Systems Theory as Lingua Franca Ch. 1

This initial essay in Opening Fields of Contact begins with a chapter that justifies an interest in Systems Theory from a first principles grounding of reality as constituting of systems.

Chapter 1

1. The first fact is this: there is being, not a void. Anything that exists, or anything we can say about it, comes after this primal fact of undifferentiated isness. This must be the beginning of Systems Theory.

2. The second fact is that there is difference. The heterogeneity of what exists is not a contradiction to its unity. The first fact remains true and simple; the second does not amend it. Colors differ, yet all are wavelengths of light. There are states of matter, yet they are all states of the same substance. There are many words, but all are equally arrangements of language. Similarly, particular instances of existence are bound and unified by being arrangements of being itself, you can't get beyond that. And yet, there are things. Things are discrete entities which populate a space of being, because a thing implies at least two: the entity with its boundaries, and that which lies beyond, the space in which it exists. Space is context, space is the room in which a thing can be. So once again, the second fact is that discrete things populate the space of being.

3. The third fact is that things are not static, solitary entities; they relate to one another. Relationship involves at least three: two things, plus the connecting relation itself, often purely informational, yet observably manifest. So we have (1) the unified being that is, (2) a thing in the space of being, and (3) the relationship between things. This is what begins to demand systems theory, but only partially.

4. Random interactions alone cannot give rise to systems. Pattern is the ground for emergence. Without cohesion across things — without shared meaning in what relationship implies about behavior and identity — there would be only the most basic elements knocking about in chaos, or worse, a non-relation indistinguishable from void. But we do not live in such chaos; we live in a patterned world. Once there is a space where things relate in emergent unity, those elements and relationships can coalesce into systems. A system is now an entity we can observe as having its own identity and its own relationship to other things and systems.

5. So far, everything has been uncontentious. Now I introduce new terminology. Things, elements — these are nodes. Nodality is a more robust individuality: the quality by which something defines its inside and outside, self and other. Nodality recognizes that things are embedded in systems, bound up with being itself. Nodality is always relational, but once manifest, its identity is ontologically real: it is as much a manifestation of being in itself as it is in contrast to what lies beyond it. A system is an entity composed of nodes and relationships, existing within the space of being, defined by its boundaries, and capable of relating as a whole to other things and systems.

6. A system is never bare: flesh is always constituted of an interface to the world. This interfacial layer is the site where the system’s inside and outside meet through a medium that shapes what may pass. Mediation is the universal condition of relation between systems. The interface can, to give some examples: filter, translate, refract, or obstruct; it can extend the system’s reach or defend it from intrusion. All contact is thus patterned by the logic of the medium itself. The medium is not a passive membrane: it actively participates in the shaping of exchange, conditioning what the system can take in and what it can express. In this sense, mediation is both constraint and possibility, preserving the system’s identity while enabling it to participate in larger flows of relation. Without mediation, inside and outside would collapse into one another, and the system would dissolve into undifferentiated being. The precondition for relationship is clarified boundaries of identity.

7. Nodes, Relationships, Systems - those are all nouns. Nouns are static, Behavior is a verb. Systems behave along the axis of time. The flesh of systems do two things: receive inflow from the world, often through other entities with whom the system has a relationship, and outflows. All behavior is an aspect of outflow. Inflow might be water in a tub, outflow might be water down the drain, or inflow might be sense perception of food, and outflow might be energy expended in pursuit behavior. One must look for pattern equally in noun structure as in verb history.

8. A system’s behavior is not mere motion but decision. Decision is the assertion of one path over all others, collapsing the cloud of possible futures into a single actuality. Each decision sets constraints for what follows, warping the space in which all subsequent behavior unfolds. Inflow opens and shapes the possibility space; outflow is the realized choice. Yet the decisions of a system do not always follow deterministically from the inflow. Inflow gestures toward decision, but in many systems, a new matrix for choice — more than the sum of the nodes and carrying irreducible novelty — turns inflow into outflow that reshapes the world around it in ways a complete history of inflow could never have foretold. There may be pattern here, there must be pattern here, but not determinism. Decision is always already the condition of behavior, forcing significance into behavior at any level. Decision marks both the selfhood of the system and the openness of the world.

9. Narrative is the story — the meaningful integration of time. Narrative is an even more informational rather than concrete thing than relationship because cannot impose itself on the systems it contains; it can only be written by their actions over time, often without their awareness. Its causal force is in inherited constraint: narrative shapes the field of future possibility by carrying forward the structure of the past. Yet it is real, for it is the form in which the past is integrated into the present and meaning endures.

10. In any system, we can observe a polarity: life and death. These are broad themes, encompassing many characteristics, but they recur wherever systems appear. To identify something as a system is, in effect, to say it is alive. Here “alive” is not borrowed from biology but named at its highest abstraction: the assertion of patterned coherence over chaos, of which organisms are one local instance. Sand on a beach is not a system; the grains are merely in proximity, with no relationship. When the cells of an animal interrelate to form an organism, taking in resources and acting toward self-directed goals, we observe life. When that animal dies, the central coordination is lost, subsystems for resource transfer and information exchange break down, and its parts disintegrate — system death. Stepping to a higher frame, the universe itself is alive by the same unifying metrics — pattern, relation, and persistence — that identify life anywhere, and life on Earth surpasses the inert mechanics of galaxies in the density and complexity of its structure.

