I n t e r n a t i o n a l   S o c i e t y   f o r   t h e   S y s t e m s   S c i e n c e s

     ISSS-ATLANTA       July 19-24, 1998 

  

INTEGRITY PARADIGM
A SYSTEMS PROCESS AND PHILOSOPHY

Ceptual Institute

Abstract

Compatibility, coherence and consistency shine through all diversity, complexity and variety of existential forms and systems - whether physics, chemistry, biology, conglomerate organization (familial, social, economic, political, spiritual, etc) or cosmos. Existential companionship relies on them and cannot endure without them. To date, no clear single overview exists which can accommodate those characteristics and all the diverse mechanisms and behaviors of integrated plural-level systems. Advances have been made in many areas such as fractal Complexity, the Austrian school of economics, and even AI/Consciousness studies, but even they are not umbrella frameworks.

The Integrity Paradigm is presented as a possible philosophy (or metaphilosophy) -- a general systems percept -- that can embrace this broad diversity, and cope with interlevel behaviors regardless of specific mechanisms. The Integrity Paradigm proposes a template -- open to a variety of translations -- through which we may understand the general dynamics of systems "behavior space" in the universe, and by which we may endure, advance and evolve.

Keywords Integrity Paradigm, entropy, complexity, philosophy, metaview

1. Existence as Process

The Universe is not a thing. It is an event, expressed in the streaming of Time and processing in waves, pulses and montages, infinities upon infinities of information, energy, relationships, qualities, entities and "being" in all manner, shapes, sizes, forms and functions. It is awe filling for fortunate sentiences as we human beings, to experience the extent of the other parts of us. For that is the relationship involved here, in case you were unsure. All the dynamics, all the dimensionality, all the systems, all that is is "us". This is not metaphor, this is fact. Extancy as we know of it is an organism of such regal proportions of self-relatedness, enacting and exploring its own self-ness and capacities of action -- systems expressions, if you will -- that only now can we correctly interpret the telling choice phrase that has survived generational transmissions, for its clear direct truth: we are "as a mote in God’s eye". No, that doesn’t mean we are insignificant spots virtually irrelevant in time and space, therefore requiring abject humbleness in the face of Immensity. No, not that at all. It means that our conscious sentience is part of the enaction of systemic-dynamics, of the universe’s ability to observe and comprehend itself. Being part of such vastness, "mote in God’s eye" is not what or where we are, but how we function-as in the universe’s exploration of itself as process and potential...as System.

"Process". The underpinning aspect of which is time. We cannot get a handle on dynamics and systems behaviors unless we have a requisite comprehension of what time might be, the relationships it allows and enacts, and the myriad expressions it exhibits in the formation of events, complexity and the continued elaboration of Creation ... systems being systems, and systems begetting systems. The Integrity Paradigm is a theme and an organization of concepts that takes Time apart, proposing a structure that's both real as well as virtual, which is to say, mathematical, and re-visits these dynamic relationships within the contexts of everything we experience. In other words, it rests on the assumption that just as a person can be child, parent, teacher, learner, provider, desirer, citizen, acceptor, expresser, listener, watcher, talker, thinker, artist and more and more and more all at the same time, each of us also has the capacity to view, recognize, comprehend and sensately experience all these views and perceptive options nearly instantaneously and simultaneously. With all the embellishments that go along with each of them. And underscoring all that variability ... which is only the tip of the iceberg when we consider all the diversity of life-forms, cultures, environments, worlds, celestial firmaments and sublime subtleties ... is the recognition that there is a mutuality of presence and function which all of this shares - in order to co-exist at all!

2. Recognizing the Fundamental Systems Mechanism

We begin quite simply with some observations and deductions. First, the entire complex organization of existence is contrivable from just a few basic dynamic forces. The domain of somatic biology/botany and more is composed of the precursor forms - and functions - of chemistry and physics. Whatever relational mechanisms are present at the simplest levels must drive the entire system. To the best of our understanding, that would include the 4 fundamental forces, plus the dissipative gradient differential called entropy... a behavioral quality which when first recognized some several hundred years ago formed the basis for the industrial revolution. Any alternative from that ontogeny would be to anarchically allow the possibility of unpredictable yet pervasive arising of different negentropic complexity accumulating dynamics which shows up quite randomly in the implementation of new levels of competent organizations. Now, that’s possible, but quite messy.

