This paper, freely downloadable at https://rational-understanding.com/UUDH#framework, presents a comprehensive framework for understanding systems across all domains of complexity: physical, biological, cognitive, and social. The framework builds upon, unifies, and extends classical systems science by grounding systemic behaviour in open system thermodynamics, energy landscapes, systems causality, and recursive emergence. At its core lies the concept of information at source: a measure of internal recursively structured order, and its dynamic relationship with energy and entropy.
Systems are defined by the emergence of properties absent from their components, and their operation depends on the balance between energy available for maintaining internal structure and that required for exercising function. The framework explains how systems form, persist, collapse, or evolve by stabilising in attractor basins within energy landscapes, scaling recursively through fractal architecture.
Sets of formal definitions and propositions, whose provenance is given, underpin the theory, offering a structured, logically coherent, and cross-disciplinary model. The framework unifies foundational work by von Bertalanffy, Ashby, Beer, Bateson, Prigogine, Rosen, and others. It also incorporates more recent developments by Bhaskar, Cronin and Walker, Parisi, and the author.
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