I wrote this reply to a colleague on an e-list who was trying to explain “Kineman” idea to another colleague.
The concept if amazingly simple once you allow you mind to think in terms of simultaneous realities. In other words, wave-particle duality may indeed be a result of perception itself, but it is also a fundamental statement about how nature is organized: It is organized such that there can be multiple formal realities that don’t always or completely correspond. We don’t see that in everyday observations of highly interactive systems, but it shows up when the frequency of a system’s interaction with the environment is not so much greater than frequency of your observation of it, that it thus appears to be unaffected by your observation. This kind of situation exists in neurons, perhaps in microtubules, according to Hameroff and Penrose, so it is the case with quantum physics and consciousness. It is also the case for simple interactions between organisms and their environment, for certain phenomena that are entailed within the organisms and thus causally isolated from the environment. So, it is an everyday phenomenon to us, as conscious human beings, but also to any life form, because life entails internal models. Anyway, here’s the post. Maybe it is easier to understand:
From: John Jay Kineman <john.kineman@colorado.edu>Subject: Re: Jung on SystemsDate: January 30, 2014 at 9:44:42 AM GMT+5:30
The word “causality” is presently understood by most practicing scientists to mean mechanical causes – states and dynamics. Rosen tried not to rub the fur too much the wrong way by calling Aristotle’s higher modes of understanding ’causes’. So, in his modeling relation he labeled the left side as a “Natural System” (more or less what we might expect we are studying in science) as operating via “Causality”, in the scientific sense. He labeled the right side a “Formal System” or “Model” and then labeled its ’causes’ as “inference”. These are the higher Aristotelian causes – formal and final, but to avoid confusion and to refer to the one domain where all accept their presence, human modeling, he labeled them as “inference”.
The relation is thus between these two mathematical categories. Each category has internal mappings, which are entailments. The difference — using our present language, between mechanical ‘causality’ and model ‘inference’ is that the entailments are inverses. One goes (using my interpreted language now) from function (efficient cause) to structure (material result), while the other, the inferential category, goes from idea (material exemplar) to system attractor (functional design). The inverse quality of these categories is what allows them to be considered as a whole, because being inverses they can generate each other. But, as Rosen clearly states, the interaction between them does not exist in either category! So what is it? It is an information relation which is not mechanical cause and not inference either. It exists at a 5th level which is the relation between the two worlds. That’s the holon.
Now these two worlds exist, clearly and irrefutably, in any picture of science. So, the holon view certainly is correct at least for describing the interaction between a scientist and the natural system he is studying. Nature “operates” and the scientist makes “inferences”. But now consider the natural existence of the scientist – after all we evolved. Clearly some natural systems do inference and relate them to causality. We do that. We are natural. What if they all do that, but some have reduced relations revealing only a very mechanical aspect? Others, such as value systems, have very little reduction to mechanism. But both can be explained as modifications of the general view. That would be a robust general theory.
There is one all-important subtlety. All analytical views are approximations. The approximation here is different than when we assume inference isn’t present in the system. The compromise in that later case is that we end up with error. We get an exact preditions + error. When we do the holistic analysis we do not have an overall concept of error. Instead, error is another holon that we could explore. When we stop theThe distinction between the causes is somewhat artificial. It describes perception and knowledge. If we want knowledge, it says these are the least reducible knowledge domains. Yes, each domain is incommensurable with the others; hence they all must be considered if we want knowledge of a whole system analysis. Is it a parsimonious ontology of knowledge or a heuristic? I’d say the former because it meets the criteria of parsimony and generality. Whereas we accept wave-particle duality in physics, this is a four-part complementarity. So, it is beyond post-modern physics. It comes closest to the ideas of Mach and Bohm; also more recently William Tiller. Yes, it gets into the ‘weird stuff’ but you won’t get a holistic theory without allowing questions in those areas. Their exclusion from science has made them all the more confused and we will eventually have to go there.
So the subtlety of the holon view is that a single modeling relation diagram does not convey the complexity of the analysis until you consider that all systems in reality MUST include all four causes. That means the Natural System actually has all four causes, AND the modeling system also has all four causes. They are both natural systems and they both are capable of modeling other natural systems. That’s what nature does, it models other aspects of nature, and sometimes the environment can reduce the models to mechanisms or entail them into living systems. We have reduced it to mechanisms for analysis, as the modeling relation diagram itself shows. How do we put the causality back? At any given level of analysis it just looks like error – that’s what we have now. Instead, we make the analysis holarchical, or by analogy, holographic. We say any given holon sees a relation between a mechanism and a defining/controlling context.
That is the problem with perception and measurement – we can only see ‘things’. But the holon creates an infinite nesting of holons if we consider the natural system to be decomposable into all four causes, and any holon itself to be composable into larger holons. That realizes Koestler’s idea and the idea in ecology that the part is in the whole and the whole is in the part. The holon is both part and whole at the same time. So, that is the power of the analysis – you can decompose nature into wholes.