The next observation is that apparently nature accomplishes with blended ease of integration, things which humans must expend inordinate amounts of energy trying to duplicate. In 1965 I had the good fortune of visiting the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, a guest of family friend Milt Rothman. Massive amounts of financial and electromagnetic resources were brought to bear there to "bottle" and so examine plasma a raw soup of a few protons and neutrons - the essential components of the part of an atom that we know as its "nucleus". It occurred to me that day that all the effort and energy was duplicating what nature does all the time everywhere with just a few electrons! So the composition of atoms must by default be some elegant balancing of process qualities ..."stable states"... special but not so unreachable as to always require vast external inputs of energy to achieve.

Now take a moment to comprehend your relationship with the information I just related to you.   In simple every day vocabulary I described the relationships that underscore the organization of atoms, the substances we are made of.  And regardless or your education or specialty, you have a working conceptual image of the behavioral processes - the systems dynamics - involved.   It doesn’t require a doctorate in physics to look at dynamic events and comprehend valid attributes about those processes. I’m as in awe and respect of the intricacies and model- ing accuracy of higher mathematics as you all are, but I balance this by recognizing that whether the language used is mathematics or English or Tibetan these are all translations which retain essential information (and thus descriptive "validity of correspondence") even when we use diverse notations in expressing those relationships - and so, make them comprehensible in the many ways we have available of dealing with events and knowledge.

Let me re-phrase this for clarity’s sake. The net implication of science’s holy grail - a unified Theory Of Everything - is that not only can the fundamental forces and their dynamic relationships be embraced and described by some singular equation or set of equations, but that if that be the case, then without exception, those relationships will be found within every possible real physical expression and elaboration no matter how complex or existentially accomplished, and, every entity will experience and recognize the qualities they and we all share, whether there is the skill or ability to enunciate those cognitions. The universe and any part of it can not help but act out the qualities of this shared construction. Nor help but respond to them, where such "responses" are tantamount to some level or other of "comprehension". In this forum today, that means that no matter your education or special field of expertise or not, if you have a reasonable proficiency in the language being used here and if you have a reasonable repertoire of life experiences to contemplate and relate to, then by the end of this presentation you will without fail find yourself competent about systems dynamics and Integrity concepts.

The first thing Integrity perceptions and formulations do is to break away from the millennia old mind set of ‘dichotomies’. Instead of perceiving systems as using two distinct separate mechanisms for moving from order to disorder versus from disorder to order (the chaos vs complexity dichotomy), the universe is recognized as compositely using the fundamental forces in local systems that move "to disorder", with the net effect being the creation of order. This is the key notion, that breaks from all other renderings of how the universe functions. To elaborate:

1) Contrary to current scientific criteria, Integrity perceptions indicate that complexity building is the pre-eminent process of the universe, employing the fundamental forces, plus local entropies to enact itself.

2) Entropy is neither strictly a broad general "tendency" we’ve happened to observe, nor a phenomenon restricted to well-defined closed systems, but is in effect everywhere as:   local systems in which structures are thoroughly environmentally interdependent and sensitive - both on peer levels and in dynamic assemblies hierarchically nested within each other, creating/enacting the tension play of oppositely directed gradients. Entropy is a systems mechanism that all the fundamental forces are sub-functional to.

Another reason this version of Entropy is absolute heresy to modern science is because it requires that Time be considered ‘primal’, preceding quantum statistical dynamics. Integrity goes further, saying that Time is most likely "multi-dimensional", with a complex dynamic sub-structure and so, plural dimensionality. I am not talking about mythically transcendent dimensions (higher planes of reality as some might refer to such things), but an extension of what physicists call "phasespace", in which momenta (aka "time factors") have a structure in 3 or more real dimensions which are companion to the recognized 3 spatial dimensions we’re familiar with. State of the art physics/math has it the other way ‘round: putting static ‘form’ as existing prior to any playing out as systems and processes "through time".

These things constitute the bare reductionist bones of Integrity. But there is flesh and sinew to it also, because Integrity is foremost a perception of existence as systems, processes and relationships, not "things".

