melting fingers into Tao

the Life in Tao

Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken called Hieronymus Bosch

the Master of Hertogenbosch

Garden of Earthly Delights, central panel

(ap. 1450–1516)

Prado Museum, Madrid

towards Tao

In a long Western tradition drawn from the writings of Aristotle, through Kant and the Romantic movement, it was necessary to wait the 1930 to 1940 years for a first complete formulation of a systems theory in biology by Ludwig von Bertalanffy:

with his idea of open system (bertalanffy box):

where for the first time the internal processes of system are connected with the external processes of the environment, as is always the case in biological systems. The whole process is commonly called metabolism. Still lacks the basic concept of feedback that will be born only from years 1940-50.

«Thinking in terms of systems plays a dominant role in a wide range of sectors

ranging from industrial companies and the arms up

to the most mysterious topics of pure science ..."

the Hell of Tao

Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken called Hieronymus Bosch

the Master of Hertogenbosch

Hell - Garden of Earthly Delights, detail

(ap. 1450–1516)

Prado Museum, Madrid

Tao Hierarchical levels

Systems, intended as analysis or synthesis of congruent elements and relationships/processes between them, are to be considered as classes/logical sets of the elements.

A key feature of any non-trivial system is the description of levels of analysis/description or synthesis/design of the system:

In this vision the system is seen as the set of classes of elements more general self-contained.
A classic description of levels of the system of life on our planet is, for example:

In real systems, existing into physical matter, level 0 is always the physical, and contains several sublevels based on the models of elementary particles and atoms.
The upper level 1 is that concerning the chemical molecular aggregates of atoms.
Level 2 is composed of aggregates of molecules to cells and cell aggregates to compose tissues and organs.
Level 3 is a set of interacting bodies and related physiologically to produce multicellular living organisms.
Once living organisms are produced there will be an interaction between them, which is the level 4, the social.

Finally, the highest level is represented by all living organisms with their environment, and that is the one of ecosystem.
In the case of artificial systems the classical example is the one of two-level physical/hardware and application/software, in turn containing many sublevels each.

A more complete representation of the various physical systems and their representational systems is:

Hierarchy of Some Systems and Domains of Knowledge
Graphics created by Marshall Clemens, NECSI

circular recursive Tao

Drawing Hands, 1948

lithograph cm 28,2x33,3

Hand with Reflecting Sphere, also known as Self-Portrait in Spherical Mirror 
lithograph, 1935

Wijkamplaan, Baarn, The Netherlands

feedbacked Tao

One of the most powerful ideas of the twentieth century -particularly in the postwar-, for design and description of natural and artificial systems was to take the output of a black box and return it at the input:

Depending on whether this back-action output is added (positive feedback) or subtracted (negative feedback) we get the destruction (runaway) or the stabilization of the system.

In the first case an increase in the output increases the input which in turn increases the output again and so on, until the destruction of the system, while in the second case any perturbation of the input is compensated by the feedback and the system reaches a controlled steady state.

Ignoring the input and the output we see that now the black box has an external loop process of circular-recursive type:

Almost all the natural and artificial systems are based on stationary negative-feedback circular processes, for example in electronics control systems the classic scheme is:

The feedback process stabilizing (or destructive) is retrospectively understood since a long time, as evidenced by the classical figure of Ouroboros, the snake biting its tail continually recreating: