by Hugh M. Lewis

Any measure of reality we may adopt may be said to be, if nothing else, discrete and therefore arbitrary. This is because our reality is anthropologically constructed in terms of symbols that are by design and of necessity discrete and arbitrary.  Measures, to be useful collectively, objectively, "inter-subjectively" must also be consistent, (i.e. standard) or else they are merely idiosyncratic constructions. We may in a sense look at our words that we speak and write as collectively shared measures of meaning, somehow pointing, however indirectly, to some form in the real world, or else some imaginary form. Collective meaning can only be created through language and the communicative sharing of meaning, and hence we can make a claim, a very serious claim, that meaning and semantics are largely linguistically relative. It is the translatability of human language, largely because, no matter what the modulations of any particular pattern of speech, we share the same fundamental language (speech production/recognition) apparatus, and because all symbols, even words, are ultimately arbitrary, that we can come to mutual agreement on common forms and measures of meaning in reality. Europeans have meters and litres and Americans have yards and quarts, but because these are standardized units of measure, we can apply simple mathematical formulas to translate one into the other, and back again. Through the sharing of measures of meaning, largely defined symbolically, human beings arrive at a collective worldview, a common, standardized frame of reference, that arbitrary design of symbols becomes thereby overlaid by convention and common agreement. All of human culture, which is largely behavioral and cognitively based in symbolically organized behavior, may be said to consist of shared conventions, whether these are explicit, in the form of meters and yards, or in the form of laws and rules, or remain implicit and indirect in our our common behavioral constraints. This in fact is an empirical, experimental, working definition of culture that allows us to take our presuppositions to the field and form conclusions about observations of behavior--it is the basis for an empirical science of human systems and human behavior.

Conventional constraint therefore overlays arbitrary and ultimately idiosyncratic organization of symbolic reality, and comes to demarcate a common field of shared cultural meaning by which people can organize themselves on a social basis into institutional systems. Conventional constraint with underlying arbitrariness of meaning entails a built-in flexibility of our received symbolic systems that enables them to be easily carried, transmitted and transformed over space and time. At the same time, conventional constraint, ultimately arbitrary, becomes reified and naturalized as if non-arbitrary and habituated as if automatic and even reflexively instinctual. It becomes ingrained and embodied, even upon a physical level of our being, such that we are conditioned and quite comfortable with such conventional constraint, and rendered quite uncomfortable without it. Conventional constraint takes on a certain inertia and momentum in terms of its direction, rate and conservative resistance to change, and many anthropologists have confused this with issues of natural speciation and natural selection, which it is not. Society that we are born into, raised with, and become members of, have a momentum, a mobility, and an institutional, "larger than life" presence that is greater than ourselves, and upon which we come to depend for our very survival and well being. Conventional constraint is not arbitrary--it is agreed upon, a consensus, and often also, a conflict of competing interests. It is not natural, genetic or instinct, either. Being founded upon arbitrary principles of symbolic design, it is ultimately constructed and constructed, by a process arrived at through compromise, coordination and cooperation of a group of people through time.

To reiterate, symbols mark our meaning, parsing up our phenomenal experience of the world in discrete and therefore comparable quantities or entities. In fact, we depend very much upon this symbolic process to achieve adaptive success in our life-worlds, and without it our world would be chaotic indeed. The symbols that we arrive at and are compelled to accept and use, are done so not from personal choice, but as the product of social process, group agreement, and continuous articulation and re-articulation in social contexts.

We may say our symbols, to be effective, must be achieved with consensus and agreement--they must be received in our social setting, or else they fall on deaf ears and hence are of no use beyond some psychologically solipsistic interest or need. Schizophrenics appear symbolically bound up just in this way--unable to use effectively the social symbolisms that are a standard coinage of the larger system, and who instead are entrapped within a private and narcissistic symbolic world of their own private construction, that is transparent from without but opaque from within.

If our terms, used to give reality a sense of structure, to provide it a place in a symbolic universe of meaning, are our measures of reality, then the relationships we hypothesize between our terms are used to build a symbolic universe onto which we can map our systems of reality in a coordinate and understandable way. We are aided greatly in this endeavor by the fact that natural systems, for all their self-organization, tend to be naturally organized into shared patterns that fall into larger categories and groupings that allow us to label and generalize across sets of systems, and even to arrange sets of systems in relation to other systems. Each tree in a forest may be individually unique in terms of its exact physical characteristics and measures, but fortunately our understanding of the forest is greatly aided by the fact that all the trees of the forest may belong to only a handful of groups of trees bound by homology and analogy, by common descent, shared form as a function of common adaptation, etc. We may thus categorize and label all the trees of the forest by the several types that are found to occur there and to characterize such a forest biome. And so it seems to be with all reality--reality is organized not only upon the level of individual systems, but in terms of sets of similar kinds of systems, either homologically (as a result of common origin) or analogically (as a result of common function). It is from the classification and understanding of these natural sets and the generalizations that are implicit to them that apply to all members of the set, that we arrive at what we refer to as natural laws that are the basis for our theories of reality.  

