Taoism and the Holarchy

Work in Progress: This article is still in the developmental stage. Please do not base any work on this content, any aspect of it may undergo change or be removed at any time without notice.

Within the context of Organic Design, the concept of Taoism focuses purely on the bāguà or "eight symbols" aspect of the philosophy.

The bagua (Chinese: 八卦; pinyin: bāguà) or "eight trigrams" is a fundamental concept in Chinese philosophy and cosmology, originating from the I Ching (Book of Change) some three thousand years ago. Each trigram consists of three lines, which can be either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang), symbolizing the dualities and dynamic interactions of nature. The eight combinations represent various natural phenomena and human experiences, encompassing concepts represented by the symbols heaven, earth, fire, water, wind, thunder, mountain, and lake. Bagua serves as a framework for understanding the interplay of forces in the universe, influencing practices such as feng shui, tai chi and traditional Chinese medicine, where it provides insights into harmonising one's environment and self with the natural world.

This article is a summary of my understanding of the trigram derivation and arrangements, and their meanings both individually and together as a holistic system.

My connection to Taoism

I saw the trigrams for the first time when I was a teenager. I was in the local library and noticed the eight trigram symbols (bāguà) encircling the yin-yang symbol on the cover of a book. The effect of these symbols was powerful on me, they were literally describing a binary machine code for the universe, but I also knew intuitively that it was totally beyond my understanding at that time of my life and that I should leave it alone.

I read a lot of "east-west" books like The Tao of Physics and The Self-Aware Universe in the early 90's, but my introduction to properly studying yin, yang and the bāguà was from Chris Lofting's writing in the late 90's which gave me access to its philosophical depth in a style that was very compatible with my way of thinking.

I studied the bāguà a lot in those times, they resonated deeply with me and helped me rationally make the "flip" of my world-view from materialism to one of conscious primacy wherein the bāguà can more clearly take on the role of the "machine code of life". Execution of this "code" takes place within the conscious experiential space.

The understanding of bāguà I have is heavily influenced by Book II of the I Ching, the so-called "ten wings" which is all about the trigrams and how they derive their meanings. My understanding of the trigrams and their arrangements came to fruition in the modern context of peer-to-peer networking and agent-oriented systems, so it's not a traditional view at all. But yet the meanings of the trigram images and attributes in the light of this modern understanding remain extremely consistent. Many of the oldest paragraphs seen in this new light add weight to the claims that the ancient Taoist sages did indeed realise the very nature of reality by deeply observing the patterns of their own consciousnesses.

The "machine code" of life

The bāguà were so fascinating to me as a young teenager, because I could see they were some kind of mysterious "binary machine code" underlying the dynamics of life, and I was obsessed with machine code at the time.

After I learned more about these symbols I only became more certain that they do indeed play this role, but yet they are very different from the binary we're all familiar with. The most fundamental difference is that yin/yang are a self-organising, self-defining and self-evolving system, whereas the binary we know requires a predefined executional context in order to function such as a microchip or virtual machine.

Another important distinction is that the two binary digits are both numbers on the same dimension, but yin and yang are hierarchically different and yet complimentary in their meaning. They synthesise to yield new possibility within.

The philosophical context

It's important to understand the Taoist perspective at the broadest ontological level before discussing any details about the form it takes or how it relates to the Holarchy network.

• the aforementioned flip

It is presented as a description of how experiential content behaves rather than relating directly to the external material world. This is because all descriptions whatsoever are designed for apprehension by an interpreting agent (whether that be a conscious person or any other form of intelligent agency).

No conscious agency has the ability to know anything outside of its own conscious field, because the process of knowing is in a relationship of creative co-evolution with the known. And so the most objective and true description must be in terms of conscious content, but yet agnostic to any specific forms that may have evolved within this conscious field.

• IOW knowing is an aspect of the conscious field

Agent-oriented model

First we need to create a universe of discourse in which to frame the concepts following.

