There are, in general, two main ways to understand a complex system-of-systems.
First, as an adaptive constellation of modularly decomposable artefacts, entities and sub-systems as subject to and expressions of orchestration and directed purpose – that is, in terms of its differentiated parts and their relationships. Later, as a bonded, binding proxy organism in which relationships and communication/energy channels are functions of a unifying, emergent whole.
Applications tend to avoid the second representational idiom. It is more difficult to define but it is, in essence, a logical switch and conceptual bootstrap that embodies the future of automation and coordination in massively high-dimensional complex systems, i.e. “at scale”.
Emergent properties can arise from a threshold of 6 or 7 interacting entities, but what of an integrated system of systems in which there are billions upon billions of components, observers, communications channels and consequences?
Philosophical rumination seems redundant when applied to the existential pragmatics of applications but conceptual holism addresses emergence.
Intuition as much as complexity science suggests non-orientable surfaces are in play.
Daedelus Kite 