11. With systems theory, the question “Why does this work?” becomes “What does the system want, and how does that shape its relationships and the nodes it contains?” To ask what a system “wants” is not to anthropomorphize it, but to recognize the central component of a nodal identity: telos — the coherent aim implied by its structure, feedback, and boundaries. Desire is the engine of life and the energy of telos; it is the organizing drive that bends relationships and flows toward the system’s continuance or expression. We can ask what health means for a system, and what patterns mark its unsustainability. We can identify universal principles of construction that apply across disciplines, allowing analogies and solutions to move between domains once thought unrelated. This unifies our vantage: art, philosophy, geology, unemployment, Jane Austen, and pizza now exist within one world.

12. Power is the capacity of a system to realize its desire within the constraints of its environment. It is not dominance in the human political sense, but the abstract measure of a system’s ability to shape flows, maintain its boundaries, and exert its will upon its space and itself in service of its desire. A system’s power can extend its influence across scales or be contained by larger structures. It is neither inherently good nor bad; it is the degree to which a system can make the world accommodate its persistence or expression.

13. Systems relate to other systems. They exist nested across scales, each a node within larger systems and composed of smaller ones. Their boundaries are semi-permeable, allowing flows of energy, matter, and information to pass selectively. These flows, once constrained, shape the system’s structure; that structure in turn shapes the flows. When systems interact, they can warp each other’s topology — altering boundaries, redirecting flows, changing what nodes and relationships are possible. Across scales, emergence flows upward and constraints press downward, so that each system’s identity is both the product of its own coherence and the field of other systems in which it lives.

14. Among the systems that originated on Earth are biological systems, and within these, human systems. Human systems are the most complex of these because human nodality is distinguished by a reflexive, symbol-mediated consciousness. The human experience of the world is the realm of the Adjective. In systems terms, the Adjective is the moment when nouns and verbs are disclosed to human nodality as quality-bearing — possessed of deep value, mood, and significance.

15. Consciousness maps value onto the world. Contextual states (being hungry, ugly, the Prime Minister or all three) filter perception so that all objects are organized by the current value-structure. We live in these spaces, and they determine what in the world is seen. We live in a world, and that space defines meaning.

16. Human consciousness prehends the entire world contained in continuously growing memory and builds a construction of what the world is beyond those memories. Each specific moment in spacetime is only a manifestation of that larger world. The moment is both transcended by the world and the point at which it is made present. The inner world evolves in symbiosis with new experience, and a shift in that inner world redefines the meaning of the moment. That a table is solid reinforces assumptions about tables; to sit at that table and realise E = mc² is to be displaced into a new world where that same table hums with energy. Locomotion in worldbuilding is bidirectional: the world moves the moment, and the moment moves the world.

17. Human worldbuilding takes the form of narrative. The inner world is shaped by the inheritance of past experience, which orders perception, value, and history into a coherent whole that transcends locality in time-space. The unifying space in which this ordering takes place is the narrative field. Narrative shapes meaning and action by integrating each moment into the larger story in which we live: we live in the space of narrative.

18. Philosophy is an example of a human system with the classic inflow and outflow. Its inflow is the world it prehends; its outflow is the ordered structure built from those prehensions. It digests, gestates, and births experience, assembling nodes and relationships into an inner world. As the search for truth, philosophy moves this constructed world toward greater coherence with the true world, in whatever dimension it values most. Science is its most organized form, but from physics to continental speculation, the root is one: migration toward a worldspace more coherent and more alive than the one we thought we lived in.

19. Philosophy is always situated within the person. It cannot be separated from the conditions into which a person is born, the world already present before their first thought. Every philosophy is shaped by the vantage from which it is lived, and every act of thought is bound to the lived world of the thinker. While philosophy attempts to construct the world beyond the particulars of the given subset of sense experience available, there is a boundary on what the experienced world gestures towards about the world at large. Philosophy is not a view from nowhere; it is a system nested within the person’s own life, drawing from the flows, boundaries, and narratives of their life.

20. The great feature of the species-wide pursuit of truth is the collaboration of all our vantages throughout history in the symbolic communication afforded to us by our relationship to the world. As such, a conversation refining a certain worldview can persist for generations, living within the lineage of people who make a point of prehending a certain genealogy of thought and picking up where the last group left off. Systems theory is the result of prehending vastly divergent worlds in the multiverse of human thought, and committing to the implications of recognizing their common boundary of existing in the same universe, their common attempt to migrate towards a deeper experience of the same place. The commonality of destination, the greatness of the common denominator of experience as weighed against the distinctions, imply a commonality of structure at root. This is of course built from our first fact. And yet a true systems theory must break open wide the affordance for utterly individual human worlds and experiences, and the motivation towards a personal world that can coexist complementarily in the cottage industry of the human multiverse. This is of course built from our second fact. As above stated, clear boundaries of identity is what makes intimacy and relationship possible. Once we fully feel what it’s like to be us and in our world, consider how the beauty of living compounds exponentially when our eyes open to the kaleidoscopic novelty of life as experienced by the other! This is of course our third fact.