The world is a hierarchy of systems.We necessarily perceive these systems in their attractors – in other words, An attractor defines a stable system. So when we’re trying to understand systems, what we’re really looking at are attractors within attractors.
To understand them, we can go two ways:
- Up, to understand how the larger context, its Environment or super-system in the hierarchy of systems, acts as a contextual Constraint on the system in question, reducing its degrees of freedom and restricting it to certain Attractors.
- Down, to understand how the system’s components, or sub-systems in the hierarchy of systems, interact to create a certain (stable) system behaviour, i.e. how attractors emerge from its System Dynamics.
An indication for switching levels is when Weak signals are caused by events on other system hierarchy levels.
Scale-free Abstractions reduce the cognitive cost of both work on different levels (re-usability) and switching between them (unification), which helps us Move up and down the ladder of abstraction.
A further Strategy to maximise our cognitive leverage is to Start system descriptions top-down.