3. Plural Entropies and Intangible ‘Walls’ that Bind Behaviors

Entropy has several diverse meanings in the scientific literature, the most well know one being the tendency of a system to move towards disorder, maximizing energy dissipation, and so achieving a basement condition in which no work can be done, and so, no complexity achievable from there. Integrity acknowledges those and all others definitions but refers to the net behavior as a "smoothing" function, equalizing the content - whatever it may be - within some possible function space. And though it’s most easily comprehended in models using well-bounded closed systems, it’s wrong to assume that hard-boundaries are required. Especially when the possibility exists that ‘hard-boundary’ could be a misnomer concept

Let’s put some meat on these conceptual bones by talking about recognizable meat - you and me for example - creatures alive on this wonderful open planet. Optically, even radio-signal wise, our environment is basically infinite. We’ve seen signals that place us in the midst of billions of years and billions of billions of kilometers distance. There is no boundary there. But, we are frail organic animals. We need a mix of breathable gasses, and can tolerate only the slightest variation. To live, we have to be within a range of comfortable air temperatures, and a range of useful pressures. We can only go up to 3-5 minutes without air, before damage or death occurs. We can survive 3-7 days without fresh water, and maybe 30 days without food. These are boundaries too, as sure as any material wall. In fact these boundaries are all the more real because they are relational, functional and variable, and impact every moment and place of our existences. So it’s not only possible to speak of local distribution potentials (entropies) of local systems being co-environmental determiners of and within myriad flexible dynamic boundaries, it seems that it should be the only correct way to contemplate existence.

Systems science to-date is elaborate and competent up to a point. Flow-charts, rate dynamics, even fractal emergence concepts have shown moderate success forming analogs of living systems. But the mathematics and systems models are missing which can treat pluralities of changing co-interdependent distributions which conditionally influence one another, even if there is no obvious direct tangible connection. Think about 2 jugglers for a moment. Setting "causal dynamics" or motivations aside for a moment. we can think of them as free to roam the surface of the planet, each juggling their own objects. We can assign a degrees-of-freedom value to their wanderings, an entropy measure of their possible distribution space. Conversely, we can theoretically imagine each of them in a fixed location and then assign an entropy distribution to everywhere the juggled objects can be in regard to each respective juggler. Now we have them come closer together, until they’re close enough that they’re capable of doing exchange juggling. What we witness when the jugglers begin exchanging elements is the primal mechanism, the robust systems process, which is the foundation for every complexity forming event in the universe (figure 1).

Figure 1.  Principle mechanism of Complexity building

The increased distribution region where the exchanged objects can now be found - an increase-in-entropy event - happens counter-posed with a reduced distribution space (also called "behavior space") of the jugglers, which is an entropy decreasing event at the next larger level of assembly. Negentropic complexity formation enacted because of a co-present local-entropy. Speed, distance, direction, energy/information processing capacities - these are among the factors which go towards specific enactments of complexity, including the production, maintenance and improvement of subsequently-organized levels of complex systems. Relationally, the linked behaviors of inversely proportional and oppositely directed local nested entropy gradients is Complexity. Whew!, what a mouthful! It’s easier to spot that than say it!.

4. Process Systems: Transforming ‘Virtual’ into ‘Tangible’

Now, once we’ve initially achieved this comprehension of systems dynamics, we not only have to create the necessary new mathematics to accurately describe the correlations of those "diverse entropies exhibiting inversely proportional gradient behaviors", but we can also start questioning "motivations". Are there deep qualitative conceptual-based incentive relationships involved here, so that we don’t fall back into old debasements of living systems behaviors being seen as non-sentient mechanical acts? Is it possible to recognize these processes for their functionality, yet retain the dignity and living worth we sense in ourselves and all life forms? My personal answer is yes, to all these concerns. So much so that we can eventually apply value-expressive philosophies that come from Integrity concepts/relationships, and possibly help ourselves to achieve the brighter future we so desperately yearn for, by making the extended impacts of immediate choices pertinent to how the spectrum of systems will survive, and what context potentials.

Each such communication loop, whether simple or intricate, whether continual or intermittent, whether isolated or part of extended hyper-integrated organizations, establishes a local identity and competency ... an integrity... a sustaining entity of system-process, where the communication/exchange is tantamount to the unity/identity of the system.

An example of this from animal cell metabolism is a loop called the Kreb Citric Acid Cycle. It is a digestion/respiration/energy utilization process. Chemical bonds are broken and made, energy extracted, molecules formed, integrated and re-formed until reconstructing major "initial condition" constituents which then participate in subsequent re-enactments of the cycle, and thus keep cells dynamic and healthy. Now, in one sense, the Kreb cycle is a definite process entity even though only a portion of it is present at any time. Electrons are shunted and moved along at various energies, making and breaking molecules until the process renews again. Side reactions and chains are environmentally ever present, including the gradient presence of new raw molecules.