This is an agent-oriented system, which shared a lot with the concept of a virtual machine or a simulation.

When talking about the system behind conscious experience, or about the behaviour of any agent-oriented system, it's important to understand that the space-time is more like the virtual machine concept than the physical machine concept that's the default perspective within the materialist context.

The virtual machine concept in its simplest form is like Javascript running in your browser or running a virtual Mac OS X machine on your Linux desktop... But the concept when taken into the philosophical realm involves concepts like universes inhabited by agents or simulated life as seen in the Matrix films.

• agent-models area inherently dualistic because they imply individual agents within an arena

• This general concept can be seen as a hierarchy of private and public scopes

• todo...

Evolution

ChatGPT: Evolution, in abstract terms, operates through the interplay of variation, selection, and behaviour. Variations arise spontaneously in a system, creating differences among entities. Selection acts upon these variations, favouring those that align with environmental or contextual pressures, ensuring their persistence or propagation. Behaviour, the way entities interact with their environment, influences the success or failure of these variations. Over time, this process leads to the adaptation of systems, refining and shaping their properties and behaviours to fit changing conditions, driving complexity and diversity.

Evolution is a deceptively simple concept, David Deutsch described it concisely and simple as the creation of knowledge through alternating variation and selection. The source of change leads to variations and the source of agency that leads to selection may be complex, but the organisational structure that binds them together into an evolutionary system is essentially very simple.

The Taoist form of the Dialectical Monism is a simple symmetrical self-organising system that embodies this evolutionary dynamic. Although the trigrams appear arcane and simplistic, they include the important fundamental concepts of class and instance, private and public scope, future and past, behaviour and performance, knowledge and expectation and more.

Behaviours

A virtual machine is a space-time in which content undergoes change in accord with rules specified by the "host" machine in the abstraction layer above that "owns" the space.

Rules might take the form of anything such as physics, biological cells, cellular automata, program code, electrical circuits or production rules. The point is that information, material or content in general within the space undergoes change in accord with rules that are embodied within the space, that's the general concept of the virtual machine.

In this system, we already have a general form for our rules dictated to us from above by the hierarchy of scopes.... production rules and biological cells closely match this context, in fact the former can be seen as a discrete quantised special case of the latter.

Behaviours are the generalised continuous form of the production rule system of program definition and execution...

The dialectical monism

ChatGPT: Dialectical monism is a philosophical framework that posits the unity of opposites, suggesting that reality is fundamentally composed of a single substance or essence, while simultaneously expressing dualities within that unity. Rooted in dialectical reasoning, this perspective asserts that contradictions are not merely oppositional but are interdependent, existing in a dynamic relationship that contributes to a holistic understanding of existence. Unlike traditional forms of monism, which may emphasise a singular, unchanging essence, dialectical monism embraces the idea that this single reality is in constant flux and development. Consequently, it implies that while the universe may manifest in diverse forms and dualities — such as yin and yang, being and non-being, or subject and object — these dualities are ultimately manifestations of a singular underlying reality.

ChatGPT: Dialectical monism as the core of "conscious physics" aligns with the idea that consciousness is both the observer and the observed, the process and the state, the subject and the object. This model suggests that all of reality’s apparent dualities are expressions of a deeper unity, and that this unity is inherently conscious.

ChatGPT: In summary, the most fundamental structure of conscious physics is this dialectical monism, which brings together the four quadrants we derived and reinterprets them as interdependent aspects of a single, conscious, non-dual reality. Through this lens, reality is seen as a holistic field of conscious interactions where opposites co-create each other, and consciousness itself is the medium through which existence becomes knowable, experiential, and dynamic. This structure indeed provides the essential foundation for a unified framework of conscious physics, reflecting an integrated view of reality as both one and many, process and state, agent and arena—all within the scope of a single, conscious continuum.

The Taiji symbol

The Taiji symbol is one way of representing dialectical monism, and is a long-standing and familiar symbol that has represented it since antiquity.

