International Society for the Systems Sciences

Conference Toronto 2000

 

Papers by Kent Palmer, Ph.D.

 

Box 1632, Orange CA 92856

714-633-9508 palmer@exo.com

000503  DRAFT Version 22 isss2000ac.doc

Copyright 2000 Kent Palmer. All rights reserved.

 

 

SIG: What is Life and Living?: 

Defining Life And The Living Ontologically And Holonomically

(Not necessary to prioritize) [edited and corrected]

 

SIG: Research Toward a General Theory of Systems:

New General Schemas Theory: Systems, Holons, Meta-Systems & Worlds

(Priority 1, highest) [edited and corrected]

 

SIG: Duality Theory:

Intertwining Of Duality And Nonduality

(Priority 2) [edited and corrected]

 

SIG: Processes and Human Processes:

Holonomic Human Processes

(Priority 4) [not edited]

 

SIG: Spirituality and Systems:

Genuine Spirtuality And Special Systems Theory

(Priority 3) [not edited]

 

SIG: Living Systems Analysis:

Not Written

(Priority 5, lowest)

 

 

SIG: What is Life and Living?

 

ABSTRACT

 

PALMER, K. D.

 

DEFINING LIFE AND THE LIVING ONTOLOGICALLY AND HOLONOMICALLY

 

Trace Studies Institute, Box 1632, Orange, CA 92856 USA E-mail: palmer@exo.com

 

The distinction between "Life" and the experience of "Living" is a variety of subject/object dualities. In order to understand what it means deeply, we need to move through the meta-levels of Being because the distinction takes on a life of its own as we go up through the thresholds of the meaning of “living life” when the subject/object distinction breaks down and successively reveals deeper and deeper levels of significance. Finally, we reach a level that is unthinkable in which we become immersed in complete nonduality. But at that level, things become more clear when balancing the successive obscuration of the meta-levels of Being. At this fifth meta-level of Being, we encounter something different which is Existence. Existence has its own structure which defines life, the social and the negatively entropic thermodynamicism. We find that these Holonomic non-dual structures reach around to define the levels of Being themselves. We get a picture like that of Escher of two hands drawing each other. This is the picture of the symbiotic nature of Being and Existence. In that symbiosis living, the social and the thermodynamicly neg-entropic are defined in existence where they could not be defined in Being. (What is Life and Living? Special Integration Group)

 

 

 

DEFINING LIFE AND THE LIVING ONTOLOGICALLY AND HOLONOMICALLY

 

Kent D. Palmer

 

Trace Studies Institute

Box 1632 Orange CA 92856 USA

 

SUMMARY

 

The distinction between "Life" and the experience of "Living" is a variety of subject/object dualities. In order to understand what it means deeply, we need to move through the meta-levels of Being because the distinction takes on a life of its own as we go up through the thresholds of the meaning of “living life” when the subject/object distinction breaks down and successively reveals deeper and deeper levels of significance. Finally, we reach a level that is unthinkable in which we become immersed in complete nonduality. But at that level, things become more clear balancing the successive obscuration of the meta-levels of Being. At this fifth meta-level of Being, we encounter something different which is Existence. Existence has its own structure which defines life, the social and the negatively entropic thermodynamicism. We find that these Holonomic non-dual structures reach around to define the levels of Being themselves so we get a picture like that of Escher of two hands drawing each other. This picture illustrates the symbiotic nature of Being and Existence. In that symbiosis living, the social and the thermodynamicly neg-entropic are defined in existence where they could not be defined in Being.

 

Consideration of the distinction between Life and Living takes place in the context of a broader theory that extends General Systems Theory by looking at the theory of General Meta-systems and between them sees the existence of Holonic Special Systems. Meta-systems are seen as being produced by the interaction of normal systems and the holonic special systems which is called an Emergent Meta-system. Special Systems Theory and Emergent Meta-systems theory as it appears in the paper Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory[1] is precisely about the nature of life and the living. It is a theory based on the work of Ilya Prigogine[2] on neg-entropic dissipative ordering structures and Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's[3] theory of autopoiesis[4] as well as the theory of John O'Malley[5] and Barry Sandywell[6] concerning reflexive social theory. The theory rethinks the concept of the living as self-organizing machines developed by Maturana and Varella and places it in a social context. It shows that living things function in the interspace between systems and meta-systems as embodiments of special anomalous systems defined by hypercomplex algebras. Living is an emergent property that exists at the next higher level from the emergent properties of dissipative neg-entropic ordering systems as defined by Prigogine. At the next higher level beyond the living is the social level of organization which is fundamentally reflexive in nature. Within the multi-cellular organism, all these properties are balanced against each other. Cells are dissipative neg-entropic ordering structures in terms of energy balance. But they are autopoietic in terms of information balance and reflexive in relation to other cells in the body. The same structures again are balanced against each other at the level of organisms which form social groups. The important thing about special systems is that they are ultra-efficacious (ultra-efficient and ultra-effective) such that once life appears, it takes over and spreads everywhere taking up all the various niches in the environment which it transforms by its presence. This factor of ultra-efficaciousness is what makes living things stand out from the rest of nature so that wherever we look on earth, there is life even though we do not see signs of it in the immediate vicinity of earth. This paper and others presented along with it at this conference will lay the foundation for showing how living social beings that embody special systems are embedded in the larger ecosystemic environmental meta-system which appears to be formed on the model of the emergent meta-systems that are made up of the interaction of the special systems. This forms a basis for a new understanding of the nature of Gaia as the planetary living ecology.[7]

 

Keywords: Life, Ontology, Holonomics, Meta-Systems, Special Systems

 

INTRODUCTION

 

The distinction between “Life” as a phenomenon and our experience of it as “Living” beings needs to be approached in terms of a “Neg-entropic Living Social Hermeneutical Phenomenology[8]” in order to be properly understood. This is because the same kind of relation between ourselves and life exists as the relation between ourselves and the social. In other words, we are already living as we are already social beings. Both Sociality and Life are already always lost origins of the individuals that come to question the distinctions between the individual and the society or between the living and the dead. Social Phenomenology[9] is an approach which takes the social as primary, just as it takes the Living as primary. In other words, it does not comprehend a view that would separate us from either the living or the social. Instead, it views both of these phenomena and our embeddedness in them as the milieu out of which we separate ourselves as scientific observers which is a further differentiation of our individuality from society. Similarly, we are living already, and it is a social project to build dead and impersonal institutions and disciplines which reify that fundament of our living experience within the social milieu. However, it should occur to us to ask ourselves. What is the nature of this primal milieu[10] which is inseparably social and living for us? We notice that it is carried on in an environment that is far from the equilibrium dynamic environment of the type that Prigogine calls a dissipative ordering structure that is negatively entropic. All we have to do is look around the earth at the variety of species that abound to see that we live in a thin film of highly neg-entropic matter on a small planet of an ordinary star which is one out of an uncountable number of stars in one galaxy out of myriads. Thus, a complete view of this primal situation would note that it is a differentiation of matter in environments far from equilibrium circumstances that gives rise to life which is inherently social. We discover ourselves already part of this situation and differentiate ourselves from the rest of the physical world, from the rest of the living world, and from the rest of the social world of our species.