Externally, and several assemblies of metabolism removed, the waste products of the Kreb cycle find their way into plants as nutrients in their metabolisms, which re-organize molecules, effect energy transfers and exchanges, and produce "waste" products (or structure products) eventually usable by animal systems as a food source, and so enact yet another economy of exchange, the primal system example of symbiotic plant animal ecology popularly called Gaia. As Hebb(1949) and Scott(1995) have described it, it is "assemblies of assemblies"...process entities involved with process entities...being defined by recursive intricate systems events, rather than being quantized fixated ‘things’. For example, iron and oxygen and hydrocarbons can be evaluated as rust and swamp-gas. But form the iron just so, mix the gasses together, add a spark of energy and you have an "engine". And understanding these multi-faceted process integrations as miscellaneous entropy flows can congeal our concepts of what is going on with such systems.

5. Comprehending Systems Properties

Sub-ordinate and larger components bring some function potential to each configuration of organization. At the most basic levels of construction, these are dictated by universal constants - Planck, gravitational, etc. and wave synchrony, which contribute to an architecture of allowed electron shell energy states of atoms. Those shell levels are very defined, whether occupied by an appropriate electron or not. Note that the shell levels - aka energy potentials - are well defined whether occupied or not. In the example I’m describing, those potentials are behaviorally tantamount to you having a hand free to hold and carry something. The descriptions and complexities and correlated factors are vastly wildly different, but, the behavioral systems relationships involved are absolutely identical. The atom’s empty electron shell, your empty hand, an empty gas tank, a student newly matriculating at the beginning of a school year, an infant swaddled in her parent’s arms, a worker with an empty garage but a new job ... they are potentials waiting to be filled, waiting to participate in the chain of information/energy exchange that enacts other integral entities.

At this point the functions and potentials of systems in various conditional states is pretty clear, but how do ‘local entropies’ develop actual direction and gradient attributes, even "motivations"?

There was an environmental slogan a few years ago that is appropriate here, "Think globally, act locally." This can be split into bottom-up and top-down varieties where the primal forms of complexity use mainly the bottom-up technique. Imagine you’re part of a long water bucket brigade. You may or may not be aware of where the water and buckets are coming from nor where they are going, because either end of the process line stretches around corners and out of view. Without that knowledge and absent any other communication possible, you might even ask yourself, "why stay here? why keep passing buckets?" Suppose though that there was no other source of water available. You need water to live, so you stay in line to maintain the chance to carry a bucket and take a drink once in a while. Your thirst and empty hands effect an "open potential", and reaching over to where an adjacent person has a water bucket and then taking or capturing it represents a local entropy increase in the distribution space of the water bucket from where it had been, and you satisfy your thirst, and the next thirsty person in line reaches over and takes the water bucket to the next position in the chain, and so on, until the water reaches a destination, even up a mountain top. Now this isn’t a definitive fully factored model, in fact it’s rather primitive, but it is a comprehensible example of the power of effective groupings of small incremental local entropy steps which are the primal mechanism of negentropic complexity building. It is the utilization of filling options spaces and potentials, emptying them and filling them again ... exploring all the possible options spaces that ultra-complex systems are composed of or could ever be comprised or enacted, is the essence of what living systems and entities do.

We are content and process where forms, styles, relationships and opportunities are pertinent, meaningful, valuable and real. Spiritual realizations, scientific truths, individuals building communities helping individuals, evolution seen as the entity called "Life" exploring all the different forms coordinating with different environmental conditions and functional complexities and energy venues can take. The wonderment of possibilities in this event we are, called universe, is literally exhilarating and breathtaking.

The theme which brought us to this gathering is not some esoteric intangible, in this regard. It is real and has a practicality. The "future", that open-house of all potentials, is reachable only if we finally comprehend the dynamics of what we are, how we function, and the relational impacts of events. We have to learn to translate our cognitions, observations and perceptions into flow dynamics, then evaluate trends and understand how to channel them to appropriate long term goals using short term considerations, and then re-translate them back into the systems and processes where needed, while at the same time valuing the dignity and integrity of systems under consideration.