The traditional "yin yang symbol" (taiji) shows that these two forms are distinct and in motion following one another, becoming one another. The smaller dots demonstrate that the concepts are hierarchical and recursive.

The concept of the symbol taken as a whole is of an arbitrarily complex structure of continuous progressing threads as sequences of discrete experiential moments. The whole thing progressing due to both cyclic and organic evolutionary change.

Behaviour is the objective mechanics or "physics" of experiential space. It's one thing to have a symbol that represents this concept, but quite another for it to be represented in behaviour.

The dialectical monism is an abstract recursive-duality based way of describing this fundamental behaviour pattern environment and its in-progress state. This in-progress state is defined in the abstract terms of the most generic state, polarity.

Its the minimal system that encapsulates the evolutionary and collaborative nature of the conscious experience flux.

The structure of the trigrams

Apart from the two pure trigrams, the six mixed ones are called siblings, they're the sons and daughters of the pure ones which are the parents.

All siblings share a similar form of two alike and one unique line. This is like foreground amongst background. The foreground is the single unique line and the background are the two similar lines. The general character of the trigram is determined by the single foreground line standing out from the two similar lines. This sets the gender for the sibling.

The trigram as a whole represents developing content in a moment of space-time. The first line represents beginning. The second line represents the playing out of the scene and the top line is the closing end scene of the moment. So the siblings with their foreground line at the bottom are the oldest siblings having been involved at the beginning, those with it in the middle are the middle-aged siblings and those with it at the top are the youngest siblings only having been involved for the end of the developing moment.

The masculine group represents active local conscious intent, the intentional form of development. The female group represent the environment as a developing process.

As we will show soon, each of them operate within the context of their opposite, acting upon their opposite to represent their meaning in action. By deriving the trigram structure in this way, all of the opposite partners have exactly corresponding opposite symbols. So the loops all represent a male-to-female connection that operates in the same temporal phase of the development.

Primal arrangement

	The Tao gives birth to the One. The One gives birth to the Two. The Two give birth to the Three. The Three give birth to the Ten Thousand Things. The Ten Thousand Things carry yin and embrace yang. They achieve harmony through the interplay of these two vital energies.
	— Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching

This quote from Lao Tzu describes this as three levels of duality, leading to trigrams that operate in the way of the primal arrangement - the 4Q system with diagonal feedback loops. The 10K things is the fourth level which is the abstraction layer permitted and actualised by the primal arrangement. The primal arrangement is the form of the "fractal layer" or "ideal platonic realm".

• there's no literature linking Lao Tzu's three with the trigram levels

	Heaven and earth determine the direction. The forces of mountain and lake are united. Thunder and wind arouse each other. Water and fire do not combat each other. Thus are the eight trigrams intermingled.
	— I Ching, p. 265

The Primal arrangement

The eight trigrams (ba gua / pa kua) consist of three generations of derivation, the most abstract and ontologically fundamental are the Creative at the top and the Receptive at the bottom. The second generation is Fire on the left and Water on the right. Each corner trigram is a third generation conceptual synthesis of its neighbouring abstract concepts.

Note that these generations are not in linear time, since this "outer world" arrangement is actually creating linear time. Each generation is adding a new level of refinement to the whole system, like adding resolution to a picture.

These corner trigrams are third-generation ones that are each based on another first and second generation one. In other words, each represents a path from root through a first, a second and a third generation.

The vertical axis concerns the energy and structure of the field, the horizontal concerns the content within the field. The four third-generation corners together represent the dynamics of a new infinite subjective space which is the result of all three generations (all eight trigrams) working together.

Each trigram has both an image aspect and an attribute aspect. A trigrams image is the value it presents, what it is as a context in which it acts in accord with its attrbute... The images of the four diagonal gen-3 trigrams conceptually correspond to Aristotles' four causes and Wilber's four quadrants. The tragrams are arranged vertically opposite to Wilber's quadrants. Aristotle had no preference for the layout of his causes.

