a life-time of research and query. Some might claim that these kinds of questions are unanswerable, though I do not think so, at least from a relative point of view. Unanswerable kinds of questions are those that science should not appropriate ask, and, when we boil it down, there may be only one such unanswerable question:

The question that I believe to be ultimately unanswerable is the question of ultimate origins of our reality. This is a question that cannot be answered even if we adopt a purely mechanistic and material point of view. It is therefore a problem not for science but for religion and symbolic ideology to deal with. There are also non-absolute or relative questions that I believe it to be ultimately beyond the purview of science to resolve. These are normative or human evaluative questions like:

There are no absolute or absolutely certain answers to this kinds of questions that science can grab hold of in a fully objective manner. That does not mean that explication and especially elucidation of these kinds of questions should not be attempted in the name and spirit of science, to yield what greater objectivity we might from them. Religion and symbolic ideology can also answer these kinds of questions as well in some ultimate sense.

Otherwise, I see the range and possibility for scientific query to be fairly unrestrained and wide open. Science can and ultimately will, if provided enough time, solve all problems relating to the questions of reality and truth listed above, at least in a way that is mostly satisfactory if only approximate. If we consider the fullest logical and natural implications and consequences of these kinds of questions, we realize that they extend beyond the boundaries of the current state of knowledge in critical ways. They open us up to asking questions we might not otherwise think to ask, and to seek answers to problems we previously did not even imagine existed. And this augmentation of reality has been a normal and common function of our sciences.

The point of departure of meta-systems science and natural systems theory is the recognition that in nature, in the real world, there is nothing that is not somehow interconnected, however remotely or indirectly, with everything else. One consequence of this that is not so obvious is the observation that no event or entity in reality is wholly or independently "determined" in and of itself. No thing or happening is without at least some residual indeterminancy of its nature or behavior that is the product ultimately of its connection to the larger "universe" of reality. Just how determined or undetermined is the total universe of our experience (and hence knowledge), or our total reality, is a subject of debate and speculation by scientists and philosophers alike. Whether or not we can describe the "total reality" as an integrated system remains a question we are not likely to know the answer for anytime soon.

Science at least proceeds on the illusion that reality is well ordered and perhaps even totally "determined" as a system. It was after all Einstein himself who refused to accept the idea that "God played dice with the universe." In a sense, science has no choice but to carry forward on this presupposition of the total unity of reality and its underlying sense of deterministic causality. According to this general ontological perspective, everything has a "reason" and there is a cause for every thing, and a good scientific theory will "explain" both how and why things happen one way and not in any other way. This has informed a conventional, (compulsive) Newtonian scientific view of the world up until the Twentieth Century when new insights, knowledge and theory, of relativity of both the very large and the very small, of complementarity, of chaos and complexity, has risen to challenge the collective mind of science. And yet even the major architects of Twentieth Century science found it difficult to reconcile and deal with the contradictions of order and disorder, entropy and design, in a single sense of reality.

Science has come of age in a systems framework, and this framework is really the only appropriate one for construing the diverse range of knowledge and activity that is continues in various disparate scientific disciplines. In short, all science is necessarily systems science, both theoretically and methodologically, or else it is nothing. Systems approaches are designed heuristically to handle the complexity of large and chaotic sets. By itself, without theoretical insight that is both mechanistic and relationally integrative when applied to particular natural phenomena, or more importantly, kinds of phenomena, systems approaches do not transcend the programmatic and dogmatic ideology of being a methodology without a reason or a sense of rhyme. The theory that is expected and pertinent to different levels of stratification of natural phenomena in reality is distinct and non-reducible to a common set of constituent elements within another level of stratified patterning nor within the entire framework of systems science itself. Systems science, properly applied, does provide insight and the vision to see beyond ideological and paradigmatic obstacles in our knowledge, and it serves to provide a sense of unity and relationship between different domains and areas of scientific thought and activity. But it does not, in itself, provide the theoretical models that are inherent to natural systems and that can be used to understand and predict their patterning.

It is clear that we can reduce the structures analytically of the human mind to that of the organic human brain composed of complex cellular networks, and we can reduce these structures in turn to large protein molecules and other forms of organic molecule, and these in turn can be reduced to organized sets of atoms and the inter-relationships of subatomic particles. It is possible that we could carry this sense of analytical explanation to even more fundamental levels of quarks, strings, or other quantum "things." But it is equally clear that the description of the human brain and its functioning as mind in terms of cells, molecules, atoms and elementary particles is equally insufficient to a valid or objective understanding of how the mind functions in a manner as to produce symbolic, or representational, intelligence.