 

Social Phenomenology considers the primary situation of negatively entropic living social being as central to all our concerns and that everything we know and do differentiates ourselves out of that primary situation which, to us, seems to be one of the biggest mysteries of all. Social Phenomenology turns the world upside down and places the “negatively entropic living social” primary situation[11] of our life at the core of our understanding of the world rather than relegating it to a marginal note. Husserl in his Krisis[12] showed that we must look at phenomenology first because it is through phenomenology that everything else becomes available for us to study and understand. Science produces a spiritual crisis by separating itself from the lifeworld and reifying things and concepts including ourselves. But even Husserl's  individualistic phenomenology must give rise to social phenomenology because it recognizes that the social must come before all our experiences as individuals[13]. It is difficult for us to understand the world from the point of view of social phenomenology due to the individualism that is imprinted upon us within our Western culture. We distrust immersion in the social and deprecate the mob which appears when our reified social institutions break down. Precisely the same problem appears in the distinction between the living and life. The life of others is the objective phenomenon, whereas the living experience is our own. And the key point is that without social upbringing, we could not achieve the capacity to even make the distinction. A similar problem exists with understanding the negatively entropic circumstances that make life possible. We have a difficult time thinking of living things as merely matter. Bergson[14] had to posit an élan vital which separated the living from the dead things, and even today this dualism is alive and well in our consideration of our self-imposed separation from nature.

 

It is necessary to embrace a new way of thinking in which the old dualisms are put out of play and a new understanding is grasped that satisfies our longing for an understanding of ourselves within nature, as living creatures, and as social creatures. We want this comprehension of ourselves and our place in nature to unify all these concepts that have been nihilisticly separated out into various disciplines within academia, i.e. thermodynamics, biology and sociology. We want to understand how all the other disciplines unfold from this primary situation of our embodiment in our own social-lifeworld which connects to nature. This is the fundamental problematic of social phenomenology.

 

ONTOLOGICAL LEVELS OF LIFE/LIVING

 

The view we take in order to facilitate this understanding is one of developing a non-dual approach to the understanding of each of these concepts in relation to the dualities that are normally projected by Western science as it goes about the business of attempting to understand the world based on its inherently dualistic approach. Dualism does not only mean production of opposites, but indicates the production of extreme nihilistic opposites which struggle until one overcomes the other. However, these nihilistic extreme opposites ultimately prove to be the same thing and thus the nihilistic distinction is ultimately no distinction at all[15]. As Fred Alan Wolf intimates: nihilism is always the given answer to the wrong question. In other words, nihilism always leads us through a maze of blind alleys although the labyrinth is a non-nihilistic because it has a single path that leads to its center with no blind alleys. The classic example of a nihilistic distinction is mind and body which, in our predominantly idealistic tradition, exalts the mind over the body. This is mirrored by many other similar dualities like the exaltation of the paternalistic male over the subjugated female, the white race over the black race, colonizer over the colonized[16], etc. Dualities are applied analytically to dissect the world and the phenomena that it presents. A non-dualistic approach is at the same time non-nihilistic. A non-dualistic[17] approach attempts to hold the dualisms apart and explore the middle ground between them. It rejects Aristotle’s principle of excluded middle. As such, it attempts to find the point where things distinguish themselves naturally rather than imposing upon them distinctions that are inappropriate projections.

 

When we apply this to the distinction between life as an objective phenomenon and living as a subjective phenomenon, we immediately realize that what is behind this distinction is the dualistic relation between subject and object. “Life in itself” is a single phenomenon seen from these two nihilistic and dualistic viewpoints. Life as an objectively reified and scientifically studied phenomenon is seen as distinct from the subjective view of life within our experience. Heidegger, already in Being and Time[18], subverted this view of the subjective verses the objective by attempting to look deeper into what came before the arising of the subject and object dualities. He described this prior existent as Dasein (being there) which is prior to the arising of subject and object distinction and thus their dualism. Dasein is the ecstatic pouring out of Being into Being by the unique process of  being-in-the-world which thereby produces a world. This ecstasy is a dynamic process that underlies all static dualistic distinctions within our tradition. Dasein is life itself in the living prior to the distinction between subjective experience and objective knowledge of that phenomenon. In Dasein, we are too caught up in the ecstasy to make this separation. Dasein is “living life” by expressing this non-dual possibility that hides within the excluded middle between subject and object.

 

In general, Heidegger calls this difference the two modalities of being-in-the-world which are present-at-hand (Pure Being) and ready-to-hand (Process Being). Dasein is rooted in Process Being which is Heraclitian and probabilistic. The subject/object dichotomies persist in Parmenidian Pure Being which is a reification of the world as objective and as separated from subjective experience. In Pure Being, there is a distinction between life as objective phenomenon and living as an experience; but this collapses at the level of Process Being where Dasein is “living life” and cannot separate itself to become either an objective disembodied observer or into a purely subjective experience.

 

However, the realization of Dasein is not the end of the story because Dasein is primarily MitSein, "With-there" or "Withness" in its social milieu which is what appears before Dasein differentiatiates itself. Other philosophers following Heidegger such as Merleau-Ponty and Levinas have explored this territory in which Dasein collapses into what I call the Query. The Query is the one who asks: What is “living life?” Levinas points out that at this level of Being, ethics and meta-physics collapse together because the individual becomes absorbed back into the “social,” or the social upbringing that makes possible the arising of language within the organism. It is clear from observing wolf children that without the social involvement with the mother and family, we would never achieve this capacity. Merleau-Ponty talks about how philosophy must take into account the genetic and developmental unfolding of the child and its development of language in attempting to understand the individual who projects a world. First, there is the social world, then individuals form subsets of that world through the ecstasy of the projection of their own lifeworld. Derrida calls this level of Being differance, which he says has the nature of differing and deferring. At this level, our life and our social world and our natural world and the relations between them become entangled. Derrida describes an indecision which exists in the pause between the words “living life” that Dasein is lost within. We represent this pause as the space between the words or the point of indecision between the two, which is the internal and external. Derrida describes it as a hinge[19]. Levinas describes it in terms of mutual bearing. Life bears the living and the living bears life just as the socializing mother bears the child while the child must bear the ministrations of the mother. There is a hiatus in between the child and the mother which is both “neither” and “both,” in which both are lost. We come to ask, who “lives life?” This is the query which gets hung up on the hinge or lacuna[20] between defining “living” and “life” as separable terms. When we collapse into the Query, then an endless series of possibilities unfold between which we cannot decide. This undecideability is like the quantum uncertainty, only on a macro level. It makes us consider the possibility that macro quantum mechanics is a reality which contravenes the Copenhagen convention[21]. We see it also in the arguments concerning the contents of consciousness brought up by David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind[22]. There is a postulate that different individuals may experience the qualia differently and so thereby splintering the world of subjectivity just like the world of objectivity is splintered by the non-determinacy of quantum mechanical states. There is a separation between the objective world without qualia differentiation on the one hand and the subjective world of qualia differentiation on the other hand. Subjective differentiation of the qualia causes an explosion of qualitatively different worlds for different subjects. On the other hand, there is the non-determinacy of quantum mechanics which under the interpretation of David Deutsch in The Fabric of Reality[23] produces multiple real simultaneous universes. Quantum phenomena is seen as the interference between these real universes. Note how on the side of consciousness there is a splintering of subjective worlds, and on the side of objective nature there is a splintering of objective worlds. If instead, we do not accept the distinction between subject and object, and the distinction between micro nature and macro nature posited in Copenhagen, then we find ourselves in a world where there is macro quantum mechanical phenomena which is qualitative in nature. Viewing this strange imaginal world[24] in which macro quantum mechanical phenomena are not suppressed, where neither quality is given precedence over quantity, nor quantity is given precedence over quality, is a way of viewing the world as seen by the Query, i.e. the world of Differance prior to Dasein. In Dasein, the ecstasy of existence is separable from the reification of things in the world. The Query is in the hiatus or lacuna between the ecstasy and its reification. In that world there are two splinterings that overlap. There is the splintering of the subjective qualia producing myriad subjective worlds, and there is the quantum mechanical splintering which produces multiple real worlds. This splintering has the nature of differing and deferring or Differance. We call this kind of being: Hyper Being after the Hyperdialectic of Merleau-Ponty that he describes in The Visible and the Invisible[25]. That is the hyperdialectic between the Process Being of Heidegger and the Nothingness of Sartre.  There he distinguishes this hyperdialectical mode as being-in-the-world, which I call in-hand, from another deeper modality, which I call the out-of-hand of Wild Being.

