[19] If the nature of this underlying unity and the way it conditions phenomenal reality could be understood, it would provide a powerful aid to solving pressing sociological problems and answering deep philosophical questions.
Work in this area is focused on developing models and interventions that can bring about human thriving in a sustainable way on a global scale.
[21] A contemporary of Laszlo, Hasan Ozbekhan[22] in the original proposal to the Club of Rome[23] identified 49 Continuous Critical Problems (CCPs) that intertwine to generate the Global Problematique.
[24] Ozbekhan sat down with Alexander Christakis and revisited the 49 CCPs in 1995 using the methodology of Structured Dialogic Design (SDD) which was not available in 1970.
Subsequently, an online class at Flinders University generated an influence map that bore remarkable similarities to that produce by Ozbekhan and Christakis.
[28] The second strand was inspired by Leo Apostel, and is grounded in the concern that disciplinary worldviews are becoming increasingly fragmented, thus undermining the potential for the inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary work required to address the world's pressing social, cultural and economic problems.
This supports systematic intervention practices that exploit, rather than trying to unify, the plurality of theories and methods that reflect different value-conditioned perspectives.
[35] The fourth development was initiated by David Rousseau, and is grounded in the concern that the value relativism dominating academic discourse is problematic for social and individual welfare, is contrary to the holistic implications of systems philosophy, and is inconsistent with universalist aspects of moral intuitions and spiritual experiences.
GST was presented in 1969 by Von Bertalanffy as a theory that encapsulates "models, principles, and laws that apply to generalized systems or their subclasses, irrespective of their particular kind, the nature of their component elements, and the relationships or "forces" between them.
[46] David Pouvreau has suggested that this quandary can be resolved by the coinage of the new term "general systemology", to replace the usage of GST in the sense of the encompassing conception that the later Von Bertalanffy envisaged.
[49] Ervin Laszlo acknowledged the problem without conceding to an ultimate relativism, saying "we can conceive of no radical separation between forming and being formed, and between substance and space and time…the universe is conceived as a continuum [in which] spatio-temporal events disclose themselves as "stresses" or "tensions" within the constitutive matrix…the cosmic matrix evolves in patterned flows…some flows hit upon configurations of intrinsic stability and thus survive, despite changes in their evolving environment…these we call systems.
"[50] In this way Ervin Laszlo accommodated the intrinsic continuity of the cosmos understood as a plenum while insisting that it contained real systems whose properties emerge from the inherent dynamics of the universe.
Systems can be destroyed or transformed, but absent radical interactions (e.g. the fission of an atom or the death of an organism) their identity is dynamically maintained by internal (autopoietic) processes.