Figure 1
Figure 1
a) diagram of an open system showing an incomplete boundary, inputs from the environment, internal processing (looped arrow), and outputs to the environment (for a fuller explanation of this method of representing systems, see Dryden, 1980); ‘m' indicates a capacity for modelling.
b) two levels of organization: interactions between open systems at the lower level result in the emergence of a new system at the next level up; the open arrows (labelled '?') indicate the difficulty in explaining how models at one level might link with a model at the next level (the 'combination problem' described by Seager, 1995)
c) artificial neural networks: the lower diagram shows a conventional depiction of a three-layered network; the upper diagram shows the units replaced by symbols representing open systems.