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<body> <p align="center"><font size="6">Systems Essays, Vol. II</font></p> <p align="center"><font size="4">Oct. 7th to Dec. 10, 2004</font></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center">Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p align="center">Copyright 2005, Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p align="center">I have taken the opportunity in the course of editing to publish on-line my second round of Systems Essays. This is a short round written during a two month transition period during which time my main Newsletter as well as web-system framework was undergoing substantial modification. I have sought to collect theses essays into a single corpus as these reflect the development of my ideas in relation to Systems Theory during this period of time.</p> <hr> <p align="left"><font size="5">Systems Essays Vol. II Contents</font></p> <p align="left"><a href="#SystemsPhilosophy"><b>Systems Philosophy</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#SystemsRelativity"><b>Systems Relativity</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#UniversalFeatures"><b>Universal Features of Real Systems</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#SystemsIntegration"><b>General Systems Integration</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#DevelopmentalDifferentiation"><b>Developmental Differentiation & Equi-finality</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#SystemsCybernetics"><b>Systems Cybernetics and the Challenges of Meta-systems Integration</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#NaturalOrder"><b>Natural Order and the Dao of Chaos</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#IntelligentDesign"><b>"Intelligent Design" & Developmental Differentiation</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#GlobalDomestication"><b>Global Domestication, Cultural Selection and Unnatural Evolution</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#BiologicalDominance"><b>Human Biological Dominance, Global Circumscription and the Doctrine of Universal Natural Rights</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#BiologicalDeterminism"><b>Biological Determinism in the Social Sciences</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#SymbolicCognition"><b>Symbolic Cognition & Human Knowledge Systems</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#SymbolsPower"><b>Of Symbols & Power</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#PowerMotivation"><b>Human Power Motivation and the Symbolic Transformation of Human Nature </b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#SystemsProfiling"><b>Profiling the Profilers</b></a></p> <p align="left"><a href="#MessageMedium"><b>The Message Becomes the Medium</b></a></p> <hr align="left"> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="left"> </p> <font size="6"><a NAME="SystemsPhilosophy">Systems Philosophy</a></font> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p>Systems philosophy concerns primarily the conceptual foundations for a systems-based framework in the world. The role of traditional philosophy has been eclipsed by the rising sun of the empirical-analytical sciences and conventional philosophy became in the later half of the 20th Century an exclusive, restrictive, entirely academic preoccupation. The call for holism and general integration of scientific knowledge across disciplinary boundaries has entailed rethinking the place of philosophy from a systems perspective. Modern scientific worldview demands increasingly a systems-based approach in order to achieve the comprehensiveness of perspective it needs, and this in turn demands a reinstatement of a philosophical framework that both transcends and incorporates scientific theory and methodology across all fields of knowledge. The time has arrived therefore for a full-blown systems philosophy to envision the leading role of the sciences in the 3rd Millennium and to lead scientists beyond the role of remaining pawns in service of authoritarian puppet-masters.</p> <p>Systems philosophy addresses some of the most vital questions concerning the foundations of reality and the role of human beings in the mediation of this reality. How we answer these questions in part determines how we will respond and adapt to our ever changing world, and in the final analysis may determine the outcome of human survival upon earth. There is a deep connection between our worldview and our behavioral and social adaptation in the world--we cannot clearly say that worldview guides our behavior or that worldview is guided by behavior, but surely there is a very high positive correlation between the way people look at and think about the world and how they respond and interact with others in their world, their position and status-identity in that world.</p> <p>The central challenge of systems philosophy, to be relevant in a contemporary world, is to successfully mediate and overcome the Mind/Body dichotomy that has served to dialectically define and constrain Western Philosophy for the past two and a half millennia. This dichotomy affects how we approach scientific problem solving and how we carve up our experience. We may say simply, from a systems philosophy perspective, this dichotomy is really a hen or egg dilemma, and it is a false dichotomy. Mind and body are two heads of the same coin. Simply put, mind is a function of the integration and action of the brain as a complex system of neural activity.</p> <p>We may say that from a systems perspective, the synergistic, holistic qualities and emergent properties that are associated with a unified system at one level of observation, do not exist and cannot be adequately explained in terms of the analysis of the components of the system or their individual functional specializations. But if we observe the pattern of integration of the various parts of a system, the principle of synergistic holism follows logically. That the component parts of systems become bound up within the system, and their behavior constrained by the operational environment and external conditions of the system, is a part of the process. </p> <p>That there occurs mostly a degree of variability in the behavior and structure of component parts, does not affect the general outcome or sense of dynamic equilibrium maintained by the system as a whole. We may observe that real systems would not be capable of adaptation and long term life if they did not have built-in variability. All real systems have built-in tolerance limits that permit component parts to vary from one instance to the next, within the same system, or if we compare one system from another. This is as true of physical systems like stars as it is of biological systems like animals or human systems like societies.</p> <p>All classification in science proceeds from these tenets, as does all logical relationship that we infer in phenomena. The concept of causality is derivative of this basic principle--we can call the developmental behavior of systems complex causality. From this, we can see that typical clausal logic is a constrained form of symbolic analogy, and we may refer to it as symbolic homology.</p> <p>There are several sets of caveats that need to be pointed out. First, we have inherited an abstract conception of the world from Western Philosophers, and we have a decided tendency to confuse the abstraction with the reality. We have a further tendency to not allow for variability of rules or relationships, even in our basic concepts of positive or logical identity--a thing is a thing, and not something else. If a thing is an abstraction that stands for a set of real things, then we can understand that real things may vary in detail and still remain parts of the set as a whole. The consequences for this tendency, we can call it a logical fallacy of absolute identity, or the fallacy of over-abstraction, is to deny or fail to see the exceptions to the rule that we set down for ourselves, and to fail to see, especially in science, that the rules follow the exceptions and observations, and not the other way around.</p> <p>The second set of caveats concerning this issue is the quest for absolute certainty in our scientific knowledge of our world, a quest we have again inherited from an abstract, mathematical model of the world. Failure to gain a sense of certainty due to the inherent variability encountered in real systems and their components results in a kind of "epistemo-pathology" of knowledge--a neurosis that attaches itself to a rigid, obsessive-compulsive form of methodology in the quest for knowledge that leads to the rejection of evidence that does not fit the type.</p> <p>The final set of caveats concerning this issue involves the paradigmatic structure of scientific theory and methodology as this is articulated by scientific communities, as pointed out by Thomas Kuhn for the field of physics and cosmology. A community arrives at a received worldview, a theoretical model of their knowledge forte', as demonstrated by a body of methods and the results of these methods. As a consequence of the consensus and reinforcement for conformity, the constraint of the community as a knowledge system controlling the state of affairs regarding a particular problem set and subject, competing or alternative viewpoints are not permitted to coexist or be developed, even if new evidence emerges as the consequence of empirical investigation that does not clearly or cleanly fit the received view of the world.</p> <p>It was the physicist Niels Bohr who, encountering the problem of the relativity of knowledge concerning the exact instantaneous state of an electron in its orbit about an atomic nucleus, derived the conclusion that scientific knowledge is not built on exactitude or on the notion of direct causal determinism, but instead on the built-in possibility of the complementariness of alternative viewpoints depending upon the context of observation, and it was this same philosopher of science who extended this epistemological and methodological paradigm to the biological and anthropological sciences as well. I think it was he who should be first credited with the insight of natural systems philosophy, even if he did not at the time directly refer to it as such. </p> <p>Contemporaneous to Niels Bohr, the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy arrived at similar conclusions, especially concerning the behavior and structure of cells and organisms, and who sought to extend the principles in a systematic way to all fields of the sciences. It was von Bertalanffy who appended the name "general systems theory" to this philosophical approach towards the sciences, and who afterward elaborated many of the basic tenets of this approach.</p> <hr> <font size="6"><a name="SystemsRelativity">Systems Relativity</a></font> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <a NAME="four"> <p ALIGN="left"></a><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p>In nature, and in the larger sense of reality, everything is connected to everything else, whether directly or remotely and indirectly. One might be inclined to see reality as a vast "scale-free" network system. But everything is not connected to everything else in exactly the same way--in fact, the bulk of empirical evidence suggests that everything connects to everything else not just differently, but uniquely in an exact and discrete sense to each instance and circumstance of a thing in question. </p> <p>Systems relativity is a basic condition of all human knowledge of reality that comes from several different sources at once, but meets in an somewhat inherently ambiguous middle ground. We may refer to forms of design relativity, structural relativity and relational relativity as alternative facets of expression of systems relativity, albeit from varying points of view.</p> <p>No real system may occur in a total vacuum or complete isolation, and so all systems are interconnected to other systems. In fact, as we observe nature carefully, we come to realize increasingly that systems interconnect upon many different levels simultaneously.</p> <p>Of course this is a rather simplistic "theory of everything" model, a bit of over-generalization about the structure of reality, but it provides a direct and dramatic entry into understanding the general problem of <u>Systems Relativity</u>--which can be described as a fundamental constraint upon our knowledge of reality in terms of our capacity, both inherent and external, to know or perceive the relations of things in a complete or even sufficient manner.</p> <p>It will be demonstrated furthermore that science, in whatever form or methodology this takes, moves forward in a systematic manner by means of coming to terms with the general problems of systems relativity, in relation to a specific domain or area of knowledge, in the accounting for the determinancy of relationships between event structures. It does not do this necessarily in a deliberate way, but such underpinnings are implicit and inherent to all general or specific scientific methodologies.</p> <p>The entire basis of a general systems framework, and of a scientific worldview and methodology based upon a general systems approach, is that of dealing centrally with the problem of systems relativity as this is found to occur phenomenally in natural event structures. Defining a general systems framework depends upon excoriating the relational patternings shared by most if not all systems, regardless of the differences occurring between systems. This cannot be done scientifically in either an empirical or a rational sense if a careful accounting of the differences that occur between systems cannot be made.</p> <p>The challenge of science becomes describing how things are interconnected, with the understanding that though not everything is interconnected in the same way, some things are connected in similar ways to other things. Traditional science has come from a framework of magic that held to loose analogical relationships, a natural consequence of the dialectical and duality structure of human symbolic logic, and came in time to impose on explanation and its own rites of performance the more restrictive criteria of the demonstration of homological relationships between event structures. Homological relationships stipulate a condition of historical precedence and consequence, and of genetic relation and therefore some sense of causal dependency. This has been the emphasis of conventional science. Systems-based frameworks extend the framework upon a structural level to embrace the informational patterns of systems of all kinds, regardless of their level of articulation or form--thus otherwise unrelated kinds of systems from different levels of pattern organization, say a molecule and a cell and an organism,  may be comparable mechanically or informationally on the basis of their patterning of organization of relations or the dynamic development of relational structures that occur in such different systems.</p> <p>It has been a common observation and generalization that reality and nature has organized itself in certain ways, and the pattern of organization between many different systems tends to follow very similar principles of relation and organization, at least upon some level of analysis and generalization. Science depends for instance on the possibility of the precise measurement of the physical patterning of event structures.</p> <p>The basis for all or any kind of information is fundamentally pattern organization that is <u>non-random</u>. It is observable that all real systems that occur are essentially <u>working systems</u> in the sense that their pattern organization is non-random (contains information) and operate against an overarching tendency towards randomization or disorder. Relational structures of whatever kind (and all things in reality are somehow interrelated) contain information if they are non-random in occurrence. Understanding significant information (i.e. non-random pattern) contained in event structures of reality is the basis for both a systems framework and doing so in a systematic, measurable manner is the basis of a scientific model of such event structures.</p> <p>In our four-dimensional view of the universe, the physical manifestation of all event structures occur in both time and space, and it has been demonstrated that we ultimately cannot separate spatial from temporal modalities of organization. Non-random pattern occurs therefore both temporally and in spatial expression. We may say that all things real have some form of physical manifestation, and therefore all real systems are necessarily, first and foremost, physical systems the behavior of which can at least be described in physical terms.</p> <p>From a physical standpoint, therefore, any real system may be described as an event structure that occurs in time and space and that exhibits some degree of non-random pattern in its occurrence, and especially if this non-random pattern endures over time and across space in a manner that makes its chance or stochastic probability extremely unlikely under conditions of spatial-temporal symmetry permanence.</p> <p>The following points, forming a basic systems relativity paradigm, must be observed:</p> <p>1. that no such system can occur in a sense of absolute physical isolation. </p> <p>2. that non-random pattern or "organization" can endure in an improbable manner only if "work" is done.</p> <p>3. from at least a thermo-dynamic perspective, mechanics of real systems determine that energy must be transported effectively with a minimal degree of efficiency from the environment into the system on a continuous basis.</p> <p>4. no real system can be permanently or absolutely self-organizing, and therefore completely self-contained in an informational sense.</p> <p>5. all real systems must be partially open to a larger environment of relationships that in part deterministically organize systems in a meta-systems context.</p> <p>Furthermore, I would be inclined to put forward the proposition that, at least in the observable universe of physical reality, all energy transactions are in the final analysis absolutely equal--for any discrete amount of energy input into a system delimited in time-space, an exactly equal net amount of energy will be output from the same system, including the energy required for the pattern of organization (information) contained in the system. The fundamental equality of all energy exchange relationships in physical reality appears to be a universal property of all real systems and can be presumed to be a basic presupposition of the cosmological principle. In other words, physical reality in a total or universal sense may have no "leaks", even if limited "self-organized" physical systems are observed always to leak.</p> <p>This sets up certain consequences for all systems, and we may identify laws of informational dynamics that reflect precisely the principles of thermodynamics:</p> <p>1.  It is impossible for instance, to squeeze more in total from a self-contained system than was originally put into a system, whether this is in terms of energy or information. </p> <p>2. It is impossible to convert all energy in a self-contained system into informational organization.</p> <p>3. There is no such thing as a permanently self-contained system. The long term trend of any self-contained system is towards increasing disorganization and loss of information.</p> <p>4. There can be no totally random system that is self-contained.</p> <p>Only ideal systems, those that exist only as abstractions, may be considered to be completely or totally self-organized and self-contained in an informational sense. All real systems are in fact at best only semi-self-contained. Science has its basis in the analysis and measurement of energy transactions in physical event structures that result in information and that can be considered in some sense to be minimally self-organizing as "systems." We have just pointed out, in a rather abtruse manner, scientific justification for why all systems are relative, in a physical sense at least.</p> <p>There is more to the story than this, and this other side of the story has to do with the inherent informational ambiguity of real systems that affect our capacity to known in an absolutely certain sense a "system." All real systems may be said to be informationally dynamic, even only upon a structural level of description. They are subject to continuous fluctuation and alteration, and hence any attempt to impose a fixed or "absolute" frame of reference to such patterning must be construed as inherently arbitrary. The true difference between a scientific theory regarded as correct and true even if in a limited manner and a symbolic ideology or mythology is not the inherent structure of the reasoning processes or knowledge encompassed by either system of symbolic generalization, but the conditions and constraints imposed on the foundations of information systematically used to verify and validate such conceptual constructions. Ultimately, physical measurement of the patterning of real systems forms the basis for the former kind of construction, however indirectly derived, while no such system of constraints operates in the case of non-scientific ideologies or other symbolic systems. Of course this is not the whole story of what makes a body of knowledge and a methodology a science, or of what makes a science a systems-based framework of comprehension of reality, but it is only a beginning.</p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <b><font size="6"><a NAME="UniversalFeatures">Universal Features of Real Systems</a></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p>All real systems share a basic set of constraints that may be called universal and these serve as limiting factors in the articulation and phenomenal patterning of any system. A real system is any natural or human made system that occurs in objective reality, as opposed to non-real systems (i.e., abstract, conceptual or imaginary systems that lack any demonstrable basis in reality.) Non-real systems may be considered to be systems that are possible but as yet undemonstrated through experience. There is thus an overlap between real and non-real systems, and it is in this overlap that parallax and play exists for the emergence of new systems heretofore unrealized.</p> <p>The universal constraints of real systems primarily involve energy exchange relationships upon a physical level. This energy exchange, of whatever kind of system, involves both inputs of one form of energy into a system complex, transformation of this energy along different pathways, and output of energy in one or more alternate forms, part of which is always the expenditure of heat. This thermodynamic model of energy exchange is really only part of the larger equation of energy transfer in real systems. It seems, all real systems are also subject to the constraints of gravity and gravitational energy, and these kind of constraints are not exactly thermodynamic by the conventional model. It is apparent also that other kinds of energy exchange transactions may be occurring in all real systems, albeit upon levels or in ways we have very little direct access to, observationally speaking, and at which we have not yet begun to understand what is really happening.