We must seek a widely-applicable science of systems

The field of cybernetics covers 100% of this context

The fact that nobody considers cybernetics an actual functional study is an unmitigated tragedy - based on politics - that needs to be fixed immediately

Wiener, etc. laid the whole thing out, gave a very compelling and clear way to approach questions and complexity, and we are just as a field completely ignoring it to our own detriment with this idea that somebody needs to invent it

Statistical Mechanics is another good example here. As I understand it, it's what allows much of the understanding of the very early universe despite us being unable to model it explicitly or observe it directly.

While I agree that nitty gritty formalizations are important to grasp, it's been made clear that the formal sciences were often insufficient in facilitating insight on the type of complexity cyberneticians cared about -- especially that of process oriented circular causality, which often involved paradox and self-reference.

See Stuart Umpleby's lectures on the History of Cybernetics: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB81F4FC0EDC4DECC

Or Walter Tydecks on the cultural understanding of mathematics as a sign system: http://www.tydecks.info/online/themen_e_spencer_brown_logik....

> Shannon was like Spencer-Brown a mathematician and electrical engineer. In his study of data transmissions, he has demonstrated how any medium generates background noise that interferes with the transmitted characters. To this day, mathematics has not perceived or not wanted to perceive the elementary consequences of this for mathematics and logic. To this day, mathematics is regarded as a teaching that is independent of the medium in which it is written and through which it is transmitted. Nobody can imagine that the medium could have an influence on the signs and their statements. Mathematics is regarded as a teaching that is developed in a basically motionless mind.

Having taken the last 2 years to really go through the discourse surrounding second order cybernetics beyond Ashby's introduction and Stafford Beer, I learned of a pivotal text called Laws of Form, which was at the heart of second order cybernetics. The formal system was directly incorporated in Varela and Maturana's thesis of autopoiesis, and Niklas Luhmann was also /obsessed/ with Laws of Form for much of his academic career. This is a progenitor of our current interest of enaction and embodied cognition!

With the book's 50th anniversary in 2019, the discourse has been seeing a rejuvenation thanks to some small conferences at https://lof50.com. I've seen some intriguing applications. Some are a bit far out, but that's the nature of systems thinkers, yeah?

A couple that may be of interest:

William Bricken's work on Iconic Mathematics, a system that covers K-12 math and bridges it to purely physical manipulation, shedding matters of complexity difficult that fuel general mathphobia such as: associativity, commutativity, division by 0, bases, functions, order of operations, the disambiguated meaning of equality. Instead, everything is a /structure/.

Bricken's work on computational implementations of Iconic Logic. One example includes a novel SAT algorithm / tautology verification algorithm called Virtual Insertion, which makes extensive use of the notion of semipermeable boundaries, in which the context of a boundary still pervades its content.

Gitta and Ralf Peyn on FORMWELT, a yet-released system aiming to facilitate precise, clear communication of nebulous natural language concepts through the use of injunction and self reference.

Great post, you're clearly on the right track. I totally agree that there is a major gap in modern theoretical understanding of how and why complex systems emerge. Breakthroughs in understanding the physical/informational processes that underlie complex adaptive systems could be immensely useful.

I'll add a word of caution though. I'm most familiar with systems theory applied to biology. Biology is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of complexity. However, it's less well acknowledged that it's also very, very complicated. This is important because it means that we have very incomplete knowledge of the base components of any biological system. Like we still don't really know the basic biochemical function of most proteins. Hell, we only just got a partial view of what most proteins even look like (in isolation) via AlphaFold. Measuring the number of all of the proteins in a single cell is effectively impossible with current and near future technology. Any feasible solution for this would probably be destructive, meaning that true time-series measurements are also impossible. These details of what we know and what we can (or can't) observe matter quite a lot, not only because they are the sort of raw matter of a systems theory, but also because they are the levers that we have to use to manipulate the system. There are only about 1000 proteins that we know how to reliably bind molecules to. There are (probably, we're not sure) more than 50k different proteins, if we include isoforms. So, all that to say, we have very incomplete knowledge of biology and very incomplete control of cellular behavior.

This isn't meant to discourage you! Instead, I think there's a tremendous opportunity for systems theory to be really useful (especially in biology) if it becomes a practical, routine analysis like statistics. But, for that to happen, we have to keep in mind the limitations and specific details of the system we're dealing with.

There is an approach that I like and I think allows one to compress quite a few different description models from different domains. Take a look at this image from wikipedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Systematik-Philosoph... You see "Theoretische" and "Praktische" philosophy in the rectangle with a diagonal which probably could mean that you can sort something based on the relation between matter and information, where something is more practical and less theoretical (say 30% practice and 70% theory) add a stimulus-response diagram at the bottom and various information-material circuits inside that allow you to show how something is transformed.

There is an development of this idea from some author which leads to something like https://imgur.com/a/AmF7AJe and currently the author tries to find the connection between syllogistics, Boolean algebra, Euler-Venn diagrams, and more. You can take a look at https://www.youtube.com/@Syllogist/videos Many of the recent videos have English subtitles It's hard to describe the whole idea at once, but maybe someone will have the courage to learn something from it.