by Hugh M. Lewis

Alternative Systems are really all about human creativity and human constructive capacity rooted in innate human intelligence that has long been environmentally conditioned and constrained in ways that render this capacity productive and adaptive in terms of developing working systems. They perhaps started with the first stone tools, or fire, and all the other accoutrements that we associate now paleo-anthropologically with Stone-Age culture. All human inventions and technological refinements are examples of alternative systems that have been produced and utilized by people, but that have no independent occurrence or existence before or beyond the fact of their human construction and utilization.

But there is a definite logic and sense of order to working systems of whatever kind we may consider, a sense of order which is really apart from their functional purposes or the reasons of their construction and development in the first place. Conceptually speaking, systems embody certain principles and ideas that are essentially independent of their actual behavior and functioning, except in the sense that such concepts and principles tend to define the parameters and limits of such behavior--what a system can and cannot do, and how well or efficiently it can do it.

An alternative system may be defined therefore as a system that had no independent order or sense of existence apart from their being constructed as the result of human behavior or the behavior of some other living system. They do not occur naturally in a self-organizational manner apart from the behavior that produced them, whether this behavior was intentional or unintentional.

It is the potential of human creative capacity to invent entirely new systems that never before existed, and hence to add to reality and the knowledge fund about reality in significant ways. This is the basic process underlying human civilization, and it continues to grow and develop in a relatively unhindered manner.

Any applied system may be thought of as a working system, and any working system that performs work, in a technical, thermodynamic sense, and that is not completely self-organizational, may be considered an applied system. An applied system is a machine in a word that has a certain paradigm of possible behavior under an operational range of conditions. Any organism may be thought of as a biological machine. Any machine's design serves some functional purpose or intent that is implicit to its design, and which constrains the possible parameters of its behavior. A biological machine, an organism has a function to survive and to reproduce. A car has the function of transporting its passengers over a roadway, etc. The design of the car, and the design of the organism, is implicitly or explicitly intended to serve these purposes.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I