</p> <p>All real systems also contain, by virtue of their non-random organization of relationships, implicit information that is intrinsic to this relational patterning. Because an informational model is almost completely describable in terms of an thermodynamic analogy, many of the constraints that apply in the process of energy exchange transactions in system also apply to the informational carrying capacity of systems. We may venture the hypothesis in fact that all energy exchange events in the universe carry some kind of informational pattern in the structure of the event that is non-random. If this is true, we may further deduce that what is most characteristic of any system is its energy transactions, and all energy transactions in physical reality can be said to be relatively "systematic" in their occurrence. We know this for two sets of reasons. In the attempt to understand any energy transaction, we can always assume that there is always a net energy balance of zero in any equation we come up with, and this exact balance of inputs-to-outputs in any "energy" system is also directly analogous to a model of pure mathematical abstraction. At this point, pure energy transactions and naturally organized informational systems are directly correspondent with purely abstract mathematical models based upon logical equations. Of course, the complexity and chaos of underdetermined natural systems is virtually impossible to replicate by means of mathematical models, but the possibility for doing so is what drives the advance of supercomputing digital simulations of complex natural event structures like wave action or tornados.</p> <p>What does all this mean? If we put aside the symbolic rhetoric of our own language and conceptual/ideological systems, and we approach any real system in its most basic terms, we can always find an exact mathematical model, however complex and relatively unavailable, that perfectly describes the deterministic behavior of the system in question in terms of its energy transactions. However chaotic and disordered an explosion might be, if we could replay the events in an exact sequence and simultaneously, we would be able to mathematically map the chain of energy reactions that composed such an event.</p> <p>Some kinds of constraints are obviously connected to the energy transactions of systems--there is always a loss of heat energy in any real system, such that the efficiency of energy input to the used energy output is always less than 100%. And such a system can never be completely ordered in a non-random, deterministic sense, but its pattern will always contain some degree of random "noise" that is essentially unpredictable.</p> <p>There are other related limitations we may find universal to all real systems. All real systems contain some degree of indeterminacy or variability built into it on a structural level. All real systems are subject to change and dynamic fluctuation over the long term. All real systems change along pathways that are paradigmatically predefined for systems of a similar kind and magnitude. Change in systems is inevitable. All real systems may be said to have a finite state-path trajectory that describes the life-cycle of a particular kind of system. The informational patterning associated with any real system is transformed on the basis of the stage of the life-cycle and the surrounding environmental events that occur to that system. </p> <p>All real systems achieve some stable, steady-state configuration in an intermediate phase of its development, which state configuration generally defines the system as such taxonomically and categorically. The mature or parent state of a normal system contains the general informational patterning that can be used in the classification and analysis of different kinds of systems. The fact of inexorable change of any real system imposes certain temporal constraints upon that system. Any system can last only so long before it perishes as such and its elementary components become recycled back into that huge physical cauldron of the universe. </p> <p>All systems, as systems, also have spatial constraints that limit their articulation. Real systems are not only bound in time, but in space as well. The reasons for the spatial constraint of systems are not so obvious as they might first appear to be. The best explanation I can make, and this is only hypothetical and tentative, is that in fact, in nature, we cannot have an infinite amount of energy in one place at one time, though we may have an extraordinary amount of energy thus concentrated in a finite area. Another way of looking at this problem, I believe, is to restate the idea that we cannot completely or clearly separate spatial dimensions from temporal event structures, and when we have the notion of space, we must include in the formula the problem of time. Hence, if anything is temporally limited due to change, that thing must also of necessity be spatially limited as well. The idea that any given spatial area, over a limited period of time, may contain only so much energy, and hence, information that is inherent to that energy patterning, sets limits as to the possibilities of growth and size of systems. </p> <p>Also, the idea that systems that depend upon energy transactions between an internal and external environment that are fundamentally different from one another, across some kind of  threshold, also entails that any real system can be only of finite 3 dimensional size. An infinitely large system could have no external environment with which to exchange energy. All energy would be contained within itself. I think another way of looking at this problem might be to state a precept like "an infinite amount of energy cannot be obtained from an infinitely small point in space-time." We cannot compress or squeeze all the energy of the universe into a single infinitesimally small "quantum" of space-time. We know that there are relativistic considerations increasingly at the lower known limits of size--there appears for instance to be increasing indeterminancy, intrinsic indeterminancy, of event structure on a small enough scale of measurement. I do not think the implications of this are completely understood, but it seems to me even "energy" as we understand this may be something completely different once we get to a small enough level of analysis.</p> <p>Perhaps a simpler way of stating this is that all energy transaction events, and the systems they represent, occur in finite space as well as finite time, and thus require both limited space and time for their occurrence. </p> <p>We must ask, beyond space-time considerations of energy systems, what other constraints might all real systems share in common?</p> <p>All real systems appear to maintain an indefinite internal state of dynamic equilibrium that is characterized by a gradient between a larger degree of energy contained internally within the system and the measure of energy outside of the system, which gradient is maintained and mediated by certain mechanisms, specific to each kind of system, that can maintain this gradient by transporting into the system greater quantities of energy per unit time and space than are lost from the system either by work, organization or entropy in the system. This state of equilibrium in a system may be maintained in a stable manner such that it will not be drastically affected by minor perturbations or fluctuations of energy levels or exchanges between internal and external environments.</p> <p>As a function of the complex internalized organization of systems in a non-random, semi-deterministic manner, it may be said that any system exhibits in its patterning certain synergistic properties that are emergent from the behavior of the system as a system, and that cannot be attributed completely to any single components or set of components of the system. In fact, so much does this appear to be the case that all of nature, and all of reality, appears to have organized and stratified itself on the basis of emergent properties, that, upon finer analysis, simply disappear as a consequence of the disruption of the system that produces the property in the first place. This is as true of protons and electrons in an atom of hydrogen or a molecule of water, as it is in an multi-cellular organism or in a star.</p> <p>We end up with a paradox of systems in a sense being built of a house of cards, or rather, systems composed of other systems, in turn composed by other systems, based on properties attributed only holistically to systems and never to the component parts of those systems. There is little beyond the enormous intricacies and beauty of natural systems that is more remarkable than how emergent properties attributed to systems integration at one level, becomes the basis for the construction of higher-order systems, and how, in such a way, nature seemingly has constructed itself, in all its intricacies, from apparently almost nothing, to what we know it as, including ourselves in that world.</p> <p>I would not say that these are the only features that are universal to all real systems. They all share complex relationships between constituent components, and they all occur within an environmental context that is essential to the stability and continuation of similar kinds of systems. Systems cannot arise in environmental contexts that are not conducive to their occurrence and stability. While this may sound like a functional tautology, it is quite true that all systems are environmentally dependent upon the conditions that are conducive to their development as systems of a particular kind.</p> <p>While it may seem self-evident to claim these kinds of features as basic to all real systems, less evident is the degree to which these same features may be used to describe, for instance, the functioning of human systems at the several levels that human systems articulate and in the contexts in which these systems have arisen and developed. Without the correct environmental conditions occurring, it is like that human systems, as cultural symbolic systems built upon the linguistic exchange and transmission of symbolic information, would have arisen in the way that they did, if at all. And we should pay heed ultimately to the same sets of constraints that drive our global civilization today, the insatiable demand for energy and the capacity to utilize this energy in effective ways.</p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <font size="6"><a name="SystemsIntegration">General Systems Integration</a></font> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <a NAME="four"> <p ALIGN="left"></a><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p>The general problem of systems integration is central to the entire challenge of understanding systems of any kind or of framing a coherent and reliable general systems theory. In its most basic form, the problem of general systems integration concerns how systems form and behave, articulated as they are in larger meta-systems contexts, composed of component parts that interact with one another in ways that result in the synergistic patterning of the system. The general problem of systems integration involves the problem of systems relations, which refers back to the issue of general systems relativity. Also, from another perspective, it involves the problem of the stratification of reality and the differentiation of systems from one another and from the environmental context in which any particular system becomes articulated. Put another way, the problem of general systems integration concerns how reality comes together and how it works, and it becomes therefore a central problem for all fields of science to address, albeit at the levels and in the particular areas of their specific research subjects.</p> <p>One of the central dilemmas of systems integration is that on one hand it involves bringing things together, and on the other, and simultaneously, separating things apart. With the problem of the integration of reality comes the concomitant question of the differentiation of reality. Just as we see things coming together in certain ways, and not in others, so we also tend to see things falling apart in some ways, and usually not in others. A great deal of differentiation observed in the word can be referred to as developmental differentiation that has a sense of historical precedence of previous states and the future-ward consequence of  possible or even probably states. Most developmental differentiation to which no outside chance forces may be attributed, seem to follow a fairly deterministic or even over-deterministic pattern of dynamic ordering. Much of the qualities we associate with "systems" of any and all kinds at whatever level of reality we are referring to, demonstrates this kind of dynamic ordering through developmental differentiation. We have not yet figured it out in the physical sciences, but call it Evolutionary theory in the biological sciences, and argue over progressive human civilization in the social sciences.</p> <p>We can say some things about the problem of integration in a formal sense, and this relates to the structure and informational capacity related to all systems of any kind or level of analytical description, and forms the foundation for a general systems approach to science. For instance:</p> <p>1. A totally undetermined system is one in which all possible causal relations, and hence all possible outcomes, are equally likely, and the outcomes are completely stochastic in a chaotic sense.</p> <p>2. A totally determined system is one in which there is only one set of causal connections between components and only one possible outcome from the system. Such a system can be said to be anti-chaotic.</p> <p>3. The observation of nature and of any real system reveals that systems may be neither totally determined nor completely undetermined--in fact, no natural phenomena appears to occur that is either completely determined or undetermined.</p> <p>4. All real systems as coherent and differentiated entities appear to be finite and limited in physical parameters of both time and space. They achieve a limited degree of deterministic order, for a limited frame of time and space, and in relation to both internal and external constraints.</p> <p>5. The limited integration achieved by real systems are neither completely self-organizational nor organized as a consequence of meta-systemic interactions in the environment, but as a complex combination of both sets of factors <u>in interaction</u>.</p> <p>6. All real systems are in a state of continuous fluctuation that is describable in terms of non-linear dynamics and control theory, and hence such changes follow probabilistic pathways within a paradigm of possible alternatives that are available to statistical measures of description.</p> <p>We may describe for any system a unique informational paradigm in which the dimensions of order to disorder are contrasted with the dimensions of internal to external constraints:</p> <div align="center"> <center> <table border="2" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1" bordercolordark="#000000"> <tr> <td align="center"> <p align="center"><b>Systems Informational Paradigm</b></td> <td align="center" bgcolor="#00FFFF">Measure of Order</td> <td align="center" bgcolor="#00FFFF">Measure of Disorder</td> <td align="center" bgcolor="#00FFFF">Measure of Internal Constraint</td> <td align="center" bgcolor="#00FFFF">Measure of External Constraint</td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" bgcolor="#00FFFF">Measure of Order</td> <td bordercolor="#C0C0C0" bgcolor="#C0C0C0" align="center">order/order?</td> <td align="center">disorder /order</td> <td align="center">internal constraint /order</td> <td align="center">external constraint /order</td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" bgcolor="#00FFFF">Measure of Disorder</td> <td align="center">order /disorder</td> <td bgcolor="#C0C0C0" bordercolor="#C0C0C0" align="center">disorder/disorder?</td> <td align="center">internal constraint /disorder</td> <td align="center">external constraint /disorder</td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" bgcolor="#00FFFF">Measure of Internal Constraint</td> <td align="center">order /internal constraint</td> <td align="center">disorder /internal constraint</td> <td bgcolor="#C0C0C0" bordercolor="#C0C0C0" align="center">internal/internal constraint?</td> <td align="center">external constraint /internal constraint</td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" bgcolor="#00FFFF">Measure of External Constraint</td> <td align="center">order /external constraint</td> <td align="center">disorder /external constraint</td> <td align="center">internal constraint /external constraint</td> <td bgcolor="#C0C0C0" bordercolor="#C0C0C0" align="center">external/external constraint?</td> </tr> </table> </center> </div> <p>The profile of any system's informational paradigm may be said to be unique to that particular system, if we can define in a precise way the constraints that constitute the system. In other words, the problem of systems integration boils mathematically (i.e., physically) down to a problem of complex mutual constraint between discriminating factors, both the degree and direction of constraint. These variables may only be modeled in terms of complex differential equations, and the changes that factors undergo within a system paradigm are continuously in fluctuation, such that we may only identify in iterative states discrete instances of a system in developmental transition.</p> <p>The description of systems integration may be best modeled by the mechanism of a periodic inter-harmonic resonance amplification device, or more simply, as a pendulum, or rather as a set of pendulums each oscillating at a different frequency and rate.</p> <p>This paradigm is somewhat deceptive though, because it disguises the true complexity of systems interaction and behavior in a discrete sense. It presents measures of order, disorder, internal and external constraint in a composite sense, disguising the complex and uncertainty factors that would make up each measure, and not accounting for the internal variables and relationships that affect the overall measures. It is precisely these sets of variables that render the entire system one of continuous fluctuation and change, and one that is rooted in complexity of interrelationship. </p> <p>In other words, it is quite unrealistic to consider that we can obtain at any one point in time a true and accurate measure of internal or external constraint or of relative order or disorder, much less to reliably describe these in any consistent manner. We in fact lack the language or the logic to do so in a simple manner, and even the descriptive analysis of the simplest of systems rapidly breaks down under the weight of the exponential increase of complexity entailed by the extension of such a paradigm. But our language does provide us with the trick of symbolic magic, the fallacy of being able to talk about systems, and components and measures of systems, in a composite manner as if these are in fact real and true to life.</p> <p>And if we think about it all information is really this way--the information we have is that of the past stream of events, and never the current condition of reality. The problem of integration is the paradox of change, and the dilemma of having to describe change in terms that are intrinsically static. Of course this is also our saving grace, as we are permitted to speak qualitatively about reality, in terms of inaccurate or imprecise generalities and implicit generalizations, when it becomes impossible to speak about reality otherwise or in terms that are "really real." This does not weaken our scientific knowledge, but only strengthens it by a realization of its own relativities.</p> <p>The rub of the matter is that in fact real systems do come to exhibit stable states and configurations, and even stadial patterns of development from one stage to another, and it is the symbolic structure of our language and logic that lends itself most readily to the description and understanding of these conditions. We see this as the emergent patterns and properties associated with systems of all kinds and as important to their identification as such. We may not easily understand the problem of integration directly, fundamentally, in a completely analytical manner, but we can readily approach the problem in terms of the consequences and results of integration.</p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <b><font size="6"><a name="DevelopmentalDifferentiation">Developmental Differentiation and Equi-finality</a></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <a NAME="four"> <p ALIGN="left"></a><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p><font size="3">The basis of all change processes of all natural systems are the dynamics of developmental differentiation of systems. We find this developmental differentiation at all levels of analysis of biological systems, and I have hypothesized it to occur for physical systems as well, if we look at a large enough and fundamental enough frame of reference. It is apparent as well that upon a human cultural level there has occurred developmental differentiation of human populations especially in the last 50,000 years of human prehistory. </font></p> <p><font size="3">We find for instance developmental differentiation of a multi-cellular organism from a single cell into a coordinated system of different kinds of cellular tissues serving different functions. In such organisms, the integration of the organism as a whole takes clear precedence in a functional sense over the functioning of the cells themselves. Upon a population level, it is apparent that groupings of all kinds of species are involved in long-term processes of continuous evolutionary differentiation. We expect in human languages the continuous divergence of dialects in areas and the fragmentation of these areas into numerous speech groups differentiated by many isoclinal patterns of variation. Similarly, we can hypothesize the continuous historical differentiation of cultural traditions in a region, the effects of extraneous variables and outside acculturative forces notwithstanding. </font></p> <p><font size="3">Contrary to received big bang theory, I have hypothesized a similar "cold fusion" developmental dynamics of physical reality over a very large compass of space and time, a process that has led to an increasing formation of matter and mass-based subsystems, primarily in the form of star formations.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This pattern of developmental differentiation hypothetically universal to all natural and real systems runs against a basic notion prevalent in general systems theory, that of equifinality of the steady-state pattern of systems of a given kind, such that no matter what the initial differences in starting points of such systems, the outcomes would tend toward a normal pattern of dynamic equilibrium of a common type of system that would include dynamic buffers against perturbation of change.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Clearly both patterns are evident in natural systems, and it is my contention that such patterns are in fact entirely complementary to one another in their occurrence in natural systems. In general what distinguishes a common kind or type of a system is primarily the sense of equifinal convergence of such systems to a common configuration, regardless of the initial starting conditions. This does not contradict or obviate the second patterning of the developmental differentiation of any particular system, or of any particular type of system, along some continuum or range of pattern variation. We can see the relationship between the principle of equifinality of systems and developmental differentiation as the relationship of the bell-shaped curve to the graph coordinates on which it is drawn. Systems of all kinds tend toward certain expected norms of patterning that may be said to be complex and heterogeneous in structure, and yet all systems simultaneously vary systematically along a complex range of variables that are composite dimensions or parameters of a kind of system.