It may be said in a systems framework that all natural phenomena, or rather all things and events of things that are real in some objective sense, observe and obey the following set of basic properties:

a. All things are naturally bound to a field of relationships and are constrained and limited in critical ways by this field.

2. All things real are subject to change, and the understanding of change is one of the main goals of scientific understanding and endeavor.

a. The principle source of change in things are in the relational field pattern to which things are naturally bound, in which interaction between elements occurs upon different levels.

We may say furthermore and therefore that all things real cohere within a larger framework of relationships, and this framework constitutes a system of sorts. Such a system unfolds in complex, chaotic ways.

3. All things real that are known are composite structures that are constituted by component elements.

4. Composite structures cohere upon multiple levels of stratification, and encompass componential subsystems.

Science has yet to discover for itself the fundamental atom or element that is irreducible and that composes all other matter. Evidence suggests that even if there is a fundamental level of constituent structure in the fabric of reality, even this level may prove to be heterogeneously constituted by even more fundamental "things" we have yet to observe or account for.

5. It follows therefore that if all things real are composite structures, then the systemic fields of relation in which they are embedded, are also composite in structure.

a. Systemic fields of relations are stratified in an analytic/synthetic sense, upon multiple levels of structural composition.

Finally, I make a profound conclusion that I take to be the theoretical and philosophical foundation for all systems sciences, and that is the central hypothesis of universal physical relativity of all knowledge:

6. If everything is composite and hence reducible, and if the fields of relations are therefore stratified, then it follows that there is no upper or lower limit to the structural stratification of reality, and hence physical reality may be said to be infinitely complex and complexly infinite.

a. Hence, our knowledge of physical reality is inherently limited to the levels of stratification/articulation of event structures that we can either directly observe or indirectly infer from implication of mathematical and mechanistic logic.

In other words, we cannot directly know the total reality in a complete or exhaustive manner or in either an extensive or intensive manner. We can only understand parts of reality in a partial and approximate sense. Reality therefore is the forest in which we are forever entrapped and lost. It is a forest so vast and so intricate in detail, that we cannot hope to escape it or move beyond its entanglements.

There are implications of this set of principles for physical systems theory in particular. If total reality is complexly infinite and infinitely complex, then we may say by logical extension that the total physical universe is also by homology complexly infinite and infinitely complex. If this statement is true, then a great deal follows in terms of the understanding the cosmological structure of the universe and the elementary structure of physical reality. We may never be able to prove this assertion in any scientifically or empirically sufficient manner, if the forest of our reality is always surrounding us and bounding our knowledge.

There is one class or form of knowledge that can be said not to be universally relativistic in this sense. I call this knowledge abstract idealism or representationalism, and essentially it is the knowledge that is comprised by pure mathematical theory. It can be argued as well by philosophers that certain other kinds of knowledge, like the knowledge comprised by pure goodness or beauty, might fit a similar non-relativistic status, except that these are ultimately normative forms of knowledge. Only mathematical reason appears to me to truly transcend relativistic constraints and limitations. I do not offer an explanation of why this may be so at this stage, but only draw attention to this curious paradox. It perhaps comes as no surprise then that mathematics has become the language of the sciences par excellence, even if in heterogeneous systems this language breaks down in its descriptive realism and explanatory detail.

1. Not all description of natural processes and patterns are characterizable in a meaningful manner by mathematical terms and relations. There is a sense of a finite limitation inherent to mathematical models that prevents us from applying such models in a more open and general manner to diverse kinds of data-sets. We may put this another way and state that though all physical event structures are mathematically describable and logically derivable, at least in theory, not all natural event structures are analytically reducible to purely or only physical systems, without the loss of emergent properties and synergistic pattern that is attributable to especially higher order systems.

2. Even for basic physical phenomena, natural event structures tend to be so complex that they quickly outstrip the capacity of mathematical language to parsimoniously describe.

3. Mathematical language, theory and formula are conceptually and symbolically derivative from an empirical substrate of meaning.

