by Hugh M. Lewis

The defining characteristic of the human species is that human beings think, speak and act in symbolic terms. There is a universal grammar, psychology, cultural framework and even content that is associated with human symbolic behavior & attitudes. There is almost no part of human behavior or thought process that has not been conditioned and pre-structured by human symbol forming, constructive cognition. Even human perception is largely symbolic both in its original form and in the manner that it becomes parsed up and reemployed after the phenomenal act of perception. Acknowledgement of and careful attention to human symbolic behavior, and its implications for our society, our understanding of ourselves, and of our world, for our social relations, actions and their consequences, forms the basis for a unified field of the human sciences and for comprehending human systems. 

To search for biological determinants of human behavior in an exclusive or primary sense is to miss the defining emergent aspects of human systems. Even Ludwig Von Bertalanffy himself, a successful biologist by background and originator of General Systems theory, had enough sense to see beyond biological determinism as a sufficient explanation of human behavior, and to seek answers in terms of emergent properties of human systems where they belong--that is the symbolic structuring of human experience at all levels and in all ways. The continuing promulgation of theories of biological determinism in relation to human behavior, in the various forms this has taken, largely ignores and sidesteps the issues of symbolization and symbolic structuring of experience because these realities are difficult to quantify and even more difficult to experimentally manipulate. We may for instance see mental illness largely as the rise of discrepancies and contradictions of symbolic process, or else the break down and loss of integrative function of the symbolic apparatus in guiding adaptive human behavior, hence there is little reason to resort to biological pre-determinants underlying behavior. 

This being said it can also be claimed correctly that symbolic human behavior is rooted in human evolution, and thus in human biology in the sense that human beings appear unique in the sense of having evolved a set of physical characteristics that are intrinsic to their symbolic behavior and the cultural construction of reality that is the by-product of this behavior. It is not the purpose of this brief essay to elaborate these characteristics in any detailed manner, but only to mention that these traits collective form a complex of traits that make human culture possible, and that without any one of these traits, we cannot imagine the existence of human culture in the anthropological form that we have come to know it.

We are already in need of qualifying our previous statements on a number of key points. It is not my intention herein to elucidate an entire framework for human systems theory. There would be many ramifications of such a framework--an alternative form of symbolic linguistics, symbolic psychology, models for education & development, rehabilitation & institutional reform. My primary intention at this point is merely to elaborate some key ideas that can be associated with human symbolic process and to thereby highlight its importance to an understanding of General systems.

I will define a model as a form of design that serves as a symbolic representation of an analogical or similar design that exists either in reality or in our imaginations. I will define a symbol by its key function, and that something that "represents" something else, usually by some form of indirect association. A symbol does not have to be similar to the thing that it represents--usually a model is similar by scale or by structural composition to the thing that it represents. A symbol must merely evoke a set of responses from a person that occurs in association with the thing being represented. Usually the thing represented also has a cognate or abstract symbolism that occurs in the mind's eye of the beholder, and that also has a linguistic form also associated with this thing. We can claim that all models are symbols, but not all symbols are necessarily models in the strict sense of the term. A model represents something in reality, a symbol functions to represent things in the world, and hence to say "symbolic representation" is really a kind of emphasis of a single set of complex processes that occur in modeling and symbolization. We may claim loosely that all symbols are in fact models of things in the world, or alternatively imagined. A schizophrenics symbols are largely imaginary, for instance, though for the beholder of these symbols they are as real as any that may be touched or available to the larger collective.

Human symbolic process has several interesting aspects of its articulation: 1. it brings us to confrontation of the anthropological relativity of our own awareness and knowledge of the world, and of our ability to see the world in "objective" form; 2. It leads to the cultural construction of reality, that is "shared" and thereby made coordinate in a collective sense with a group of people, that is "naturalized" in the sense that it is made to appear or function on a level as if "instinctive" and reflexive, that is linguistically and behaviorally transmitted between people, that creates a social level of organization of human systems that is semi-integrated and that feeds back upon the psychological construction of the self in the world.

We build models of reality in our heads--we do this continuously, on a daily basis in fact, and when we sleep and dream it is our dreams that are the symbolic mediators and negotiators of our experience, upon an unconscious level. The models of our reality we depend upon for accuracy and reliability for getting us through our days, and for ordering our world in a manner that make sense to us. Because the world is ever changing and complex, there is an almost continuous need to modify and moderate our models of reality in order that they remain functionally adaptive. We discard old models that are no longer applicable, and we develop new models on the basis of learning. Human beings in fact learn all their lives, and what they learn are to build and refine models of reality upon multiple levels--we are sophisticated when our models are complex and elaborative, and such sophistication allows us in turn to respond to events in our world in ways that in turn appear sophisticated and based upon such elaborated models.