 

Think about “living life” in terms of the hinge (or lacuna or hiatus) of Differance. We do not know whether we are in separate realms of qualia or within separate physical universes. We experience macro quantum mechanical states qualitatively as the imaginal realm, and in that way our consciousness becomes completely intertwined with the physical and subjective worlds in a way that cannot be unentangled. This hinge within the “living-hinge-life” dichotomy is the same as the individual-hinge-social or the thermodynamics-hinge-physics dichotomies. In other words, the trace of the hinge pulses in the midst of many of our dichotomies. The hinge itself is merely an indecision between our projected categories. Cornelius Castoriadis calls the Magma the substrate on which we project our categories. We have strange attractors within our category schemes that cause us to hover over the distinctions we make between living and life. Because we project these categories on ourselves and everything else in some sense, we are beyond the categories themselves in a realm that we only see when we are unable to decide whether we are the life or the living, the individual or the social, the thermodynamically far from equilibrium entropic or the physical. At the level of Hyper Being, the concept of life is equivalent to the third meta-level of the concept, i.e. “the lively living of life.”

 

 

The Hyper Being of the Query is not the end of the story. The Query itself slides into another even deeper strata of Being. That strata is called the Enigma, which finds no answer to the Query: Who is Dasein? or Is Dasein Life or Living? or Is Dasein individual or social? or Is Dasein themodynamical or physical? It is Merleau-Ponty that discovers this level of Being in The Visible and the Invisible. He calls it Wild Being and contrasts it with Hyper Being. The Enigma is what allows us to see ourselves at the hinge of indecidablity. The enigma is a position that we cannot step back into to view ourselves any more deeply. Life is an enigma because we are that enigma. The social is an enigma because we are that enigma. The neg-entropic far from equlibria thermodynamic system is an enigma because we are an enigma.  First, we are the enigma, then all the other distinctions appear as facets of that enigma. It is the enigma that is the object of social phenomenology par excellence because it is opaquely social, living, thermodynamical and more beyond that which is beyond our kenning. However, this level of Wild Being has of late been the subject of much philosophy building. Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus[26] and Thousand Plateaus[27] build a philosophy at this level which they call the Rhizome. John S. Hans in the Play of the World[28] does the same. Arkady Plotnitsky in his book Complementarity[29] gives us a good view of the relation between Bohr, Bataille and Derrida with respect to this level of Being. Also, Cornelius Castoriadis[30] builds a dynamic theory of social institutions at this level where he distinguishes the Magma upon which all distinctions are projected. Thus, from a philosophical viewpoint, there are some outposts on this frontier of Wild Being. Wild Being is only an aesthetic surface and has no depth itself, so it is very difficult to think at this level of Being. But here we see, as Merleau-Ponty tells us, the chiasm between living-life and life-living. The reversal of this pair of terms has a subtly different meaning. Merleau-Ponty says that this chiasm or reversibility has the nature of touch-touching, i.e. you cannot feel from both sides at the same time. Thus, there is an interspace within the reversed dichotomy that is subtle but real. That chiasmic non-dual interference between the reversible images has the nature of Flesh according to Merleau-Ponty. Deleuze and Guattari call it the Rhizome. Cornelius Castoriadis calls it the Magma. John S. Hans calls it Play in the sense of the play between things, i.e. the allowable movement that shows us differences. Arkady Plotnitsky calls it Complementarity as defined by Bohr where there is no deep structure underlying the complementarity but merely the complementarity itself. The propensities are etched in the intaglio of the two phases of reversibility within the spacetime interval, and these propensities send us chaoticly into one dualistic basin of attraction or another.

 

In this way, we see that life will always be an enigma because it is rooted in Wild Being, i.e. the deepest level of Being in which all the dichotomies underlying dualisms resolve into the chiasm or reversibility between the opposites differences with themselves in conjunction. There is no deeper level of Being. At the fifth meta-level of Being, we reach the unthinkable which is interpreted as Existence. Beyond Wild Being the difference between life and living, individual and social, thermodynamical and physical becomes unthinkable. This unthinkability gives us an intimation of the groundlessness of Being. The culmination of Being occurs when the operator and the operand are the same. “Life autopoieticly Lives” is a view of the monolith of Being. We can express it as the “Social reflexively Socializes” or the “Thermodynamical neg-entropicly Thermodynamicizes.” This monolith of Being encompasses the verb and the noun in a single construct. But we notice that there is the difference between the noun and the verb. That difference leads us to understand Hyper Being or Differance. But ultimately the distinction between the two breaks down and we are thrown into the chaotic Wild Being where there is mixture between the life and living, social and the socialized, thermodynamical and the thermodynamicized, order and disorder, continuity and discontinuity. At the level of Wild Being, the concept of life is equivalent to the fourth meta-level of the concept, i.e. “a lively living of life as lived.”

 

 

The fifth meta-level of Being is utterly non-dual and non-nihilistic. It is what we call supra-rational. In that utter nonduality where even reversibility does not exist, the tension between living and life is finally resolved in silence or death. But that resolution occurs in a very strange way. It is impossible to think of the augmentation of “a lively living of life as lived” with another way of saying “life” that takes us to a higher level of expression. Somehow the mind freezes up when it tries to go to that fifth meta-level of Being.