The natural laws that apply to one set of systems upon one level of observational analysis, do not necessarily apply to other sets of systems at other levels of observational analysis. In general such laws may be said to be general statements about the periodic patterning we associate with the members of a common set, and this periodic patterning is associated with the typical or characteristic organization of the prototypical member of the set, and the emergent properties that are the consequence of this organizational patterning. At the same time, sets of systems do not occur in nature in isolated or pre-grouped form, and it is most often the case that different sets, at different levels, overlap and interpenetrate one another in terms of shared space and time and the relationships that may occur between different but interacting members of distinct but overlapping sets. This has been the cause of much academic equivocation, especially in fields like biology and the social sciences, when the exact homological relationships between taxonomic sets, or taxons, for instance, cannot be determined in a precise or conclusive manner, or when for instance we articulate theories of natural selection based upon the speciation of populations, though in natural context we find interacting individuals of different populations with pure chance and happenstance playing a large part in selective processes.

Often, heterogeneous meta-systems, or systems of individually distinct and different subsystems, emerge in reality with their own characteristic properties. All eco-systems tend to be complex and heterogeneous meta-systems in this manner. The earth itself may be said to be a complex heterogeneous geophysical meta-system, composed of a variety of elements that to some extent interact with one another in regular ways. It has an iron core, and different hydrologic, plate-tectonic, and atmospheric-nutrient cycles maintain a fragile framework for the biosphere.

We symbolically group and parse up our experience of reality, and attempt to organize the totality of our phenomenal knowledge of reality, in terms of broader groupings on the basis of generalizations that we apply to all members of groups. Working with groups, instead of with individuals, is a way of simplifying otherwise complex realities and dealing upon a level of general analysis in an expanded frame of reference that leads to the formulation of worldviews and general principles about reality. This leads to the question of alternative frames of reference for understanding the same kinds of observational phenomena--11th Century Europeans saw a sun rise and set upon the earth, thinking that the earth was the center of their known universe--we see now the earth as traveling around the sun, as the earth spins daily on its axis, and even though we still refer to the rising and setting of the sun, we do so with a much clearer view of the real system than did our 11th C counterparts. If you are a member of a non-literate and fairly superstitious culture, you are unlikely to view a diurnal eclipse of the sun by the moon as a natural event, and more likely to attribute it to supernatural forces at play. You would be, in terms of the logic of your own symbology, no less correct than your modern counterpart, only less realistically accurate.

Pure mathematics are examples of abstract systems in which the relational identity of all known values are founded upon the basic idea of equality. The equal sign permits us to assume that what value exists on one side is either the same or otherwise as the value occurring on the other side, and we can perform common reductive operations which demonstrate this equality in terms of reflexive identity, or that demonstrate inequality in terms of basic difference. We can even perform manipulative operations, as long as we perform the equally on both sides of the equation sign, in order to solve the "problem" of proving equality. We sometimes substitute comparative signs (greater than or less than) for the equal sign, but this is usually the extent of our relational activities, but even such signs always allow for a clear dichotomous resolution of the implicit problem. The transformations we make on both sides of the sign we use are otherwise guided by the pure deductive logic that informs mathematics in terms of the axioms, laws and their corollaries that we employ. This is the same form of positivistic, two value logic that we find with formal logical philosophy. In fact, logical philosophical positivism was derived from the logic implicit to mathematics, based as it has always been on dichotomous (true/false) values. Logical positivism or syllogistic two-value logic only works in natural language to the extent that we can clearly restrict the basic meaning of terms to dichotomous (true/false) values. Often, in such operations, conventional meaning of truth is substituted for what is presumed to be natural truth--"common sense," being nothing but the operation of conventional meaning, takes over. We do not question whether the sky is really blue, the ocean is deep or that roses are red. We simply say, modus ponens style, If all roses are red, and this flower is a rose then this flower is red. The fact that we do not normally, naturally think this way seems to have little to do with the status enjoyed by logical positivism in academia. 