4. Conceptually formulated theories that are concise in their definition and reference may provide the most flexible and coherent language for many areas of science and natural systems thinking, as long as the conclusions are empirically or experimentally based through inductive observation and result in testable conclusions by a hypothetico-deductive methodology.

5. We face a central paradox of attempting to describe general systems that are considered basic and objective in terms that are ultimately rooted themselves in advanced symbolic and conceptual systems that are themselves derivable from the teleological development of natural systems. In short, we are bound within the very systems we are seeking to describe, and we are ourselves, including our conceptual systems, a by-product and a part of these systems.

What is sought in grand theoretical terms of general systems science is a deep form of linguistic parsimony and precision of terms and definitive relations that has predictive and explanatory power across a wide range of variable phenomena.

I would say that implicitly at least, there has always been ample room in the sciences, at least in scientific knowledge itself, if not in the scientific community or in terms of its social articulation and application, for a comprehensive and comprehensible general systems perspective, just as there has always been room for synthetists and synthesizing activity to attempt to understand natural patterning of phenomena from a holistic and emergent-property standpoint. The proclivity to promote a certain analytical-cognitive style and approach to knowledge, pretty much across the sciences, may have been an unfortunate by-product of an entrenched and tradition-bound academic structure that has defined itself in terms of disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries, as well as a certain premium placed upon the experimental, observational discovery of new, fact based knowledge, sometimes at any and all costs.

Lack of clear interdisciplinary communication, and I would claim, integration, has in the history of the development of general systems theory tended to hinder its progress and coming together as a unified field of inquiry. In the 1960's journals and societies developed from different directions with the aim of providing the context for such interdisciplinary communication and integration, and to some extent these efforts were partially successful in the forging of a coherent knowledge structure for general systems theory. I would claim though that disciplinary compartmentalization and especially academic-based hyper-specialization of knowledge expertise continues to undermine and interfere with the further development of a general systems framework.

The problem of interdisciplinary integration must be seen as reaching beyond the context of cross-disciplinary communication that implies a cooperative sharing of ideas, knowledge and skills between different kinds of experts from different backgrounds, especially when united by common problems or objectives. It implies a fusion of knowledge across multiple boundaries in a manner that should result not so much in "cross-fertilization" of new ideas, but in the development of a totally new comprehensive perspective that is inherently multi-disciplinary in orientation.

Meta-systems is a concept not only of a system of systems, or of an attempt to deal with complex, heterogeneous systems that are composed of a hierarchy of subsystems, but also it implies, perhaps more importantly, an interdisciplinary framework for the reorganization and reconceptualization of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, in a manner promoting interdisciplinary integration and the dissolution of knowledge boundaries that tend to interfere with such integration. What a meta-systems framework provides therefore is a new comprehensive paradigm for the unification of scientific knowledge across all disciplinary fields and sub-fields, in a manner that retains the integrity of each disciplinary sub-field, and yet provides a context for its integration with other sub-fields and disciplines.

A beginning to this integration is recognition of the innate and natural boundaries separating fundamentally different domains of knowledge. There is no sense in mixing apples and oranges in our formulations. The basis of this is the recognition of the natural hierarchy of meta-systems, and the nonequivalence of theoretical explanation or even of descriptive terminology from one level to another within this hierarchy of systems. We may adopt a physics of human symbolic behavior, but this is unlikely to yield productive results compared to the conventional physics of subatomic particles and fields. The problem of the hierarchical stratification of natural systems leads to the relative appropriateness of theoretical terms, definitions, and relationships we draw in relation to different domains of scientific knowledge. It becomes merely inappropriate, and probably irrelevant as well, to mix our scientific metaphors, so to speak, and to refer what is essentially anthropological or even biological phenomena to a physical level of analysis and explanation. Of course, hybrid, hyphenated (and I should say frequently "hyphenated") approaches at least attempt this all the time, but rarely to such approaches yield any great or significant insight into the fundamental problems of reality. Another way of putting this problem is to suggest that we are unlikely to find the answers we really want if we seek a primary explanation to the cause of the Great Depression in terms of a cycle of Sun Spots, El Nino events, or the variations of the Earth's magnetic poles. If a huge meteorite took out New York City and most of the East Coast, we would probably have slightly more to worry about in our history books than another Great Depression.