6. Global Economic Venues

One of the best examples I can think of happened over the past half century when the once national phone company of AT&T went from a US market to a global one. Under the historical capitalist understanding of supply and demand, every product has an associated cost, including especially the energy of delivery. Using that conventional view, you pay for what you use. In phone service, it used to be that residential users paid a low rate, and high traffic users like businesses paid a substantially higher rate. It only makes sense, if you want to go farther in a car you pay for more gasoline, components of systems or local sub-systems can reasonably be assigned to cover the cost of their own existence. At some point in the 1950s-60s the American market was heading toward saturation for its time, AT&T was on the verge of being disassembled into the "baby Bells", and the company was looking for future survival ... focussing on international markets. Citizens of other countries couldn’t afford the then high charges for overseas calls, and even international businesses had to consider the cost of communication in their pricing structures.

It was then that AT&T did something new and significant. They changed the entropy relationships of money flows relative to the phone services they provided. They slowly raised residential rates (possible because of improvements in the larger US economy and consumers’ willingness to pay for needed phone service), and they lowered long distance rates both within the nation and internationally. Essentially, they accomplished a wholesale restructuring of the money flows of the costs of tele-communication, maintaining company revenues, and even improving them because now an affective trade tariff barrier was slowly removed and global businesses could now afford to communicate cheaply with potential markets and suppliers elsewhere in the world. Finances on a global scale got entropically re-distributed, as did products, services, and the newly important trade unit: information.

7. Integrity - Existing in Life-Spaces / Option-Spaces

Returning to considerations of any system’s behavior or function space (fig. 2), it’s important to recognize the ‘openness’ required by all systems. Systems need uncluttered ‘room to move’ so to speak. This is true in regard to the external environment that extends around a system. And, equally as important, systems need the ‘internal’ room - unused physical configurations, or unfilled energy shells, or molecules capable of metabolically accepting additional energy.

No system can interact with other systems and participate in enacting subsequent complexities unless it is functionally self-competent and organized with the functional room to absorb, process and even transfer energy/information from and to external sources. The non-scaled schematic (Fig.2) of the gaussian type curve illustrates the thematic Integrity measure, even highlighting the significant differences between fractal complexity and communication (dimensional/environmental) complexity. Competent systems don’t require maintaining a razor’s edge balance between order and chaos. They require the functional capacities to encounter wide ranges of energy and information and rates of exchange - process such things and survive to process again. That means latitudes within all ranges possible where, over and above any "best" state, a system would be healthy when functionality is maintained across a spectrum of conditions. "Health" would be the process of existing throughout such ranges, and never ever transfixed or locked into one configuration or another. Nodal "fixation" isn’t in a system’s best interest, it’s a stasis tantamount to death.

Finally, mathematical descriptions and algorithms of Systems are important and provide one of the techniques of translating observed systems behaviors. But mathematics is a rigid exacting edifice. Everything is formalized and well defined.

In reality, dynamic thriving systems on the other hand are associatively open, and must always be so by their nature. The words you hear or read are only partially identical in your thoughts, life space and understandings as they are compared to the speaker you listen to or writer who wrote. We allow and expect that each person recognizes shared concepts, but we also allow and expect that each person has different experiences from any other person, and so is expected to flavor and color concepts with other conceptual links and associations. This is creativity, humor, the living essences of life-spirit. Certainly mathematics can have some of those qualities too, but it’s primary application at this point in human history is to be an exacting predictive reductionist tool of reproducible exactness. Current mathematics is a house without a soul. We haven’t devised the mathematical functions yet that permit flexibility - the qualitative characteristic of thriving dynamic systems. This then will be the next important accomplishment in mathematics, because flexibility is the measure of systems competence, operating with statistical rather than absolute predictable repetitiveness, and having and using random accessibility of options.

In the meantime, Systems people such as ourselves, planet wide, will have to rest assured in the knowledge that intuition and recognition of behavior patterns and systems styles are very valid and effective conceptual tools also as we re-structure our planet and our future, looking to maintain and encourage the health of all systems and lives, and ensure that there will be progeny to explore the next 15 billion years of our Being.

 

8. Integrity Dynamics & Relationships in Full Context

We begin with all Potential of All-Possible-Universes (Linde,1994) (meaning everything, including dimensional space and time) that "exist" - for lack of a better term - as some intangible location without extent. This is sometimes referred to as the Implicate Order. We might even mystically refer to it as the Mind of God. It is all energy, matter, space and time in perfect unity, unseparated and differentiated. Then, a change happens and the parts of this unity find expression as separate aspects ... time, space, energy et al. .. or, "symmetry breaking" as it’s called by mathematicians and physicists. Dimensions become unique, and establish relationships with one another. When this happens the distinctiveness of all possible relationships and their alternative arrangements transform what was simple information into complicated information.