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The dynamic equilibrium characteristic of a stable or steady-state system concerns a stadial perspective of processes which seen from the standpoint of developmental differentiation may appear otherwise as relatively continuous. All biological organisms pass through a series of states or stages of their developmental cycle, or life cycle from birth to death. From a biological standpoint, an organism is successful ultimately if it in turn produces viable and reproductively successful organisms upon reaching a steady-state stage of physical maturity.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The concept of equifinality appears to address the central part of most systems that involve the stable state-path trajectory of a fully developed system during which prolonged period (relative to the total life-cycle) internal structural differentiation or growth is minimized. In mature biological organisms, cells reach a level of division and growth in which they are primarily replacing dead or lost tissue, rather than growing new tissue structures.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is systems that achieve such stable state-path trajectories that we tend to ascribe as systems--we are less inclined to look at event phenomena that follow rapid or destructive trajectories as "systems" as such as they appear to lack one of the central qualities of a "system," that being a sense of long lasting dynamic equilibrium and self-maintaining organization of structure. At the same time, we also understand as well that all systems have a demise and come to an end eventually, and this is also expected from any form of event we may seek to understand. Indeed, the only truly equifinal state that all systems must eventually meet is the fate of final demise as a system.</font></p> <p><font size="3">I do not write this essay to quibble over the finer points of the problem of developmental differentiation and how it might relate to the concept of equifinality. Rather the main point is to address why developmental differentiation is important to an understanding of reality, and how it may apply to a systems based adaptive framework in reality.</font></p> <p><font size="3">If from a theory of a dynamic state universe, we hypothesize that all systems originally emerged from a common background framework, in a sense sprang from a single fundamental, primary, original "system" then we can conclude that the differentiation of systems eventually became the consequence of systems primarily differentiated interacting with one another, in selective ways, that resulted in the increasing differentiation of old systems and the emergence of new systems. Reality, or all that encompassed by our total universe, would in such a model have become thereby an increasingly dynamic and turbulent place, as different systems, originally springing from a common source, began interacting with one another leading to the formation and emergence of entirely new patterns of phenomena that could in turn be described as systems themselves.</font></p> <p><font size="3">I hypothesize that there has probably never been a time, except for some "beginning" time, which may not have been "time" at all, has there ever been a sense of a system or set of systems that have occurred in total isolation or as single systems, and that cannot be said to have arisen as the consequence of interactions and a developmental history of interactions, between different and differentiating systems at all levels.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Reality, and the universe at large, can be hypothesized to be a state or condition in general that is tending towards increasing differentiation, just as a tree that springs from the ground from a single seed branches and spreads itself more and more, above and below ground, until what was originally a single germ becomes eventually an entity of millions of leaves and roots. </font></p> <p><font size="3">But this analogy of the tree as a differentiating system is somewhat misleading, as it will be observed that our tendency to speak of systems as if singular and in isolation does not answer the issue of the interaction of multiple systems in relation to one another, and the developmental consequences that are the product of this. If we realize that a tree is nothing without soil, air, water, and that certain kinds of trees can only grow in certain kinds of climates and biomes, then we see that a tree itself is an interacting, and not an isolated, kind of system, and its developmental possibilities and outcomes are largely dependent upon the systems based context in which it arises and takes shape.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The interaction of systems may be referred to as either destructive, innocuous or constructive in terms of the consequences of the interaction. We may borrow furthermore from evolutionary theory and refer to convergent, divergent or parallel forms of interaction that lead to consequences of one kind or another. Furthermore, the interaction of two complex systems, must in itself be inherent complex, and hence the addition of the interaction of more than two systems becomes exponentially more complicated with the addition of every new interacting system.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We understand the paradigm of developmental possibilities of two or more interacting systems may follow a range of alternatives, from destructive, to constructive, to some form of intermediary indeterminancy or complementariness. In effect, we observe within such a paradigm of possibilities the same kind of developmental paradigm we ascribe to the non-linear control dynamics of systems themselves, as if they were isolated and not interacting systems. In fact, I would probably argue, at least from an intuitive point, that the occasion of a paradigm of non-linear control is primarily the result of the complex interactions between systems, and not the intrinsic developmental constraints of a system in and of itself, which would tend, on average, towards a sense of equifinal convergence to a single complex but stable state equilibrium.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In a sense this idea vindicates the notion that a giant meteorite or a super-volcano caused a phase of sudden mass-extinction which resulted in a major shift in evolutionary change on the earth, as in such events we can see a grand scale of systems interactions between living and non-living things. But we would not even need to invoke such spectacular cosmic or geological events in order to use this principle of systems interactions to explain how extinctions and mass extinctions may have arisen merely and primarily as a consequence of the shifting interactions of different species and kinds of species across multiple biomes and trophic levels, triggered as this may have been by gradual changes of the geophysical substrate, the climate, and so forth.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Developmental differentiation then, like structural organization, cannot be completely or sufficiently accounted for on the basis of the intrinsic developmental possibilities of a single system construed analytically as if in isolation from its natural environment <u>in interactive relationship with other systems.</u> We cannot have completely intrinsic developmental differentiation of individual, relatively isolated systems, just as we cannot have completely self-organizing systems that are not subject to some larger meta-systems context. Even in cases, as with the developmental growth of individual organisms, and the process of cell differentiation, more attention should be paid perhaps to the interaction of emergent systems in the body that affect these developmental outcomes.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The sense of equifinality achieved by an particular system or class of systems is an indirect consequence of the differentiation of systems based upon mutual interactions and the stratification of such systems across space and time. We may hypothesize for instance that systems achieve stable, steady-state configurations in their relational patterns that represent in a relative way optimal solutions to the problem of integrative organization within a larger context of open interactions. Such a solution would be equivalent to a local "rest" state at which level entropy producing interactions and order producing interactions are effectively balanced. Natural tendencies toward greater entropy are indefinitely arrested and do not take over such a system, as these are effectively counterbalanced by processes, drawn from the larger environment, in which energy of sufficient levels can be transported back into the system. A car, for instance, in motion represents a steady state system, just so long as there is gasoline in the tank. To keep a car running, of course, one must keep putting more petroleum into the tank. Similarly, biological organisms must regularly take a meal in order to keep functioning in a stable manner. Borrowing again from ecology, we might state that systems naturally tend toward and reach their intrinsic/extrinsic carrying-capacities in their developmental growth and in their levels of integrative complexity</font></p> <p><font size="3">To summarize and conclude this exploratory essay, I would like to hypothesize that under certain prevailing natural conditions, which in fact and principle seem to be omnipresent in the universe, developmental differentiation of natural systems, leading to compartmentalization and stratification of reality, are expectable outcomes of complex variable interactions occurring in environments that can be considered open and underdetermined. I would state a principle, less obvious perhaps, that equifinality of stable, steady state systems is also an expectable outcome of the developmental differentiation and stratification of multiple systems.</font></p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <b><font size="6"><a name="SystemsCybernetics">Systems Cybernetics and the Challenges of Meta-systems Integration</a></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <a NAME="four"> <p ALIGN="left"></a><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p><font size="3">For purposes of this essay, I offer the following operational definitions:</font></p> <p><b><font size="2">Meta-system</font></b><font size="2">: A "system of systems," and, theoretically, a generalized system of less general and more particular systems. Also, a philosophical and theoretical dialog about systems relativity and systems contexts.</font></p> <p><b><font size="2">Cybernetics</font></b><font size="2">: The logical organization of information that is implicit to the functional, developmental and relational-structural patterning of any given system. Usually cybernetic systems are looked at from the standpoint of control and feedback mechanisms that serve to maintain a complex stable-state of dynamic equilibrium over the structure of the long run and the large. Cybernetics also implies a model of nervous system feedback and organization typical of all animals, which is a model especially fit and adapted for the cognitive sciences and the development of artificial intelligence.</font></p> <p><b><font size="2">Integration:</font></b> <font size="2"> The problem of integration is the central theoretical and applied problem of general systems theory and methodology. Systems integration may be defined as the problem of understanding how systems come together, and how the components of systems interact, in such a way as to  produce emergent properties that are uniquely associated with a particular kind of system. Furthermore, meta-systems integration implies that there are ordered relationships not only of parts of systems, but between different kinds of systems, and this overarching sense of order forms the foundation for our understanding of the world.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Before proceeding let it be remarked that not everything in the world is integrated, nor was everything even meant to be integrated. In fact, most things that occur in the world appear to occur in a relatively un-integrated and therefore independent manner. And it seems, at least as far as we can tell, if left alone, things in the long run tend to fall apart. Things seem to go from states of greater integration to less integration. And this poses a riddle about the natural organization of reality--how did integrated systems come about in the first place if the tendency of all self-organization is towards greater disintegration. True Believing, born again, bible thumping Presidents hold to "Intelligent Design" which is another euphemized way of saying "God created the world in six days and rested on the Sabbath." But origin mythology aside, the sciences are indeed hard pressed to answer the question of the seemingly spontaneous stochastic self-organization of integrated systems when the overarching tendency in the universe is definitely towards disintegration.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Integration is what can be called organization of things into a larger whole, a system, which occurs over time and space in some self-consistent way. Any such organization requires working energy to maintain, and it also implies knowledge, or a sense of order, in its functional and structural relationships. So the question becomes, without some sense of predetermination being involved, or without the hand of some deliberate or intentional being, how did systems arise, apparently by themselves, in nature, when the gradient for all events seems to be in the opposite direction?</font></p> <p><font size="3">Ludwig von Bertalanffy essentially solved this riddle, and thereby laid the foundation for general systems theory as a fundamental paradigm for the sciences. First, he identified the difference between ideally closed systems, upon which the conventional laws of Thermodynamics were based, and the idea of partially closed/partially open systems. Second, he restated the principle that there can be no completely self-organizing systems, with the idea that systems may be partially self-organizational through interaction with the environment, and particularly, with interaction of other systems within the environment. Finally, he stated that systems may become self-organizing and integrative as complex-state, order-increasing systems in the context of open environmental situations when conditions of energy transport into the system may temporarily outweigh the loss of energy from the system, due primarily to the immediate availability of a certain form of energy and the availability of suitable transport mechanisms that permit energy to be carried into the system with a certain level of efficiency.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It appears for instance that the explanation for the spontaneous self organization of living systems as we have uncovered these from the strata of the earth follows precisely this general systems model, and can be explained scientifically in no other way. Any living system we know about on earth follows this same pattern of organization and systemic integration, however convoluted and meta-biotic they have become, and it can be hypothesized in a reliable way that any living system we may in the future encounter in the universe will also follow the exact same principle, albeit if not in exactly the same ways.</font></p> <p><font size="3">I would like to theoretically explain the spontaneous self-organization of physical systems by a similar model, but Big Bang creationists, thank you George Gamow, will have nothing to do with alternative paradigms. The organization of energy upon a fundamental level has yet to be clearly ascertained, if it ever can be clearly ascertained, given the statements of relativity that have been forthcoming regarding physical event structures.</font></p> <p><font size="3">And, if we are to believe prognostications of global warming and conspiracy theories about the fossil fuel wars, it appears that human systems, as grand state systems, operating upon the same basic guidelines, much to the chagrin of traditional capitalists and social engineers of all kinds.</font></p> <p>The problem of systems solutions and integration is fundamentally the problem of solving the Von Neumann information bottle-neck in the search solution space for any given problem set. Each system imaginable or demonstrable in reality has one or more abstract symbolic representations that may be used for the purpose of relational and structural generalization about systems. The challenge of integration can be said to the problem of getting behind any immediate, or relatively local solution set, to achieve a more comprehensive or general solution set that properly integrates the local solution to a larger frame of reference. Systems integration is successful if local solutions, as subsystems, become coordinate to and incorporated within a larger systems framework. </p> <p> The problem of this is the relativity of systems by size, scale and generality. Many systems occur in the world independently, and there is no clear sense why they should be integrated. Ideally, we would want to create a socio-political system in which all people, as individual human systems, are independent and wealthy enough to pursue their own goals as long as these goals do not hurt or hinder the freedom of anyone else. There is no sense in such a world that there must be a single overarching ideological or political entity by which the interests of all people should be made to conform to a single set of general standards, however these may be conceived. On the other hand, there appears in any socio-political meta-system a need for the rule of just law that may apply to all people equally, without double-standards, without religious or racial bias, etc., etc. </p> <p>It is clear that if any real or possible system is underdetermined in any ultimate sense, then there is no reason to conceive of or attempt to design a meta-system, or a system of systems, that is itself more over-determined than the systems it contains. At the same time, it is generally conceded that in the long run some form of meta-systems integration is perhaps inevitable, in whatever manner it may be eventually achieved or realized. There is a clear sense, for instance, that the mass extinctions that followed the Permian or the Triassic were probably not caused by a gigantic meteorite or a super-volcanic eruption, which would be part of systems by themselves, but from the inherent dynamics of biological meta-systems that tend to run towards deterministic integration in the long run. Therefore, over-determination through meta-system integration is not always the most desirable state to achieve, and in fact may eventuate ultimately in a rather night-marish state.</p> <p>The entire criticism of modern development has been the pursuit of local solutions that are not generalizable to global problem sets, and the lack of coordination of resources and information that would permit such generalization of solutions in a common context to take place. What occurs in this perspective is not the over-determination of systems, but the mass wastage of resources, and inefficient utilization of systems, and the arising of critical events from complex states, that result in destructive interference of systems or subsystems and the increase in randomization of systems.  This is not the same as foisting on the world a limited symbolic ideology or a form of "planned development" that stems from power and relatively narrow-minded and self-serving interests. It is rather a challenge of figuring out an appropriate generalizable methodology that can be considered genuinely comprehensive in design and therefore universally applicable, with the appropriate modifications, to all manner of different kinds of local problem sets.</p> <p>Systems are good to think for humans because human thought is organized upon systems principles. The emergent properties associated with mind, and found to be transcendent to the functions of the brain, are the properties of the brain functioning as a super complex system in a symbolic manner. The entire mind-body dichotomy that underlies particularly Western Philosophy, and the binding problem that lies at the heart of philosophical debate concerning AI, resolves itself upon a systems-based perspective. This is not to say that we necessarily understand in any adequate way how the brain functions as a system to create the noetic properties of mind, but this system, as natural as it is, and as a unique product of natural evolution, forms the central basis for human systems that are to be distinguished analytically from biological and physical systems.</p> <p>The entire challenge of attempting to design and articulate a comprehensive systems-based framework has resolved itself on the problem of integration. It is largely a cybernetic problem as it represents attempts to think through to solutions to problems that lie behind more immediate solutions. It is a cybernetic problem not only because systems are naturally good for humans to think and act in, but because all systems themselves that have any sense of order carry information and this information can be said to be cybernetic in terms of its integration. We are attempting to move from local problem sets to basic and global problems, to try to get behind local problem sets to see what connects them to larger frameworks. To a great extent this feels like an ever vanishing horizon, and with each step towards greater generality, there is implied an exponential jump in the levels of complexity that are being subsumed in the search-solution space.</p> <p>The problem can be resolved in two ways--formally through the implementation of alternative general frames of reference, and heuristically through the implementation of practical shortcuts of working presuppositions that permit us to resolve some of the complexities for practical purposes. Fortunately, we have some fairly powerful heuristic shortcuts that allow us to resolve complexities at every-turn. One can even say that symbolic organization of consciousness, manifest for instance in human speech, permits us to put a simple and sweet symbolic label on a complex reality, and then to treat that reality by means of its symbolic handle as if they were one and the same thing. Even human perception appears to accomplish the same tricks of the imagination, in numerous ways and instances, that saves us the problem of processing all the information and signals that exist in the world. The more formal approach of course is large the approach of scientifically methodologies, in whatever way they are expressed or realized in terms of research and application in the world. These approaches tend overall to be more systematic, more deliberate, more analytical in dealing less with generalizations and more with the details of reality subsumed by such generalizations.