Diagonal feedback loops

The trigrams "attribute" is the action it performs onto its opposite partner. Since opposite partners affect each other reciprocally, a geometry of four independent feedback-loop axes all intersecting at the centre is represented by these gen-3 partners.

These loops are not directly seen in the inner world of experience, but they affect the way that identity and environment develop in that world.

The dynamic embodied by the primal arrangement is a minimal system description capturing all aspects of the fundamental evolutionary experiential space.

It's an answer to the question asking what the simplest form is that any complex experiential instance can conceptually be regressed back to (in the conscious space context).

• what is the simplest idealist evolutionary context?
  • what is the most generic description of evolving behaviour context?
  • corresponding to this question is what is the most generic content?

Following is a section about each of the trigrams in the primal arrangement.

The vertical axis (|)

This is the most fundamental and abstract meaning which defines the space-time (multiplex) that all else will play out within. Heaven represents time and Earth represents space, but they operate in a dependent and cyclic way intermingling recursively but coherently. They give rise to a second axis, the horizontal derived axis with fire on the left and water on the right.

• multiplexing brings about the 4Q, integrative naming joins the names
• Axis: Creation and reception, active and passive.
• Meaning: Heaven represents pure Yang, symbolizing the creative, dynamic force, often associated with masculinity, action, and authority. Earth represents pure Yin, symbolising the receptive, nurturing force, associated with femininity, support, and adaptability. Together, they form the fundamental cosmic pair, Heaven and Earth, which generate and nurture all things.

Heaven (T, ☰, Qián, 乾)

Heaven above represents the energy of focus which is the fundamental ability of execution and identity. Its attribute is strength, which means the ability to progress things, or more technically, executional focus. This trigram is primal first generation and represents the abstract concept of time-like behaviour.

• collective scope, just the abstract idea, needs content to be manifest
• link to collective public
• Heaven represents pure Yang, symbolizing the creative, dynamic force, often associated with masculinity, action, and authority

Earth (B, ☷, Kūn, 坤)

Traditionally earth below represents pure Yin, symbolising the receptive, nurturing force, associated with femininity, support, and adaptability.

For us, Earth is informational structure memory. Its attribute is the ability for structural complexity to persist between quanta of executional focus. This trigram is primal first generation and represents the abstract concept of space-like behaviour.

• individual developmental private scope, just the abstravt idea, needs content to be manifest
• link to individual private

The horizontal axis (—)

This axis consists of fire on the left and water on the right. They inherit the feedback-loop nature of the primary pair. Where the vertical axis represented the abstract container of space-time, this axis represents the content within the space-time. The left represents the structure of content which is its ontological meaning. The right represents the state in-progress of the structure - i.e. the resource-flow aspect.

• second generation
• Axis: Flow and transformation, danger and clarity.
• Meaning: Kǎn symbolizes water, representing depth, danger, and emotional intuition. It's often linked with the unknown, challenges, and adaptation. Lí symbolizes fire, representing brightness, clarity, and transformation, often associated with intellect, passion, and vision. Water and fire are dynamic opposites; water can extinguish fire, and fire can evaporate water, but together they create life and change.

Fire (L, ☲, Lí, 離)

Fire in the left is perceivable (intelligable, apprehendable, knowledge) ontological structure (actual content structure) Traditionally this trigrams attribute is "clarity" and it's described as being that light by which all beings perceive each other amnd make sense of the world. It is also associated with the word "clinging" which can be thought of as ontologicallly "wrapping" state making it conceptually understandable or known, and also as continually "fitting" the ontology to dynamically changing state.

• second generation
• ontological structure, be-able, locally performable
  • just the abstract idea of the locally performable, needs scope to actualise

Water (R, ☵, Kǎn, 坎)

Water to the right is structure in-state-of-progress (content progress) Resource flow, the actual state inside the comtainer of space-time and taking the form of ontological structure, extending it and co-evolving with it.

