12 Degrees of Freedom
"You can't have a system of less than four points that divide the Universe into insideness and outsideness of the system. The number four is the beginning number and not the number one. Unity is plural and at minimum two."

Buckminster Fuller

Systems

A system is the first subdivision of Universe. It divides all the Universe into six parts: first, all the universal events occurring geometrically outside the system; second, all the universal events occurring geometrically inside the system; third, all the universal events occurring nonsimultaneously, remotely, and unrelatedly prior to the system events; fourth, the Universe events occurring nonsimultaneously, remotely, and unrelatedly subsequent to the system events; fifth, all the geometrically arrayed set of events constituting the system itself; and sixth, all the Universe events occurring synchronously and or coincidentally to and with the systematic set of events uniquely considered.


Systems are domains of volumes. 


All systems can be modeled as polyhedra.


(R. Buckminster Fuller. Synergetics)
"A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something."

Donella Meadows
...a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. the skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical and biological science, and begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow inexorably from the original act of severance. The act is itself already remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please.

...[T]he idea that we can find a reality which is independent of how the universe actually appears, that lends such fascination to the study of mathematics.

(G. Spencer Brown. The Laws of Form)

The Gaia hypothesis, also known as Gaia theory or Gaia principle, proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet