General Systems has been an eclectic field. This eclecticism has been in part due to the cross-disciplinary nature of General Systems, and can also be attributed to its inherently holistic and comprehensive orientation to knowledge and applied frameworks. There is now a confusing plethora of disciplinary names and interests that can pass somewhat synonymously for "General Systems." These include, but are not limited to, some of the following: Complexity, Chaos Theory, Cybernetics, and Control Theory. We may also refer to feedback systems, circular systems, developmental systems, etc, as examples of the same general concepts and principles. Von Bertalanffy listed several related sets of general systems concepts: compartment theory, set theory, graph theory, net theory, cybernetics, information theory, theory of automata, game theory, decision theory, and queuing theory (General Systems Theory, 1968: pg 21-2)
I would include certain developments in number theory, statistics and probability theory, scaling and modeling theory and methods, and even in some aspects of geometry and other areas of mathematics, both theoretical and applied. I would add to this list specialist concerns in certain areas of computing and mathematics, as well as applied aspects of engineering, critical path analysis, systems management and also certain theoretical schools that have developed in various fields of study. Super computing designs have made the feasibility of General Systems modeling & representation more practical. Systems based archaeology is clearly elaborated in the New Archaeology under the leadership of Lewis Binford, primarily. I have found systems principles articulated in a lucid fashion as well in fields of biology, especially ecology, in psychology and other behavioral sciences, as well as in the larger framework of anthropology. I would also add my own ideas to the list: meta-systems, alternative systems, synergetics or the study of systems-based emergent properties, and organics, or the study of "whole systems"
A distinction is furthermore made between hard and soft Systems theory, with the implication being that hard systems theory is tied rigidly to mathematical models and formulas, relatable as well to computing theory and logic, while "soft" systems theory is concerned principally with what is referred to as systems philosophy, systems epistemology, systems ontology and general systems models that are primarily verbal, rather than mathematical, in form and terms of elucidation. For instance, for all the efforts to the contrary, the leading theory in biology, the theory of evolution, remains still largely a purely verbal explanation of natural processes, both on a molecular level of genetic transmission, and on a species level of natural selection of whole organisms in larger population-ecological contexts. This distinction is really a hubris of a false sense of science that, on finer analysis, really gives way both in terms of consideration of the constructive dynamics of knowledge systems, as for instance in Thomas Kuhn's elucidation of scientific paradigms in his now classic work on the subject of Scientific Revolutions, and in terms of the elaboration of theoretical terms for genuinely complex real systems, even on basic physical levels, where emergent properties and their analysis defies simplistic or reductionist quantification.
I will add a short list of basic principles that are found consistently operating in systems based thinking (Lewis, Natural Systems, 2001)
These basic concepts represent important challenges to our scientific ways of thinking, bound as this has been in a classic, Aristotelian view of the natural world. A brief list of such concepts as they come to mind are as follows:
2. Self-organizing Complexity & Chaos
3. Dynamic & Heterogeneous Models
Ours has become an age of extreme specialization that has accompanied the dramatic differentiation of our scientific knowledge even down to nine or more levels of complexity. Generalism of a more comfortable academic era, that implied a kind of armchair eclecticism and the entitlement to pontificate in extended tracts and lecture series, has had to yield to the speed and emerging interests of Internet based communications. What has been lacking, and what we are in dire need of, is a new level of comprehension, and a new sense of studied, systematic comprehensiveness of approach, especially in our worldview, that affectively provides us with a working roadmap of our complex and ever emergent noetic landscape.
Comprehensiveness is what the term implies, a deliberate attempt at exhaustive holism without the appearances or consequences of dilettantism. Thus an effective comprehensive framework must embrace in full force and detail the entire range and spectrum, and coordinate this broad range of knowledge in a manner that makes some kind of grand, if not strategic, sense.
Comprehensive frameworks necessarily represent neither dilettante spuriousness nor mere generalist eclecticism. Comprehensiveness, especially within an effective systems framework, demands and provides a contextual theoretical framework driving the search for specific solutions to complex problems in a number of different areas of inquiry. These are frequently problems that demand answers that naturally do not fit the departmental delineations of different conventional areas of study and research. Comprehensiveness, to be effective, therefore does not require less expertise, but greater, as well as greater understanding of the fundamental issues involved in any natural problem set.
With the rise of chaos theory, we view the natural world in an entirely new way than we did in the age of the slide rule, Newtonian Laws and Euclidean Geometry. So much that we find in the natural phenomenal patterns of nature, whether it is in the spiral design of a sea snail shell, or in the growth and development of a deciduous tree, suggests to us at some level the working of complexity and chaos in critical systems. This chaotic complexity belies a supreme simplicity that is in control of the infinite variation of pattern.
Scientific models and worldviews must not only explain such complexity, in whatever way it might be encountered in the natural world, in the finite and elegant terms of simplicity, but it must also learn to see and construe the natural world in such terms also. I believe that no theory or model of science now can be framed without at least one hand on the issue of complexity and chaos.
