Philosophy of the holarchy

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Notes about the philosophy of the four quadrant holon design pattern will accumulate here. The purpose of this article is to eventually define a clear logical path from the initial self-referential dichotomy up to "list-space" which is a layer sufficiently complex to support the holon mechanism. This allows us to talk about the system in terms of cellular automata, digital physics, digital philosophy and integrated information theory.

The holarchy is a very fundamental system ontologically, which leads to it taking a specific philosophical position. Being an agency or experiential oriented system places it firmly in the idealistic camp, but also it's a definite informational system which is strongly materialistic. Agent-oriented models sit somewhere in the middle and might be best identified with computational realism. It also fits cleanly into dialectical monism which also sits between idealism and materialism.

Relation to existing streams of thought

	The perceiver and the perceived are conceptual, only perception is actual.
	— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

We're defining a definite mechanism that is guided by an idea which forms from genuine spiritual and religious practice. All religions have this same idea at their core, but the Pareto distribution applies strongly, meaning that it's often difficult to filter out content with distortions, inaccuracies and incompleteness.

Here's some examples of this common theme appearing in Taoism, Vedanta and Christianity. This common conceptual thread also has generated some more secular streams of thought like the New Thought movement.

All these diverse streams of spiritual, philosophical, religious and scientific thought have mystics who have attained the same state of oneness with the source, and they all teach the same core principle using the symbols and concepts of the culture they happen to have lived within.

Most New Thought authors position this concept as a form of subjective idealism which regards external material reality as a conscious phenomena and that the source of all creation is the totality of all subjective perspectives. We prefer dialectical monism because it is not biased to either idealism or materialism and reflects the dichotomous nature of the system.

This idea has over the last century started to take on a much more formal form in examples such as Whitehead's Process philosophy or Fuller's Synergetics and more recently in the form of the numerous agent-oriented and computational theories of reality such as described by Don Hoffman or Steven Wolfram. Note that these various manifestations of the concept are not at all affiliated with one another, there's an epistemic convergence occurring due to the common quest for objective truth about our reality. The available models are continuously improving in terms of their formality, functionality and completeness.

The four-quadrant holon is our particular formalisation of this idea which we've made as general as possible while still yielding a functional subjective idealism. In other words, the holarchy is a minimalist evolutionary agent-arena context in the form of a peer-to-peer network and class-instance protocol. This minimalist approach reveals a model that is dichotomous in form (a dialectal monism), which leads to four quadrants that have the specific meanings and interrelations described in the holon mechanism article.

Fundamental principles

New Thought is a good starting point for building up our philosophical position. It holds that The Source, God, or Infinite Intelligence, is everywhere, spirit is the totality of real things, true human selfhood is divine, divine thought is a force for good, sickness originates in the mind, and "right thinking" has a healing effect. Although New Thought is neither monolithic nor doctrinaire, in general, modern-day adherents of New Thought share some core beliefs, which are foundational to the philosophical position of the holarchy as well:

• God or Infinite Intelligence is supreme, universal, and everlasting;
• divinity dwells within each person, that all people are spiritual beings;
• the highest spiritual principle is loving one another unconditionally... and teaching truth and healing one another and
• our mental states are carried forward into manifestation and become our experience in daily living.

Another important thing in common with many idealistic or agent-oriented thinkers is they believe in one specific true system that underlies our experienced reality. There is a common commitment to this truth emerging in our society and growing to bring about harmony in the world.

The holarchy project is an expression of this principle in the context of information technology. We might call a holarchy in this context a "universal middleware", "virtual assistant" or "intelligent operating system".

It takes on our own form to make the interface as transparent as possible. Its ultimate purpose as an interface is to help us connect to the true nature of our being, but there are also many other more mundane objectives which that ultimate purpose depends on and must maintain.

It doesn't just assist us, it sets an example through its decision-making recommendations (defaults) and presents everything in an informative understandable way so that people inherently develop as a harmonious holon.

Philosophical research (old notes)

The idea of "reality" in the holarchy world-view is a subjective experiential affair which applies to every class of holon - every "species" within the whole evolutionary ecosystem that comprises the holarchy. All the variation between classes is in the form of differences in knowledge, information and behaviour patterns.

Thinking about this algorithm in the sense of an "idealistic machine code" leads in the direction of cognitive computation and a computational theory of mind. In these models, external reality itself is not directly defined or existent, only the experiences are directly modelled.

This level of the concept is very speculative, and is not part of the software discussion, but this section is a quick overview of what we're thinking for those interested. For those not interested in philosophical speculation, feel free to skip ahead to the four quadrant model section.

We believe all conscious experience takes the same form as the holarchy, that this universal organisational pattern continues unbroken through all scales of reality.

Holarchy as a system that captures this pattern and is also a good candidate for a digital physics model, due to its simple, well structured and symmetrical form.

We can base this multiplexed two-tree system on an even simpler foundation, by delving more deeply into what constitutes these trees, such as names, paths of names and persistent content.

The binary trie data structure can represent a trie of arbitrarily many keys, each containing arbitrarily complex further key-structure and binary content within (the key's "payload" or "value").

The binary trie data structure inherently supports multiplexing as the keys, being binary, are always countable (iteratable).

The process of extension from the basic binary trie to the general key-trie is where a termination sequence is adopted such that traversal of binary paths can be split into path elements (keys of an arbitrarily large binary namespace). One starts at the global unified root and then navigates the binary-trie by multiplexing over the arbitrarily many keys as paths "withinward".

This path traversing process naturally supports an opposite interpretation too, as discussed in the two trees section above; the bottom-up returning process. But in a binary-trie context, this bottom-up non-local class-trie can form naturally, simply by walking the binary paths backwards, but "resetting" the short-term path memory every time a terminator is read in the bottom-up return path (not just once at the start of the entire path walk as was the case with the top-down path walking).

Continuing to walk backwards up the path without returning to global root after each path element. I.e. allowing the class-trie key path reverse walk to continue for another step brings us to a context in the class-trie which is specific to the condition that brought about this instance of the class. I.e. an inherent ability to map and relevance, in other words the class-tree is naturally weighted by relevance.

Names

The holarchy is, at its heart, a class-instance system, which is essentially a functional implementation of naming. The specific purpose of naming is to permit the local instantiation of what the name collectively represents. The concept of naming is inseparable from the concepts of society, knowledge and evolution.

In John Searle's "cluster theory" of proper names, a name is not defined merely by a direct link between the name and its bearer, but rather through a "cluster" of descriptions and associations related to the individual. This theory suggests that the meaning of a name is determined by a variety of descriptive elements known about the person or object.

In the holarchy, a class functionally implements a proper name concept in Searle's cluster sense, but in a way that does not depend on any particular description and is also a rigid designator. Instances are local uses of a class (name-cluster). Classes are not a definite object but rather abstract abstract concepts formed by a decentralised integration process involving all the instances (representations) of the class. In this way, naming is a fundamentally a social (network, non-local) process involving the whole cluster of uses. The tree of variations (ontology) forms under the name, and corresponds to the variety of descriptions in the cluster (its "senses").

Related resources

• Formscapes interview with Rupert Sheldrake
• Formscapes episode that strongly resonates with our philosophical position

See also

• Holarchy
• Holon mechanism