Natural Systems Theory

by Hugh M. Lewis

http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/

Preface

              It has been a decade already since first I had applied myself in a deliberate and explicit effort to the problems represented by the term "natural systems," in both a pure, theoretical sense, as well as in a practical, applied manner. It began in the dark, damp, chronically cold interior of our little semi-subterranean apartment in a guest hotel in a central province of the People's Republic of China, or sitting on small stools outside our little rooms trying to catch the feint warmth of the passing sun. I had finally set myself, by small steps, in a small pocket notebook, to this line of pursuit, at a time when, day-by-day, we were not even quite clear what life would bring us next, or even of our next meal. Since then, my family has endured radical displacement and dislocation, the grief of inconsolable death, the permanent sundering of family, the loss of too many "friends," jobs and years. Little that has happened this last decade has served to positively reinforce or encourage the continuation of that course I had set myself upon back there in China.    

        Of course, this past decade was preceded by almost two decades of steady academic and intellectual progress towards what may properly be called the anthropology of knowledge, implicitly, somewhat unwittingly and half-consciously, about systems. Of course, there was considerable precedence for systems models in Anthropology. The seminal work of Gregory Bateson and Frederick Barth come to mind, as well as the work of Louis Binford. But more importantly perhaps is the core and fundamental recognition that the problem of culture in anthropology is a problem of human relationship, sharing, and indeed, of human systems not very unlike eco-systems in biology. Culture cannot be clearly isolated as a thing, an artifact, and this reification of culture was a basic error of the Culture Historical approach that we had inherited, as an intellectual tradition, from the European continent. Systems theory is not directly or exclusively about the physical reality that we can all see and feel and sense, but about our understanding, and ultimately, our formal knowledge of that reality and how it becomes organized to produce non-physical properties. It makes complete sense, for myself at least in terms of my own intellectual background, if in hindsight only, that a general systems perspective should logically derive from an life-interest in human knowledge and worldview.

            Thirty years later, I arrive upon some kind of plateau of ideas from which I might view the world once again, albeit in a more even and balanced manner than before. Still we struggle, however quietly, as we once again pass into the dark night, but this sense of commitment to a single purpose, albeit one deemed grandiose and much larger than my meager self, continues to give me a sense of renewed courage and enlightenment by which to cast a light, however thin and frail, upon that darkness.

            We might say that a system is a discoverable set of enduring relationships that recur between objective things in the world, and that constitute an emergent pattern of properties based upon synergistic integration greater than the mere behavior or properties of "things" themselves. And thus, nature appears to almost magically compose itself, something complex, wonderful, and often sublimely beautiful, emerging seemingly from seemingly nothing, from something inchoate, chaotic and random. These patterns endure and develop over time along alternative pathways of change, and this change becomes to a diligent and careful observer at least understandable in terms we call scientific.

No system in reality stands alone, in isolation, and we must begin therefore a cogent understanding of systems science in the recognition that systems are always part of a possibly infinite hierarchy of relationships that appear stratified and organized upon multiple levels, and all systems occur and develop in relation to the larger inclusive set of interactions with other systems, upon many different levels.

Most importantly, perhaps, the understanding of natural systems is fundamentally about change, not stasis, even if it is the apparent long-term stability of systems and their ability to maintain equilibrium against change that seems the most remarkable. The study of natural systems becomes science when it seeks to explore and comprehend in a predictable manner the reasons and causes of change in systems, and the alternative pathways systems may take in the course of their development.

Change in nature seems to be truly universal, the fundamental property of our world that is perhaps ultimately inexplicable and unfathomable in any fundamental sense. It is paradoxically the source of both order and chaos in our world. And yet it is the problem of change that drives our scientific endeavors to know and understand the physical world, and it is our efforts to explain change that underlies our scientific knowledge about the world.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to imagine a world without apparent beginning and with no end, in which change is fundamental to everything, and to then think that the world, the entire universe, and everything in it, has always been changing, forever, without beginning or end. But if we are honest enough, and clear headed enough, we must finally admit that even in our explanations of change there are no final causes or consequences and no ultimate explanations. Whatever reason for something happening that might be given, it must always beg the question of the origin of the cause, of what caused the things that made the change we could finally observe happen, or of explaining the explanation.

