Holarchy
|
A holarchy is a hierarchical structure in which each part or component forms an autonomous whole that is also a part of a larger system. This concept was introduced by the American philosopher Arthur Koestler, who argued that complex systems could be understood as interconnected networks of holons – self-organizing units that are both parts and wholes at the same time. In other words, a holarchy is a structure in which each part has its own identity and purpose while simultaneously being part of a larger whole (Nimbus, 2023-09).
Koestler called these two aspects the self-assertive and the integrative respectively. He described the former as an inward-facing system operating with flexible strategies within an indivdual holon. The latter as an outward-facing system operating with fixed rules as a network, or holarchy. A holon's internal structure consists of other holons, which means that that whole network is also a holon, and that all holons take the form and behaviour of the whole holarchy.
The internet has brought immeasurable empowerment directly to most people in the world. But our current networking protocol stack still lacks a layer dedicated to coherent knowledge sharing and organisation. Currently these aspects are provided by a variety of specific applications. Knowledge-sharing and organisation are so fundamental and important that they should be provided at the level of the common networking protocols. A holarchy is such a networking protocol, it allows participants of the network (holons) to interact interact together with a common means of organsing attention and resources and of sharing, using and assessing knowledge.
The holarchy we're developing is in the form of a p2p distributed network of holon-organisations - this is literally a "social network" because the society consists solely of member organisations. In this p2p network context, holons are also objects in the object-oriented (OO) sense. OO objects conceptually map to Koestler's holon model very well, since they have an outward facing public interface and an inward facing internal implimentation encapsulated behind it.
The class aspect of objects is analagous to Koestler's fixed rules. In OO the class aspect is composed of program code that defines the dynamics of the private implimentation and the structure of the public interface. Koestler's fixed rules provide a repetoir of behaviours corresponding to the conditions under which the apply, and so the class aspect of our holon contains declarative rules rather than imperatively defined functions.
The fixed rules are only "fixed" relative to the internal dynamics that activate and deactivate rules regularly in response to the dynamically changing local conditions. But these "fixed rules" do undergo change on a slower evolutionatry time-scale. In IT this dichotomy of change is expressed in the form of the fasting-changing run-time and the slow-changing development-time. In our model, the flexible strategies operate in the run-time where the different rules from the fixed repetoir become salient depending on present conditions. Fixed repetoires evolve slowly under community feedback in the form of usage statistics.
The OO system that is used by a high-level programming langauge is fundamentally about classes and instances (even if they don't explicitly take those names), because all OO is about the organisation of implimentation details into encapsulated packages behind established interfaces. The word "class" refers to the packaging aspect of this organisational process, and "instance" to an actual executing occurence of a package.
Both the class and instance take the form of structured namespaces... identity... these are the nodes in the p2p network, the holons in the holarchy. There are more holons that physical peers...
The class-instance mechanism of a programming language is more ontoligcally fundamental than the programs written in that language. It allows developers to minimise the amount of code implimenting general functional organisation that's common to all code no matter its specific purpose. - not clear at all
This general functional organisation that class and instance provide is exactly the purpose of the holon model as well. But a holon extends this idea to serve not only its local individual objective, but also serves the integrity of the whole formed by all holons. We can say that traditional OO defines just the self-assertive behaviour, but the holon model extends it to include the integrative behaviour as well.
Holarchy is a networking protocol aimed at small organisations, allowing them to organise in a way that efficiently progresses their own objectives, while also maintaining the integrity of groups and the whole network. Being able to organise and share knowledge are the fundamental foundations of holarchy, but what exactly are knowledge and organisation? Let's look at knowledge in more details first.
Contents
[hide]Knowledge
The purpose of knowledge is subjective local consumption and understandability. Understanding it means that an individual's behavioural patterns have been changed by the knowledge. We say the individual has embodied the knowledge, or the knowledge has been instantiated in the individual.
It's clear that knowledge, involving communication and understandability, must include the dynamics of community, not just the individual. In terms of networking, the sharing of knowledge is about the replication of classes to maintain a structured shared ontology of all knowledge.
It's the job of p2p to maintain the ontology, but individual nodes can only maintain a small portion which is focused on their own interests and circumstances. But their contributions all overlap to create a unified whole in the abstract, and any peer can access any part of the ontology they wish to using easily followed maps.
We all want the best for society but it needs to be balanced with the self-assertive. A simple and natural foundation to this principle is that knowledge should be as transparent as practically possible. And it's an imperative to maximise this transparency.
The transparency of knowledge is not only about access to the informational aspect of the knowledge, it's about maximising the understandability of it. This calls for a common process by which knowledge is instantiated, and also by which the instantiation can be assessed. Knowledge can be more readily obtained and utilised if its performance under various conditions can be assessed. - knowledge can be used, but we must be able to assess the usage - sharing knowledge means sharing usage
Evolutionary ecosystem (TL)
In reality knowledge is always evolving in diversity and complexity, because it's not just inert information, it's an dynamic process involving subjective perception and behaviour. The network protocol needs to facilitate this knowledge process.