</p> <p>Backward chaining of inference structure is an important consideration of achieving comprehensive solution sets to general problems, and this process allows a formalization of solutions and their organization into a larger meta-systems framework with the promise of creating relatively complete computer-based integration of the framework utilizing a relevant inference engine and suitable database structures. In fact, it provides the entire basis for seeking a comprehensive systems-based solution set that can be cybernetically expressed in terms of computer-based design and management of information. If we recognize that all real systems carry information as intrinsic to the fact of their functioning organization, and knowledge, like work, requires non-random modulation and transference of energy, then we understand that the capacity to program knowledge based informational systems provides tremendous power to construct and maintain alternative working systems of all conceivable kinds.</p> <p>I consider in fact backward chaining systems of inference to be so cybernetically important, especially in terms of the possible automation of artificial systems, that once we have achieved a global generalized solution set, all other possible problem sets may be logically and functionally integrated in an adaptive manner. This is perhaps my own specialized bias as an anthropologist, but it remains quite evident that the integration of human reality, and all reality is, from an anthropological standpoint, humanly filtered reality, is cybernetically organized and ordered in such a manner that is both good to think and good to do.</p> <p>To compare this to conventional approaches to systems problem solving, which are based primarily upon empirical and experiential expertise through specialization and the division of labor and the implicit kind of structural-functional organization this entails, we may refer to this fundamentally as a forward chaining inferential approach, which relies upon a series of selections of known choices and progressive delimitation to a final selection. It is called the coke-machine approach to cybernetic problem solving, and works well with small ranges of choice that are in keeping with natural cognitive limitations of people. Such a system does not work well though with very large sets of alternatives or very complex systems.</p> <p>The sciences have largely been articulated and organized on an empirical and analytical basis. This by itself is nothing bad, but it does represent by and large a tendency towards forward chaining solutions from particulars to generalities, rather than backward chaining from generalizations to particulars. Of course, science is not strictly speaking a forward-chaining affair even if it is mostly taught and idealized in this manner--the greatest contributions in science have been largely backward chaining theories that represent general systems solutions to basic problem sets, like the theory of evolution and the general theory of evolution. Careful and tedious observation to detail may have preceded the formulation of these theories, but by no means did the theories themselves depend or hinge upon such observation alone.</p> <p>The basis for the Lewis Works framework has been the understanding of the universal applicability of general systems principles, and the potential value that can be derived from such understanding. It stands to reason that the studied application of such principles to general and special problem solving endeavors would in part serve the purposes of achieving relatively integrated solution sets at various levels of organization of reality. But this is not a problem that can be directly attacked or arbitrarily by the deliberate application of systems principles. It is a problem that can only be achieved through creative insight and intuition, through experience with different kinds of systems in all ways and at all levels, and through the process of discovery associated with the recognition and appreciation of the developmental emergence of systems.</p> <p>A final proviso must also be remarked upon. Though Lewis Works has adopted a general systems perspective as a comprehensive framework for problem solving and project application, a systems perspective by itself is not the only or exclusive point of view that carries any relevance to the understanding of different kinds of things or phenomena in the world. The differences of each thing, or each kind of thing, must be appreciated for what they are, and understood in the unique terms that they represent by their design, whether this is conceived in a systems framework or not.  In fields like ecology where systems perspectives are almost automatic and therefore quite obvious, there is always an on-going debate between the analytic approach and a systems or holistic approach. Ultimately, it is the holistic approach that is capable of comprehending and incorporating the analytical perspective, and not the other way around. This kind of debate is really a hen or egg dilemma, once again, or rather a mind-brain dichotomy or a ghost in the machine kind of paradox. In terms of anything we may study or approach for study, the analytical or holistic perspective is neither privileged over nor exclusive of the other approach, whatever our manifest values or predilections in scholarship.</p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <b><font size="6"><a NAME="NaturalOrder">Natural Order and the Dao of Chaos</a></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p><font size="3">We cannot attribute any form of outside agency or predetermination in natural systems. The only form of determinancy that we can validly recognize as causal to the original organization of nature and to the continuing development of this organization, is through the meta-systemic organization and interaction of systems in relation to other systems. Such attribution of independent agency or predetermination to natural systems of any kind or order is considered to be a projection of human motive and human intention in the explanation of events and their origins. Natural order, unlike human-made order, is generally speaking "self-organizing" in an open meta-systemic context.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It follows logically that if we are to contemplate the original sense of order or disorder of the primordial state of physical reality, the origins of the universe, we must consider the possibilities of whether any system could have existed in an original sense, and what factors or events may have occurred that would eventuate in the organization of reality as we encounter it now.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There is a paradox about natural order, and that is it appears to rest upon a basic state of random disorder. The fact that everything appears in the long run to pass from a state of order to disorder does not preclude by itself the reverse possibility that ordered states may have arisen stochastically from disordered states. The likelihood of a system going from a state of disorder to one of increasing order, everything else being equal, appears highly unlikely. The only way we can consider this as arising is if the system that increased in order internally did so at the expense of a larger system that constituted a critical part of the environment of the ordered system.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is difficult to understand how living systems for instance could have arisen from nothing, from a non-living state of nature. Science not only demands that we accept this as so, but attempts to show us how this could be so. Of course, if construed from a purely systems standpoint, there might not seem anything unusual about the organization of biological systems from a physical substrate. The emergent properties demonstrated by living systems might be understood as just that--as synergistic properties associated with the holistic organization of systems that, upon a basic level, are purely physical in character.</font></p> <p>If we can imagine a thousand pennies being tossed every second at the same time, and their face-up value read instantly with each toss, we can predict at random that most like about half of the pennies will land tails up and the other half heads up. This is pretty much the basic state of a disorganized natural world. Now the likelihood that 2/3rds or 3/4 of the coins will all land with the same face value at the same toss decreases substantially, and the likelihood that all thousand coins, or nearly all thousand, all land with the same face-up value is even far more remote. The occasion for the spontaneous, stochastic organization of living systems from a non-living substrate is comparable to landing nearly all heads-up or tail-up coins among the entire population of pennies simultaneously. The coins could toss every second for thousands and thousands of years and still never arrive at this state of affairs. </p> <p>For life, it appears to have concatenated one time in our remote earth history, and never again. It is possible that it may have arisen multiple times in multiple places during a very brief window of our remote geological history, when conditions on earth were so complex and ripe for these kinds of events to occur. But this window, by geological standards, must have been a very brief epoch--perhaps only a few years, or a best a few thousand years in duration. Once life emerged, it appears to have done so in a fairly resilient and robust manner, such that until now, it has survived, adapted and evolved into a multiplicity of forms and possibilities. This evolution itself is nothing less than remarkable, as it again appears in fundamental ways to violate our preconceptions about the organization of natural systems--namely that systems go from a state of order to one of increasing disorder. The evolution of living forms, particularly the taxon cycle, appears to have produced increasingly complex and sophisticated living systems, and to have passed from a phase in which all of life was probably a single set of unicellular organisms, to what it is today, that is distributed between several major Kingdoms and many, many differentiated sub-groupings. This appears to mark the rise of increasingly ordered systems from systems that were originally less well organized.</p> <p>It can therefore only be by a similar manner that we can explain the rise of physical systems in the universe, as the occurrence of a system of order in a background of natural disorder, however long or brief this may have been and however widespread or local a point in time and place we must consider. In terms of the rise of the universe, we have the notion of a genuine butterfly effect, and we can put forward on the basis of this the theory that the universe arose to its current states and distribution of matter an energy by a series of events now extremely remote in time and space, the long-term consequence has been the rise of increasingly organized natural systems from a background of random pattern. We cannot know how many butterflies may have originally occurred, and perhaps this number is curiously enough infinitely large as well. It would have been tantamount to a bias in our penny example, introduced at some early stage of the tossing events, that resulted in more pennies coming up heads than tails, and with each subsequent toss, the pennies biased in favor of the heads becoming increasingly biased in favor of the heads. In other words, we must hypothesize a certain structure of dependence of early events that influenced the outcome of subsequent event structures. </p> <p>If we adopt this kind of analogy, we might wonder what kind of early cyclical bias may have tipped the balance in favor of the kind of universe we have, versus some alternative form. For instance, though it theoretically can occur, we appear to find no real anti-matter in the known universe on a scale comparable to what we find matter, and in matter we find a uneven distribution between positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. In other words, we do not find negatively charged protons, as least not as we have observed them, though we have found positively charged electrons, or positrons. We observe that most anti-particles do not stick around in the universe very long, and we must speculate whether the entire universe may not be asymmetrically lopsided in favor of the distribution of matter versus anti-matter.</p> <p>This of course is probably an overly simplistic view of the fundamental structure and dynamics of the universe, but it is a good analogy for illustrating the natural organization of physical systems in reality. If at some early stage in its evolution the likelihood of matter or anti-matter were even distributed on a random basis, then something must have occurred that would have tipped the balance in favor of matter over anti-matter. Some set of events or general conditions must have occurred that favored the selection of matter over alternative states of anti-matter. Indeed it is very likely that the same universe, or universal state, could not be both matter and anti-matter at the same time unless the universe is more isotropic cosmologically in the grand sense than we are aware off. States of matter and anti-matter would be mutually destructive of one another in the same space-time manifold.</p> <p>There is a fundamental sense in the natural organization of reality that we can refer to chaos as the grand design of natural systems, and that all order is based upon and derived from disorder. This makes the analogy of the collective coin toss a fitting model of how natural order can occur stochastically, even if and when the odds always tend to favor random events. In nature, order appears to be a subset of disorder. Non-random formations appear to arise out of a very large number of simultaneous random possibilities. The difference between the random pattern or background noise of physical reality and the non-random structures that arise appear to be one based upon the occurrence of dependency relationships. We can attribute to the endurance and developmental differentiation of non-random pattern in the Universe at all levels of the stratification of natural systems, to the development of interdependent relationships that tended to bias the outcomes of otherwise inherently random event structures. Thus, the kind of imperfect determinancy that we come to associate with natural systems, becomes in due course the butterfly effect of natural chaos. If we can attribute a fundamental sense of indeterminancy of systems of natural order, we can at the same time discover a profound sense of order to apparently, complexly disordered systems. Order and disorder appear like primordial Greek divinities, engaged in a kind of dialectical play in the fashioning of the natural world, with natural change being the consequence of their cosmological dance. We are their offspring.</p> <p>Returning to the question of cosmology, there must have been a state and time in early stages of the universe (how early could this be if the universe proves to be eternal and infinite in time and space?) when protons were produced in fairly prodigious quantities, without the kinds of pathways that we can hypothesize that they might be produced today. During this period of time, for whatever sets of unknown reasons, these protons, produced in vast quantities, began coalescing into more organized states of matter. Protons thus produced generated large amounts of radiation, and this radiation in turn may have collided to produce, for instance, electrons and positrons. If protons were produced, we can hypothesize that anti-protons were also produced simultaneously, but for whatever reason did not appear to survive or build up to the massive quantities that we find protons. It is possible that protons that appear to be almost perfectly stable and hence long-lived as fundamental particles, are in this characteristic precisely opposite to anti-protons in that they may be extremely unstable and short-lived fundamental entities, virtually disappearing at the moment of their creation. I suspect that we might find in the universe today the production of massive quantities of protons wherever we find massive amounts of radiation of a very short wave-length being produced from a single source or area at the same time. If anti-protons do not survive that production process, then they must either become a part of that radiation emitted or else dissolve into some even more fundamental states of nature, or possibly some combination of both. </p> <p>It thus appears sensible that the chance development of stable configurations like protons, "practically, permanently perfect in almost every way," resulted in the biases of change events in the structure of the universe, and thus the rise of new interdependent systems that became no longer strictly subject to the laws of disorder. But I do not see protons as fundamental, self-constituent structures, which they are from a general systems standpoint, but rather as componential entities that are composed of yet more fundamental event structures, but this is a subject for future reference.</p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <b><font size="6"><a NAME="IntelligentDesign">"Intelligent Design" and Developmental Differentiation</a></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p>A system of any particular kind may be said to symbolically and functionally represent a general or particular solution to a certain kind of problem that exists in the world. From the standpoint of information theory, a systems provides a finite solution to what can be called an information bottleneck, or the explosion of informational possibilities in the occurrence of a system at any particular instance that is so complex that it becomes impossible to resolve, and the limited means by which this information can be simultaneously organized and handled in a semi-non-random manner. We may conclude that all natural or real systems represent certain specific kinds of solutions to certain kinds of problem sets, and that multiple alternative systems may represent alternative solutions to the same or similar problem sets. This is not to say that all alternative systems are equal to the solution, or that there might not be a single most-optimal or best system to a particular kind of system. </p> <p>Furthermore, in the articulation of any kind of system, it is observable that there are in the complexities of the organization of such systems trade-offs between determinants or limiting factors, which may have an important influence in the developmental trajectories of such systems. For any given kind of problem set, there is a hypothetical range of alternative solutions that vary upon multiple dimensions, and there might be multiple optimal states that satisfy alternative configurations or instances of the same or similar kind of problem set.</p> <p>This is of course a rationalistic human understanding of systems. Natural systems in and of themselves lack any sense of predetermined purpose or arbitrary design in their informational organization or transactional articulation. It is the fallacy of human rationalization that we project upon systems said to be "self-organizing" such a sense of purpose and predetermined order. The logic of relationships that occur in natural systems is not a priori formal, but functional and embedded in the relationships and interactions that occur in all systems. To call "Divine Will" a projection of the human imagination upon natural order is not to play down the near miraculous wonderment and sublime beauty inherent to the organizational patterning of natural systems at all levels. The fact that we may rationally and logically deduce that all energy transactions in the universe, when considered in terms of net inputs and net outputs, will always sum exactly to zero is itself an amazing aspect of the natural world. But the true amazement is the human capacity to be aware of these facets of natural ordering, and to make sense of them in terms that are relevant to ourselves in multiple ways. In my humble opinion then, "Intelligent Design," especially as this is used to suggest the idea of predetermination or intervention or original intention in the organization of nature, represents a common fallacy of pragmatic human logic, an extension of the fallacies of naturalization and reification, that confuses simply our capacity to apprehended in a rational and intelligent manner the organization of the patterning of nature, with the relational patterning implicit to nature itself.</p> <p><font size="3">Developmental differentiation is the process of natural change that accompanies the developmental trajectory of any system. Change is one of the most fundamental principles of reality. We can attempt to explain change from a purely physical standpoint in terms of energy transactions, but this form of systematic accounting, that always in the net equation balances to zero, is only one dimension of a larger problem that involves information and pattern organization. This change is inherent to any real system, and has its sources in the underdetermined nature of cause and effect relationships both internally to a system and externally between a system and its environment, either directly or indirectly. The inherent variability of systems and the interplay between internal and external factors permit the cross-system realization of its developmental paradigm among a range of alternative state-path trajectories, and which define such a system therefore as not just complex, but chaotically so.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The concept of developmental differentiation from the standpoint of general systems theory seems to stand diametrically opposed to the idea of equi-finality of systems development that leads to a common-type solution from a range of alternative starting points. The question of equi-finality of systems really is at the center of the problem of synergistic integration of systems and the notion of dynamic equilibrium and self-organizational stability that integrated systems achieve. Given an initial set of alternative starting variables, there exists only a limited number of possible solutions to the problem of systems integration between these variables that are capable of yielding a stable configuration exhibiting properties of synergism and dynamic equilibrium.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Developmental differentiation of a single system, from one state or stage of its state-path trajectory, to some alternative stage or state of its history, or of a single system into multiple alternative systems, refers to the idea of the simultaneous co-occurrence of multiple systems that are upon a basic level independent of one another in terms of their internal state configurations. Invariably it is observed in nature that systems interact with one another within a larger meta-systems context and that no system occurs in complete isolation or independence from the influence of other related systems.</font></p> <p>Developmental differentiation describes therefore the process of continuous divergence from what can be relatively considered to be a common "proto-type" form, or a base-line type, into multiple alternative forms. For purely a-biotic physical systems, the pattern of differentiation seems to be based largely on random or chance factors that occur early on in the developmental sequence--determinants in early starting systems may come to play a strong role in subsequent "iterations" of the system that may in the long run result in the emergence of different kinds of systems.</p> <p>Physical systems are not self-propagating or self reproducing as systems--they do not in themselves carry the information that leads to the replication of their design. They arise as a natural consequence of recurrent conditions that lead to expectable outcomes. Biological systems have solved the problem of self-replication of design as systems, containing the information necessary for their replication at the core of their basic structure. The natural concatenation of events that resulted in the emergence of biological systems were so complex and, statistically speaking, so unusual, that it is apparent that life seems relatively rare and sparsely distributed in the universe. Because they arose from and were based on non-self-replicating physical systems, the chances for their arising become relatively small and events that may interrupt this process could arise at almost any time in the process.</p> <p>For biotic or living systems, the organization of systems and their state-path trajectory appear to be non-random, even if the basic mechanism for change in successive transmission of information remains randomizing and therefore essentially "blind" in its occurrence. The point of the non-random determination of the alternative state-path trajectories of biotic systems lies in part within their meta-biotic context of interaction with other living systems, and in the resulting selection regimes that follow from such interaction.</p> <p>The basis for the non-random selection and developmental differentiation of living systems seems to me to be rooted in the challenges of such systems in achieving adaptive and reproductive survival. The model that has been developed and effectively deployed in computer simulations is that of the genetic algorithm. We may say that, based on what we know about systems development as optimal solutions to implicit problem sets, living systems tend, on average, towards selection to greater meta-biotic fitness. It has been found that very specific key features may critically effect the net-fitness of a species in a specific context, based upon a law of limiting factors, all other features being equal.</p> <p>There is no telling beforehand what these key factors of evolutionary development for a species in any particular period of its taxon cycle may be--the greater number of known extinct species attests to the fact that in the long run individual species lose out in playing the game of life, but that the continuity of life overall has been preserved through its broad developmental differentiation into multiple kingdoms and multiple sub-forms. I will hypothesize that developmental differentiation occurs and results in the differentiation of species into multiple sub-forms, and in the rise of new species, because, all other things being, equal, the most optimal form for a given evolutionary problem set, will on average, have a non-random chance of winning the game of life over the less optimal solutions. This kind of functional explanation may be regarded by some as tautological--we only known successes on the basis of those that survive, but in theory at least, if we know enough about a given environmental context and the organisms involved in that context, we should be able to predict the key determining factors and the optimal solutions before they occur. </p> <p>When we come to the consideration of human systems, we deal with culture and symbolic realities, and the attendant consequences of these in the world. We find that these consequences are often violent and destructive. We must understand therefore that willpower and determination that are a function of the capacity of humans to construct themselves in their world, and to manipulate the world in deliberate ways, are also fraught with problems of projection and ideological superstition. These may be truly called non-random systems, but they often tend to unintended consequences that are due in large measure to random circumstances and factors that are beyond anyone's capacity to control. So, what comes off as "Intelligent Design" from a human point of view, ends up being in the structure of the long run something far less than "Divinely Intelligent" and often, more often than not, downright misguided if not completely dangerous in its outcomes.</p> <p>If we observe the natural spectrum of traditional human cultures and languages, we find a process of developmental divergence occurring in every instance. But this developmental divergence, though it has been analogically correlated with the speciation of biological populations, through the concept of gene-culture co-evolution, has been different in form and character because the transmission mechanisms of cultural, linguistic and technological information has been largely environmental and "horizontal" in its occurrence, with acculturation and trans-culturation occurring with trade and the exchange of cultural information. There has been nothing biological or genetic about this kind of exchange. People learn from their environment, explore their environment, and are capable of adjusting their behavior and their environment to suit their needs. </p> <p>At each level of stratification in natural systems, we will find that developmental differentiation is a inherent outcome of the internal and extrinsic variability of complex systems that may lead to a paradigm of alternative possible outcomes. Some sets of outcomes are more likely than others, and some types of trajectories may be said to be more optimal than others--stable configurations of systems arise along optimal pathways because non-stable systems do not last as long and soon become replaced by other systems. Developmental differentiation may be said to be a complementary property of natural systems in an extrinsic sense, and are a function of the fact that the synergistic integration of systems is never closed, complete or completely determined. </p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <b><font size="5">Global Domestication, Cultural Selection and Unnatural Evolution</font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <a NAME="four"> <p ALIGN="left"></a><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p><font size="3">A large part of Darwin's observations upon which he based his theoretical model of natural selection was in fact taken from the context of the breeding and management of domesticated species in his native England. Many of the patterns of selection he was basing his theories upon were in fact the kinds of human selection that had resulted in the domesticating of many kinds of plants and animals, and that had a fairly well known human history behind its occurrence. Darwin was able to infer from the domestic to wild populations that a similar kind of system of selection was occurring that resulted in the on-going modification of species.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Taking our cue from Darwin's theory, I would like to revisit the idea of cultural selection that has resulted in the domestication of so many different species of floral and fauna for human cultural purposes. We are in a time now of the global human being, in which increasingly culture and human civilization is converging to a single set of implicit technological standards, and this process of human development is increasingly encapsulating the entire earth and quickly dividing up the earth's remaining natural spaces as so many sectors between the interstices of human civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We may hypothesize a kind of global domestication of feral life forms occurring, that is increasingly forcing many species of life to either make a jump to a culturally adapted form or else to face the prospect of rapid extinction. A few species appear to have made the leap from feral to semi-domesticated and appear as quite successful within a human background. Other species appear to be unable to make this kind of jump and appear therefore doomed for evolutionary removal. In fact more species than not appear to be incapable of effecting this kind of evolutionary transition, and we may be in the midst of an unprecedented evolutionary epoch, that really probably started more than 10,000 years ago, that is overall witness another mass extinction event and the bottlenecking of surviving species. </font></p> <p><font size="3">Recent advances in cloning, genetic engineering and modification is adding an entirely new dimension to the age old practice of cultural selection for domestic forms of life. For the first time it appears that we have the entire mechanism of evolutionary change in our grasp, under our control, and that we can for the first time begin shaping species in a kind of designer fashion without having to wait generations of careful selective breeding and culling to see the results. We have in a sense accelerated the pace of evolution at the very moment that natural selection and the evolution of feral forms appears to be reaching a global standstill and dead end.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Natural selection in the world appears therefore to be undergoing an important revolution, or rather "evolution" of its own. Biological systems worldwide, and the global ecology in general, is becoming increasingly subject to human cultural influences whether these influences are direct or indirect in effect, and these influences are serving increasingly as basic factors of constraint, or limiting factors, that increasingly determine the outcomes of natural selection regimes and events. Many forms of life are having therefore to adapt to and survive within the context of a global human ecology, and many forms of life are failing to achieve this mode of adaptation and as a consequence are running the risk of extinction. Human culture has become the modern comet of global mass extinction. The rise of penicillin resistant strains of bacteria, many of which are almost exclusively dependent upon the human body as a host, is a clear example of the rise of new life-forms that are an unintended but expectable consequence of human cultural selection.</font></p> <p><font size="3">An expectable outcome of this is not only what we are in the midst of, which is a global mass extinction event that is playing out over thousands of years, but at an increasing rate that is positively correlated with the rate of human population growth, but that as a consequence new forms of life will continue to emerge that come attached and primarily dependent upon human cultural selection, intervention and management, either directly or indirectly. It is sort of like the Yellowstone Grizzlies at the dump site, behaving in ways that are strikingly human. I would think this kind of transformation of nature to be something of a perversion of natural design and evolutionary ecology. It is a kind of Frankenstein complex that leads to the evolution of monstrosities that merely pass as viable forms of life. This is true whether we talk about pygmy chimp populations being breed in captive experimental facilities or stock salmon that return each year to their hatcheries. We all know of proverbial story of the monster rats of Chernobyl. Fewer people hear about the pig-sized nutrias invading Louisiana.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This transformation of the natural world therefore begs certain basic questions about the future course of life on earth. I do not think, in the bigger scheme of things, that human kind will come to completely control or manage all of nature, and that nature might not in the long run succeed and rebound where human beings fail and themselves face extinction. We in fact may be much closer historically to this consequence than we realize or care to admit. I'm sure that even if we cast human civilization in the shroud of a long-term nuclear winter, and irradiate ourselves to a bizarre extinction through mass mutation, we would at the end of the day find life emerging once again with renewed vitality between the cracks of where our over-rated civilization crumbles. </font></p> <p><font size="3">Just the same, while we are around and in the driver's seat, it would behoove human beings to carefully consider where they are going and how they are going to get there. If we wish to accept the meta-ethical responsibility of our global dominance as a life-form, then perhaps we should take the proposition of the cultural selection and management of life at all levels of its occurrence more seriously and more to heart than we previously have. With great power to shape life anew comes grave responsibility to limit and constrain this power in constructive and wise ways.</font></p> <p><font size="3">By and large the main impact humanity is continuing to have upon the biosphere is destructive. The shear volume, mass and behavioral impact of very large human populations on earth seems perhaps to be more than the earth itself can bear. As with all destruction, there is the occasion for the reemergence, the rebirth, of life.</font></p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <b><a NAME="BiologicalDominance"><font size="6">Human Biological Dominance, Global Circumscription & the Doctrine of Universal Natural Rights</font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p><font size="3">It is becoming increasingly apparent in the world, obvious to say the least, that the dominant life form on earth is the human being, Homo sapiens sapiens. How wise we really are remains to be finally answered, but to argue our relative dominance in contemporary global ecology is fairly absurd and represents a form of ideological denial of basic realities. Our ecological dominance is expressed in many ways. The manner of gravest concern is of course the rapid destruction and interference of natural ecosystems at many different levels, and what can be called the phenomenon of global circumscription by the human species. Circumscription is usually looked at from of the standpoint of the environment impinging upon human society--to look at circumscription as human society impinging upon the environment is to case a new light on an old problem, and to invert our sense of place and complacency in the world. The idea that increasing degrees and frequency of human circumscription of human systems, that human systems will continue to become more involuted with increasing growth.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We do not know what the carrying capacity of the natural earth is for human population. We are cresting seven billion people already. Carrying capacity largely depends upon our relationship to our environment and our capacity to manage both the environment and ourselves within it. But regardless of our management systems, systems theory determines that an increasing volume of human population, whatever the level of average consumption, etc., will result in increasing depletion of resources of the global system, and, in the long run, destructive consequences for natural ecosystems. There is no way that we can sustain a global ecosystem in a healthy state for the long run no matter what methods and techniques we might adopt to mediate this relationship.</font></p> <p>The greatest likelihood of human systems in the future are that they will become increasingly self-destructive and destabilizing unless effective control structures can be developed that permit the sufficient mediation of human conflict. Beyond decrying an imperative for dramatic family planning and birth-control policies, internationally orchestrated, coupled with effective human development programs that are capable of raising the standard of living for most people and education people and providing them the necessary opportunities to escape the world prison of poverty, we must ask what measures can be taken to best contain the situation. Of course, no one has a complete answer to these difficult problems but this does not mean that we should ask and try to answer the necessary questions to get the job done right.</p> <p>Beyond a rapid transformation to a hydrogen-solar based energy economy and the colonization of space, the most direct and effect means of forestalling these processes would be the broad-based institutionalization of programs geared at curtailing human population growth in non-destructive ways, educating people effective to live as global citizens in a responsible and enlightened manner, and the enforcement of temporary global moratoriums on a variety of human activities that have had the most destructive effects on the global environment. This would include a large number of fishing enterprises, deforestation and lumbering enterprises, particularly in tropical regions, and postponement of development and building projects, especially in peripheral zones where the relative degree of ecological impact would be the greatest.</p> <p>Of course, the achievement of these kinds of programs would take a degree of collective will and government responsibility, across the board, especially by the leading powers, that has not yet been demonstrated in any serious manner. It is largely up to governmental agencies to set the tone and determine the climate of leadership in creating a sustainable human global ecology. Efforts toward achievement of such collective sustainability of and by the human population should not be construed as marginal or hostile to the collective order or sense of well being of established society, but as an intrinsic and necessary part of this order.</p> <p>This consideration leads to the formulation of a doctrine of universal natural rights and responsibilities. We must understand that such a doctrine is human-based and centers upon human behavior and relationships with the world. Natural rights are not intrinsic to nature, they are what human beings, as stewards and parts of this world, must adopt and grant to the world. They are primarily aimed at the regulation of human behavior and the determination of the intrinsic value of non-human natural resources, including the holistic resource of global and natural ecology.</p> <p>Basically, a doctrine of universal natural rights and responsibilities are an extension of the doctrine of human rights and responsibilities. I emphasize this doctrine as an extension of universal human rights because I believe it provides a meta-ethical platform for guiding the conduct of human affairs in a global context, and it provides therefore the necessary foundation for the reconceptualization and reconfiguration of the collective human relationship with its world. </p> <p>We can not any longer afford to treat the world and the natural environment as a fetish, as a possession, that is ours to do with as we please. Our sense of dominance and power over nature should not be allowed to continue unrestrained by own moral capacities for exercising judicial constraint and symbolic capacities for transcending our own natural limitations.</p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p style="line-height: 100%; margin-top: 1; margin-bottom: 1" align="center"><b><u><font size="5">Universal Natural Rights & Responsibilities</font></u></b> <div align="center"> <center> <table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1"> <tr> <td align="center"> <p align="center" style="line-height: 100%; margin-top: 2; margin-bottom: 2"><b><u>6 Universal Natural Rights</u></b></td> <td align="center"> <p style="line-height: 100%; margin-top: 2; margin-bottom: 2"><b><u>6 Universal Natural Responsibilities</u></b></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> <b>1. The universal right of life</b> <p><b>2. Right to non-interference</b></p> <p><b>3. Right to natural selection</b></p> <p><b>4. Right to natural habitat</b></p> <p><b>5. Right to resource protection</b></p> <p><b>6. Right to explore and research in natural systems</b></td> <td align="center"> <b>1. Universal non-violence</b> <p><b>2. Responsible Intervention</b></p> <p><b>3. Responsible selection</b></p> <p><b>4. Responsible environmental design</b></p> <p><b>5. Responsibility to resource conservation</b></p> <p><b>6. Responsibility to transmission and extension of knowledge of natural systems</b></td> </tr> </table> </center> </div> </font> <p align="center"><b><font face="Times,Times New Roman" size="3">The doctrine of universal natural rights represents a meta-ethical and logical extension of the doctrine of universal human rights. As with everything else, things can be argued both ways and nothing is incontrovertibly set in stone. There are of course gray areas in the articulation of development that will be manipulated by interests capitalizing on development.</font></b> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <b><font size="6"><a NAME="BiologicalDeterminism">Biological Determinism in the Social Sciences: A Systems-based Perspective</a></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p><font size="3">In the last quarter century in academic forums of American Anthropology there has been a strong and relatively aggressive trend towards trying to explain human behavior and social phenomena primarily in terms of biological determinants. Many physical anthropologists have crossed the line therefore separating their discipline from that of socio-cultural anthropology, and they have passed into the fields of socio-cultural anthropology with the deliberate intention of foisting their worldview and paradigm upon their colleagues in the other sub-disciplines. They manifest frequently the aim of monopolistic power and control over departmental resources as a principle motivational incentive for their social action and ideological proclamations. The remarkable thing about these theories are not so much what is intrinsic to the theories themselves, which becomes fairly trivial in short order, but the motivations that people demonstrate by adopting such thinking and by the strong sense of obsessive preoccupation demonstrated with extreme analytical reductionism. The positive correlation of this trend with regressive political conservativism on the right is obvious to most though it is strongly denied by those who adopt such frameworks of explanation for human systems.</font></p> <p><font size="3">My first acquaintance with this trend came in the early 1980's, a period of the "moral majority" in American politics, with Freeman's attempt to debunk the work of cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead by hypothesizing a "rape prone" genetic profile for the Samoan islanders, and engagement in the hot debate in academic forums that followed.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This kind of thinking has a had a long legacy that goes back at least to the 19th Century with Herbert Spencer's sociologism, and it ties Anthropology and the other social sciences indirectly to an earlier Christian worldview that linked biology and character of people on the Great Chain of Being. In the 80's it took the form of a basic socio-biologism, especially influenced by the writings of Konrad Lorenz and the statements of E. O. "Insect" Wilson, who sought to equate the social patterning of human beings with the social patterning of insects. By the 1990's, this trend had assumed the name of "bio-culturalism" and became expressed in models of gene-culture co-evolution, as put forward for instance by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and others. Later, the concept of "memes" (one should substitute herein the term "genes") as basic units of "memory" that are passed from generation to generation became popularly espoused by the year 2000.