System/environment boundaries are really somewhat arbitrary. It is generally only on the simplest and most rudimentary vectors of analysis that we can ever speak clearly of any kind of Manichaean system/environment differentiation and unambiguously-articulated identity or closure. Where and when boundaries are easily delineated, the systems under discussion are generally quite uninteresting and unrealistic.
Systems of explanation, however, are bound by cultural practices and normative expectations to produce the artefacts and entities of a common vocabulary best suited to communication, often less appropriate for actual description or design. That is an irreducible enigma – to communicate, we reduce concepts to caricatured abstractions that rarely capture the complexity they intend to infer.
The Mobius strip is something of a cliché in this context. Systems are, yes, their environments (holding one’s breath indefinitely makes this point with effect). The question is, or becomes, how best to incept the communication of a pre-existing unified and organic totality that sits mischievously outside the fabricated boundaries of organisational, cognitive and linguistic orthodoxy?
The answer here lies in applying the problem to itself.
Daedelus Kite 