Pretel-Wilson’s Human Systems Theory

Systems theorist Manel Pretel-Wilson proposes that understanding human systems requires discovering “an anatomy of the universe that does away with the mind-body dualism” and replacing it with “the spatial and temporal dualities that constitute everything that exists from the ground up” (Pretel-Wilson, 2020). Thus, consciousness becomes superseded by the actual-possibility duality intrinsic to human systems that avoids postulating a “collective person” with a consciousness of its own (Scheler, 1916) or an “artificial man” without its own purpose (Hobbes, 1651).

From Cartesian Consciousness to Dualities

Pretel-Wilson argues that moving beyond the concept of a being whose nature is to think or to perceive can bring us closer to a being whose nature is to create, that is, utopico-practical being, and who needs to work together with other human beings to realize ideas that shape the human world through human systems, the architects of the human world (Pretel-Wilson, 2025). We cannot understand human beings, he says, by separating them from the human world that is being shaped by human systems through the realization of their purposes. Unfortunately, consciousness is defined in opposition to an external world, which does not define human beings, given that, according to Descartes, “my essence consists only in being a thinking thing or a substance whose whole essence or nature is thinking” (Descartes, 1637).

The origin of the concept of consciousness came from Descartes’s discovery of the first axiom of his philosophy in which he postulated a thinking subject as an absolute truth correlated to an extended body through which it experiences an external world. From then onwards, the subject became associated with thought and the body with extension, creating two parallel dimensions of reality defined in opposition to each other (Spinoza, 1677). Consciousness defined as something non-material, non-spatial, non-divisible, and non-passive as opposed to something material, spatial, divisible and passive.

However, by doing so, Descartes’s first principle reinforced a world-encompassing dualism, making a split between an internal consciousness and an external world. When, in fact, the inner and the outer define the spatial dimension of human beings because the spatial duality defining sentient beings, namely, the peripheral and the central, which we share with animals, rules out the separation between the organism and its environment. Clarifying the spatial and temporal dualities defining the “anatomical” constitution of everything that exists, including sentient and human beings, makes the concept of consciousness redundant to understand the universe. We cannot understand human beings without the human world, in the same way that we cannot understand sentient beings by detaching the organism from their environments, as they are functionally related.