</font></p> <p><font size="3">What all these kinds of perspectives share in common are what can be called the biologistic fallacy, or rather the fallacy of biological determinism in attempting to explain one level of phenomena that is culturally and socially based, in terms of a completely different analytical level of natural systems articulation, namely that of biological genetic evolution. The central criticism of any such approach therefore comes from a systems point of view, and states that one cannot invoke the principles found operant upon one level of natural stratification of reality, to directly or indirectly explain the emergent phenomena that are found operating upon another level of systems integration. It is equivalent to attempting an explanation of population genetics in terms of the physical structure of the atoms that compose the organisms being described. Mixing levels of analytical stratification in our explanatory theories of natural systems is equivalent to mixing apples with oranges and rocks, and treating them as the same on the basis of their generally round shape. It results in two unfortunate consequences, the attribution of causal explanation to factors and mechanisms that have no direct bearing on the phenomena in question, and an ignorance of the mechanisms that do have a bearing on the phenomena in question.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The motivation of those who put forward biological explanations of human cultural and social phenomena, to the neglect of theories that deal with such phenomena in terms of systems integration at those levels of articulation, must be called into account and held suspect. It appears that such biologistic arguments are most promulgated during periods of relatively extreme political conservatism. Bio-cultural frameworks in anthropology can really be traced back in time to the period of Hitler's Germany when concerted efforts were organized to demonstrate a biological basis for the differences between different groupings of humanity--to demonstrate and justify a basis of racial inferiority/superiority.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Though most biologically inclined anthropologists are loath to be identified with such an intellectual legacy, they nevertheless happily promote a very stilted and jaundiced form of intellectual conformism and often have assumed a very active and aggressive stance in the posturing of their points of view in anthropology programs and forums.</font></p> <p><font size="3">One of the hallmarks of intellectual conformism seems to me to be the strong predilection and preference for relatively simplistic solutions to complex problem sets, and the foisting of rational arguments in support of an intellectual ideology, whether solid evidence for such an argument exists or not. </font></p> <p><font size="3">Success in biological genetics, especially as this has impacted the study of DNA profiles in human populations, has had a dramatic impact in the same period of time in lending a sense of superficial credence to such biologistic arguments. By mapping out the human genome, social expectations were raised that one-to-one genetic trait correspondence could be found for all kinds of complex human behavioral patterns, such as homosexuality, alcoholism or other impulse control disorders, criminal behavior, characteriological disorder, mental illness, intelligence, even such relatively vague traits as social achievement, parenting abilities or other socially marginal tendencies.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Needless to say, when such biologistic arguments are put forward in cultural anthropological forums, there is then a built-in need to play down the importance or role for instance that environment will play in human learning, the question of the plasticity of the human mind or the plasticity of human cultural adaptation, the role of cultural transmission and social construction in the development of human cultural patterning, and the wide spectrum of variability of either human personality or human cultural patterning that occurs in the world. The concept of world-openness of human nature, not being bound by any strong instinct, and the importance the role of enculturation plays in shaping the human child's behavior and character, are largely ignored or considered insignificant in such thinking. The symbolic foundations of human consciousness and behavior underlying human social and cultural patterning, rooted as this is in the enormous complexity of the human brain, is generally construed as far too complex an issue to be dealt with in purely biologistic fashion, except through the over-simplistic invocation of such things as "memes" encoded by genes</font></p> <p><font size="3">We may refer to such theories based upon arguments for the biological determinism of human culture and social patterning for what they in truth are, and these are essentially folk theories and pseudo-scientific ideologies of the importance and value of biological inheritance and of the ethno-centric naturalization of cultural pattern. The danger of the promulgation of such theories, and their legitimization as received science, comes from the teleological and functional implications of such legitimization for certain policies or agendas, usually put forward by a political elite in relation to some social underclass or counter-reference "other."</font></p> <p><font size="3">To reiterate, the exclusive biological explanation of cultural and social phenomena suffers the fallacy of biological determinism and naturalization of constructed, reified cultural realities. This fallacy comes from the failure to apprehend basic principles of systems stratification and integration, and consequently depends upon the overemphasis upon a form of analytical reductionism carried to the extreme. Rules that apply to systems integration and emergent properties at one level of natural stratification, cannot be sufficiently explained in terms resorting to the rules and principles applying upon another level of natural stratification. While all phenomena may be systematically reduced to constituent forms and subsystems, all the way down the line, the behavior and properties of systems at one level of natural integration and stratification cannot be fully explained in terms of the patterns found below it, especially if removed at more than one or two levels of reductionist analysis.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This is not to say that biological factors do not indirectly influence and affect human patterning in general, but these factors cannot become thereby either the primary or ultimate causal explanation for why human psychological, cultural or social systems occur or develop as they do in the course of natural history. The question of the role of biology in human evolution is a non-trivial problem, and certainly the fact that human beings must meet certain basic biological requirements for survival and for achieving reproductive success are scientifically significant to understanding how humans organize themselves into groups and seek to perpetuate and extend themselves in the world. But answers to these kinds of questions by themselves cannot go far enough in the explanation of human cultural patterning and social behavior.</font></p> <p><font size="3">To a great extent, cultural and social patterns appear to occur largely independent of specific biological determinants. Direct evidence of cross-cultural adoptions and severe cultural deprivation demonstrate clearly the role played by culture in the determination of human behavior. This evidence cannot be explained by resorting to genetic or other biological factors. We can say for instance that human aggression and violence are so common place and widespread in the world because their are no if any instinctual inhibitions or constraints to the expression of human aggression, and this aggression is readily shaped through symbolic transformation, and learned through cultural transmission. Therefore control or explanation of widespread human violence cannot be sought or found upon a biological level of determination, but rather must be found upon a cultural and social level of institutional constraint and sublimation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In conclusion we may say that all living organisms are biological systems that are made up of atoms and molecules, but these organisms possess properties of living systems that are not possessed of other physical entities like rocks or water. Similarly, human cultural and social systems are indeed made up of biological organisms with functional biological needs and requirements, composed of cells, in turn composed of complex organic molecules, in turn composed of atoms, in turn composed of subatomic energies and particles. But we do not thereby seek to explain human cultural behavior or social phenomena purely or exclusively in terms of the molecules that constitute the actor's body, or only in terms of the atoms the make up these molecules. Certainly, the element lithium dramatically affects a manic-depressive's behavior, as do many other kinds of chemical compounds, but this association does not constitute an explanation for the behavior of a manic depressive person or that of any other kind of individual in the first place.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Arguments based upon biological determinism are easily dismissed and disprovable from a Systems based perspective. They represent analytical attempts to explain socio-cultural phenomena reductionistically by resort to biological systems, and hence violate a basic principle of general systems theory that natural systems stratify upon multiple levels. It therefore comes as no surprise that Ludwig von Bertallanfy, founder of general systems theory, was himself a biologist and easily identified the symbolic basis of human culture and social patterning.</font></p> <p><font size="3">I suggest that such thinking and ideology persists and continues in the name of social science and anthropology because the conservative and backward looking political regimes and authoritarian administrative orders continue to exist that seek and find justification for their policies and practices in such narrow lines and modalities of thought. As long as people see something they think can be gained by intellectual conformism to some ideological status quo, we will have to contend for scientific research resources with ideologues who espouse self-serving ideologies. </font></p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <b><font size="6"><a name="SymbolicCognition">Symbolic Cognition & Human Knowledge Systems:</a></font><font size="5"> </font><font size="4">The Noetic Revolution of Human Civilization</font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <a NAME="four"> <p ALIGN="left"></a><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p><font size="3">The binding problem is a central problem in overcoming the mind-body dilemma in both philosophical perspectives of human reality and epistemology as well as in cognitive science and artificial intelligence models of the human brain and mental operation. Basically, we must ask how the brain organizes itself, and integrates its various networks and centers of neural activity, to achieve human consciousness and mind, especially in consideration of highly developed states of human reason and intellect. Analytical approaches have sought mechanical solutions to this central problem, in terms of neural networks and models of the neuron, but these solutions fall short of a complete solution to this kind of problem.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In the anthropology of knowledge there occurs a very similar problem in the question of  (1) linking human cognition to symbolic behavior and (2) extending symbolic behavior to the cultural construction of human reality and to definitions of human culture. This problem is not in fact unrelated, and the theoretical-methodological solution I developed for the latter question in terms of symbolic framing provides a potential solution for the former problem as well.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We may say at the outset that if the human brain is looked at from the standpoint of human systems theory, then we can understand clearly that the mind is the central emergent property of the integration of the brain, and the components of the brain maintain themselves in a complex and dynamic kind of equilibrium, involving normally a diurnal-nocturnal cycle of sleep and wakefulness. We can further say that because symbolic behavior and integration appears to be the uniquely defining characteristic of human mind, as opposed to that of other known animals, then we can understand that the emergent integration of the mind has to do with the mechanical organization of the brain to produce symbolic awareness. This symbolic awareness is behaviorally expressed and linguistically encoded and articulated. </font></p> <p><font size="3">We can attribute by inference states of mind to other species of animal, especially obvious in highly intelligent animals. Experiments with primates teach us that primate intelligence is as sophisticated as human intelligence in many dimensions and shows many of the same basic components of symbolic self-awareness and self-reflection that is characteristic of human conscious awareness. Primates in captivity take readily to human cultural preoccupations and patterns, and primates in natural settings have demonstrated the emergence of rudimentary cultural adaptations and expectable variability of patterning between different groupings.</font></p> <p><font size="3">If we examine what is unique about human knowledge systems, and universal to these systems, compared to inferable animal states and systems of knowledge, we can apply primarily the trait of "world openness" to human knowledge systems versus what can be called an "Uexkullian closed world" of the animal. We may state a continuing human plasticity to learn and adapt to the environment on the basis of cognitive processing of perceptual inputs and behavioral interactions that continues throughout the life cycle. We can refer as well to what can be called the cognitively directed behavior that is relatively independent of instinctual constraints or basic drives, though obviously influenced by these drives. Human beings demonstrate a remarkable degree of voluntarism and arbitrary willpower, as well as a cunning of foresight and planning.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Human knowledge systems can be said to be symbolic systems of encoded signals that have a material form and that demonstrate basic design features of human language. We may refer to these as linguistically encoded cultural texts. These systems provide largely directive or alternative relative templates that are used for guiding human behavior, or alternatively for the symbolic justification and rationalization of events. In preliterate or oral societies, knowledge systems largely took the form of mythologies and associated magical lore that were utilized to explain and organize the world, including human social relationships. Story telling has been an important part of this process. Encoding often to the form of ritual performance and even architectural construction and aesthetic design in folk arts.</font></p> <p><font size="3">With the advent of systems of writing, attributed in the main to the need for record-keeping connected to the rise of large scale state-organized systems, and the advent of craft and labor specialization as well as the rise of a formal priesthood, human knowledge systems took on a sense of developmental differentiation that allowed a new level of understanding and comprehension of the world to be achieved. Associated with this is a sense of abstraction and awareness of conceptual independence of ideas from realities. Associated with this also is the classical idea of the "Birth of Tragedy"--the rise of an Apollonian virtue theory of the rule of law and order and the regulated organization of human society. Vast repositories of knowledge thus developed that represented organized collections of texts and these provided a framework for extended and systematic systems of knowledge transmission.  </font></p> <p><font size="3">The next revolution of human civilization arrived with the advent of mass printing technologies, which allowed the broad dissemination of texts and provided a basis for increasing rates of literacy. Associated with the advent of printing in Europe was the rise of the Renaissance as well as the early development of a form of market capitalism and early forms of craft and cottage industrialization. The key noetic transformation of human knowledge systems was at this period of time the rise of science and the rise of a non-idealized and naturalized view of humankind. With this came the active exploration of the world and of worldview, and the development of a broader range of alternative systems of knowledge. Associated with this was the questioning of basic precepts and dogmas by which traditional cultural knowledge and worldview had been organized, particularly as a product of a Medieval Scholasticism that was focused on the problem of the exegetical translation and interpretation of sacred texts.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The most recent revolution of human civilization has occurred essentially in the last fifty years with the rise of electronic broad-casting media and especially digital forms of knowledge recording and storage. I see the advent of the Internet and newer satellite based wireless technologies to be an extension of the same processes begun with the radio and television broadcasting of the previous era, as well as with photographic and film recording technologies. </font></p> <p><font size="3">We are today in the midst of this newest knowledge revolution and we do not know the consequences of this in terms of the patterns of integration of our world. We may say clearly that we are dealing with symbolic and organizational structures in the world that are essentially obsolete and that are anachronisms of the past standing in the way of future progress. There is also no way to knowing for certain the outcomes of this direction of development. What can we expect from the future of development. I'm inclined to think that the next knowledge revolution of human civilization will be the achievement of comprehensive systems of integration that are fully automated and that might be based upon hybrid or exotic forms of quantum knowledge storage and manipulation.</font> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <b><font size="6"><a name="SymbolsPower">Of Symbols and Power</a></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <a NAME="four"> <p ALIGN="left"></a><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p><font size="3">Universal to human beings time-immemorial and worldwide is that they traffic in symbols, and this trafficking in symbols is a source of both objective and subjective power for all people. Successful truck with symbols results in the increase of power, and a sense of growing empowerment in the world. Unsuccessful negotiation with symbols results in the loss of power and a growing sense of powerlessness in the world. The paradox of human reality, and the anthropological relativity of this reality, is that though humans must deal in the world in terms of the world, the manner in which they thus deal are defined symbolically. When they love another person, they love that person not as the person in and of oneself, but as a symbol, as an living embodiment of something in the mind of the lover. Human beings have no choice but to deal with the world, and other people, in terms symbolic to their nature. Wherever we watch the parade and pageant of power in the human world, there we will find human actors who are manipulating and managing key symbols, and serving as embodied symbols, within a larger social system.</font></p> <p><font size="3">I bring up the fundamental relationships between symbols and power in human reality for several interrelated reasons. </font></p> <p><font size="3">First, human beings are in a sense prisoners of their own symbol systems, and they cannot escape these prisons, as they are carried around in their own heads and constrain all way may do or even wish to do. We may refer to a fundamental symbolic solipsism of human consciousness that is the foundation of the anthropological relativity of human reality. This influences not only our attitudes, our worldview, our knowledge, but our behavior and our social relations as well.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Second, these symbol systems are fundamentally arbitrary in the sense of not being bound by natural instinct or genetic endowment or hormonal fluctuations. We have a not unlimited capacity to manipulate, control and select our own symbol systems, even if the overarching tendency is for these systems to dominate and control us.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Third, these symbol systems are the primary mechanisms that mediate our adaptive behavioral relationships with our environment. They are the principle mechanism of human cultural integration and social-environmental adaptation on earth, and they are the universal basis for human cultural ecology.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Fourth, human relationships and human society in general is organized on the basis of human symbol systems. We would be loathe to admit it, but even our most intimate relationships, and even always our most intimate relationships, are in essence a kind of symbolic acting out and elaboration of our own fantasies, in our own heads. It is not that all other people are merely or only "objects" of our own symbolic dreams, because there occurs an important process of interaction and negotiation of symbolic forms between people.</font></p> <p><font size="3">One of the key characteristics that partition off the psychotic from the normal is the lack of social rapport and in a sense the fixation and inflexibility of internalized symbolic structures. For neurosis, we find a basic social dependency and rigidity of symbolic structures that are incapable of being modified, particularly through self-initiated efforts.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The key difference therefore between what we can call normal and abnormal appear to me to be in terms of the cultural sharing of symbolisms and the mutual reinforcement and modification of these symbolisms, probably upon multiple levels of their articulation. Abnormal behavior becomes deviant to the norm to the degree that such behavior is idiosyncratic and not shared in any cultural sense. </font></p> <p><font size="3">The relativity of cultural patterning and social order arises from the social consequences of the symbolic relativity of human behavior and consciousness. The tremendous variation of cultural patterning worldwide demonstrates several things: 1. that cultural patterning is independent of genetic constraint; 2. that cultural patterning is highly susceptible, as systems, to processes of symbolic construction and modification; 3. that cultural patterning arises in the interdependencies of human social interactions and symbolic mediation of these relationships through time and across space.