So how do we really think? We think symbolically, but without the necessary logical constraint of dichotomous truth value, except in very practical, common, everyday terms and applications. Our logic is less precise and more bound to the relative semantics of psychological/behavioral context, innuendo and association, whether this is conventional or arbitrary. We think rationally with a form of logic that is not constrained by two-value choices and that can move in more than one direction. We commonly employ a form of analogical association in which like is compared to like, and there is presumed similarity on the basis of proximity, co-occurrence, or pre-occurrence. 

We may tend to act in dichotomous terms, and even delude ourselves that we are right in thinking in black and white truth, but we tend in fact to think in looser terms that replaces the equal sign found in abstract models of relationship with alternative signs designating similarity, one-to-one correspondence, approximation and equivalence without the necessary constraint of the law of absolute identity.

What does this entail for our general understanding of systems? In our scientific models and symbolic representations of reality, we typically employ mathematical formulations that are based upon logical positivism and that are derived from the basic relationship of identity or equality. In chemistry, the equal sign is typically changed to a reaction arrow, or set of reaction arrows in systems with equilibrium, but we are always balancing the energy/number/mass budget on both sides as if it were an equal sign. In physics, equations seem to work really well because primarily we are dealing with energy pure and simple, and we know that energy always balances--it cannot be created or destroyed. We can of course reduce everything to chemical and physical reaction terms, and hence transform all event structures in reality into nice mathematical equations, but this would indeed become quite tedious.

This is not necessarily so when we deal with macro-biological systems or social systems. We can of course apply demographics, population measures and formulas, and other statistical measures and devices to our models, and we frequently do to great benefit. But we recognize basic limitations in these approaches at this level of integration of natural phenomena. 

For instance, if we have two pile of stones, seven stones to each pile, we can proceed to act and treat each pile as if they were completely identical and the same to one another, even if each stone is actually unique in terms of its exact physical characteristics. And because the stones do not act spontaneously (they are not living) and especially they do not talk back to us and behave in contradictory ways, we can treat them in our counting games as if they are in fact the same. We may easily do the same with many living organisms, such as amoeba, dogs, trees, and even ourselves. But at some point we must come to recognize a couple of limitations to our formulations especially when it comes to living organisms, and especially thinking organisms. Even if we tend to define evolutionary processes of speciation upon a group population level, the actual selection, transmission and mutation occur effectively upon the level of the individual organism. Organisms of a common set, a common gene-exchanging population, must vary continuously upon a genetic level, otherwise they will not evolve, and they will thus lose out in the long run. Treating all organisms of a common populational set as identical therefore does not solve our basic problems of understanding the fundamental mechanics of speciation. Beyond this, if individual organisms are enmeshed in complex webs of eco-systemic relationship with other species, then the simple classification of these organisms into their populational groupings will not get at the dynamics of meta-biotic organization and interaction that lead to certain fitness and selection regimes.

It is even more the case with human populations complicated as these have been by culture and human civilization and all the weaknesses associated with these phenomena. There are numerous instances and times when it has been of great value to treat people in a quantitative way in statistical manipulations, but so far very few if any universal laws of human nature or human social systems have been derived in this manner, with very few exceptions. So, the "hard" scientist used to the comfort of working with numbers and equal signs, will advocate throwing the human sciences out as "soft." This is not really coming to terms with the central problem because human systems are natural systems of their own right, at their own level. The theory of emotion is a good example to finish with--if we say that he is angry, and it is his anger that made him do it, and we then generalize that all people who do similar things do so because they are angry in the same way, we have reached a kind of hypothesis generalization based upon certain presuppositions. But in doing so we do not ask if the emotion of anger is a clear and universally shared feeling or even what it is as a feeling, or if other circumstances may co-occur to predispose a particular individual to commit a certain act, or if the sense of anger shared by all people is the same, for the same reasons, of the same quality or intensity, or may be different and even unique for different people. Upon further investigation, we may discover that in fact different people do the same sorts of things for very different sets of reasons, and the reasons are not always one and the same. There may be precedents and precursors of behavior resulting in similar consequences. Nor do we even really ask if similar kinds of acts, all lumped together, are really in fact the same acts, committed for the same sets of reasons, or perhaps different sets of acts, committed for different sets of reasons.

So, in such cases, of which there are far too many to count, do we simply throw out the problem as being somehow unscientific, or do we amend our scientific view and methodological approach to reality to be able to better account for the problem? I will only answer by stating that, in general, as we progress the hierarchy of emergent properties associated with different kinds of natural systems, we move from strictly logical, mathematical equations, to more linguistic, generally verbal generalizations in the form of basic statements, but even all our understanding of physical systems and realities cannot be completely coaxed in purely mathematical formula without reference to generalized verbal expressions. 

General Systems Essays, Vol. I