 

HOLONOMIC LEVELS THAT DEFINE LIFE/LIVING

 

When we reach the level of utter nonduality in our consideration of these primary dichotomies such as life living, social socializing, thermodynamic thermodynamicizing, etc., then we must go to special systems theory in order to understand the situation as it has unfolded in Existence beyond Being. General Systems Theory concerns social gestalts, i.e. what the socializing social, living life, thermodynamicizing thermodynamic, i.e. negentropic system sees. Social phenomenology studies the phenomenon that “we are ourselves.” The dual of General Systems Theory must be a general Meta-systems Theory concerning the milieu of the system under our gaze. Meta-systems are environments, ecosystems, situations, contexts, etc. of systemic gestalts. Systems as gestalts are wholes greater than the sum of their parts. Meta-systems, on the other hand, are wholes less than the sum of their parts. Meta-systems are full of niches tailor made for the systems that appear within it and interact within it. A Meta-system is the origin and arena of the systems that comprise it. But it is like an operating system for those systems giving them resources and the processing time they need to exist. Our culture and sciences are blind to meta-systems. We see systems but not their dual, which is the meta-system. Even ecology, which is our only explicitly meta-systemic science, is bound by the ideas of systems instead of understanding the nature of the meta-systems which underlie the environment being studied[31]. The meta-system is a General Economy as described by Bataille in the Accursed Share[32] which he contrasts with the Restricted Economy of the system[33].

 

Once we realize the duality between the system and the meta-system as wholes either greater or less than the sum of the parts, then it is necessary to realize that there are systems which are wholes exactly equal to the sum of their parts, like the perfect numbers studied by Euclid. These are special and anomalous systems, and we discover they are three in number. There are several different kinds of balance of “part to whole.” They roughly correspond structurally to prefect, amicable and sociable numbers. These kinds of balance are called Dissipative after the concept of the Dissipative ordering structures of Prigogine, Autopoietic after the theory of Maturana and Varella, and Reflexive after the social theory of John O’Malley and Barry Sandywell. These three kinds of systems and their relation to the Emergent Meta-system are explained in detail by the author in his paper Refllexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory[34]. This theory shows how the utterly non-dual level of existence is articulated. Existence beyond Being is not without structure but has a very special structure that demands that we augment our General Systems Theory by the addition of other related disciplines. We must construct the inverse categorical[35] dual of the System to produce the Meta-system. Then we must realize that in the region between these categorical dualities there exists Special Systems that defy our intuitions, but have a definite mathematical form and specific phenomena that shows that they have actual existence, not just theoretical possibility. Beyond that there is the Emergent Meta-systems theory that combines the special systems together with the normal systems theory to give us a dynamic image of the Meta-system.

 

We learn from these extensions that in the process of the social gestalt unfolding out of the Meta-system of the social, there is a series of stages, first of which is the social field, which Deleuze and Guattari call the Socius. It is reflexive. Barry Sandywell described this in his Logological Investigations. The next stage is the living autopoietic system which unfolds from the social as a further holonomic differentiation of the social field. Finally, the dissipative structures which produce neg-entropy unfold from the autopoietic system as yet a further differentiation. Finally the social gestalt appears within the meta-system of the social environment. Each of these stages are partial systems and partial meta-systems. They are, in fact, what Koestler calls "Holons" because they are Janus faced looking up the hierarchy of the meta-system and down the hierarchy of the system at the same time. In this emergent unfolding and differentiation, the social environment of the various species comes first, then comes the social field of our species, then comes the differentiation of individual organisms which then differentiate into smaller structures called dissipative systems and which Deleuze and Guattari call desiring machines. It is on the basis of the entire structure of emergent differentiation that the social gestalt finally appears as the socially constructed object held in view as a system. The whole greater than the sum of the parts unfolds from the whole less than the sum of the parts through a series of stages in which the whole is exactly equal to the sum of the parts. It turns out that the difference between these five stages is, in fact, the four different kinds of Being. Thus, there is a structure to the following construction that underlies the differentiation of phenomena.

 

Kinds of Being

Emergent Systemic Levels

 

System = thermodynamic-living-social gestalt

Pure Being

 

 

Holonic Dissipative Special System = Thermodynamic

Process Being

 

 

Holonic Autopoietic Special System = Living

Hyper Being

 

 

Holonic Reflexive Special System = Social

Wild Being

 

 

Meta-system

 

Thus, the non-dual is interlaced with and embedded in the dual. It is not without structure, but merely has a kind of structure that we are not used to seeing due to the dualistic bias of our culture. In the non-dual, we see the thermodynamic, living and social distinguished by the emergent levels as they exist in the unfolding between the meta-system and the system. We find that these non-dualities appear in the interstices between the levels of Being that we considered earlier. In other words, the differences between the thermodynamic, living, and social, differentiate the various stages of consideration of the nature of each of them. The subject of our inquiry, when we consider the imaginal primal situation encountered by a living social phenomenology, structures our means of inquiring. We might expect this since we ourselves are the subject of our inquiry and thus we are structuring ourselves. In other words, if we consider the universe, including ourselves, to be dreaming the quantum mechanical probability wave with its incomprehensible superimpositions which we experience qualitatively as the imaginal realm, then that dreamtime which we called the primary or archaic situation has a peculiar structure which embodies the balance of nonduality and at the same time defines the unfolding of the imbalance of the dual through the meta-levels of Being.

 

CONCLUSION

 

This is a taste of the kinds of insight afforded us by an Ontological and Holonomic view of the difference between Life and Living. We find that life/living means something different at each level of Being. But eventually as we go beyond Being into Existence, we find our own life/living, along with our social and thermodynamic basis, structures the kinds of Being just as our inner nature structures our understanding of ourselves at the deepest level. What seems a mystery in terms of the hierarchy of Being, becomes very clear in terms of the holonomic hierarchy between the systems and the meta-system, we define our own mystery very succinctly.

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

 

Would like to thank my mentor Ian Dallas, as well as Ben Goertzel, Onar Aam, Bob Cummings and Owen Ware.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Kent Palmer is a Principle Systems Engineer at a major Aerospace Systems Company. He has a Ph.D. in Sociology concentrating on  Philosophy of Science from the London School of Economics and a B.Sc. in Sociology from the University of Kansas. His dissertation on The Structure of Theoretical Systems in Relation to Emergence[36] focused on how new things come into existence within the Western Philosophical and Scientific worldview. He has written extensively on the roots of the Western Worldview in his electronic book The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void[37]. He had at least seventeen years experience[38] in Software Engineering and Systems Engineering disciplines at major aerospace companies based in Orange County CA. He served several years as the chairman of a Software Engineering Process Group and is now engaged in Systems Engineering Process improvement based on EIA 731 and CMMI. He has presented a tutorial on “Advanced Process Architectures[39]” which concerned engineering wide process improvement including both software and systems engineering. Besides process experience, he has recently been a software team lead on a Satellite Payload project and a systems engineer on a Satellite Ground System project. He has also engaged in independent research in Systems Theory which has resulted in a book of working papers called Reflexive Autopoietic Systems Theory[40]. A new introduction to this work now exists called Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory[41]. He has given a tutorial[42] on “Meta-systems Engineering” to the INCOSE Principles working group. He has written a series on Software Engineering Foundations which are contained in the book Wild Software Meta-systems[43]. He now teaches a course in “Software Requirements and Design Methodologies” at the University California Irvine Extension. He may be reached at palmer@exo.com.