Each so-called break provides added parameters, and with them, new frames of references. Specifically - and most importantly - each new dimension-factor allows all prior dimension-groups to be evaluated as new number-line domains, which extend from minus infinity to plus infinity. What this translates to is that with each extra dimension/variable, a new negative number group relationship is introduced, and relational non-commutative information results from it.

This is extraordinary, and has real physical meaning. It is the source of "measurement" as we know it. It is the relationship that existentially creates "differences". One essential "difference" that is created is the distortion and displacement of spacetime.. greater in one region than another. This relationship - existential imbalance ... has a real quality, which we generally call "gradient", and leads specifically to what we call "entropy". Because any and all gradients ... positive pressures and forces, or negative pulls and attractions ... are stresses that induce contra-dynamics that tend toward restoring of balance and smoothness. They are the felt pressures of dynamics. Dynamics in the act of moving toward unstress .. the primal attribute of entropy. Entropy has been narrowly understood as "tendency toward disorderliness" until now. That changes with Integrity perceptions. The goal is not "dissipation" or dis-order, but "smoothness and uniformity".

And, in complicated dimension-meshed systems a corollary dynamic occurs. The action of moving toward unstress (a ‘smoothing’ operation) of one group of components, imposes organization on the dynamic behaviors of other qualities in the same venue, or in adjacent organizations in dimensional structure. A de-stressing activity imposes new stressing in other system coordinations. Entropy creates negentropy. They are pas de deux dynamics, not simply opposites of trend. The most fundamental de-stressing gradient we know of is spacetime itself. One quality is which we experience as "gravity". Gravity, called the warp of the fabric of spacetime by Einstein , is viewed as an entropy function under Integrity Dynamics. It is essentially a first-order symmetry breaking that introduces "negative value" components pertinent to several temporal dimensions. These right-angle Time stresses interact and create an "attraction" force (causally denoted by a ‘negative’ sign in standard math equations).

Please don’t be dismayed by this topic that seems unassociated with the living thriving Systems you are concerned with. There is connection here, in Systemic fundamental ways, and not just because we happen to live on a globe that produces gravity.

Universal bodies smoothly distort the spacetime around themselves. As 2 or more bodies exist, they "dimple" each others’ regional smoothness - no matter how far apart. What happens next is a counter- intuitive event. The standard model of gravity has particles called gravitons flying toward each other carrying "pulling" forces. But, in the Integrity model, the spacetime fields are stressed and distorted and attempt to smooth out the dimpling, by the generative bodies moving toward the dimple. That is, the masses approach each other. Contra-intentionally, what this causes is not full smoothing, but greater dimpling, and the directive motions become stronger, because the dimplings enlarge and increase the divergence. Net effect? It’s the irresistible force moving the so-called immovable objects, whether they want to be moved or not. (!)

Now comes the quality important to Systems perceptions. This primal "field".. a time-field having structure ... is essentially a physical communication domain. This is a crucial notion. Integrity Dynamics hypothesize the Systems model that all communication ... no matter what specific mechanisms or forms or processes involved ... is the factor which binds separate distinctive entities together into coordinated behaviors. Communication synchronizes activities, it creates order, and builds and establishes Complexity.

The universe is essentially a Communication Essence. All parts and relationships and aspects are so connected in such an integrated way that information flow is everything, everywhere. Information is dimensionally structured to "be" and "convey" at the same time. What we experience and model as ‘dimensionality’ are simply different forms of coding and expression. Take a sheet of paper with drawings and words on it and turn that paper edge on to your eyes. The information doesn’t disappear or "collapse" (as physics call the event; topology would call it something else again). It is still there, just in a form we’re not used to decoding, transforming, experiencing or translating.

In simple terms, this is what the conundrum of so-called particle/wave "duality" is all about. A self-same intrinsic energy and information is transduced to different forms merely by increasing or decreasing the number of dimensions through which the content gets expressed. The universe is an infinite density of dimension-possibilities - transforming and communicating through itself at all levels and in all configurations. And the upshot of this kind of structure is that there are myriad coordinations possible, abundances of local entropies affecting one another, inducing and deducing positive and negative entropy gradients. Not just generally going toward universal disorder, but creating pockets of order along the way ... everywhere. In fact, the prime tendency of the universe is towards order and not the other way around. Simply consider the fact that Gravity is the first-order asymmetry. It draws all masses together to a single "orderly" location". Gravity (a chronometric time phenomena) is the final arbiter of existence, not gas distribution. The entropy of time will eventually negentropically re-organize all the matter of the universe. But where does that leave us, and Systems and Complexity, pertinent to our lives and the future?

