Abstract I add an additional thread to the web of physically inspired ideas (which we call homeokinetics), that my colleagues and I believe are required to describe complex systems. Such systems are to be found as the whole or part of nature, including life, man, mind, and society. The suggestion that our themes are relevant to understanding the chemical coordination of the living organism and its command-control system may motivate the reader to consider them. Physically, all complex systems are to be viewed as electrochemical, fluid mechanical, thermodynamic field systems. This makes them ‘soft’ systems rather than the ‘hard’ systems that we regard as characteristic of man-made machines. Such soft complex systems use language as catalytic elements that control their state or the evocation of microstates in the systems. The new idea that we add, which is completely general, is relevant to recognition processes in cells and to the characterization of the organism's mind and brain. That additional idea is that culture in the anthropologist's sense, but not restricted to human systems, is a necessary overview for a physical comprehension of complex systems—e.g., at every level, the elementary units are enculturated; process and material recognition is not de novo , but occurs in a field in which a culture already exists. In this paper, the startup problems of the origins of culture are not considered.