Findings/Info Bits

While there are many facts emerging from experiments in the hard systems sciences and mathematics, there are also insights and arrangements from other approaches like the conventional, reductionist sciences with systems implications that must be seized and exploited. This is probably the category that will be most used to capture the insights of the workers in systems approaches like management, philosophy, systems thinking to join with the findings of the natural sciences. It is also the category that probably will be used most by those who are trying to apply the ideas and findings of systems science to lots of application areas.

This is a particularly important information category because it provides us with a “pathway” for integration of the literature. As pointed out in the sections on fragmentation of the systems knowledge base, there are many works on systems theory and even more on parts of what we would consider a more comprehensive general theory of systems. Long texts on hierarchy, self-organization, fractals, origins, emergence, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, chaos and more exist and their texts occasionally contain valuable insights on each of these processes, patterns, or structures. But those insights are not brought together in one place according to one logical, self-consistent framework.

Workers populating the SPT relational database

Go to sptrdb.com

pledge to isolate these insights in quotations and place them in the order and flow of SPT. We call these for the moment “information bits.” Each will be tied to its bibliographic source, but placed in the overall schema of SPT rendering it a small part of this one general theory. That will give users, for the first time, the possibility of experiencing the insights as a unified whole rather than as an isolated set produced by one of the many isomorphy disciplines, the isolated conventional disciplines, or the many separated systems domains.