Thus, we are led to finally concede, however weakly, that the explanation of the infinite and the unlimited is found within the imagination of its possibility, within the realm of our own knowledge in the first place, and, it leaves us with a grand existential paradox about our knowledge that however intuitive this imagination may be, it cannot constitute the final conclusive criterion of a strong science. But it is this vague intuition of the possibilities implied by universal change that allows our scientific imagination to proceed, however hesitatingly, into the night of our ignorance, into the abyssal darkness of the unknown always lurking just beyond the horizons of our vision.

Of course academic armchairs prefer on average scientific analysis, as this is the hard-salt and bread and butter of scientific funding, and thus there is a disdain holism of perspective, of the pudding without the proof, so to speak. The true religion of our age is perhaps not the atheist ideology of the communist state, nor the materialist monetarism of a capitalist economy, nor the Catholic vision of an over-populated, impoverished world, nor a male-centric Muslim paradise in a sea of sand, nor even Buddhist Nirvana viewed through the self-destruction of a self in the sense of attachment, illusion and suffering in the world. The true religion of our age is perhaps one that gives us the sense of confidence in our scientific knowledge, of faith to go forward into the dark night of our collective future, knowing that no human, no civilization, is an island, and that the bell tolls for all humankind, for all civilizations. It was Einstein who said that without religion, science is blind, and without science, religion is crippled.

            This work is an exposition of general and natural systems theory that has been ten years in the making. It pretends not only to present a coherent and cogent framework for a systems based scientific worldview, but to hopefully provide productive frameworks for this worldview in terms of a series of alternative systems-based hypothesis for key problem sets at different levels of the natural stratification of our objective reality. These hypothesis come short of something of scientific theory, but represent, in the systematic application of systems thinking to real scientific problems, something logically consonant with systems thinking and empirically consistent with the evidence provided.

            Systems thinking is neither the system of everything nor the science of nothing in particular. It offers us the hope for a very broad-based paradigmatic unification, not just of the general sciences, but ultimately for all human knowledge. It offers potentially a universal framework for all of human knowledge, in the grandest of its schemes, both pure and applied. It is ultimately a perspective about knowledge, and hopefully, objective knowledge. Anything and everything may be considered a system, or a part of a system. The critical question becomes just how it is a system, or part of a system, and the explanation of why it is so and how it relates to everything else, however indirectly.

            General Systems thinking allows us a freedom of independent thought that does not need to be constrained through institutionally defined symbolisms or conventional constraints upon how we interpret reality. Systems principles either apply or not.

            As a primer to the introduction and the body of the text, to general and natural systems theory, it might be useful to distinguish basic concepts and terms as these are deployed throughout this work and commonly found in the literature:

            Systems Philosophy is the thinking about thinking about Systems. It represents an exploration and investigation into the implications of systems, ontologically, metaphysically, epistemologically, logically and even, aesthetically and ethically.

            General System Theory is the thinking about systems in a general or theoretical sense, as first expounded by Ludwig von Bertalanffy. The General System Model is the prototypical underlying model as developed primarily by Ludwig von Bertalanffy.

            Natural Systems Theory is the extension of general system theory to the problems how nature stratifies and integrates on basic levels in terms of self-organizing systems. Three such levels are currently recognized: Physical Systems; Biological Systems; and Human Systems, though with new discoveries this may change.

            Metasystems is a fairly ambiguous term but refers generally to the system of systems, or alternatively, to the context or framework within which systems may occur or become construed within. Metasystems offers an approach to systems methodology and operationalization, as well as a systematic approach to the framing and contextualization of systems theory within a larger systems based framework.

            Real Systems are those systems, natural or artificial, that exist objectively in some form of substantive demonstration. Abstract Systems are those which are primarily ideal in form. Alternative Systems are those which are ultimately possible, whether real or not, whether known or yet unknown. Artificial Systems are those made by people, or possibly by other kinds of organisms. Applied systems are those that involve a degree of engineering. Universal Systems are general systems that are held to be universal in application or in general reference, relevant to any and all systems, in principle at least.

            Many systems can be explored. I offer a typology of systems, as well as an extended terminology. There are systems within systems, subsystems, and super-systems that incorporate systems. Systems seem to be a good way to think about how nature and reality is organized, if not the actual way in which our knowledge about reality is so organized. Systems are not just good to think, they are good to imagine, know and apply. They are inherently self-organizing, making any other form of human organization seem contrived and arbitrary. Unfortunately, the received terminology does not reflect this sense of harmony and holism where systems analysts are the archetypical reductionists, and , it seems, their own worst enemy from an antireductionist standpoint.