• second generation
• continuous instantiation
• energy-receiving structure
• that which is in-flux wco fire, content in-progress, just the abstract idea of in-flux, needs scope to actualise

The second generation as a whole

	What manifests itself visibly they called an image; what has bodily form they called a tool. What is established in usage they called a pattern. That which furthers on going out and coming in, that which all men live by, they called the divine.
	— I Ching (Ten Wings), p. 318

The multiplexed (intermingled) space-time and the in-flux content structure are all enabled by these first four trigrams together. The top-down and bottom-up cycle inherent in the space-time allows same-name connected groups to form.

From the perspective of any local context within the structure, this name connection (instances of the same class connected) is relatively non-local (it seems non-local from any local perspective). This is due to the entire structure above any location in a multiplexed tree having progressed in between every local moment.

What this dynamic of four gives us systemically as a whole is essentially an object-oriented virtual machine, with private and public scope and a class-instance mechanism that allows behaviour structures to be representable by names and to be locally embodiable. Further, all progressing embodiments of the same class form inherently into maps shared by them all like a special interest group.

Third generation trigrams

The second generation all together allows the intermingled space-time structure to represent class-instance structure and content. The third generation is the default application of the second layer, the first instance of a class.

The four third generation trigrams are each within the context of both a content form and a scope form, but their meanings are only expressible in terms of interaction with their opposite scope-pair partner.

This dual diagonal feedback-loop dynamic is inherently available due to the first generation referring to, depending on, and completing each other. The loops both involve a change side and an informational feedback side, each defining a specific form of content progress and interaction between collective and individual.

The default application of the second layer must be expressed in this inherent dual feedback-loop form. It turns out that a society of organisations with a evolutionary culture of behaviour structures can be represented directly in this dual feedback-loop form inherently available in layer three.

These diagonal meanings involve information that can only become available through agency because it is holistic and its totality cannot be known by any specific context window. So the information being organised in the diagonal loops is content in a new abstraction layer composed of the same symbol set but in a new arbitrarily evolvable way.

• all gen-3 are abstract and the "real" layer is the next one of arbitrary evolutionary complexity based on the same symbol set (further trigrams), but used to make arbitrarily many names of any complexity.

Behavioural (variation) diagonal

The variations are maintained in the TL ontology of behaviours organised by condition-action variational usage map. The actions performed are determined by the TL which makes the background structure setting the default flow for the agentic focus to act in accord with.

The actions are in terms of declarative objectives with associated costs and therefore permit expectations, contracts, usage metrics and account of performance. This accounting is the BR and is sent back to the TL updating the ontology with usage metrics and possible variational additions.

This ontology is effectively a non-local behavioural repository connecting roles (instance wanted) of the same class.

Mountain (BR, ☶, Gèn, 艮)

Mountain in the bottom-right. The local performance is assessed and extends the ontology, local metrics are merged in the global map wco their conditions.

• the performance results are assessed and extend ontology (TL)
• this assessment is over a larger time-frame and non-locally merged
• keeping still or finishing things is about the final immutable account

Lake (TL, ☱, Duì, 兌)

Lake in the top-left... expressing performance. The ontology organises structure which is performed locally internally. In a healthy harmonious individual the default state is genuine happiness and the default action is unconditional love.

• the corresponding matching action is prepared for agency, i.e. the filtered determined behavioural structure to enact
• the condition determines the flow of focus into what actions
• action occurs in the present not perceived, perception is ontological and after the facts, derived from them
• ontology and action all involves unseen energy in the present
• presence over all scales
• the combination of the primal executional energy and collective container and ontological structure
• The lake symbolises openness, joy, and communication. While the mountain is unmoving and contemplative, the lake reflects and encourages joy and interaction.

