Interesting ... a system that starts out as understandable/understood can degrade into one that still works, but is not understood (obviously ... we see it every day).

At that point, work (in the Physics sense) is required to lift it back to the outer energy level -- that of both working and being understood.

In many cases, a reasonable option will be to leave it at the degraded level and continue to utilize it (after all, it still "works").

This all seems obvious to me for the first time, as I look at it from this perspective. But it has never dawned on me before, probably because every inch of my soul longs for the beauty of the highest level of the hierarchy -- "works and is understood".