Composition, part of
The main relationships in systems (system realizations, remembering their physicality) are the relationships of "part-whole" (part of), also known as **composition relationships. Engineers often refer to this as the breakdown of the system. In systems, the most important thing is system breakdowns. **The levels of this breakdown are system levels. Breakdowns are made through attention, nothing in the physical world is intentionally broken! If you dissected a butterfly into wings, body, legs, and antennae, it does not mean you detached the wings, legs, and antennae from the body; no, you simply distinguished these parts in a living butterfly with your attention! Furthermore, you highlighted the butterfly itself with attention as part of its environment!
The main flow in breakdowns is from part to whole, from the system to its environment. Parts are clearly visible, easily distinguished, while the whole in the environment is often harder to identify. Therefore, system thinking is often referred to as holistic, oriented towards the whole. Later we will learn that it's not quite the case—system thinking is oriented not only towards the whole, but also towards the parts, making it reductionist as well, and pure holism and pure reductionism without each other—evil, misconception, error, deadlock. Nevertheless, the initial thought of a system thinker is towards finding the whole, when the part is known (meaning any system triggers the first thought in finding the supersystem, outside the system boundary, not within the subsystems).
We are talking about "true parts," that is, physical parts, not a casual conversation about "part of the system description," "part of the system characteristics," and other "parts of information objects." Thoughts on how to extend system thinking to such "information parts" are emerging now, and we will touch upon it a bit later. For now, let's focus solely on spatial-temporal parts, that is, parts of the physical world, parts of some systems. Remind that systems are physical/real.
Wing and fuselage are parts of an airplane, while the fuel pump is part of the engine. The wing (all wing molecules) occupies part of the airplane's total volume, meaning part of the space it occupies in the physical world/space-time; the fuel pump occupies part of the engine. All fuel pump molecules are part of the engine molecules—molecules defined as small places in the physical world. If we were to discuss some nanocoatings a few molecules thick, we could extend the reasoning to quarks—nuances of quantum uncertainty here are irrelevant; what matters is the reasoning about parts of the material world.
If we consider that all systems exist not only in physical space but also in space-time, then the entire discussion about different system states or roles becomes a discussion about parts over time. For instance, an egg is just part of a butterfly in time—while the butterfly goes through the "egg" stage, there is no other "butterfly" in the world in place of the egg.
Thus, system states or roles (time periods when the system performs a function for its supersystem, that is, plays its role) can be treated as individual objects, receiving individual names. A butterfly in the "egg" stage is called an "egg." Peter Smith in a state of illness is called a "patient." And "patient" here is simply a role/state of Peter Smith. A microscope, a hammer, or a stone in the role of "pounder" for a nail—that moment when they are used for that purpose (they are affordances performing certain functions).
It's convenient to conceptualize system realizations as "worms" in time, where their place in the physical world follows a trajectory over time or a "temporal deployment"...
Please note that due to the text's length, the translation is provided in parts.