Before getting into the salutary functions or metasystems, I want to caution that there is a special type of problem which commonly arises in human metasystems. The actors in the Metasystem structure lose their intimate contact with the Operations System. They shift their stance, viewing the Operations System primarily as sources of material and energy for the Metasystem. The Metasystem has lost its Operations system and has begun treating it as captive part of the environment--an Enclosure.
Meta systems have increasing latency compared with the operating systems. These delays are normal but they are also strong reasons to keep all decision making possible in Operations and System 2 so that the environmental impact (lost customers) is minimized.
Individuals can **make good decisions faster** than families who are faster than neighborhoods, who are faster than municipalities, who are faster than counties, who are faster than states who are faster than countries, who are faster than regions, who are faster than the whole world of nation states.
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A metasystem is a system which operates at a higher level of logic and which is capable of taking a **larger view of system behavior**. The explicit employment of a metasystem allows questions which are not decidable between competing systems or within the boundaries of a system to be discussed in a language (or metalanguage) of a higher order.
A metasystem does not need, and often docs not have, formal authority over the systems it discusses. It may even be constituted of members of the actual systems under discussion who have agreed to **wear another hat representing the whole** of which they are parts.
Kurt Godel proved in a mathematical paper that there will always be problems in any arithmetic which are not solvable within that arithmetic. This proof established the limits of any closed logic, whether in the formal sphere of mathematics or the practical sphere of decision making.
# SOURCE the word meta is from the Greek and means over and beyond. The mathematical and logical theory arc discussed in: Nagel, E., & Newman, J. R. (1958). Godel's Proof. New York: New York University Press. Hofstadter, D. (1979). Godcl, Escher, Bach. New York: Basic Books.
# EXAMPLES • a language - for a conversation • a board of directors which oversees several divisions of a corporation • a professional association sitting in judgment on the behavior of an accused member • a court of appeals • the village elders for an tribe • a discussion at a higher level of abstraction • a metagame • parents settling their children's disputes
# NON-EXAMPLES • a paradoxical situation • two equal partners who cannot agree • a discussion which does not rise to a higher level of abstraction • a game
# PROBABLE ERROR • Moving between system and metasystem frames of reference without noticing • 'Getting stuck' in an undecidable situation
# SEE Recursion; Metalanguage; Observer; Self-Reference