</font></p> <p><font size="3">I bring up the topic of symbols and power because I want to emphasize the tremendous power that symbols and symbolisms have for human behavior and human "nature." What we do in a material sense are without meaning if they are not imbued with symbolic importance. There is a great deal of room for error and manipulation in symbols, this is the source of their power and adaptive capacities for human beings. The world attaches tremendous importance to vital symbols, even the importance of life and death itself, and there is thus much power to be gained in the manipulation and control of symbolic forms in social life.</font></p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <b><font size="6"><a name="PowerMotivation">Human Power Motivation:</a> </font><font size="5"> & the Symbolic Transformation of Human Nature</font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <a NAME="four"> <p ALIGN="left"></a><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p>If we are seek a sense of universal motive in human behavior, whether we are referring to the behavior of people in collectives, or as lone-individuals, or as investigators or jurors in a adjudication of a crime, we must refer ultimately to the human drive for power, especially power that is expressed socially in terms of human relationships and symbolically in terms of the manipulation of the elements of one's life world.</p> <p>From the standpoint of the anthropological relativity of knowledge in the understanding of human behavior, I would make a strong claim that all human purposive activity that involves even a minimal degree of intentionality and planning, is primarily and ultimately motivated by what amounts to a drive for power, whether this is expressed in social contexts or in personal ways. Therefore, almost all organized human behavior, and even much behavior that appears otherwise disorganized, is behavior that can be explained, motivationally speaking, in terms of the need for power and the sense of satisfaction that is gained from power.</p> <p>This claim being made, it becomes incumbent to define "power" in a way that is relevant to our argument. In a fundamental sense, I would say that power is the ability to control change in a deterministic manner, especially as change relations to other people and to social relationships. In social terms, power translates into a sense of status and a sense of control that is gained from the ability to determine a course of events, especially as these events affect other people. </p> <p>The drive for power can be largely unconscious, and yet remains a prime mover in the organization of behavior. Because the sense of status and control that is achieved from power is symbolic, it becomes a powerful psychological motivator and inducement for behavior, so powerful in fact that it may override almost any other drive or human need that may be claimed to occur. Because power is at the basis of  the symbolic transformation of the human psyche, as the source of will and driver for purposive determination, and because symbolic experience allows for the flexible encoding and analogical transference of value and meaning from one form into a variety of alternate forms, the drive for power is very plastic and very malleable and itself can be sublimated and transformed in very different and often interesting if not completely frightening ways.</p> <p>The drive for power has one central weakness--it is largely a vicarious and fleeting, impermanent experience. Once having achieved power through the actual determination of an outcome, the experience, status and sense of satisfaction gained quickly dissipates, lost in the stream of on-going experience, and hence, as the sense gained from the achievement of power sinks back below the surface of conscious awareness, the need to regain this sense of power arises back up in however a rationalized and convoluted a manner.</p> <p>It is apparent too that the drive for power is largely an insatiable and unending need, and the achievement of power induces an even greater need for gaining more power. We can speculate therefore that at the core of the need and drive for power, especially when this appears to occur in an extreme or inordinately large degree, is a deep seated and fundamental sense of dissatisfaction and insecurity of one's own sense of ego identity in the world. This sense of deep dissatisfaction I believe comes from the experience of the loss of control, and the achievement of vicarious or displaced symbolic control, in one's early years of development, mediated as these experiences are by significant others and the often uncontrollable vicissitudes of one's effective environment. We might relate this deep need to a sense of separation, loss and rejection experienced by an immature ego, especially in relation to significant others, and the inability to effectively compensate for this sense of loss by replacement with others or displacement onto healthy forms. We may suggest a fundamental sense of discrepancy in the personality and character of an individual human being, bifurcated between a largely unconscious, libidinally driven, power hungry persona, and a weak and fragile sense of ego that is incapable of controlling the "controller." </p> <p>In making these remarks I do not separate qualitatively or distinguish clearly between what I would consider to be normal cases and examples of the need for power and what can be considered clinically or criminally pathological drives for power. The differences seem to be in the degree to which this drive for power becomes the controlling factor of one's behavior, and the manner in which this drive is symbolically transformed and transferred onto a larger set of relationships in the world. In this sense, writer who lives through the characters and plot structure of a novel may be working with similar drives as a dictator who lives through the suffering and repression of an entire nation, or a sadistic sexual psycho-path who lives vicariously through the torture and cruel suffering of their victims.</p> <p>What this drive for power is critically linked to, at least in terms of human systems theory, is what I have elsewhere referred to as the symbolic transformation of human nature that is most marked by the idea of world openness and the lack of instinctive or other forms of natural constraint upon human behavior. Human behavior is invariably transformed and becomes symbolically expressed and mediated. Because it is highly plastic and highly volatile, it is capable of being manipulated symbolically in a wide variety of ways, often in ways that may be considered extreme, bizarre and naturally perverse. Human behavior frequently shows signs of symbolically transformed perversity largely not encountered in the natural animal world. Our tendency towards aggressive action and violence, especially in group contexts, is therefore probably not the show of an instinct for natural aggression arising for instance from intra-specific agonism, nor can we attribute it to some genetic predisposition per se. Rather, it is evident, that human aggression in the forms it takes and in the ways we are familiar with it especially in modern social contexts, is largely the result of the lack of natural mechanisms of control over human "nature" and the consequences of the symbolic transformation of this "nature" in ways probably not intended by nature.</p> <p>The plasticity by which this drive for power can be shaped in so many divergent forms, and the degree to which the symbolic displacement and transformation of human character can take, even to the point of overriding what can be considered natural sexual urges and other natural drives for food, a stable body temperature, etc., is indeed quite remarkable, and I believe a very strong case can be made for the influence of hormones and also the release of endorphines and other psycho-active agents as a by-product of the quest and actual achievement of a sense of power. These "psycho-somatic" side-effects of the drive for power may be the essential component that predisposes humanity to a chronic abuse of psycho-tropic drugs and narcotics and what is considered by some the universal need for the achievement of alternative states of consciousness. This need for periodically experiencing alternative states of consciousness, however induced, including various forms of hallucination as well as hyper-suggestive states of trance and other "out-of-body" experiences, seems to me to be a consequence of the symbolic possibilities of the active human brain that quickly finds tedious and monotonous the pace of normal experience.</p> <p>If we watch animals in their sleep, we an have little doubt that they are dreaming and that the subjective experience of their dreams is very like the way in which we experience our dreams. Dreaming serves therefore a very fundamental purpose for the active mammalian brain. The functions of dreaming are not well understood, but must have a lot to do with the reorganization of the brain, the filtering and integration of new experience, and the symbolic processing of new experience in relation to old experience that is stored as forms of memory or possibly posited in the neural encoding of the brain itself. But it becomes equally evident that dreaming for human beings takes on an entirely different level and order of meaning than it does for instance in dogs, and that for human beings, states of waking consciousness can at times become confused with dream states, the two commingling at the edge of conscious awareness. Not to revisit old stereotypes, but in severe schizophrenics we find people who are awake and yet who are as if in a dream world of their own making. If schizophrenia occurs in dogs in a manner and degree we find it in human beings, it would be a surprise to me as I've not seen a dog yet I would call schizophrenic. But then we can assume that dogs are more instinctively bound to nature, to a closed Uexkullian world of "dog nature" than human beings seem to be.</p> <p>It is not my intention here to rhetorically belabor a scientific argument with only anecdotal evidence and an appeal to common sense. I would say that the drive to some kind of power is resident in many forms of animals, particularly in animals we refer to as active predators. The capacity to control the outcomes of events in the world are a direct extension of the capacity to control one's own behavior in response to events in the world, however this is achieved, whether by instinct or by symbolic construction. Biological survival, and an "instinct" to live, especially for animals, is predicated on the capacity to interact with a world in terms of one's behavioral controls. This "instinct" even supercedes and hence precludes any drives toward reproductive success, which in its way can be considered an extension and further expression of the self-same set of instincts for survival. We may call it a "natural" will to live or will to survive. This drive exists within us whether we are challenged by our environments in any critical manner or otherwise. It seems often in ordinary life, many of these kinds of rudimentary challenges are removed by design, by cultural preference and by social directive, and often as not, with little to replace it in any ordinary sense of lived experience. But whether suitable contexts exist for its expression or not, the need for its expression may continue doing its own thing regardless.</p> <p>There is one last point that I must question in relation to this thesis about the universality of the human drive for power and the symbolic transformation of human nature, and this has to do with what can be called a preoccupation for death and, possibly the fear or at least sense of symbolic marginalization that comes from the experience of death, the threat of death, or even just the existence of death. A perverse fascination with death, with killing and the dead, seems to psychologists to be a pathological expression of innate curiosity in life, and of a need to control one's experiences of life. The preoccupation with death and dying seems to me to be a rudimentary expression of the drive for life and survival. In living systems, and especially I think in living systems as sophisticated as human systems, there can be no greater expression of power than the control of life or death over another living being, for death is not just final, ultimate, irreversible, but, I think often overlooked, it represents in a fundamental sense a "win" in a kind of zero-sum game of living and an essential form of competition between organisms. In this sense, the taking the life of another, whether this is done on a field of battle, in a robbery, or as a consequence of a psycho-pathic perversion, represent what might be referred as a pre-symbolic affirmation of one's own life experiences and chances for success in life. This is by no means a justification of why it is humans so commonly and frequently take the life of other organisms, not just humans but of many forms of life, and appear often to be fascinated by this scenario in their life such that they would want to watch it over and over again played out in movies or on television or in the news media. It is rather merely an attempt to understand how it is that we can be thus fascinated by such a perverse and seemingly destructive interest on such a basic level, and an at least tentative explanation of why this just might be so.</p> <p>Perhaps needless to conclude, the drive for power is in all of us and may become expressed in many different ways. Many ways are in fact constructive and healthy, and many other ways are obviously not. To become psychologically and behaviorally caught in a particular trajectory of development of this drive for power and its behavioral and social expression in the world, versus some alternative pathway, is critical to answer and yet probably so complex and multivariate that it is impossible to answer in any final way. Whatever trajectory we achieve in the course of our life, and in the course of events in our life, we get caught into what can be called a "circle of power" in which one set of events leads to another, to social consequences and reactions, that in turn drive the need for power to even greater heights, and power can become both psychologically and sociologically amplified thereby.  I'm exhibiting my need for power in writing this overwrought essay, and, if you have read thus far, you are probably exhibit some will for power in reading it to the end. The proverbial slave exhibits power through the dependency of the master on the slave's powerlessness. The will to power takes many forms symbolically in human behavioral response in the world. It is shaped, harnessed and made available to the world by the society in which we are a part and in which we enact our parts.</p> <p>It is something of a mistake to cast the drive for power as an abnormal or pathological characteristic of human nature, and to portray it only in terms of sociopaths and other criminals. The drive to power characterizes all human beings both equally and in uniquely individual ways. We all manifest this drive, more or less, along a multi-dimensional continuum of its expression in terms of strength, direction and transformation of affect, aggression, activity and rationalization. </p> <p>I am of the opinion that human achievement motivation (McClelland et. al.) that in the modern global system is primarily expressed by means of money, that translates into resource acquisition and appropriation, is what can be called a structurally and socially normalized extension of fundamental human power motivation, and the never-ending quest to make money and to get rich is merely one more culturally and socially sanctioned form of the manifestation of the drive for power.</p> <p>I think, as a refrain, that it is easy to overlook the motive of power in our lives and in our world, especially if we are caught up in the grip of power and its circles in our lives. We can repress our confrontation with it, attempt to stifle, manipulate, alter or even extinguish it, not only in ourselves but in others around us. We can especially rationalize its ends and means in our life in practically any manner we choose to see it in, thereby justifying it to ourselves in a satisfactory way if not completely to others in the world. We can act out the drive and fantasies that the need for power manifests itself in, and we can vicariously displaces and project it out onto the world in all kinds of ways. I would even say, that in some social settings, the drive for power can become so manifest and so overwhelming in social life, that it must needs thereby be denied or ideologically justified in a collective manner that not only "makes sense of it" but serves to neutralize or remove any possibly negative consequences that apperceptive realization of its possibilities (and potential horrors) might bring. As it has been said recently, the fish rots from the head down. I think it is in this regard, in a sense of projective symbolic displacement, much easier to recognize the true intent and designs of power in others than to see and acknowledge how it may play out in our own lives. Our ability to symbolically manipulate and transform power is a form of power itself, uniquely human it seems.</p> <p> </p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <hr> </font> <b><font face="Times,Times New Roman" size="6"><a name="SystemsProfiling">Profiling the Profilers</a></font><font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"><font size="5">: </font><font size="4"> Administrative Authoritarianism in State Systems and the Structural Erosion of Democratic Institutions</font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <a NAME="four"> <p ALIGN="left"></a><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font> </font> </b> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <p><font size="3"><font color="#000000">A</font>merican administration is not just a job, nor even just a profession any longer. It has become a whole style of life, a country club, even a somewhat pseudo aristocracy. The traditional stratification of American society, between line and staff or blue and white collars, has evolved to a new form of hierarchical stratification via governmental administration. An administrator doesn't simply quit because of a lousy work ethic or bad judgment on the part of those who appointed her or him or the mistakes they make on their own and blame on others. No, they are promoted out of harm's way, given a salary increase, "relocated" to a distant field with a second, a third, neigh, nth number of chances to start fresh. No, the American government has too much invested in the status and privilege of an administrator to let them go as if they were so many salaried or part-time employees. After all, it would look bad for the company as a whole, as they stand for the whole system, the established order, the authority that articulates down from on high. They are the living embodiment of the justification for higher taxes, big budgets and inflation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In such an administrative context, Government profiling of the American people has come of age as a principle mechanism of social control and manipulation. No doubt the digital information revolution has conspired to make such profiling even more subtle and sublime in its results than it already had been. It is carried on like a deep science, though it is not done in an open manner in the way that normal science is supposed to be conducted. It seems the shallower the bureaucratic water-hole it is practiced in, the "deeper" the science of profiling becomes. Who the deep scientists are who have concocted these profiling systems, and to whom they are held accountable, seems to me to be largely a well-guarded secret. Of course, academic psychologists themselves have come to use standard inventories, that do not go past certain built in cultural, linguistic and cognitive biases, as the chief instrument of their legitimization as true social sciences, and it seems, government funding agencies and interests have been largely the source of their funding and prestige. I doubt a lot of debate is going on any longer in academic psychology forums concerning behaviorism, organicism, psycho-analysis or Father Freud, just as anthropologists appear to have abandoned their own father, Franz Boas, in favor of new theories of ethnic memes and mom's blue genes.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Of course, reworking the Universities after the debacle of Vietnam and the campus protest movements of the late sixties and early seventies has been the first step to the reform of the American system. Universities are more strapped by government sponsorship and administrative controls than ever before, and to raise any form of political protest these days is not only to be construed as "political incorrect" but as a basis for dismissal and removal from a campus. Needless to comment, thought on campuses has fallen suit, and if one is looking for free speech and independent thinking in various academic programs, one is almost bound and certain to come away from one's academic experiences disillusioned if not completely "brain washed." I think the contemporary American campus reflects many of the realities of contemporary American society. They have become a breeding ground for a certain kind of uninquiring intellectual conformism, and for a kind of paradigmatic disciplinary approach to knowledge organization and articulation across a wide range of scholarly fields. Graduate students are being trained and rewarded not for the clarity or independence of their ideas, but for adopting the dogmas espoused by one or other of the faculty who are jockeying and competing with one another, often in a vicious and cut-throat way, for limited resources, students and, of course, the prestige of being treated like you really know what you are talking about. If a critical attitude among students is cultivated, more often than not this attitude is one that is more hypo-critical and aggressively criticizing, rather than merely being skeptical or critical in some philological sense of the term.</font></p> <p><font size="3">I would define profiling in its basic sense as a nomothetic system of social and personality classification based upon an individual's response and performance to tasks on a kind of inventory or other interview protocol design, or based upon an individual's traits, characteristics and other patterns of behavior. Profiling a serial killer at a murder scene is one thing, profiling a person seeking job is quite another.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The function of profiling the general population in a closed socio-economic system is primarily to reinforce the status quo of a class stratification in such a system, and thereby to structurally preserve the inequalities and asymmetries of such a system. In order to help keep people in their places, and to legitimize a policy of doing so, one must first define what those places are. Profiling serves this purpose when it comes to its broad-scale deployment across large sections of the national population. It can thus be described as a gate-keeping mechanism that serves to limit access to resources redistributed through the system by means of systematic categorization and exclusion. It provides a way of blocking "front door" and "front of the line" social mobility, while still permitting side-door or back-door selection to take place.