It may seem paradoxical to claim that the basis of integration is stratification and differentiation of sub-disciplines along natural boundaries, but we must realize that it is in the organization and interaction of these sub-disciplinary fields that we are to find the true integration proceeding, and not in terms of their isolation and further compartmentalization. It makes no sense either to put the physics department in the same wing and floor as the anthropology department, and expect that everyone in the building will become happy bedfellows. The interaction between anthropologist and physicist must therefore proceed at other levels, and in other ways, than merely in their behavioral articulation in department settings. It must proceed in a sharing of ideas and thoughts over a cup of coffee at a lounge table, unharried by administrative demands, within a systems framework that somehow transcends the disciplinary differences that exist between them. What of relevance might an anthropologist be capable of saying to a physicist, and vice versa, that would lend theoretical and methodological insight into their respective knowledge domains and associated problem sets?

At the root of this problem and dilemma confronting interdisciplinary integration is I believe, the natural organization of real problem sets and the non-reification of ideational or conceptual systems in relation to these problem sets. It should by now go without saying, as a somewhat trite Kuhnian type of cliche, that our problem sets and how they are defined theoretically and approached methodologically, both define and are defined by the dogmas and boundaries of our expert sub-fields. One of the key identifying features of any scientific sub-discipline is what can be considered a unique set of methods that are built and established around a unique set of problems in reality. The problem is not here, so much as it is in tackling a class of problem sets, what can be called meta-systemic problem sets, that by their complex nature transcend those boundaries established around traditional sub-disciplines. It is even a paradoxical issue to try to define what these problem sets are. The obvious example is the problem set centered around concerns for global ecology and global conservation, especially in relation to the further technological development of human civilization. No one sub-discipline can claim an exclusive handle or monopoly of methodology and theoretical insight into such a grand scale problem.

The problem is real enough, and undeniable in its major outlines. But it is largely a problem that everyone is inheriting, but nobody seems to want to claim even partial ownership for. Therefore it becomes a problem that grows in proportion without antidote, prescription or solution being taken. But this problem is part of a deeper and more basic problem set that concerns human adaptation, social organization, evolution, and ecology, and that also concerns the role of geo-physical structures and processes in shaping and constraining the patterns that life takes upon the earth. This deeper level of the problem is not as taboo, and perhaps more available to sub-disciplinary definition and resolution, albeit in a limited and partial manner.

The advent of the computing age and the information revolution has made possible new patterns and capacities meta-systems integration in ways we can scarcely yet imagine. It is possible that we do not need to worry about building supercomputers powerful enough to solve essentially unsolvable differential equations, or extended mathematical problems of astronomic proportions, so much as we can learn eventually how to program and construct our computers in new languages that permit them to facilely express general insight into pattern or logically deduce new conclusions that is possible in nature and to model this patterning in ways that can be considered realistic and representatively reliable. I believe the computing power or capacity for this kind of meta-systems integration may be with us already, if only we knew how to bring it to effective realization in the construction and articulation of our working systems.

Beyond this issue of theoretical relevance and appropriateness, I would also make a claim for a general perspective of meta-systems science as an extension of a general systems theoretic framework, especially when natural systems involve inherent complexity arising not only from large numbers or large sets, but also especially from intrinsic heterogeneity of sets and components as well. Meta-systems I believe provides us with a framework for conceptualizing certain kinds of mixed problem sets, as systems collide and entangle with other systems in the real world, to determine what are ultimately underdetermined outcomes for a system. Meta-systems, to define simply, is not only a system of systems, but also a problem of how heterogeneous systems interact and interrelate.

It is reasonable to claim that all things in nature cohere into their own systems, ones that we call for the most part self-organizing, and these systems are all part of larger systems, and composed in turn of many smaller subsystems. We recognize no intrinsic upper or lower limits to this process of embedding and contextualization, or subordination and super-ordination of natural systems, though we do deal with extrinsic observational limits to our capacity to perceive and therefore to know with any sense of first-hand certainty at levels and scales far removed from our own human-sized proportions. We identify super-ordinate patterns in terms of emergent properties that we can associate with hierarchical integration of function and holistic or organismic synergy, or rather the functioning of the entire system as a unique entity, which implies in itself systematic subordination as well. From these we adduce that all systems undergo developmental life or state-path trajectories and maintain a complex process of dynamic equilibrium of relationship and feedback with its environment. I make an assertion that human cultural systems are a natural outgrowth of more basic biological systems that have lead to the product of large brains, creative hands, and symbolic consciousness unique to humankind. I make further more the more revolutionary assertion that these systems, a natural product of integrative patterns and forces in nature, might eventually result in the formation of even higher order systems in which our own anthropological status and identity becomes subordinate to the machinations and patterning of a larger sense of integrative order.