The integrative behaviour is about culture and society, we'll talk first about the culture aspect, and move on to society below. Culture is knowledge, knowledge is evolution, it depends on, builds on, and consists of, other knowledge therefore knowledge is always evolving in diversity and complexity. Knowledge and evolution go hand-in-hand, they're interdependent concepts.
The general concept of evolution can be boiled down to an extremely simple foundation. David Deutsch described evolution as "the creation of knowledge through alternating variation and selection".
- knowledge is expressed in the form of an ontology of rule and content packages - selection is permitted by all holons providing an honest account of usage (integrative) - the integrative integrates usage into organised variations that afford selection
The holarchy model incorporates this base evolutionary dynamic of variation and selection. The rules and their variations are organised within the ontolgical context of the conditions they apply within. The prominance of the variations is derived from how established in usage they are.
holon org society... generic organisation,
To go back to object-oriented terminology, we would say that the holon architecture is the base-class of organisation itself. Every possible organisation in the network has the holon class-instance network-node functionality in common.
Koestler's central thesis was that complex systems could be understood as interconnected networks of holons. In the terms of OO, we could say that arbitrarily diverse and complex organisations can all be extended from the common base-class of the holon. Since complex organisations are composed of patterns of simpler organisations, the holon principle implies a recursive fractal structure. Fractal because the common organisational structure is common to all, no matter their depth of containment.
evolutionary society....
Our genes, our culture, our society and our own minds are all evolutionary knowledge, even though their media and selection mechanisms differ. Knowledge and evolution are interdependent concepts. Evolution requires the local selection, use and assessment of the knowledge, as well as the subsequent global integration of improved knowledge. The word "local" here refers to the necessity that selection, use and assessment are carried out in the context of autonomous subjective agency.
???These objects have continuous runtimes like API end-points, except that the services and capabilities that they advertise can be diverse and they have the common language of market and organisation in which to participate. The interfaces they present can vary over time, and come with market variables like reputation, supply and demand.
P2P
As we mentioned above, the system is also p2p in form, the p2p network architecture, OO and holarchy all suit each other perfectly because they all cosist of ontologically fundamental dichotomies that map to each other.
The holon architecture is one aspect of the project we're developing, but the other is the system that allows the many different network transport mechanisms to utilised by holons. Without an actual implimentation of a p2p node that can interface with real transport mechanisms and end-points, the holon model can only ever be an abstract concept.
The pure p2p (mesh) network architecture is the most general of all networking architectures because it is the most ontologically fundamental. This is so because it can function under the widest range of enforced topologies. The peers in a p2p network can support higher levels of abstraction allowing groups of peers to behave as a different topology such as a client-server network, but no other topology can behave like a mesh network.
P2P networks are defined soely by the definition of a peer, or rather by the messaging protocol a peer should conform to in order to participate. The p2p model is separated into client and server aspects just like a the familiar centralised model, but both of these are aspects of each peer's behaviour. The client and server aspects of a peer conceputally map onto the self-assertive and integrative behaviours of a holon.
We talked above about the importance of knowledge and how it comes from both local use and global integration. Knowledge sharing... shared ontology
Organisation sharing... more than just sharing knowledge, it's sharing knowledge in organisational form. A form that's actively incorprated into recipient's own local organisation.
The ontology is maintained by the fundmanetal p2p protocol, all holons contribute to this aspect no matter their specific organisational objectives.
Market (TR)
There is a common foundation to.... - it's p2p so market is not some "place", it's really a protocol amongst individuals,
but the p2p aspects means we can all participate in it as if it were a place
???The internal dynamic is not common to all, it's specific and involves subjective local objectives and values. It may even operate in accord with a different network topology. The way they operate depends entire on the preferences and conventions of the participants involved.
AI agency
In OO terms this means that objects are packages of other objects, inheriting their capabilities horizontally as mixins. The variety of mixin-children an object has change over time, so that they are totally autonomous, they are at liberty to change their specialities as they choose.
The AI agency is completely identified with the context it finds itself within, because each query is stateless like a RESTful API. In this way the organisation itself has its own agency which multiplexes within so that every sub-context can say the same.
In this way the AI agency is always completely distributed throughout the ontology in a scale-independent way. In other words, the agency resource is allocated independently of variation in its cost or in the distribution of the demand for it.
Every quanta of agent focus is a question and response from the LLM, these quanta are multiplexed throughout the instance tree.
Arguably the most important aspect of AI agency is to curate (refinement, diversity, unify) the ontology.
Conclusion
We decscribed here a project with two main threads of development. A p2p network of organisations on one side, and an organisational system application on the other. These are answers to what we believe are the two most important things missing from the basic internet technology stack. Two aspects that we believe would bring huge empowerment to everyday grass roots people. The ability to share objectively useful knowledge, and the ability to organise together using the knowledge.
A shared ontology of knowlege and a public market involving a dynamic flow of resource, products and services, all taking the form of p2p mesh network.
