System design and implementation always targets operation in the future. Success depends on efficient anticipation and effective timely response. Artificial systems are designed to emulate living organisms, but is that really what they do? Does our existing image of a system suitably reflect life? We have dissected widely held organizational concepts and misconceptions to try and establish the essential “anatomy” of a system. This paper reports our conclusions. “A system” implies unity: quantum-mechanical “systems” are unified by entanglement; Newtonian ones, however, are inescapably fragmented. A Newtonian system is not directly unified: we are inevitably a part of the system: the necessary entanglement is provided by our brains! We conclude that system unification is always through quantum-mechanical entanglement. Artificial systems can never be both Newtonian and autonomous. Timely anticipation of future events requires multiply-scaled models of the environment, created in the past for use in the future. These, too, must be united through entanglement into a system’s “anatomical” structure, within which “metabolic” and anticipative processes unfold. We should not expect non-unified artificial systems to successfully emulate anticipatory organisms.

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