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Your comment made me think of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_graph

“Multi modal” system representation in graph format. You can represent an electric, hydraulic and mechanical system in one graph. Anything really by relating them to the substituent energy and power. Its representation allows you to easily extract the differential equation. Neat stuff.

>Anything really by relating them to the substituent energy and power.

My brain is tickling, thank's a lot for the reference!

FWIW, control system theory resolves similarly. The response of a system (whether electrical, mechanical...) has the same basic concepts related to the energy of constituents defined by the differential equation of that system.

For example, specific systems have fairly well understood corollaries like a compressed fluid behaving as a mechanical spring within a system. Further, mass is akin to capacitor (stores energy), a spring is akin to inductor (stores energy), a damper is akin to a resistor (dissipates energy) in terms of their representation on the differential equation of their response. You might find some control theory an interesting read but I don't know if it speaks to exactly what you're looking for in terms of the broadest applicability.

Consilience sprang to mind for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience_(book)

>Delivery date: 16 Jan 2020

Much appreciated!

> What I'm thinking about is: how can we parametrize the manifestations of these scopes, and, ubiquitously, reverse-engineer them, thus linking all the systems?

> Then: which systems are topologically identical? If there are classes, how many? How do they differ? Are they (the systems OR the classes of systems) related?

> If so, is there a hierarchy (or are there multiple hierarchies)?

To what end though? How would you even begin measuring success in such a vast context?

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the art for arts sake, just curious to hear more.

>To what end though? How would you even begin measuring success in such a vast context?

Well, so far it's just mindgames, so while these are very valid questions, I never thought of an exact goal... But I'd recognize it when I'd see it. The best answer I can come up with right now:

First, I'd want to understand what components are necessary and sufficient to make up "a system".

From there, these components and their relationships would need to be understood from a mathematical perspective (maybe graph theory, but I'm not 100% sure).

Then, one could look for patterns in nature that reflect such components, and rule out which of those patterns are valid components of such generic systems, and which not, based on heuristics that were developed/explored in the previous step.

The following step might be to investigate how the interplay of a given systems components is mapped in human language, and how similar or topologically identical systems differ in spoken representations with respect to the different parametrizations of the aforementioned scopes [...]

(Etc.) - is this a satisfying answer, or does it just lead to more open ends? Anyway, that's the process as far as I've mapped it so far.

Systems thinking? Category theory?

I actually ordered "Systems thinking" after someone in the thread mentioned it, Milewskis series on category theory is on my todo!