Human beings have a central weakness--without our symbolic models to guide our behavior, we would not be able to function, and would quickly become maladaptive and perish as a consequence. We depend upon our models, and this in a general sense can be called "symbolic dependency." Because our models tend to merge together into larger adaptive frameworks, as psychological & cultural systems, we tend to function with rather open model systems where reference points overlap, boundaries are indistinct, and there is the possibility for much substitution and free-play in our formulations and the functions they are made to serve.

It follows therefore that a Systems based approach that is centered upon the challenge of developing and improving human systems, would seek to make explicit and elaborate the systems-based aspects of modeling in order to render this central articulatory and mediational mechanism of human adaptation more available and technologically useful than it already seems to be. I do not refer only to a form of "symbolic engineering" that relies upon the manipulation of imagery with special effects--indeed the whole of Hollywood can be seen as an industry that is based upon such symbolic engineering. I am referring more directly to the technological development of alternative working systems in a practical sense, understanding that technically such systems have symbolic organization and expression.

Modeling in a more technical sense is a constrained and elaborated form of activity of what we do everyday anyway in our construction of symbolic realities. More careful and studied aspects of modeling as small scale engineering or computing projects, allow us to develop alternative systems based upon our the flexibility of our imagination and understanding of reality, to create new forms and new possibilities thereby. Through modeling, we are able to experiment with these possibilities and bring them "true" to form on a workable level of reality.

I have emphasized the concept and problem of modeling because, methodologically speaking, it stands in central importance to the articulation of our meta-systems framework. Developing means that allow us to model systems in a reliable and efficient way, enables us to directly articulate the framework in a larger context. Modeling extends into every area of interest and endeavor within our framework, and therefore providing a general, broad-range and multipurpose modeling framework provides us with a central articulatory mechanism for the framework, as a direct extension of our planning and design endeavors.

But modeling stands in importance in more than a methodological or operational sense, because we are referring to a broader sense of activity of symbolic representation when we refer to modeling, and we are therefore not just talking about model making or the construction of scale models, etc., but we are also talking about the construction in both a theoretical and applied sense of the entire meta-systems framework as a viable alternative worldview that is capable of competing with symbolic ideologies and adaptive orientations that are extant and predominant in the world.

Without making a systematic modeling approach a central part of the articulatory frameworks, and without generalizing and adapting this modeling approach to a broader range of interests and involvements that are defined by the framework, the model formation and organization process would run helter-skelter and amok, as it so often seems to happen in the larger world that lacks any explicit frameworks of organization and coordination of action. By such means we can put into motion a kind of strategic developmental process, similar to the process of evolution, by means of the transmission of symbolic information and symbolic exploration of the environment. Rather than going at the issue in a blind manner as biological evolution does, we can approach it instead in terms of deliberative efforts and conscious planning and design. We can seek developmental progress in terms of systems integration and automation by an arbitrary means, rather than leaving such processes mainly to chance as they have largely been in our history. 

One of the critical features of human symbolization is that it is arbitrary, and this sense of fundamental arbitrariness of symbol systems is a key defining feature of human systems--we have a choice, and by having such a choice, we have the source of doing both great good and perpetrating great evil. It is the arbitrariness of symbolic design that provides us great freedom from natural constraint, and also puts us chronically and forever upon the horns of a basic moral dilemma about our potential goodness or capacity for evil.

We do not necessarily seek to invest this alternative worldview with a moral agenda or a code of conduct or normative code of evaluation of right and wrong, or good and bad, though there does exist a meta-ethical component to such a framework. The larger purpose of such a framework is that we can free ourselves from such narrow agendas and moralities, and for once approach the world with a more open frame of mind, formalized and collectively received as such. We do so largely for practical and adaptive reasons, and a great deal that passes for a sense or suggestion of a moral code of ethics within the framework is done so largely and primarily on practical grounds.

It becomes valid to ask, for instance, what might constitute a "healthy" model for a particular kind of system in a particular set of circumstances. We can test our model out through demonstration and control of contexts in an experimental manner, and derive our measures and determinants of health for a particular kind of system in an empirical manner. From a larger meta-systems standpoint, a relatively "healthy" specimen might not necessarily be an "good" thing in the larger context--a "healthy" lion in the African savanna is probably a good thing--the same creature displaced to a flock of sheep in New Zealand would probably not be a good thing.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I