This work has been undertaken to address key problems facing the integration of the sciences under a general science paradigm, and the challenges of developing a well-received general system framework that is sufficient for this paradigm. There are key theoretical and methodological problems in various fields of the sciences that remain:

In the physical sciences, what is exactly is gravitation and space-time, and is the total universe infinite or not, and what is the total universe, anyway?

In the biological sciences, how does the ecology of living systems, small or large scale, local, regional or global, relate to the evolution and development of life on earth, and how would this compare to possible extraterrestrial systems of life we may perchance encounter? How can we analytically account for emergent properties of living systems on the basis of cellular integration and differentiation?

In the human sciences, how does the problem of the functioning and hardwiring of the brain relate to the philosophical problem of the mind, and how does human intelligence create new things? If we encounter Alien Intelligence and an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, how would we relate to them and what would be the consequences of this encounter for our knowledge systems and our own development as a species and a civilization?

It is readily apparent that most of these questions cannot be easily answered in any final or conclusive sense, until we learn new things and make new discoveries about our shared world. This leads to important methodological problems and questions that also need to be addressed, about appropriate scientific methodology and systems based approaches that permit holistic explanation and interpretation to enter into our equations about reality and that may possibly extend our vision of reality beyond analytical reduction of data-bound interpretations. If we can search for and find evidence of systems at all levels, even in the furthest reaches of our observational powers of space, then we can possibly apply systems models in constructive and productive ways that extend beyond traditional scientific praxis, to the solution of many other kinds of problems.

These kinds of questions pose a general framework and provide many touchstones of interconnection between the received classical and largely academic science paradigms, and what can be called a general system and science paradigm that promises upon some level integration of scientific knowledge on many levels.

We are about midway upon our pursuit of a unified general science paradigm. W are not yet at the point of well-developed systems-based methodologies and well defined applied problem sets, but we are quite well beyond a somewhat naïve and misplaced application of a general system model to everything and anything we see without consideration of the level of natural stratification and the intrinsic natural principles of self-organization and integration that seem to apply at any given level.

It is perhaps a legacy of our Western Platonic idealism, of a dichotomized view of reality, that we should find no compromise and a poor marriage between analytic and synthetic approaches and forms of knowledge. Over the years I've grown quite comfortable with holistic, non-Western ways of thinking about our world. I cannot take what becomes common knowledge for granted as if unquestionably true, and it seems in some basic problem areas of science, this is what we have essentially done.

General systems theory seems to run against the academic grain of disciplinary hyper specialization, monopolization and, to an increasing extent, professorial inbreeding. Productive cross-fertilizations have arisen in some areas where various academic interests intersect with emerging developmental and technological problems of the larger society. Thus, fields like cognitive science, human behavioral science and exobiology that require the perspective and critical input of many different fields of expertise, have come to the forefront with the rapid advance of computing technology and the renewed efforts at robotic exploration of distant planets. But such fields tend to remain marginal to any core academic concerns, especially with increasing academic entrenchment that has been the outcome of increased funding problems and competition for scarce resources.

My main experience of the past decade has taught me, if nothing else, that any systems-based perspective pretending towards a generalist weltanschauung of science, must encompass a broad range of problems and trespass many different areas of highly restricted expertise. It has also taught me that few scholars whose main trajectory is maximization of professional success in their own chosen career areas, demonstrate little motivation and much reluctance to cross disciplinary boundaries to make intellectual forays into verboten areas. Many principles reign supreme in the feudal gardens and castles of Academia, but freedom of the intellect has not been one of them. This essential problem is aggravated by two sets of related factors: 1. The daunting requirement for any general systems theorist to achieve some modicum of broad, comprehensive cross-disciplinary expertise in a wide variety of academic fields upon a hopefully non-trivial manner; 2. The general lack of social-symbolic and behavioral reinforcement or sanctioning of any serious generalist commitments that seem to run against the status quo of the uneven distribution of resources and power to control resources in the world.

A physics of everything is not necessarily a wrong ideal of all the sciences, if by this we mean the application of a restricted body of mathematical knowledge and terms that become a necessary part of physical explanation and theory. All real systems are first and foremost physical systems, and therefore, on some level, mathematically defined and denoted laws of physical systems must apply. Any theory of a complex system remains speculative and inexact unless some form of mathematical knowledge can describe the system in such exact numerical terms that quantitative predictions of experimental fact inevitably must follow. Then such theory becomes part of the covering laws of physics.