Meta-systems as I have developed this idea applies at multiple levels of natural systems integration, but there is from a developmental standpoint a sense of a grand meta-system that may be the logical, if not quite natural outcome, of further human acculturative development, that is if we do not destroy ourselves in the process. The development of such a grand meta-system will be contingent upon several sets of factors, not the least of which is the improvement of fundamental communications systems and knowledge and information processing systems, as well as the rise of truly automated and integrated artificial systems that can be called in some sense "intelligent" in their behavior. I would now consider such developments not only as inevitable, but as intrinsically benign and therefore entirely desirable and even necessary outcomes if we are to secure a more stable and peaceful world for our human posterity as well as for all other life on earth.

Beyond the rhetoric and hype, and the unfulfilled promises of general systems theory, a systems framework remains critical to the achievement of a truly comprehensive worldview and scientific attitude toward our shared reality, as disillusioned and ideologically non-delusional as we can possibly make this. The potential of general and applied systems theory has largely been unrealized for a variety of reasons, not the least has been the uncoordinated balkanization of the territory of knowledge that comes one way or another under the rubric of systems theory and science. Also, systems thinking and general models have encountered resistance, not so much from specialists hyper-compartmentalized into increasingly focused and narrow problem sets in their respective fields, but because the development of a truly comprehensive systems framework is probably a threat to the status quo of leaders in the world who want to be able to manipulate and to some extent limit the mind-sets and worldviews of the people they have under their power of control. But even more, the failure of systems thinking, to the extent that it has failed to progress as much as it has promised, stems from those who have or would embrace the meta-paradigm it offers, albeit in a too-general, imprecise, and ultimately irrelevant way. It is simply not sufficient to say that everything coheres into some kind of system at one level or another. It becomes vital to the development of such a perspective to explain in detail not only how that thing coheres to form a part of a system interconnected to other systems, but to study and derive from its behavior predictive generalizations that can be applied, homologically and not just analogically, to other kinds and forms of systems at other levels of the natural integration of reality.

It is the general patterning that we observe in nature that we identify as being indicative somehow of a natural system. All phenomena, even much that is apparently chaotic, is patterned in meaningful and orderly ways when they are understood in a scientific and systematic manner for what they really are. I would call all of science but aspects of general systems theory and methodology, and there is no scientific problem or question that is not fundamentally a problem or question about systems.

Natural systems theory deals with the scientific conceptioning of how natural systems work. We find nature to be stratified on the basis of size and composite complexity, and within this stratification occur discrete levels of organization that are at least partially determinable by rules that can be stated in the form of a proposition or equation. The natural stratification of reality provides us with a ready system for classification and organization of knowledge in order to understand, in a relative way, how things function in specific terms at specific levels.

Meta-systems science deals with the challenge of the complex integration of reality, and the rise of heterogeneous patterning of super-systems as the result of the interaction of multiple systems at multiple levels. Meta-systems science seeks to employ operational procedures to the description and explanation of this super-complex patterning, as well as to the applied heuristics of this understanding to the creation of alternative systems and the augmentation of reality thereby. Meta-systems science is concerned with both the analysis of data and the synthesis of models relating to naturally occurring problems.

The nature of generalization therefore is different between natural systems theory and meta-systems science. Meta-systems science tends to generalize across to systems models while natural systems theory tends to generalize towards the patterning of natural stratification found in reality. Meta-systems science tends to treat specific problems within a same or similar kind of operational framework, but as unique problems. Natural systems theory is concerned primarily with general problems, or problems of knowledge and understanding of naturally occurring systems that occur at a general level. Specific examples are then said to be experimental tests or demonstrations of the general theory that is in question.

While natural systems theory is more representative of knowledge that is conventionally construed in terms of the traditional scientific disciplines and their emergent sub-disciplines, meta-systems science is a new informational-based science that deals with cross-disciplinary interests and problems arising as the result of the dealing with complexity in systems that stems from several sources and therefore crosses multiple knowledge boundaries.