 

 

SIG: Research Toward a General Theory of Systems

 

ABSTRACT

 

PALMER, K. D.

 

NEW GENERAL SCHEMAS THEORY: SYSTEMS, HOLONS, META-SYSTEMS & WORLDS

 

Trace Studies Institute, Box 1632, Orange, CA 92856 USA E-mail: palmer@exo.com

 

The theory of Special Systems and the Emergent Meta-systems stands as a new extension of General Systems Theory. Briefly, Systems are defined as Gestalts that are wholes greater than the sum of their parts. Meta-systems are defined as environments which are wholes less than the sum of their parts. Special Systems Theory posits that there are a class of special systems that are exactly equal to the sum of their parts which has not been recognized before. Koestler called these special kinds of systems HOLONS, and we call the investigation of these specially balanced systems HOLONOMICS. We posit that there are exactly three special systems which are called Dissipative neg-entropicly ordering (Prigogine), Autopoietic (Maturana and Varela) and Reflexive (O'Malley and Sandywell) which are mathematically based on Hyper Complex Algebras. The identification of these special  systems that combine together to form an image of the environment called the Emergent Meta-system is an important development in General Systems Theory that has implications for the future development of General Systems Theory. In general, it means that there are really three kinds of theory that need to be pursued in parallel. There is General Systems Theory which needs to be augmented by a General Meta-Systems Theory which is a theory of environments, ecosystems and all other "general economies" as opposed to "restricted economies" (cf. Bataille Accursed Share). Then there is the theory of Special Systems or Holonomics which studies the rare and anomalous balanced systems where the whole is exactly the sum of its parts neither more (as in the case of systems) nor less (as is the case with meta-systems). The study of these ways of looking at things in the world is posed in terms of what is called General Schemas Theory which includes other schemas as well, for example the schema of the World which serves as a context for understanding Systems, Holons and Meta-systems. (Research Toward a General Theory of Systems. Special Integration Group.)


 

NEW GENERAL SCHEMAS THEORY:

SYSTEMS, HOLONS, META-SYSTEMS & WORLDS

 

Kent D. Palmer

 

Trace Studies Institute

Box 1632 Orange CA 92856 USA

 

SUMMARY

 

The theory of Special Systems and the Emergent Meta-systems stands as a new extension of General Systems Theory. Briefly, Systems are defined as social gestalts that are wholes greater than the sum of their parts. Meta-systems are defined as environments which are wholes less than the sum of their parts. Special Systems Theory posits that there are a class of special systems that are exactly equal to the sum of their parts which has not been recognized before. Koestler called these special kinds of systems HOLONS, and we call the investigation of these specially balanced systems HOLONOMICS. We posit that there are exactly three special systems which are called Dissipative neg-entropic ordering (Prigogine), Autopoietic (Maturana and Varela) and Reflexive (O'Malley and Sandywell) which are mathematically based on Hyper Complex Algebras. The identification of these special  systems that combine together to form an image of the environment called the Emergent Meta-system is an important development in General Systems Theory that has implications for the future development of General Systems Theory. In general, it means that there are really three kinds of theory that need to be pursued in parallel. There is General Systems Theory which needs to be augmented by a General Meta-Systems Theory which is a theory of environments, ecosystems and all other general economies as opposed to restricted economies (cf Bataille Accursed Share). Then there is the theory of Special Systems or Holonomics which studies the rare and anomalous balanced systems where the whole is exactly the sum of its parts neither more (as in the case of systems) nor less (as is the case with meta-systems). Meta-systems must be distinguished from SuperSystems which are the nesting of systems at various levels of abstraction. Meta-systems are deconstructed SuperSystems. Meta-systems tend to be invisible because they are the background on which the System gestalt is seen, i.e. they are a deeper background than the background of the figure in the gestalt. The study of these ways of looking at things in the world is posed in terms of what is called General Schemas Theory which includes other schemas as well, for example the schema of the World which serves as a context for understanding Systems, Holons and Meta-systems.

 

In other words, we need to be concerned with a wider theoretical framework than merely General Systems Theory. When we look at that wider framework, then we see that some interesting and anomalous systemic features arise that can only be seen when we compare Systems to Meta-systems. However, this broader framework is just as general as General Systems Theory yielding General Meta-systems Theory and General Special Systems Theory that both apply to many disciplines. But the important point is that the discovery of these new levels of generality force us to reconsider some of the basic assumptions of our dominant Western Philosophy of Science in such a way that makes comprehensible earlier traditional sciences and also helps us understand how a kind of science that is not alienated from the Earth may be built from the ground up on different assumptions.

 

How the objectives of  Research Toward a General Theory of Systems Special Integration Group are met:

 

Objective 1. To discover or develop a set of universal concepts and algorithms that are relevant among all the branches of science, and useful in describing all the diverse systems in nature and culture. -- Examples are: Aristotle or chaos theory.

 

Special Systems Theory and Emergent Meta-Systems Theory are founded on the mathematics of Hyper Complex Algebra and Non-orientable Surfaces in Topology that gives it a mathematical rigor to be envied by other systems theories. It is interesting that these kinds of Algebra which have been known from about 1850 have not found much use within physics or other sciences. It is precisely these forms of mathematics that describe the relation between elements within the special systems and within the Emergent Meta-system.

 

 Objective 2. To give a rigorous definition to these notions in the physical sciences to start with; to add conceptual expansions to concepts and algorithms where necessary or appropriate in order to cover the emerging properties of more complex systems; to apply these expanded concepts systematically in the varieties of complex sciences such as cybernetics, biology, sociology and ecology.

 

The hierarchy from System through the Special Systems to the Meta-system is a series of emergent stages, each with its particular properties that arise on the basis of the lower levels but contributes specific emergent new properties at each level. In the case of this systems theory, these new properties are described as the properties lost when we move from one algebra to another. Because these properties and the subsequent systems that occur when the properties are lost are mathematically defined, they are very rigorous. The algebraic model gives you a combination of additiveness and emergence together which is characteristic of holonomic systems in general.

 

Objective 3. To test the validity of the unified scientific theories; to demonstrate and to verify their predictive power by practical examples in each of the branches of science; to otherwise establish criteria under which the behaviors of observed and inferred systems can be reasonably evaluated.

 

Besides the mathematical definition of the various special systems and the Emergent Meta-system, there are also a series of physical examples of these rare and anomalous systems that occur in nature which have the same structural configuration predicted by the mathematical model. Special Systems are always anomalous and rare, but the physical examples show that they do indeed exist in the realm of physics, and they probably also exist in other disciplines as well as yet unrecognized[44].