Integrity envisions that Newton’s thermodynamic laws are a narrow interpretation of a larger Systems Law. When he phrased "inertia" as a body’s tendency to remain in motion or at rest unless acted upon by an outside force, he was expressing a version of the Systems Theme: "existing constructs tend to endure and maintain existence unless impacted by another force". Most prominently, entities are changed by "alternative" forces externally and dissipations or limitations, internally . The first order of alternative force is of course the bath of spacetime, the environment, with all its variety of entropy and negentropy aspects. With all this interaction accessibility, the universe is indeed a vast Communication System. Via the four fundamental forces plus varieties of entropies - entities endure by having, or not, the constructive competence to encounter, interact with, react with and endure all sorts of "communications". And this leads us to understand "how" Systems are "competent", and what the impetus of Evolution is.

Systems assemble because of communication. Assemblies enact new coordinations and new dimensional factors. The enlarged group of dimensional factors bring hyper-exponential quantities of potentials ... situations and conditions and relationships to deal with. Behavioral possibilities just blossom and re-inforce complexity. And the systems which endure and survive are those which are competent to handle more encounters in more ways.

From this we organize the model of a gaussian type curve, to evaluate "competence". To one side are low quantities of encounters ... the side where there tends to be endurance by encounter avoidance. On the other side of the peak is the region of more frequent encounters ... where survival and endurance are based upon system competence to cope with prodigious amounts of encounters. The bulk of the curve represents the competence range through which a given system has the capacity to survive.

On this issue, Complexity says that behavior and functional "competence" is a razor’s edge poised precariously between chaos and rigidity. Integrity say that "competence" means the ability to cope with many and varied conditions and still successfully survive. The "best" condition (which is never permanently or narrowly locked-in in the real world) is the behavior region where a system is sufficiently engaged in ongoing interactions and commun- ications to continue, while having the open capacity to deal with more interactions and communications. This also implies the capacity to substantively adapt and change, and so, improve interaction capacities ‘for’ and ‘in’ new subsequent environments and relationships.

At this point you can apply any specifics you are already familiar with to that notion. Biomolecular adaptations made possible by new arrangements of molecular organizations ; complicated social dynamics made possible by the vastness quantity of alternative language codes, blended with the stasis of repeatable and consistent mores and codes of ethics ; etc.   Essentially,  Integrity's Systems dynamics "theme".. which I am really loathe to call it a "rule".. is a functional/operational foundation group of relationships, that become elaborated in enactments and experiences that are our human philosophies ... perceptions and cognitions of existence and communicative interactions and everything that comprise them ... pieces, portions, relations and wholes.

 

9. Envelopment

So where are we, with all these Systemic relationships, communications and involvements upon involvements? We have simple fundamentals that can be found everywhere. We have a priori relationships that are as meaningful to Bohm’s Implicate Order, as to Quantum Mechanics, as to the processes of biological organisms, as to the life activities of animals in complicated environments, as to human communication with another person, as to economic involvements and social organizations, as to psychological interpersonal dynamics, as to the geology of planet tectologies, as to the love between a parent and child, as to the motivations for learning, as to the driving bias which ever advances evolution, as to the motion of cosmic bodies. The very philosophies and spiritual notions of our species are expressions of the qualia emerging from basic relational dynamics; our ethics and mores too.

I know that this is a rather dangerous concept to express, because it seems to make existence and life reductionist and we nothing more than complicated automata. But I don’t hold to that deduction. I focus on the magnificence and incredible elaborations that are the fuller reality of Creation. I focus on the freedoms and consciousness that come with a universe that blows right past pseudo-limitations of a Godel-style boundary ridden universe. To exist in harmony ... to just continue existing ... requires that everything that is "unknown" have the potential to interact and share communication with all that is "known". That one essential quality means that we "know something" about what we have yet to ever experience and is supposedly beyond our knowing. The unknown, with all its abundant possibilities, is potentially "experience-able" - whether for good or bad or neutral outcomes. We can void-out Godel’s interpretation that stresses ignorance and isolation, and advance to a Systems perception of existence that exhalts anticipation, possibilities, and connectedness of our true UNI-verse. A One-song, one theme, in which diversity and alternatives strengthen and enhance and embellish Existence. Competence is valued, and interaction that supports mutual endurance is encouraged. Growth and adaptation are as important as continuity.  Science and Faith are embraced companions in Creation's grand unfolding.

