by Hugh M. Lewis

General Systems Dynamics implicitly necessitates consideration of what can be called General Systems Design--state-complexity may be considered a measure of relative order of a system that is organized by a design or configuration of pattern. This design or pattern occurs as a non-random possibility in a field of alternative possibilities, and carries therefore what can be referred to as informational value about any particular system.

Though achieving a design configuration may occur by chance or stochastic process alone, the likelihood of this happening is usually astronomically residual. Design configurations themselves are usually achieved through organizing or self-organizing processes that themselves require work. Furthermore, the maintenance of the non-random design configuration always requires some rate of energy input, otherwise the tendency would be for the design configuration to change into one that is increasingly random and "noisy." 

We cannot clearly separate questions of design from questions of dynamics and change therefore, as they intrinsically imply and necessitate one another in their realization in any system we may consider.

We may stipulate expectancy values attached to the transformations that occur within a given system, based upon the rate of decay of ordered relations toward disordered states on a random basis. We cannot predict the occurrence of such patterns--but we can assess stochastic expectations of the likelihood of occurrence of random events in a given system. Different systems that are order maintaining have different rates of decay, and different components of such systems also have different rates of decay that may effect the net-values of transformation occurring in the system as a whole.

The basis for understanding a theory of general systems design is to understand that the "structure" of a system that underlies its patterning and developmental dynamics is a kind of grammar based upon rules implicit to the sequence of events and relational directions that occur in a given system. We may refer to points of articulation of a system as structural switching points that exhibit non-random patterns of systematic transaction.

It may be well argued that the "purpose" of any system is the effort expended towards the maintenance of its sense of order, its design, over the long run and the large, though this is somewhat of a circular argument. No real, naturally occurring system may be attributed a sense of "purpose" beyond the fact of occurrence of its own behavioral existence. It would be great to spin a child's top on a table and interpret our failed attempts to knock it on its side to a "ghost in the machine" with the implicit intention of staying upright on its spinning point. It can be argued that any system achieves self-maintenance and perpetuation of its design pattern in some minimal and sufficient manner, for that is the definition of what a system is. Living or biological systems for instance, and unlike purely physical systems, have achieved self-maintenance not only in terms of the life of a single instantaneous system, but over a successive series of systems that are self-replicative and regenerative as systems. How they do this is an interesting and complex point, and we have been prone to try to attribute the 'miracle' of life to some "spirit" that resides in living things and that defines the sense of purpose that we attribute to such things. 

Non-random pattern is intrinsic to the design of systems, and hence important to the definition of systems. A totally disordered system may be said to be a system lacking any meaningful pattern or information. It is a system that has zero design efficiency and 100% design potential or possibility. The design of such a system may be said to be completely undetermined. A totally ordered system is one that can be said to contain maximum information, and may be said to have 100% design efficiency but zero design potential or developmental possibility. The design of such a system may be said to be completely determined.

No real system may achieve a maximum state of information, or 100% design efficiency, nor may any real system exist beneath some threshold of minimum design efficiency or at a level of zero design efficiency.

It therefore follows that a system at any instantaneous point of its trajectory, cannot be completely described with 100 percent accuracy or reliability. We may say there is an intrinsic parallax of uncertain in the structural order of any real system that is part of the relativity of general systems, that is a function of the inherent indeterminancy of such systems. If we observe for instance DNA molecule, we note for instance that the same amino acids can be constituted by usually more than one set of triplet codons. This in itself has little to do directly with error of transcription or random mutation that may affect the information on a given strand of DNA, but indirectly it can be the source of fundamental change as a result of point mutation occurring.

We are left therefore with a certain complementariness of perspective regarding different systems and different kinds of systems that may be attributed to all systems in general. Another way of looking at this is to say that we may have more than a single correct solution or model of the same system, even for otherwise very particular systems, and this would in part depend upon the point of view we adopt about the system.

The design of any system must be seen in whole or in part. If seen in part, then it is to be seen in terms of the principal subsystems that are constitutive of the system, and these subsystems may be seen both in whole, in and of themselves, and in relation to the other subsystems that occur synchronously with them. To look at a specific system as a self-constitutive whole is to adopt a "holistic" frame of reference toward that system, and to look at a specific system in terms of its composite parts is to adopt an "analytical" frame of reference. This leads to a certain basic dichotomization of perspective that is inherent to our knowledge and our scientific approach to understanding systems. Traditional sciences have been dominated, sense Aristotle, by an analytical frame of reference to systems. It has only been in recent decades, with the rise of digital information processing technologies, that an alternative holistic frame of reference has come into vogue, there being computational methodologies now available that permit us to model complexity in a reliable and representative manner.

All real systems may be seen as self-constitutive, or as composite, and all real systems are, depending upon the frame of reference we adopt, to be construed either as being self-constitutive (holistically) of design or as composite (analytically). The problem is really the systems hen or egg type of dilemma--nevertheless it has real consequences what frame of reference we adopt in looking at and solving a particular problem set, or even for how we define a problem set in the first place.

All known real systems are in fact both composite and self-constitutive as integrated systems. Therefore we may treat their design in both a manner as a single, summative variable, a general monomial, or as a complex composite set of variables, or a polynomial.

We may apply the general concept of a systems grammar to the patterning and change dynamics of systems that is inherent to the structure of their design.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I