The Principle of Permanent Change and Irreproducibility and Human Rights

Human rights disputes rarely occur between parties possessing equal power. More often than not, they emerge in situations where one side possesses greater military strength, economic resources, institutional authority, technological capacity, or political influence than the other. A powerful individual may use force to obtain something desired from a weaker individual. A powerful state may wage war against a weaker state to secure territory, resources, or strategic advantage. A dominant social group may create laws, policies, or institutions that preserve its privileges while limiting the opportunities available to others.

When such imbalances occur, the struggle is not only over resources, territory, or rights. It is also a struggle over explanation. The powerful possess greater capacity to define what happened, why it happened, and whether it was justified. They can marshal experts, institutions, records, technologies, and legal systems to produce narratives that transform contested actions into accepted facts. In many cases, the explanation becomes as consequential as the event itself.

Throughout history, some of humanity’s gravest injustices have been accompanied by carefully constructed justifications. Slavery was explained as an economic necessity. Colonial domination was presented as a civilizing mission. Forced assimilation was described as social progress. Mass displacement was portrayed as a security requirement. Civilian deaths during war were justified as unavoidable costs of achieving a greater good. In each case, a reconstruction of reality became authoritative because it was backed by power.

The Systems Thinking Framework offers an important response to this tendency through what may be called the Principle of Permanent Change and Irreproducibility.

This principle follows directly from the proposition that systems continuously perform work, transform energy, interact with other systems, and evolve through time. Because no system remains perfectly static, no event can ever be reproduced in its entirety. Similar events may occur. Familiar patterns may emerge. Systems may exhibit recurring behaviors. However, the precise configuration of systems, energies, relationships, motivations, and conditions that produced a particular event can never be recreated exactly.

Permanent change is more than a characteristic of reality; it is a condition of existence. Every system—natural, social, political, technological, biological, legal, economic, or cultural—is continuously changing. Consequently, every event emerges from a unique configuration of systems operating within a unique temporal context. Irreproducibility is therefore not an exception to reality; rather, it is one of its most fundamental features.

The insight itself is ancient. More than 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus observed that no person can step into the same river twice. The observation is often treated as a poetic reflection on impermanence, but it also expresses a profound systems insight. The river is not the same river because its waters continue to flow and change. The person is not the same person because time has altered the individual physically, mentally, emotionally, and experientially. Even if the person returns to the same location moments later, both the observer and the observed have changed. What appears to be repetition is in reality transformation.

Within the Systems Thinking Framework, this ancient observation becomes a methodological principle governing explanation itself: Every event emerges from a specific arrangement of systems performing work through time. Since those systems are constantly changing, no event can ever be perfectly reproduced. What investigators, historians, judges, scientists, and policymakers produce are not reproductions of events but reconstructions of them. The distinction is crucial.

Consider a person crossing a river who slips, falls, and dies. Investigators arrive and determine that the river was unusually high, the current was strong, the victim could not swim, and the body struck rocks after falling. Weather records, witness testimony, and measurements of water levels support this conclusion. The explanation appears complete.

From a systems perspective, the investigators have reconstructed the event; they have not reproduced it. The reconstruction may be highly persuasive and supported by substantial evidence. It may even be correct. Nevertheless, it remains an approximation of a reality that can never be fully recovered. There may have been factors no one observed or recorded. A small insect may have struck the victim’s eye at a critical moment, causing a brief loss of focus that contributed to the fall. A loose stone may have shifted beneath the victim’s foot. A sudden sound may have caused a brief distraction. A minor medical episode may have altered balance.

Based on available evidence, investigators may classify the river current as the determinant system and the victim’s inability to swim as a contributory system. Yet this classification remains provisional. The discovery of additional evidence may reveal that what appeared to be the determinant system was merely contributory, or that an overlooked system played the decisive role in producing the outcome. Such findings could alter the causal architecture of the event and lead investigators to reassess the classification of systems involved.

This observation does not imply that investigators are wrong. Nor does it suggest that all explanations are equally valid. Rather, it acknowledges a fundamental limit: every explanation is constrained by available evidence, and no reconstruction can claim complete certainty regarding every force that contributed to an outcome. The significance of this principle extends far beyond accident investigations.

From Rivers to Data

At first glance, the river example may appear far removed from the technological realities of the modern world. In fact, it provides a useful lens through which to understand them. The significance of Heraclitus’ observation lies not in the river itself but in the nature of flowing systems. Rivers are dynamic pathways through which water moves continuously, never remaining perfectly still. Modern communication networks function in much the same way. Instead of water, they carry streams of information. Instead of channels carved into the earth, they rely on towers, satellites, fiber-optic cables, servers, and software. Yet both are systems defined by movement, adaptation, and constant change.

The comparison is particularly relevant because the role once occupied by rivers in human civilization is increasingly occupied by digital networks. Water remains indispensable for biological life, but access to communication systems, digital identities, financial networks, and information infrastructures has become indispensable for participation in modern social, economic, and political life. To be disconnected from these systems is increasingly to be excluded from opportunities, services, institutions, and even rights. Digital technology has become one of the principal environments through which contemporary life is organized.

For this reason, the ancient image of the river remains remarkably relevant. The same principle that prevents a person from stepping into the same river twice also cautions us against treating the outputs of digital systems as fixed or perfectly transparent representations of reality. Just as the river’s waters are continuously changing, the flow of data through modern communication networks is constantly being redirected, adjusted, filtered, prioritized, and transformed by interacting systems. The examples are therefore not separate illustrations but expressions of the same principle operating in different historical contexts. The river of water that sustained earlier civilizations has, in many respects, been joined by a river of data that increasingly sustains contemporary society. As control over rivers once translated into political and economic power, control over digital infrastructures increasingly translates into social, economic, and political influence. Understanding these systems is therefore not merely a technical concern but a human-rights concern.

Modern societies increasingly rely upon technological systems to reconstruct reality. Criminal investigations routinely employ cell-phone records, GPS data, surveillance footage, facial-recognition software, predictive algorithms, and other forms of digital evidence. These technologies are often presented as objective representations of events. However, they are themselves products of dynamic systems whose operation is only partially visible to those evaluating the evidence.

Consider a criminal case in which prosecutors argue that a suspect was present at a crime scene because records indicate that the suspect’s phone was connected to a particular cellular tower. To many jurors, such evidence appears precise and objective. It may seem little different from direct observation. The reality is more complicated.

Cellular networks are not designed to establish forensic certainty. They are designed to facilitate communication. To achieve this objective, providers continuously balance signal strength, network congestion, bandwidth availability, interference, device movement, and service continuity.

Imagine a person speaking on a mobile phone while driving near a railroad crossing. At the beginning of the call, the nearest tower provides the strongest signal and initiates the connection. Moments later, a freight train carrying dozens of metal railcars passes between the caller and that tower. If the connection remained dependent solely on the nearest tower, the call would become fragmented and nearly unintelligible. To prevent this, network software dynamically redirects portions of the communication through other towers capable of maintaining continuity. These adjustments may occur repeatedly during a single conversation, without the user’s awareness.

The resulting call record reflects the operation of an entire communication system rather than a simple record of location. The tower identified in a database may not perfectly correspond to where the caller was located throughout the call. Moreover, the algorithms governing these transitions are often proprietary. Telecommunications companies frequently refuse to disclose their operation, citing trade secrets and competitive concerns. Some providers explicitly state that their systems were not designed to establish precise geographic location and should not be interpreted as exact measurements of a person’s position at a specific moment.

The issue is not whether the technology works. Clearly it does. The issue is that the output of a complex and dynamic system is often presented as though it were direct observation of reality itself.

The tower record becomes a reconstruction of location rather than location itself.

The same logic applies to historical analysis. Historians reconstruct wars, revolutions, genocides, economic crises, and civilizational transformations from documents, artifacts, testimony, and material evidence. The original events themselves remain inaccessible. Historians can approach them, illuminate them, and explain them, but they cannot reproduce them. Every historical account is a reconstruction built from surviving traces.

This observation also challenges the common claim that history repeats itself.

From a systems perspective, history never repeats itself. What recur are patterns, structures, incentives, feedback loops, and relationships of power. The Roman Empire does not return. A particular revolution never happens twice. No genocide is identical to another genocide. Similar configurations of systems may generate analogous outcomes, but every event emerges from a unique arrangement of systems operating within a unique moment in time.

Recognizing irreproducibility does not weaken explanation. It strengthens it.

The significance of irreproducibility is not that truth is unknowable. Rather, it is that no actor, regardless of power, possesses a privileged exemption from the limits of reconstruction.

This insight becomes particularly important in human rights analysis.

When extreme power asymmetries exist, uncertainty is rarely distributed equally. Powerful institutions possess greater resources to gather evidence, produce records, shape public narratives, influence legal interpretations, and establish official accounts. Their explanations often acquire the appearance of certainty not because certainty exists, but because power amplifies particular reconstructions while marginalizing alternatives.

The Principle of Permanent Change and Irreproducibility functions as a methodological check on that power. Human rights emerged in part because societies recognized that power left unchecked tends to become self-justifying. The Principle of Permanent Change and Irreproducibility reinforces this insight at the level of knowledge. Just as human rights place limits on what power may do, this principle places limits on what power may claim to know with certainty. It reminds us that the authority to explain an event should never be confused with possession of the event itself. In this sense, the principle functions as an epistemological counterpart to human rights protections: both seek to restrain the tendency of concentrated power to transform its preferences into unquestionable truth. The principle does not require rejecting official explanations. Nor does it require accepting every competing claim. Rather, it insists that all explanations remain open to scrutiny because no reconstruction can exhaust every relevant system, motivation, interaction, consequence, or causal pathway.

Human rights place limits on power in action, while the Principle of Permanent Change and Irreproducibility places limits on power in explanation.

Where power differentials are significant, the principle calls for heightened scrutiny of dominant explanations. The greater the power behind an explanation, the greater the responsibility to examine the assumptions, omissions, and uncertainties embedded within it.

This does not replace evidence with sympathy. It does not substitute ideology for analysis. It does not abandon reason in favor of emotion. Instead, it introduces intellectual discipline into environments where power often seeks finality.

The Principle of Permanent Change and Irreproducibility reminds us that the map is not the territory, that evidence is not the event, and that reconstruction is not reproduction. It requires humility from investigators, judges, historians, policymakers, scientists, human-rights advocates, and systems thinkers alike.

For systems thinkers, the principle serves as a safeguard against overconfidence, reductionism, and the misuse of explanatory authority. It does not deny the possibility of knowledge. It places knowledge within its proper limits.

Because systems are always changing, every event is unique. And because every event is unique, every explanation is necessarily a reconstruction. And because every reconstruction is necessarily incomplete, no individual, institution, or state can claim absolute authority over the meaning of an event.

In human rights inquiry, where explanations often determine who is believed, who is protected, and who is punished, humility is more than a virtue. It is a safeguard against the transformation of power into unquestionable truth.

Ahmed E. Souaiaia, PhD., University of Iowa