Natural informational systems are largely self-organizing systems. The rule-properties they exhibit are always intrinsic and implicit to the patterning of epiphenomenal organization that is its manifestation. If they are "self-organizing" systems, they are not "self-knowing" systems in the way that we understanding this. Natural information appears to be largely nonreflexive, even at the anthropological level, and therefore we can assume that is it almost never "intentional" patterning in the way that we understand motivations from an anthropocentric worldview.
With the rise to preeminence of chaos theory and new thinking about complexity, there has come as well a new understanding of the inherently dynamic structure our natural world. We find increasingly that everything changes, even things once considered immutable like atoms and protons, and we have a received picture of the universe now as something that ushered into being in less than a nanosecond, and that has been slowly, gradually unwinding ever since.
With dynamism implied in the complexity of nature, I believe heterogeneity is also an important part of the conceptual formula of the modern scientific worldview. Heterogeneity stems from the idea that reality is composed of multiple kinds of things at all levels. We have a vision of this if we explore the sub-atomic levels of particle physics to discover a range of exotic things unknown in a bygone era. Heterogeneous systems are complex informational entities, and tend to defy prime mover theories that like to invest ultimate causes in single, clear to understand mechanisms. Often, like the hen or the egg dilemma, in such systems it is difficult or impossible to isolate original causes or sources.
As we push back the edge of reality, we discover on ever finer levels of analysis the place of a basic sense of relativity, even in our physical existence. In such complex systems, relative states, or rather, relatively understood states, become more important in the final accounting than abstract or static or absolutistic models that entail some "noumenal" sense of perfect order. In our accounting, we must say conditionally that "such and such is true....under certain conditions a, b, c, but not under other conditions e, f, g."
From a classical perspective this attitude and approach to a scientific worldview, one that undermines a sense of absolute certainty in either the world or our knowledge about the world, seems antithetical to a rational worldview, if not downright heresy. But it is increasingly the case that our realities have not been made more certain by scientific progress, but more uncertain. With each new fact and bit of knowledge we learn about the world, we open up an entire Pandora's box of unanswered questions and suggestion of things we have not yet figured out.
In this world, even our sense of ourselves as "for all practical purposes" certain and, at least in human proportions, absolute, becomes itself relative to that anthropomorphic level of dimensionality about reality. Shift to another level or order of magnitude, and this sense of "things are as they are" quickly goes away, if we are to explain and have a firm sense of the real patterning of the world.
Relativity has intruded irreversibly upon our collective worldview in a wide variety of ways, but especially it was Einstein who offered a model of the universe, and a new way of thinking about reality, when even time and space itself no longer had an absolute sense. This and subsequent science has fundamentally and irretrievably rendered our worldview relativistic for all time.
Synergism has acquired an implicit connotation of being something "holistic" and somehow a-scientific, like flower power and herbal remedies. But synergism, as a central systemic design principle, has a legitimate and very scientific place in the conceptual design of the natural world. Basically, it states that patterns at one level inaugurate processes that are more than the mere sum of the individual component parts that make up that system. The system as a whole does something that cannot be done by the parts separately.
Synergism thus has a superorganic function of systems. We cannot fully explain the operation of the system as a whole by a mere enumeration of the functioning of the various parts. Synergism is central in gestalt theory, which underlies the understanding of human cognition and symbolism from an anthropological perspective. Patterns are the result of complex part-whole relations and are apprehended as such, and are not merely the analytical reduction to the individual parts.
This sense of synergism is especially important when we apply it to the understanding of living versus non-living systems, and even truer when applied to sentient and self-conscious systems versus those that appear to lack such deliberate volition. But the sense of synergism can be found aplenty even in the vast and empty reaches of outer space. I doubt a solar system or a galaxy is merely the complex cosmological waltz of planets and stars around a common center of gravity. As systems they create forces and patterns that cannot be understood merely by a reduction to its individual entities and would not happen if they were not locked into such a system in the first place.
Concepts like these inform our thinking about our world on very basic levels, and it is important that our understanding of the basic concepts is sound and reasonable before we begin to seek solutions and answers about that world or our place within it.
There are, I believe, a set of primary questions and answers that inform our natural systems theory at its several basic levels. We must seek to ask and understand such questions fundamentally, and to derive in a clear sense whatever implications they may have, if we are to construct for ourselves a worldview that is less prejudiced and more objective than before.
Perhaps this is the real and practical purpose of our scientific philosophy to be able to make obvious those questions and answers otherwise not so obvious. And if, as primitive philosophers, we can do this half well, then maybe we earn for ourselves the reputation for being good at what we do.
This list was taken from my text at Natural Systems: Introduction. I would add to this list the concepts of holism, analytical hierarchy, developmental ontology, stochastic process, equilibrium and equi-finality. It goes somewhat beyond the scope of this newsletter to continue elucidating in sufficient detail these principles, but their explanation will be the central topic of Part IV of this main article.
General Systems Essays, Vol. I
2001
Hugh M. Lewis
Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.
Last Updated: 03/18/05