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Economy |
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An economy is a physical system organized as an energy conduit
developing between energy sources and sinks, identified by
having:
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self-animating and learning parts,
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connected by markets,
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exchanging complementary goods and services
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accumulating organization as the parts learn to exploit
their material and organizational resources,
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acting as a whole in relation to an environment
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One may identify various temporally useful models of the
systematic behavior of economies as they develop along the lines
of resource and organizational opportunity it finds
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Markets |
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Markets are mediums of reliable exchange where resources are
found and products cast off, resulting in the exchange of
complementary services.
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Markets may be open or closed, made reliable by being confined
and exclusive, as the blood stream is for the cells of an
organism, or just circumstantially as in an open environment
where compost enriches soil making it a place where nutrients
accumulate.
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Organism |
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Things |
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Subjects referred to by terms or theories beyond the scope of
our information about them.
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Terms |
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Words of a language having dual roles of referring and relating
to each other and referring and relating to the context of
things in the environment in to which people attach some
meaning.
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Complexity |
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Complexity
within systems comes with making things
simple.
To see how takes effort in closely watching how nature does it,
and tracing the way things change as a whole.
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Vast assemblies of independently behaving parts self-assemble to work as a whole
by a process of accumulatively linking their complementary shapes and functions; wastes to resources,
liquids caught by cups, etc., building on the kinds of opposites that connect,
like growth.
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It's also the term for a branch of
mathematics that attempts to describe natural system
behaviors as deterministic processes, despite a disconnection of
parts being one of the most common features.
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Whether systems operate by the individual
exploratory behavior of their parts, as many living systems
visibly do, or the
deterministic control by their environments, as is also
sometimes seems, is not always accepted as a legitimate question
to ask by most scientists. It depends on whether you see
environmental influence as imposing control or providing
opportunity within constraint.
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Complex systems often display regular
developmental processes, like growth and decay, that work by the
opportunistic joining of complementary parts,
"accumulative happenstance", making what determines them
inexplicable, needing observers to develop new modes of
explanation for the emerging regularities that develop.
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Logical
explanation needs to resolve into rules for the
relationships between categories, relying on the systems behind
them for structure.
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Theories |
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Constructs of terms and references defined to a point of
abstraction, intended to both emulate and raise useful questions
about things and relationships.
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A projection from things to a workable set of dimensions
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Relationships |
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Physical Continuity |
- Relationships that change over time or space or in relation to
each other by steps that do not exceed either the upper or lower
limits of the system making them.
- Generally, either steady or proportionally regular change as
emulated by regular mathematical functions for flowing change within
the limits of a system.
- Specially, referring to the transitions of scale exceeding the
limits of systems, and the organizational "handshake" such as the
roles of smaller scale events in initiating larger scale systems and
the reverse, as needed to satisfy the conservation laws and solve
various Zeno's paradoxes.
- Limitations of change established by the law
of continuity
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Natural System |
- local organization accumulating
around the movement of energy
- both a unit of organization and the
whole process of organizational change over time that such a unit of
organization also represents. Thus, either the
accumulated organization or it's developmental learning process by
which it developed.
- a 'circle' of relationships (complex heterarchical network of
accumulative events and responses)
- defining an interior and exterior
- that develops as an individual/environment pair
- increasing in complexity to stabilize
- by a continuity of conserved changes
- with an internalized stress distribution (ESP = equal stress
principle) serving to coordinate its behavior as a whole.
- Systems are perhaps most identifiable by
- their cycle of organizational developmental
- the 'hole' in an observers information about what determines
events in an environment due to the interior of systems being
largely invisible.
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Open System |
- the coupling of a system with
an environment, and as a point of view the consideration of
both.
- As used by Boulding the term
referred to throughput systems capable of self-maintenance,
having an active role in their own survival, such as a cell or a
community.
- Other kinds of systems exist,
and persist or not, by emerging from their environments too.
They may not have throughputs, though, and how they develop may
use processes are either internal or external to the system,
etc.
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Learning system |
- either
- the the system by which a
system learns, like the way a system directs surplus resources
for experimental use or how path following occurs by exploring
along avenues of discovery.
- the system considered for what
it is learning, like growth systems discovering diminishing
returns for some direction of growth, or means of sensing and
reacting to environmental reactions.
- the methods people use for
learning
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Happening |
- some new system of relationships developing, like the notion to
write down one definition as a margin note triggering a flurry of
related definitions forming the basis of a glossary.
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Bubbles |
- A happening that is the combination of one system that pumps up
the pressure and another system designed to regulate or contain it.
"Bubble" generally refers to a condition in which the pumps are
unresponsive to the regulation or containment.
- It’s invariably the pumps that actually pop bubbles, not the weak
spots or pin pricks that instigate the breach of the containment.
They would have no effect on the containment without the
systematically increasing pressure.
- Systematically increasing pressures, and the pumps driving them,
tend to be visible to people looking for them a long way off.
If failing to see bubbles developing ends with tragic consequences,
people not having the good sense to identify and turn off (or turn
down) the pumps that inflate them is the cause.
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Whole System |
- The processes within the boundary of the network of developing
relationships that respond to each other as a whole
- Often identified by being part of the same accumulative energy
transfer system and process.
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Whole System Measure |
- Measures reflecting strategies for inclusive assessments
what takes place with the boundary or between the boundary and its
environment.
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Whole System Boundary |
- Physical boundaries are always thresholds. Complex
systems have various identifiable thresholds surrounding them to use
for demarking their inside and outside. They also, then,
have a likelihood of relationships that cross any boundary one might
be able to define. So as useful as some boundaries are, a whole
system is not likely to be found within any identifiable whole system
boundary.
- An animal has its skin, but it's gut is open to its
environment... and it certainly can't exist without its population
or its environment. Still, the metabolic network of an
organism is most usefully located inside its skin.
- a system and its environmental niche, say a bird and its nesting
or a culture and its technologies and habitations, so for different
purposes you may draw different boundaries.
- Locating a boundary at a threshold of change offers three basic
choices, at the beginning of the transition, in the middle of the
transition, and the end of the transition.
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Boundary Spanning |
- Bridging between systems and their circles of relationships,
across boundaries
- Inventing ways to connect their languages
- An individual who has connections in more than one system of
relationships
- A process of discovering the boundaries of a system and its
circle of relationships and making bridges to others
- For example:
- bridging between cultural circles or schools of thought, between
levels of an organization, etc.,
- between human languages and their physical counterparts for
which there is no human language, or between the human world
and the wilderness of natural systems outside human cultural
awareness and meaning sharing our physical environment
 Spanning
between nested worlds within an encompassing world, and looking out
into the local environment and its wilderness of other little worlds
Spanning between a nested world
and the wilderness of its environment of others, looking out into the
wilderness of other worlds not part of the observer's
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Systems Calculus |
- the basic subjects of mathematical calculus, but for measures of
undefined complex natural systems that exhibit similar properties
temporarily, and for which there is no formula -
- continuity,
- scales of continuity,
- emerging continuity,
- proportional walks,
- derivative reconstruction
- derived rates, integrals and exponents,
- inflection and transformation points,
- norms, asymptotes and limits.
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Tabula Rasa evidence |
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Evidence good enough of the independent behavior of other things
for an observer to "take a break" from their own habitual
interpretations to allow something else to tell its own story to
them unimpeded by perception.
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Simple evidence over which you have no influence letting you
discover, or rediscover, the original meanings.
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