 

Keywords Life Ontology, Holonomics, Holon, Meta-System, Special System, World

 

GENERAL SCHEMAS THEORY

 

Instead of talking about General Systems Theory as the rubric under which we might subsume other sister disciplines, let us talk about a General Schemas Theory which subsumes all the various ways we understand the myriad phenomena studied by different disciplines. In this paper, we will consider several other potential sister disciplines to General Systems Theory and their interrelations. The first of these is the General Theory of Meta-systems which is still nascent. By meta-systems here is meant ecosystems, environments, ecologies, contexts or milieus of Systems. The second of these is the General Theory of Holons which was inaugurated by Koestler in his book Janus[45]. A holon is something which is both a part and a whole at the same time. Here we will consider a variant of General Meta-systems Theory which sees Meta-systems as composed of Holons and Systems which will be called Emergent Meta-systems Theory. It is called “Emergent” because in it we study how Meta-systems arise as an schema with its own characteristics out of the combination of holons and systems. The three General Theoretical disciplines concerning these schemas: systems, holons and meta-systems form an unexpected and fascinating combination that has unprecedented explanatory power. Together they open up a new horizon of research by supplying a new way of looking at phenomena which may be applied to various disciplines. A theory is a conceptual view of phenomena. We are seeking general views that may be applied across disciplines, i.e. General Theories, giving unity to the enterprise of science. Our views of phenomena may be reduced to schemas such as System, Form, and Pattern which, along with others, give a basis for understanding phenomena by providing a template, or a set of analogies, which illuminate the relation between the various aspects of the phenomena under study. Here we propose two other schemas which, like that of the “system,” are slowly gaining favor among scientists as ways of looking at things. What will be explored in this paper is the interrelations that are emerging from the study of the relations between the schemas themselves. The cutting edge of scientific theory development is the exploration of how we might combine various schemas or foundational theoretical views into composites that offer the possibility of applying these various views in concert to better understand the phenomena under study. The most successful of these which is the basis of most Western scientific theorizing is the combination of the Formal Structural Systems which is exemplified by the work of George Klir[46] that combines the schemas of Form, Pattern and System into a single theoretical edifice. In this essay we will construct and explore another interesting combination of schemas, i.e. system, holon and meta-system, which gives us an unprecedented and powerful explanatory perspective on phenomena that has baffled Western science since its inception. Many times it is the limitations of our conceptual tools which causes us to misrepresent and misunderstand phenomena. When we take the chance on a new paradigm, sometimes we are rewarded with new insights that could not be apprehended through the old paradigm. One way to understand paradigms is in terms of combinations of schemas of understandings and fundamental assumptions that underlie our theorizing in a specific discipline. What is offered here is a new combination of conceptual schemas which might be combined with theoretical assumptions to produce new paradigms for specific disciplines. Because our focus is on General Schemas Theory and not on particular disciplines, the assumptions that would be necessary to produce a paradigm for a field of study will not be generated. Rather, we will concentrate on the interrelation between these various schemas and what we might learn from them that might be fruitfully applied at a more specific level of theorizing in a particular field to give cogent results.

 

THE SYSTEM SCHEMA: Gestalts and Flow Duality

 

We will characterize the “system” schema here in terms of a social gestalt. In other words, we will not enter into the debate as to whether systems are “out there” in the world, but instead will say that a system is something projected by a social group as a social construction or invention. This obviates the problem of whether we are imposing or discovering system schemas in relation to phenomena. The system schema gets its objective nature from the fact that it is a “social” construction or invention which is projected in concert by a group of people. This is a matter of perceptual pre-synthesis on the part of the group and can be studied by a social phenomenology[47] which is attuned to looking at the social gestalts produced by various groups including scientists.

 

What the social gestalt gives us is a basis for thinking about the system which sees it as a projected schema and not as something necessarily inherent in existence. The projection of this schema in a way that cuts through the joints of phenomena as Plato has advised us is a skill to be developed and which has been perfected over the centuries by science. At one time, all of science was concentrated on Forms which derived from geometry and algebra and their combination discovered by Descartes. It has taken a long time to establish that Systems are different from Forms and just as useful in their own right as ways  of comprehending relations among Forms. Forms are the Figures that appear on the backgrounds of the systemic gestalts. We talk about systems as sets of entities and their static or dynamic interrelations. We see those entities as figures on the background of all the other entities within the system. We bring out each entity one at a time to stand out on that background, and the entire system is the set of all possible foregrounding of entities on the background of the possible focal entities within a system. It takes time to go through and enumerate the entities in a system. It takes time to bring these figures into juxtaposition in order to understand their separate interrelations which, woven together, make up the web of systemic relationships. Thus, we may view a system synchronically as all the entities and their relations at one point in time, or diachronically as the evolution of the system as the entities change and their interrelations transform over time.

 

We must first realize that a system is really a social gestalt. That is a series of entity figures on the background of the entire system within a specified boundary. And we realize that their interrelations as projected by some social group so that any one individual’s perceptual or conceptual gestalt of the object is a reduction to a single perspective projection of the group's multiple perspective projection. [We must recognize, along with Husserl[48] and Gurwitsch[49], that gestalt is always both perceptual (Husserl’s noema) and conceptual (Husserl’s noesis) but may emphasize one or the other in any particular instance.] Then we may ask ourselves what is the dual of the Gestalt way of looking at things. After years of missing this essential point, I realized that the dual of the gestalt schema is the flow schema. In a gestalt there is a figure on a background. If we take the figure and submerge it so that the background becomes the foreground, then it becomes a reference point on the basis of which we can get some idea of the flow of the foreground. A rock which sticks up from a stream is a gestalt figure to us on the background of the flowing stream. But submerge that rock slightly into the stream and it becomes quickly a reference point for our judging the swiftness and the patterning of the flowing waters above it. Thus, it is necessary to consider social flows as the duals of social gestalts and understand that flows and gestalts are almost always seen together, where one is emphasized or the other in each particular instance of perceptual or conceptual comprehension based on the system schema. Thus, when we look at a system diachronically, we are concerned mostly with flows, while when we look at it synchronically, we are concerned mostly with the various gestalts by which we pick out the entities and their interrelations.

 

Another important point about the systems schema is that these gestalts, as has been long recognized, are wholes greater than the sum of their parts, i.e. the whole has emergent properties that go beyond the properties of their entities and interrelations between entities. Part of that overflowing is seen in terms of the dynamic flows within the system, yet even the flows interact with each other to produce characteristics that cannot be captured by analysis. A gestalt or a flow is a pre-synthesis, what Kant calls an a priori, i.e. a projection prior to experience on the basis of which we perceive and conceive phenomena. That pre-synthesis has characteristics that are supervenient, i.e. emergent, which go beyond what can be discovered by reductionism and analysis. Those emergent or supervenient properties must be understood in terms of dialectics, trilectics, quadralectics[50] or some other scheme which allows for the superabundance of characteristics in the system over and above the forms and their interrelations which make it up. This emergent characteristic of the system, i.e. that it is a whole greater than the sum of its parts, has always been the keystone of the identification of gestalts over and above what formalisms can describe and explain.

