both cybernetics and systems theory fit into a broader field called systems science (also called complexity theory), which is the study of complex systems. Esse

both cybernetics and systems theory fit into a broader field called systems science (also called complexity theory), which is the study of complex systems. Essentially the field is adjacent to the scientific method, where the scientific method tests cause/effect from one variable to another, systems science aims to understand and model causal relations that can't be reduced to a single cause/effect consequence (and thus can't be accurately studied using reductionist methods). It's a fairly large collection of fields, from mathematical (systems dynamics, chaos theory) to philosophical (constructivism, second-order cybernetics which is a form of epistemology) to practical (systems thinking, automation, feedback mechanisms etc). It was by far the most influential school of thought in the 20th century. It was a revolution at the time but nonetheless died out before its time. A good place to start would be W Ross Ashby's "An Introduction to Cybernetics", or Donella Meadows' "Thinking in Systems" for the systems theory side. FWIW, Stephen Hawking claimed the 21st century would be defined by complexity theory. I'm disappointed to say that's not yet been the case. As for the metaphysics comment - all of reality is emergent and arises from interactions at a lower level - newtonian physics emerge from quantum mechanics, chemistry emerges from newtonian physics, biology from chemistry, sociology from biology and so on (though things of course don't stack quite as neatly as that!) - so to understand how systems work in an abstract sense is very useful for understanding reality - it's like knowing physics, if knowing physics was still useful at the macro-level.