This does not mean either that any or all mathematically description or application will be sufficient, nor that abstract mathematical knowledge is sufficient without its application. Neither does it mean that a mathematical description of the physical principles of operation of any system is sufficient to the description of the system or its operation as such. This might seem especially so as we intellectually climb the great chain of being of natural systems, to increasingly complex and organized natural systems of life and intelligence, but it even applies with equal relevance to fundamental physical levels of description as well as to intermediate descriptions and explanations of the chemical systems of matter and the interactions of matter. An analytic, "reductionist" explanation of physical phenomena of real systems in terms of mathematical principles and operations is entirely complementary to a holistic, perspectivist and "anti-reductionist" description of the behavior and organization of real systems in terms of general systems principles and theory.

It can well be argued, that the two types of understanding demand one another, and were never meant to be dichotomized from our worldview or methodologies in the first place. The perspectivist worldview of the general system can be called integrationist, or, as I have termed it, holothetic. A holothetic perspective is not anti-reductionist, as analysis is a critical part of this approach. The holothetic perspective is foremost a comprehensive view of reality, and of the systems that constitute the organization of reality, from as many points of view as possible. It involves a deliberate effort to achieve as comprehensive an understanding of a problem set as possible, such that no knowledge, formal or tacit, lies outside its purview of research and scholarship. It involves as well a critical understanding of the nature of knowledge, and of the different kinds of knowledge and the range of possible consequences knowledge systems may have.

This approach has in fact been fairly well developed if not always well received in fields of anthropology, and less well developed in other sciences. Anthropological studies of different cultures and various groups of peoples demands a critical and hermeneutical holism of perspective and implicitly at least, some deliberate attention to human systems as well as to the structure of our own knowledge and prejudices regarding our self-understanding. The nature of our object in anthropology defies fundamental mathematical or physical description, and any such physical description of at least overt behavior, is bound to be exceedingly trivial and useless as explanation of human systems anyway.

In spite of intransigent and conservative resistance to the development of a genuine general system perspective in the world, increasing evidence strongly indicates that the need and requirement of just such a general science paradigm by which to organize our collective worldview is not just increasing with the increasing demands and possibilities of modern scientific and technological development on earth, but is becoming a critical shortcoming of our current development. There is gathering evidence that until and unless we become a global, space-faring civilization, the human species, the entire hominid evolutionary line, and even all of life on earth, will suffer increasing risk of global circumscription and eventual mass extinction, with a catastrophic runaway global systems effect induced by human behavior.

We can put it another way. Up until now, human beings have largely relied on chance processes and serendipity of systems self-organization to develop culture and some sense of global, metacultural civilization. Up until now, the fact of human civilization has been almost exclusively the outcome of stochastic processes of systems development. These outcomes have not come without a cost, and in human terms, the cost has often been very high in terms of mass warfare and violence and the unintended consequences of blind, ideological agendas and short-sighted, narrow-minded vision of our world.

With the development of a general system framework and its application to the solution of common problems in the world, the problem and challenge of our own development and metacultural civilization does not need any longer to be the outcome of blind self-organization, but of deliberate design and intentional planning. We can take greater control of our own future than we have ever done so in the past by means of the intentional application of a general system framework to our knowledge and our knowledge engineering.

Another way of stating this is that for perhaps the first time in our history, humankind has the opportunity for throwing off the yoke of prejudice and chauvinistic commitments to blind ideological frameworks and all the violent consequences forthcoming from false commitment to these ideological systems. A general system framework offers the promise of true collective human liberation and freedom from the coercive consequences of its own knowledge systems.

Cultural selection and stewardship of life on earth has become the onus and obligation of human civilization whether people choose to carry this mantle of collective responsibility or not. Ethically speaking, we have little freedom of choice in this regard, except to try to act ethically or otherwise. The metaethical imperative to act remains the same whatever our collective choices. And with humans, increasing knowledge creates increasing responsibility. A general systems framework is not just at the part of the current knowledge revolution, but is symbolically and behaviorally at the center of such a revolution.

A serious general systems perspective promises and proffers not just vertical integration across the levels of natural stratification of real systems, nor even just horizontal integration across academic disciplines and cultures, but perhaps most importantly it offers the real possibility of in depth teleological integration in four dimensional coordinate reference systems. It proffers a framework not just for intellectual integration of pure knowledge, especially in the sciences, but for the practical application of working knowledge for real problem solving in engineering.