 

The Formal Structural System is a combination of three levels of schema that is endemic within our scientific way of approaching things because it has been so successful in helping us to understand nature. Formalisms give the possibility of proofs which is particularly reassuring to our rational intellects, and we wish all things we studied lent themselves to proof. However, we have discovered in the development of science that the advances we have made in mathematics are harder to win in physics and other disciplines that attempt to understand nature. We use our formalisms, both in logic and mathematics, as a means of connecting Theory (logos) and the phenomenon of nature (physus). But many times we cannot prove in a determinate manner things we would like to about the phenomena we study in a particular discipline so we resort to explanations that are probabilistic. These explanations are usually based on the transformations of content as we move across discontinuities that present themselves in the phenomena. Thus, we create a level of understanding that deals directly with content of the forms which produces a new schema of understanding called a pattern[51]. Patterns may be seen in terms of time or space and thus can be either structural or process oriented. Structural Patterns explain transformative changes across discontinuities in space while Process Patterns explain transformative changes across discontinuities in time. In software engineering, when we take an Object Oriented Approach to design, we combine these by encapsulating structures within the wrapper of an object and providing operations to transform these structures which no other outside object can perform. The General Systems Theory of George Klir in Architecture of Systems Problem Solving is an example of a Formal Structural-Process Systems Theory which combines both ways of thinking about patterns in a single edifice. He does this through his hierarchy of epistemological levels which splits into meta-models (processes) and meta-structures. These pattern generating models prove very powerful ways of explaining phenomena that change discontinuously across time and space. They appeal to the changes in pattern generators that operate on the content of the forms as the basis of understanding alterations in phenomena that formalisms cannot comprehend. When this level of explanation is combined with the Formal level that offers a stronger basis of comprehension, i.e. proof, then we are able to explain many things in a cogent manner that would otherwise remain baffling. However, this does not allow us to comprehend all aspects of the phenomena and so it is necessary in those cases where we cannot explain to merely describe what we find in nature. When we describe things, our tendency now is to use the schema of the system as a basis for comprehending the interrelated entities which we observe. Our observations are of conceptual and perceptual gestalts and flows that cohere into the system schema that we project by pre-synthesis to encompass the phenomena under study. Thus, the Formal Patterned System is a series of fall back strategies for comprehending phenomena in general that combines in a powerful way three distinct schemas, each based on a separate analogy. Form is based on the analogy of shape or the outlines of things that we see in terms of the mathematics of algebra and geometry on the one hand and logic on the other. Pattern is based on the analogy of the warp and weft of fabric that we see in terms of processes as discontinuities in time and structures as discontinuities in space. System is based on the analogy organisms that we see in terms of gestalts and flows.

 

We should pay attention to Wittgenstein[52] when he talks of language games. Both languages and games are systemic phenomena par excellence. It is through them that we can understand systems in nature because these are two ways that the systemic schema manifests itself within society, and this allows us to understand what systems are through our own intimate experience of systems in this form as social beings. Social Phenomenology discovers that we are already language speakers who learn these skills as children when we are also learning to play. So the system schema which starts with the analogy of organisms as pointed out by Rescher in Cognitive Systemization[53] is augmented in other powerful socially based analogies based on our inherent understanding of games and language which comes to us out of our social experience. Form and Pattern which we see in nature also have these social expressions. Form has two aspects: Shape and Behavior. These are seen in dance and theater and other social arts as well as in rituals where costume and special actions are performed in some institutional social context. Pattern shows up mostly in terms of handicraft such as the weaving of the cloth for the costumes that the dancers and participants in the rituals wear. Pattern shows up in the embellishment of the architectural forms that hold the performance. Pattern is decorative of the forms which participate in the play of the performance. Thus, there are social roots for all these schema by which we attempt to understand nature through the reified theoretical structure of the Formal Patterned System.

 

 

THE META-SYSTEM SCHEMA

 

From the familiar territory of the schemas of System, Form and Pattern we now move to a new schema that is gaining in popularity but has not yet become established except in the discipline of environmental studies and ecology. This is the meta-systemic schema which has not yet received a general name of its own. If I were to name this schema, I would call it an “Archon” after the Archons who oversaw the city in Greece. An Archon was a magistrate in the historical setting of Athens after the establishment of democracy. The Archon had some functional purview over the whole city which was split out from that assumed previously by the king. The city is the perfect analogy of the meta-system in that it is an environment in which households flourish and interact. The Archons are the ones who oversee the functioning of the household environment and, for instance, regulate the markets or oversee preparation for war with other cities or administrate justice. The functions of the archon are hidden in and subsumed by the king, but when the king is deposed as in the fledgling democracy of Athens, then these functions have to be taken over and performed by others who must coordinate their efforts. The Archon is the symbol of the deconstruction of the unity of kingship and, thus, specifically points to the environmental aspects of the city as a place for households to develop and interact which would otherwise be hidden by the unification of kingship. The meta-system has a similar relation to the super-system. A super-system is a system made up of sub-systems which are, in turn, made up of sub-sub-systems to some degree of hierarchical nesting. Each level is seen again as a gestalt/flow whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. However, we do not often look at the dual of the super-system which I have dubbed the meta-system, i.e. the deconstructed whole which is less than the sum of its parts. That whole is the environment itself as the origin and arena of systems at some level of abstraction. It is different from a system itself because it operates as an “operating system” supporting the systems that it contains. Thus, we only see the meta-system when we deconstruct the super-system (king) and see instead the intervening intermediate level of organization within the super-system that acts as an environment for encapsulated sub-systems. The analogy of the meta-system to the system is like the relation between the universal turing machine to the turing machine. It is like the computer operating system to the application that operates within that operating system. The meta-system is broken up into archonic functions which give resources to and regulate the systems that are allowed in its environment. The environment in this sense acts as a filter because only certain systems can operate within a specific meta-system. The meta-system is inherently disunified and thus the archonic functions within it are generally orthogonal although they have to cooperate in order to produce an environment which facilitates the growth and development of the kind of systems that are allowed in its niches.

 

Meta-systems are inherently complementary in their organizations rather than unified. They are totalizing rather than unified in that they contain the totality of complementary opposites that provide the necessary archonic operational resources and regulation of the systems. Sartre, in The Critique of Dialectical Reason[54] calls the meta-system a detotalized totality because it is never a static totality but a dynamic totalization by which the various orthogonal archons cooperate through shared complementarities to produce an optimal environment for unified systems and anti-systems that appear within it and are enveloped by it. The meta-systemic environment is composed of niches, which are holes, which make it less than the sum if its parts. These holes are exactly fitted to the kind of systems that the filter of the meta-system allows. Within the meta-systemic environment, systems within their niches are created, given resources of various kinds, and are eventually destroyed such that their constituent elements are recycled back through the meta-system to produce other systems. All interactions that a system has with its meta-systems are through complementary opposites. Thus, the attributes of the meta-system is always pairs of complementarities as seen from the point of view of the systems within it. These complementarities can be deeply nested as complementarities of complementarities of complementarities much like the nesting of the sub and sub-sub systems within the super-system. When super-systems are taken apart, they appear as meta-systems. One may think of the meta-system as a field of tendencies which dictates the order of assembly of the super-system out of the sub-systems that appear within meta-systemic milieu hidden within the super-system. For this reason, when we think about design landscapes, we are necessarily talking about meta-systemic fields.