The essential dynamic of the Integrity schemata is requisite openness ... where what is temporarily "incomplete" has the capacity and optionspace to encounter and embrace what is new and novel and not part of previous experience .... to make decisions based on partial information and opt for certain outcomes over others, but most important, to change and mature with each new encounter.

Only at the atomic and molecular levels are the options limited and therefore empirically "perfectly" predictable and regular. As the basic dynamic becomes compounded in number ... exponentially and hyper-exponentially ... assemblies communicating with one another and forming new levels of assemblies ... the number of true options blows right off the scale. There are more options in each instant of our lifespace than we could ever live to explore. So we live in organizations where people commit to some choices instead of others, and as a species, we exhibit a small portion of the grand diversity that resides in the universe’s "possibilities". And each society, culture, or family of humanity experiences the interactions and integrations of past choices ... we create new results, new environments, new conditions to react with.

And what we found at the foundation of existence is re-expressed over and over again through all the new assemblies of existence and life. Stresses and divergences - tangible and intangible - are everywhere. Systems of all kinds are rife with displacements, vying and counter-vying with one another to balance, blend, niche and "survive". What we are is part of the grand schema .. a simple template group of Systems relationships, acted out over time as time, blossoming into the incredible universe of experience and encounter, challenge and accomplishment, communication and synchrony.

I want to recap now the promised claims I made in the opening abstract.

We endure because we are part of an organic dimensionally integrated communication System of which all its aspects are behaviorally compatible with itself. Creation and stasis and destruction are merely sibling processes, founded in "the ability to communicate/interact".

We advance, because all systems endure and improve their respective survival chances by being more and more competent in encountering and processing more forms of energy and information - what ever is appropriate to current environments and conditions, and for whatever future conditions hold. We cope to the capacity levels of our structures and our adaptive skills.

Existence - and we - evolve because the goal of Life ... capital "L" ... is to explore all its possibilities. Sapiens will do that biologically, socially, economically, scientifically, creatively and spiritually. Diversity, the keystone of Systems Dynamics, will be the key to the future in all these areas and more, with integration and accessibility recognized as the keystone of healthy communication. We are not the culmination of evolution, that process in which Life explores all the forms it can exist in and be competent ‘as’, in all possible situations. We are marathon baton runners, receiving our portion from posterity, contributing our measure - of time and distance in the advancement of Life - and passing on our portion of conceptual, bodily and spiritual advancement to all the possible Progeny stretching long into the full exposition of Time.

We have come to this conference not just to understand themes of Systems behaviors. We have come in order to understand ourselves .. who we have already evolved into and who the future can be, that will evolve from us. The Integrity Paradigm vision of existence is of a Universe as a thriving wholeness of communication and actions. The paradigm tries to be as broad and encompassing as any vision ever audaciously devised before. It embraces all the factors we currently concern ourselves with: complexity, adaptiveness, systemic integration, functional integrity, competence in a universe of diverse extended environments, the pertinence of gathering and using energy and information, and emergence. If the grand scheme isn’t immediately obvious to you from the way I described it, I can only tell you that it's as plain as the nose on your face. You may not immediately see it from where you are, but trust me when I say it’s there, and that with the right reflection you can see it too.

 

References

Bohm, D. & Hiley, B.J., The Undivided Universe, Routledge, New York 1993
Cabanac, Michel. 1991. Pleasure:The Common Currency. ceptualinstitute.com/genre/cab91work.htm
Dirac, P.A.M., The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1930
Hebb, Donald. 1949. The Organization of Behavior. Wiley, New York.
Linde, Andre, Scientific American p.48(8), November 1994.
Quinn, Daniel, Ishmael, Bantam, New York, 1992
. 1973. Four Plane Universe Conundrum. SUNY Stonybrook.
. 1992. Understanding the Integral Universe. Ceptual Institute, Miami..
                                  URLs: ceptualinstitute.com        ceptualinstitute.com/links.htm
Reichenbach, Hans, The Philosophy of Space and TIme (1927), Dover, New York, 1958
Schroeder, Manfred. 1991. Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws. Freeman & Co., New York.
Scott, Alwyn, 1995. Stairway to the Mind. Springer-Verlag, New York.

Return to ISSS98 index

Return to Integrity Links

Genre

Mindways

Poetics