Both natural systems theory and meta-systems science are primarily concerned with working systems in the natural world, as well as with those working systems that are the product of human imagination and invention. A working system can be defined as any kind of patterned process that maintains regular order over time in a predictable manner. The concept of order is necessary and vital to all of sciences. The universe and physical reality is ordered in certain ways, and appears disordered in other ways. If the universe where totally disordered, then there would be no possibility for science.

As such, natural systems theory and meta-systems science are primarily concerned with the principles of order and disorder that affect different kinds of working systems at different levels of articulation and integration. All working systems are by definition entropy based and inefficient systems as all such systems involve energy exchange that is always less than perfect.

[1] There is pressing need nowadays to design and develop systems that are human proof in the sense that they serve to counteract the destructive and unintended consequences of human behavior. We need to bring the person back into the center of human systems, and we need to bring nature back into the center of the human being. Human proofing a system is designing such a framework that serves to counterbalance and prevent human nature from corrupting or otherwise undermining the developmental possibilities of such a system, as has been so common in the world today.

[2] The study of systems in our world has only begun, and we have just begun to recognize and acknowledge not only the relevance of systems to our scientific comprehension of our world, but the potential productivity of understanding systems in their application and possible, especially studied, alternation in that world. What is demanded of us in the study of systems is an entirely new way of seeing the world, and a new kind of idiom within which to frame this new worldview.

[3] Artificial systems of human design pale in comparison to the sophistication and complexity of natural systems, and yet human-made systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated and intricate in their design and capacity. Even the possibility of our imagination and comprehension of systems, being ourselves the natural products of such systems, are more than just remarkable and extremely, astronomically unlikely.

[4] Systems theory and thinking is more of a way of knowing and seeing the world than it is anything new. It is a framework for the understanding of reality in a holistic and synthetic manner, and it offers for science a genuinely holistic approach to problem formulation and solution, one that encompasses the analytical in a non-exclusive manner. To construe the world from a systems perspective is to rethink the world in alternate terms than we are conventionally taught to see it through our received definitions, proscriptions and methodologies of normal science. The same phenomena or problem can be viewed in either a systems or a non-systems perspective, with radically different outcomes in how we see and respond to the problem or pattern depending upon the perspective we adopt. The realities with which we must deal remain the same, but the outcomes in our knowledge and relationship with the world become radically different.

[5] As discussions below on various central topics will readily demonstrate, systems thinking and theory has a part to play, not just in the philosophical armchair, but in the discussion of scientific theory. Scientists may be methodologically and analytically strong, by training and natural inclination, but they are not necessarily theoretically or synthestically equal in strength--hence thinking often falls short of expectations or presuppositions, especially upon the boundaries of our knowledge where the unknown looms large and outweighs the light of the known. On the margins of our knowledge, where many scientists are supposed to work, we often confuse fact with fancy and knowledge with what we think we know.

[6] Some of these kinds of questions we cannot now answer, and some we may never be able to finally answer. But these are questions that are worthy of being asked and wondered about, and they are questions that are provided by a systems-based perspective and framework of natural phenomena.

[7] On the basis of this natural philosophical foundation, I have attempted to derive what I consider to be basic naturalistic statements about human metaethics, aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics and logic. I also attempt to apply this form of philosophical perspective as a means of inquiry into the fundamental nature and structure of reality, and as a heuristic problem solving way of knowing that has applicability to a broad range of naturally occurring problem sets in reality. Though we cannot have a naïve, unpreconditioned view of reality, we can approach the real world in a manner that can be said to be naturalistically naïve in a relatively unprejudiced and unbiased manner. This can lead us to new insight and wisdom concerning the nature of our reality.

[8] The point of departure for universal systems is general system theory, particularly as this was developed and propounded by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the consequence of the common, cross-disciplinary recognition that fundamentally different kinds of systems, otherwise unrelated, often demonstrate very similar or analogous patterns of development, which tend to include the achievement of a stable state characterized by dynamic equilibrium maintained between the components of a system and the external environment, as well as boundary-mediating mechanisms or "transport" devices that serve to maintain the internal-external differential in balance.