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Profiling seems, by its deployment, to be in fact much more than a new form of science, but a form of high art, albeit somewhat propagandized into service of government based interests and interest groups. In large measure, what is kept in secret and hidden from view from the eyes of the American public, does not need really to be held in any kind of ethical account--the ethics of profiling are presumed away with the "science" of administrative anonymity, bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility, and a lock-step, "hail the SYSTEM" sycophancy.</font></p> <p><font size="3">One really does not need any longer to buy into the idea of Global or Federal Conspiracy Theory to accept or find plausible the idea that the degree of control and, in a sense, "intrusion" into the everyday affairs of Americans has increased considerably, especially in the last couple of decades, and that this has resulted, among other things, in the possibility of a new form of "unfreedom" that comes from the ability for other people to manipulate your identity and control your range of choices without you even knowing about it happening. The conspiracy part is really not one guy phoning another guy in a distant city. It is a collusion of shared cultural values, of ideological commitments, of a form of limited responsibility that comes through wielding power. The side-benefits are great, the prestige built-in and there is almost no downside to speak of except perhaps a series of lunch-dates with social undesirables and rather boring in-service meetings in hotel conference rooms.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Cybernetically, we can say the government bureaucracy, in spite of increasing deregulation, is getting better at what control functions it has done. It is getting better in a sense that it is able to monitor and respond efficiently to a wider range of issues that occur, even down to a very local and even personal level of articulation. Depending upon our perspective, I guess, this can be either a very good and wonderful thing, or it can be potentially a very dangerous and bad thing. I'm inclined to suspect that most people employed by the government or serving in some administrative position, would be inclined to adopt the former point of view. Everyone else would be wise to be a bit more skeptical about our Brave New Bureaucracy, and would probably do better to lean the other way.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The concept of political equality really plays no part any longer in government based decision making or selections, if they ever really did play a part. Double standards, disguised by ideological rhetoric about "Diversity" and "Multi-Cultural Multiplicities," have become the norm, by which people can be conveniently categorized, labeled, channeled, and, in a sense, their fates sealed permanently in a file that everyone in the world seems to have access to except the person whose name is on the file. For one thing, Party Politics seems to have become all the rage, and the notion of a professionally disinterested bureaucracy, secure in their posts regardless of weather changes in the Presidency or Congress, is perhaps a quaint anachronism from a by-gone, "Gone with the Wind" era. </font></p> <p><font size="3">The concept of political equality would entail a measure of, should I say dare mention it, social and psychological blindness, even racial blindness and ethnic blindness, which is really another way of saying that the government officials who are selecting on the basis of applications, for whatever purposes, would have to do so in a manner essentially blind as to the background and profile of the individual doing the applying. This is not to say that those who have a criminal record should not be subject to screening on some level, or those with certifiable psychotic episodes, or those who have some other kind of dubious history of social deviance. But at some point, at what point, should profiling of average American people, and utilization of secret records kept on their identity, be allowed, manipulated and abused in secret, particularly among a petty and somewhat overpaid class of administrative gate-keepers?</font></p> <p><font size="3">Though the government increasingly uses market based designs and strategies borrowed from big Business, and even, often, the business leadership themselves, it remains basically the greatest and wealthiest re-distributive economy the world has ever known, which means that however much it may deregulate and privatize public sectors of the economy, it still fundamentally runs on the same basic framework of administrative "trickle down" of positive authority, opportunity, and resources availability. Among a lot of other things, this means that there is always going to be a huge bottleneck of money and power--the two biggest things that make up any political-economy, in the seats of centralized power. There is nothing unusual about this pattern as it is typical of any state-organized political system that ever existed.</font></p> <p><font size="3">If we want to look at classical anthropological and archaeological models of state systems theories, we can refer to the concepts of <u>hyper-coherence</u> and <u>meddling</u> as explanatory models of why bureaucratic systems grow into increasingly expensive and inefficient, self-sustaining, and somewhat parasitic structures that eventually incapacitate the adaptabilities of a society to meet new challenges or to respond effectively in local behavioral settings. Hyper-coherence and meddling both refer to the tendencies for government bureaucracies to grow in time in control of increasing details of a larger system, to the point of destructively interfering in the day to day details of the articulation of the system. The theory is, that in all its complexity and over-control, a system that is too hyper-coherent and too meddling in local affairs, is likely to break down in the structure of the long run, to suffer unpredictable "critical events."</font></p> <p><font size="3">The kind of system that has been created parallels, on some levels even exceeds, that that the Chinese have concocted, it seems, for surveillance and control of their own people, for cultural espionage abroad, and for control and manipulation of Chinese cyberspace and for digital espionage of the global Internet.</font></p> <p><font size="3">My concern is the rise of what I refer to as modern, post-industrial, administrative authoritarianism. How to define this new form of social authoritarianism? It invariably involves some level of coercion of authority--the principle modality of this coercion is not through threat of force, but through economic persuasion and exclusion. The bigger the government, the bigger the money it can throw at a problem, and the bigger the problems associated with the money thrown at the solution and the bigger the business needs to be that stands behind the government in both the problems it deals with and recognizes to be important, and the kinds of solutions it devises to solve these problems. So, we get a really Big Deal going.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The problem I have had with all this is the question, who is profiling the profilers? Who is holding whom to account in the administration of public or increasingly, private-based public affairs? At what point does the idea of public interest and public based or public derived control come back into a bureaucratically convoluted formula--or is the notion of control and accountability just some administrative "Catch 22" kind of euphemization of a tangle of manipulative power and misinformation, of closed doors behind a secretary behind a secretary behind a secretary behind a phone in front of a human being with a problem or a real need to be addressed.</font></p> <p><font size="3">I would define administrative authoritarianism, especially in the American context, as a centralized system of regulative social control based upon the arbitrary manipulation and management of redistributive resources, including vital and strategic information, and screens of opportunity within an exclusively capitalist state system. This social authority is reinforced primarily through a system of socio-economic exclusion, disenfranchisement and penalization, and through the manipulation and differential enforcement of legal systems to favor the interests of those in control over those being controlled, and to preserve the status quo of such structural and social asymmetries. Increasingly, the use of covert investigative and paramilitary agencies as a means of coercive control become depended upon in such systems in order to maintain a facade of social normality in the system. Such a system of social discrimination rests upon a framework of nomothetic typologization and categorization of people along different dimensions of cleavage and stratification, and is reinforced symbolically and legitimized by means of academic sanctioning, manipulation, publication and control of specialized knowledge. Routinization of these mechanisms of typological classification and control serve to background and embed the framework as a form of indirect constraint that is culturally sanctioned. Thus, such control is "normalized" as intrinsic to the order of the system. Presentation of class attitudes, values, and conspicuous consumption serve to behaviorally reinforce class-bias and class-based discrimination in such a system. Symbolic ascriptions and attribution of personality traits, of psychological attitudes, conditions and "states," serve to reinforce such a system socially and behaviorally. Within such a framework, the differential exercise of human rights becomes situationally relative to the identity, positionality and control mechanisms that are used to reinforce social control. </font></p> <p><font size="3">The consequences of the rise and socio-structural embedding of such administrative authoritarianism is the closed stratification of society and its polarization between the systematically enfranchized and disenfranchised. The danger of such a pattern of development is the consistent undermining of the legal and political foundations of an open, democratic society, namely the exercise of blanket political equality and the social and structural reinforcement of social inequalities under a blanket ideology of social or communal based equality. Control over the results of open elections is largely achieved through the pre-selective manipulation of the items and individuals that are found upon a ballot, and through the persuasion of mass communications media that cultivates an atmosphere of social conformism, hierarchy, in-group/out-group identification and and a generalized sense of social insecurity. </font></p> <p><font size="3">Being able to vote for one's own best interests on any ballot depends on having one's best interests represented on the ballot and knowing what one's best interests may be and how they might be served or not served by a particular ballot item. This is all well and good, but being able to vote on any ballot makes little difference at the end of the day if one receives a notice that one has been "downsized" or otherwise euphemistically disenfranchised from socio-economic and political economic participation within the system. </font></p> <p><font size="3">Administrative control in the articulation of the American system is generally limited only by the bureaucratic delegation of negative authority and power and by legal precedents and liabilities in a common law system. Conflict resolution is always negotiable in such a framework. This control is not normally subject to the same kinds of structural constraints of government defined by the constitutional separation of powers, and the rise of a single party framework across all three branches of federal government will tend overall to blur and confuse the boundaries of such separation. We can in such a scenario expect that the processes of development of increasing administrative authoritarianism based upon class stratification to continue and the actual practice of democratic institutions in society to be further eroded as a consequence.</font></p> <p> </p> <hr> <b><font size="6"><a name="MessageMedium">The Message Becomes the Medium:</a></font><font size="5"> </font><font size="4">Web Cybernetics and the Universal Digital Language of the Automation Revolution</font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <a NAME="four"> <p ALIGN="left"></a><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> </font></b> <p> </p> <p><font size="3">What is clearly emerging from the continuing development of Lewis Works as a systems based framework is a sense in which and how digital electronic literacy is transforming how we see, relate to and communicate in the world. This transformation of information is vital to the organization, storage and articulation of knowledge in the world and will fundamentally alter our worldview and how we go about dealing with the world.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Cybernetically integrated web-systems are rapidly emerging in many areas of knowledge in the world, and this integration has important implications, I believe, for the manner and form in which we symbolically represent and mediate reality. The very symbolic structure of our knowledge is being thus transformed, and this process has created new possibilities for knowledge and informational organization hitherto unimagined. In short, we may say that human knowledge itself is being rapidly and permanently transformed.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Though language barriers still exist, the Internet is providing a common forum and framework that is truly trans-cultural in scope and global in scale, and this has a consequence of transcending traditional linguistic and related knowledge barriers and providing a common communication platform for all people who are attached to the web.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We may say and look at this in another way, and this is that knowledge, by becoming almost completely virtual and virtually without effective limits in terms of storage capacity, informational carrying capacity or accessibility, will no longer a completely material form of embodiment, and that the symbol structure of this knowledge will become increasingly "scripted" and controlled by programming languages and hence will become increasingly dynamic in its developmental articulation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In considering this proposition, it is important 1) to invoke a duality of structure model in symbol systems and to recognize 2) that symbol systems themselves are nothing unless human beings enact and make these systems happen. They are entirely relative therefore to the people who are engaged in their construction, articulation and reproduction.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In understanding the first point, it is important to recognize that symbol systems are usually divided between the sign as an external marker, and the meaning that is carried by the sign, or signification. The cybernetics of human symbolic meaning comes in the reading of these sign systems and their construction and utilization in everyday life. The principle function of a symbol is to represent something, to stand for something, that is not physically identical and that is remote in reference from the sign. It is the interaction between the sign and the signification, and the productive play between them, that symbol systems may be referred to as cybernetic--but they are so only from the standpoint of the human symbolizer who is capable of reading the signs and understanding the significations.</font></p> <p><font size="3">To understand the first part of this problem, the duality of structure of symbol systems, it is interesting to look briefly at the human history of the writing and literacy in human information systems and the changing symbolic units and functions these basic units took as a consequence of the progressive development of new writing systems.</font></p> <p><font size="3">If we examine the earliest icon-graphic and pictographic forms of writing, we see that the content of the sign was not necessarily independent of the form of the sign itself, and that both content and sign were relatively context dependent to the period, place and people of its articulation. One could not read a set of signs in a coherent or meaningful manner, if one were not privy to the particular contexts of its production and origination. Thus, petrified texts today that are largely pictographic, mainly as petroglyphs, are, the world over, largely mute as to their true meaning and significance, and their interpretation is largely conjectural and itself contextually relative to the point of view of the observer.</font></p> <p><font size="3">At some point, associated with the rise of early pre-state societies, recording systems that were largely rebus and memory devices arose that served to count things and to record basic events and things in the world, largely in a pictographic manner.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Eventually we have the rise of primitive syllabaries, still pictographic, in which each sign becomes associated with a particular phonemic consonant-vowel sound pattern, or alternatively, large pictographic libraries in which each pictograph is associated with a morpheme, or a sound carrying meaning.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Of course, at some point in the rise of western civilization we have the invention of true alphabets, in which the sign carries a particular phonetic sound entirely independent of meaning, and which can be arranged in an almost infinite number of possible combinations to which meaning is arbitrary and mostly independent of sound pattern.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The printing press and printing techniques was the next major revolution to occur, and the consequence of this was widespread literacy and the rise of mass communications in which information for the first time could be transmitted in a completely horizontal manner across a broad base of population.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is my opinion at least that with each stage in the development of human writing systems, signs and their significations became increasingly detached and independent of one another, and the symbolic association between sign and signification became increasingly arbitrary and dualistic in structural patterning. Meaning at this stage became increasingly manipulatable in a manner for purposes of remote communication and transmission of information. The remote representation of meaning by unrelated and independent signs is the basis of the definition of true human symbolic systems. With the advent of print technology and alphabetic writing systems in particular, as long as we knew the structure of a language and code decode a foreign script in familiar terms, we could translate any language and text into any other language available to us, certain considerations of contextual parallax and relativity of cultural semantics notwithstanding.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We are at an interesting state now, as we have cybernetic systems in which information can be stored digitally in terms of an infinite number of sequences of ones and zeroes, and these sequences can be arranged and organized into an infinite number of alternative combinations or "strings" that can be assigned meaning in a completely arbitrary manner. In a sense, by such a system we have a universal language that can transcend the boundaries of different linguistic codes. At the same time, it will be observed that in the history of writing, larger and larger quantities of information could be collected and stored in a single location, and this information became increasingly independent of the context of its production and original articulation. Essentially, now, we can store an infinite amount of information remotely, and we have virtual access to unlimited quantities of information almost instantaneously. At the same time, we are able to access contexts for information within the system itself--information has come to completely incorporate its own context on the web.</font></p> <p><font size="3">I think perhaps that domain names have come to take on a particular significance in the modern global information economy, like "Google" or "Amazon" or "Microsoft" because symbolically they stand for something more than just successful e-commerce ventures. It is likely today that more people in the US when they casually hear "Amazon" are more likely to associate it with the ".com" than with the gigantic river in South America. These represent significant new entities in the organization of human knowledge in the world, for they are almost purely and completely symbolic in the cybernetic sense of an arbitrary sign standing for something else that is remote and otherwise physically unrelated.</font></p> <p><font size="3">What seem to be some of the significant features of the new global information ecology? I would include the following points:</font></p> <ol> <li><font size="3">The ability to store and retrieve digital information is virtually unlimited.</font></li> <li><font size="3">This information carries with it a virtually unlimited context, making it nearly completely context independent.</font></li> <li><font size="3">For the first time, information and symbolic knowledge is mediated by 'scripts' or by programs that translate instructions and content into binary code.</font></li> <li><font size="3">As symbolic systems, digital knowledge systems are becoming increasing automated in the sense of self-organization of such systems, self-initiation, self-modification and self-managing. Human control of such systems are becoming increasingly telescoped out and increasingly remote as a source.</font></li> </ol> <p><font size="3">When we talk about artificial intelligence, I think we are talking really about cybernetic symbolization of human knowledge. As with all symbolic systems, we bring to the computer program our intentionality structures, our sense of meaning and contextual relevance. We construct the code and run it and ultimately turn it off or on. I am not sure if automation can ever completely eliminate the ultimate human factor of control, or the basic constraint of the anthropological relativity of knowledge. In a sense, with the digital information revolution, we are coming to realize what might be called a perfect and scale-free cybernetic system of human symbolization. As with all symbolic systems, the requirement of the human cultural component, to construct and to bring meaning to such systems, remains, but his component itself is becoming rapidly transformed. As a consequence, I see knowledge systems becoming on one hand increasingly more complex, and on the other, increasingly more powerful and facile in manipulation and meaning.</font></p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> </font> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <p align="left"> </p> <p align="center"> </p> <p> </p> <hr> <p><a name="Copyright">Blanket Copyright</a>, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. 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