            There are a core set of problems from a general systems perspective around which the integration of human knowledge on earth must become organized for a problems solving perspective in terms of alternative applied systems. These are as follows:

            1. The problem of the fundamental organization of physical reality and the development of sustainable alternative energy systems for human civilization.

            2. The problem of the fundamental organization of living systems and the development of alternative metasystem frameworks for the long term evolution of life.

            3. The problem of the fundamental organization of human intelligence and the development of alternative systems of intelligence, especially in applications to the central problems previously stated and the problem of intelligence itself.

            Human civilization must eventually become a space-faring civilization, independent of its native earth, if it is to survive and carry-on in the long run. There is a critical sense that rapidly emerging upon our collective horizon are issues of global circumscription and worldwide environmental degradation that we cannot afford to too long ignore or disregard.

The requirement for development of global human civilization as a space-faring culture is especially acute if in fact life proves unique and rare in the universe, and human intelligence by which to comprehend the patterning and occurrence of nature, even more rare and unique. Only and primarily by means of the organized development and collective realization of a general system framework in the world that humankind can best become a space-faring civilization, and put the risks of self-destruction behind us.

It is only by means of the development of a general systems framework, both pure and applied, that we can hope to move collectively and deliberately beyond the kinds of problems that continue to plague our knowledge and adaptive relationship to our world.

A well developed and systematically implemented general system framework would probably provide the platform for the necessary level of integration required of humankind achieving this next, somewhat revolutionary step in its development. Without such a framework for comprehensive integration, it is doubtful that humankind can successfully make this transition in any other way but by pure serendipity and happenstance of unintended consequences, of system-based equifinality in spite of our own resistance, and probably not without much unnecessary violence and destruction.

            This comes as something of a grand paradox in our age, because even people who on some level push and promote a general system framework appear to seek almost any other way to describe what they are doing in terms other than general system theory. The negative largesse and lack of credibility, or should I say received counter-paradigmatic anathema and prejudice that general system theory seems to have built for itself, comes as something of an insuperable dilemma.

The general system perspective seems to have had a euphemization about it as something that is fundamentally anti-scientific. "Holism" in science is nothing new, nor is it inherently anti-reductionist, but it seems to carry a negative connotation of "vitalism" that implies a kind of smuggled spirituality. There is nothing intrinsic to a general system perspective that is antagonistic of an analytical and mathematical approach to physical evidence of pattern and cause and effect. Not all properties can be completely or sufficiently accounted for and explained in terms of analysis of physical event structures and physical evidence, unless we have a precise and exact mathematical calculus of systems and their dynamics.

            These types of issues come to the forefront with research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, when there are attempts made to model using computers complex phenomena like vision, or speech recognition or production. The complexity of the problems like vision or speech production are vastly underestimated and the solutions rendered extremely and often inanely oversimplified.

            The antipathy, apathy and lack of received legitimacy of systems-based approaches in the general sciences is perhaps explainable and understandable from the standpoint of the paradigmatic entrenchment of a kind of rational empiricism and logical positivism within the traditional or now classical sciences, but this comprehension does not make such resistance justifiable or even rational, and if the general sciences may be said to have any single major shortcoming, then it is surely this critical weakness of an implicit rejection of systems based perspectivist approaches.

            The paradox ultimately may be that this resistance to systems-based perspectives in the sciences has stood in the way of fundamental research and theoretical development in the sciences, almost across the board. To the extent that a premium is placed upon non-relative or "absolutistic" methods of physical evidentiary analysis, versus relative methods of comparative analysis, then relativistic perspectives, even if they are fundamental and unavoidable, tend to be eschewed in scientific interpretation. This data-boundness of scientific worldview may prevent us significantly from going further in our comprehension of physical reality where the data becomes beyond our ability to observe.

            The resistance to systems-based perspectives has been demonstrated to me time and again over the past decade especially, even from within purported systems based approaches by people who seek to profit somehow upon the spurious promotion of such applications, and though in hindsight its pattern is understandable, its potential outcomes are not acceptable as a necessary or inexorable reality.

            The moral dictum of our modern age, implicit to all our lives and everything in our world, even to our sciences and our knowledge of the world, is that this knowledge creates responsibility, both individually and collectively, not just to know, but to try to act upon what we know, if only to learn better about what we don't know.