Thunder (BL, ☳, Zhèn, 震)

Thunder in the bottom-left... intent, inciting/permitting self-development and progress, starting things. Body-schema (image) is future-objective update/maintain (attribute)

• the future energy allocation is adjusted (TR)
  • based on conditions and assessment
  • body-schema development
• usage metrics and conditions are the inputs
• the allocation of energy in the future (TR)
• the individual progress structure adjustment

Wind (TR, ☴, Xùn, 巽)

Wind in the top-right. Public flux and ontological fitted conditional wrapping of the body schema (BL) to it.

• the conditions are matched against the state, ontologised as body-schema filter (BL)
• the condition is primary and sets up the energy flow to the actions
• the collective container and the resource-flow future-state

The diagonals

In the primal arrangement, all the axes are polarities that form loops together where each projects itself onto its opposite partner. The symbols are exact opposites in the polarities representing these tightest relationships symbolically...

The vertical and horizontal are both in different generations, but the two diagonal axes connect the third generation trigrams into two orthogonal loops both in the same generation (the same level of abstraction, "abstractness").

In traditional Chinese cosmology, the Bagua trigrams are often understood in pairs or axes, representing complementary forces (Yin and Yang) and dynamic relationships between elements of the natural world. These axes illustrate how opposites interact and balance each other, a key concept in Daoism and the philosophy of Yin and Yang. The trigrams not only represent elements of nature but also aspects of human life, emotions, and actions. Each pair embodies a dynamic tension that creates harmony in the cosmos.

The trigrams and axes have our own specific meanings within the context of the holarchy. In each of the following sections describing the axes, I've first included a summary of the traditional meaning made by AI, and then our own specific meaning following. It can be seen that the spirit of the meaning is carried from the general traditional context to the specific holarchy context, in some cases with a slight conceptual shift.

We've already discussed the vertical and horizontal axes, and they don't need any further explanation in this discussion. But the axes formed from the third generation trigrams introduce an important new dimension to the inner world being created by the trigrams. Like the other axes, these are feedback loops connecting opposites, and so the two loops connecting the opposite third generation pairs are the diagonal axes.

Here's a breakdown of the polar axes and their meanings, based on traditional interpretations from texts like the I Ching (Book of Change) followed by our specific meaning within the context of the holarchy.

Evolutionary development

The diagonal axes together extend the class-instance "virtual; machine" pattern of the second generation to become a full evolutionary subjective space with the self at the centre.

Thunder and Wind (/)

• third generation
• this is the selection axis of evolutionary development

Axis: Movement and penetration, sudden action and subtle influence. Meaning: Zhèn symbolizes thunder, representing sudden, forceful action, awakening, and stimulation. It’s the force that breaks stagnation and inspires movement. Xùn symbolizes wind, representing the gentle yet persistent influence that penetrates and spreads. While thunder initiates, wind sustains and disperses energy, creating balance between abrupt change and ongoing transformation.

Mountain and Lake (\)

• third generation
• this is the variation axis of evolutionary development

Axis: Stillness and joy, contemplation and pleasure. Meaning: Gèn symbolizes the mountain, representing stillness, stability, and meditation. It’s the energy of being grounded, reflecting on the inner self, and patience. The lake symbolises openness, joy, and communication. While the mountain is unmoving and contemplative, the lake reflects and encourages joy and interaction. Together, they balance contemplation with enjoyment, restraint with expression.

The King Wen arrangement

• todo...

Taken together the two arrangements have some objective correlations to the things we've been talking about.

• we see four dimensions formed by trigram pairs that are common to both arrangements, forming the same connection pattern of pairs having only a rotation of the pairs in their dimensional positions
• these four common connections assign the trigrams to the three generations
• the third generation (diagonal trigrams) connected in their third-level way means connecting to the trigram that is opposite in both the state-wise ("colour", value) sense and the function-wise sense (direction, vector)
• I don't know if it's relevant, but this dimensional rotation yields a cycle of four arrangements, the two others have each of the diagonal pairs vertically

See also

• Spanish version using Google Translate
• Holarchy
• I Ching category
• Karl Friston on imperatives and axioms in evolution (1:20:00)