[9] The reality of the matter seems to be that we really cannot completely or even sufficiently step beyond or outside of the boundaries of our own very human knowledge about the world. This anthropological relativity of all human knowledge, the sciences included, means, among other things, that we probably need to account for the philosophy of systems somewhere along the way. Recognizing what these limitations may be, allows us at least the sense of when we might be straying too far in our speculations and scientific leaps of faith.

[10] The distinction between general systems and a particular system is an important analytical and semantic difference to draw upon in the definition of systems. We must be careful to specify a particular system or kind of system in the statements we make about a system, and to separate those features unique or characteristic of that system or kind of system, from any other systems, or from the general properties or patterns that can be ascribed to all systems. A general systems model and definition provides us a point of entry into the examination and comprehension of any particular system or kind of system, but it is not the final set of statements we want to arrive at about any given set or set of systems.

[11] I would speculate that there is a certain left-brain emphasis in the analytical and conventional model of scientific methodology that we have come to accept, and this is largely rooted in what I would call a Pythagorean perspectival frame that relies upon systematic analysis to the solution of a finite problem set. This is contra-posed to an alternative form of logical argumentation, known as dialectical, that we can refer to as Zenomian in style. In a superficial sense, the Zenomian style of dialectical argument may be a more right-brain form of argumentation.

[12] I would say about the way science is currently being articulated, in conformity to the demands of Academic frameworks now largely sold-out to industry and the corporate business world, tends to work against the development of a holistic systems-based perspective. What is sought and in demand, what is being trained for among young, innocent and often unquestioning brains, is narrow specialization of interest and involvement, and a kind of conservative comformism in the guise of "scientific objectively and neutrality" about all the rest. This is encouraged, no, it is even promoted.

[13] The resistance of formal styles and modes of scientific thinking, particularly that steeped in a Western tradition of Aristotelian and Platonic logic, to systems based orientations and viewpoints is similar and related to the same kind of resistance to what can be called "relativistic" arguments or points of view that emphasize or incorporate "relativity" of things and knowledge. The quest and call always seems to be one of greater certainty, and a sense of simplicity, however arrived at by ill-gotten means, is preferable to the problem of complexity and the uncertainties it always entails.

[14] Lacking the sophistry or sophistication to practice philosophy in an academic manner that would be interesting to professionals, I will not attempt the effort, so there is for me no initial "Cogito Ergo Sum." Instead, I prefer to cut through the word-play directly to the sticking point. Ultimately, it is an "empirical leap of faith" we must take in the reassurance and relative certainty of our objective knowledge--that the world exists out there, whether we are present to apprehend it or not. It exited before we were there, now in a universal sense, whether we can comprehend it all or not, and will continue probably to go on existing well after all of us are gone.

[15] Scientific knowledge peels back the layers of truth one at a time. We do not get straightway at the truth of anything, and often, once we find the layers peeled all off, we discover that nothing remains at the core anyway. Much that passes in the name of science has the prospect of a "Wild Goose Chase." The rest, as we say, is clouded by ignorance, and we all know that ignorance is just another excuse for an overactive imagination that lacks any clear facts or experience.

[16] In fact, much that passes for human rights in the eyes of the law, and blind justice, does so from the same standpoint of arriving at the truth as does scientific method--facts are gathered, clues followed, research conducted, and alternative hypothesis entertained, then systematically discounted in favor of the one that best fits all the evidence. In this sense, justice is a dramatic demonstration of the application of scientific principles in the adjudication of law and the resolution of conflict in human society, and it becomes in a sense an objective foundation for human ethics and meta-ethical prescription--such as "do not be too quick to judge."

[17] Even though this digression upon metaphysical systems reflects a preoccupation with scientific knowledge and method, it should be understood that such metaphysical systems construe a scientific approach as being but only one of several different kinds of alternative approaches to reality that each has its own distinct method of inquiry. These other approaches, through art, religion or philosophy itself, are no less valuable or important from a metaphysical standpoint that are such scientific methods. Furthermore, I believe that the social sciences can be categorized separately from the physical sciences in this regard, as their metaphysical implications are also somewhat divergent from those of the harder sciences. Each has its own merits that warrant special consideration in terms of their metaphysical implications.

[18] Part of what I have sought in natural systems theory has been a reunification of scientific and philosophical approaches on a level that transcends and comprehends narrowly defined interests in science, and yet which nevertheless ties broad and general philosophical concerns back down to an empirical foundation in scientific reality. To a great extent I believe this has been accomplished, though not completely.