 

Culturally we have difficulty thinking about meta-systems. Today we generally reduce them to systems, or nested super-system complexes, which suppress their extremely different characteristics that are, in fact, the dual of those characteristics of systems. Systems are unified and meta-systems are detotalized totalities. Systems have their dual within the meta-system where we see anti-systems emerge, but where meta-systems are nested complemetarities, systems are made up of singular parts or functions. Systems only develop complementarities in relation to and by their adaptation to their meta-systemic environment. We use the term “meta-system” because if we take the system through its series of higher logical types,[55] we find that the meta-system is related to its rules, like the rules of a game or the grammar of language. The rules are the constraints that the meta-system places on the system while it is in its environment. The next higher meta-level of the system is the properties of the pieces in the game or the properties of the markers in language like the phonemes which are allowed within the meta-systemic environment. The next higher meta-level of the system is the constraints on the system and exceptions to the rules which determines the freedom and determinism under which the system is operating. Each of these meta-levels of the system refer to the relation of the system to the meta-system. Here the term “meta” refers to all the meta-levels of the system operating on it at once. But each schema should have its own name other than by reference to another level of organization of phenomena. That is why we have suggested the term Archon which is related to the term that Jung uses for structures in the collective unconscious which he calls “complexes” or “archetypes.” The term complex and the term archetype are suitable for use when describing meta-systems because Jung attempted to describe the Totality of Consciousness which he called the Self which was composed of the system of the Ego and the anti-system of the Shadow and various archtetypes, which were higher level nested complementary formations that intervened between the level of the unity of the Ego and the totality of the Self that included both the conscious and unconscious in one whole. We can see the Self as super-system, as Nietzsche did when he posited the uberman as the impending fated arrival of what was other than human within humanity (but which never actually arrives), or we can consider consciousness as a field full of complementary complexes in which various numinous loci like that of the ego interact beyond the filter of consciousness. This model is similar to that of the region full of communities (city states) which are again full of neighborhoods which contain households which are based on marriage. All of these are meta-systemic levels of organization within society. Our culture has difficulty recognizing and dealing with these amorphous types of human organization which are rooted in the meta-systemic "field" view of nested environments. Our stewardship of these aspects of our own society is very poor; because they are amorphous, they receive little attention and are easily destroyed by highly organized systemic institutions. Meta-systemic institutions are social archetypes. You notice that each of the archetypes that Jung points out like the Anima, Animus, Wise Old Man, Cathonic Female[56], etc. are symbolic internalizations of some aspect of society, some type of person or some type of relationship between different types of people in society. That is why he calls it the collective unconscious. But it is the dual of the outward amorphous relations which appear as standing wave patterns in the meta-systemic field of society such as region, community, neighborhood, family, marriage which mediate between the abstract organized and systemic institutions of society and the individuals within it.

 

Meta-systems exist as nested complementarities. The first level complenetarity with respect to the system is that the meta-systemic field is the origin and arena within which the system arises and interacts with other systems including anti-systems, i.e. complementarity images of itself. An example of system and anti-system pairing in society is the gender distinction. In fact, this is probably the most basic complementarity within our society, and it is rooted in nature based on the distinction between male and female that we discover in ourselves. However, gender ascriptions are not directly tied to these natural and physical markers but instead form a field of signifiers within society. But the next level of meta-systemic nesting of complenetarities is that of the meta2-system which includes the conjunction of origin and arena with source and boundary. The arena is bounded, and whatever has an origin within the system must also have a source. The origin is the spacetime point of entry into the meta-systemic field. The source is the endless-timespace template from which the system is patterned. In software, there is a distinction between an object and its instance. The object as a template for data structuring, and behavior is the source while the concrete instance of that object as it enters the system given memory and CPU[57] cycles and initialized with specific default values in variables is the origin. In the meta2-system, we see that the meta-system establishes the limits of its control and filtering via the boundary, and what it establishes is a priori patterning of the systems that are allowed to emerge within it, while once they appear at a specific origin, then they develop through their interaction with other systems until they are terminated by themselves, other systems or the meta-system. The meta-system is infinitely nested through a series of metan-system levels of environmental articulation. This is another sense of “meta” than that used when we considered the various higher logical types of the system. That series only has three levels. This sense of meta is the higher and higher level complementarities as the meta-system expands to embrace wider and wider environments which is the dual of the nesting of systems within systems of super-systems. At each level of nesting of meta-systems, there is a new conceptual level of complentarity that arises.

 

For instance, Origin / Arena // Source / Boundary has a dual which is Generator /Encompassing Regress // Root Singularity / Subspace Regress at the meta3-system level. The generator is what takes the source template from the endless realm outside of timespace and produces a system at a particular origin within the spacetime boundary of the meta-systemic field. The encompassing regress is the series of encompassing fields beyond the boundary of the meta-system. The subspace regress is the series of differentiations of the sources which recede infinitely differentiating in the progressive bisection of Pascal’s triangle. This regress of sources, which is based on the Cayley-Dickson algorithm[58] for the production of Hyper Complex Algebras, produces negative dimensionality[59] which is the opposite of the positive dimensionality of the encompassing regress. The root singularity is like the origin in spacetime and the source in the subspace only at the next level deeper. It is the meta-source of the sources in the subspace. The root singularity is the nexus of actualization of the sources. In software engineering terms, if the sources are the object templates that are the basis of instantiation of actual instances of those object templates in the spacetime of memory and CPU cycles within the computer, then this singularity would be the root object from which all the templates are built, i.e. the meta-template. It is singular and unique as the root of all objects that are produced through inheritance from it. This differentiation of the meta-systems is infinite following the form of Pascal’s triangle down into an infinite regress of subspaces giving us more and more possible complex environmental formations based on complementary duals. The next level has sixteen elements and is not completely understood as yet.

 

If we want a concrete example of this differentiation of the meta-systems into the various levels of encompassing, we can think of a highway. Each lane is an arena for traffic flowing in a specific direction. We produce a conjunction of the two lanes to create a roadway because it is more efficient to have the traffic adjacent than travel different paths. We can see that each lane has its sources (on ramps) and sinks (off ramps) as well as the boundary of the verge of the roadway. The lanes are the arena in which the systems of the cars operate, and each car has a particular origin and destination as it moves through the roadway meta-system. When we go up to the next level, we have to consider the sources of the cars which are automobile sales companies and the fuel sources, which are gas stations. The generators of the automobiles are the factories that create them. The end of the production line is the ultimate point of origin for the automobile which then goes to showrooms. The showrooms are the purchasing source or place for the general public to buy the automobiles. The encompassing regress can be seen in the fact that the automobile transportation system is only one of many different kinds of transportation that are knit together to give us the ability to move from place to place on the planet. The subspace regress shows up when we consider that all those other modes of transportation have their own gen