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Surfing around the Internet
sometimes will give you an intellectual enlightenment. That what I got when I
stopped at the website of Kent Palmer and browsing his works. Though I have not
read all of his works yet, I really got a big surprise when I read his gigantic
work the REFLEXIVE AUTOPOIETIC DISSIPATIVE SPECIAL SYSTEM THEORY. This is the
most comprehensive theory I have ever read in the net about holism. I think his
e-book is the best in the holistic tradition of David Bohm, whose work on
holo-movement is the most quoted work in the holistic movement in the West
since the 70-s, followed by lesser luminaries like Leonard , Sheldrake and
others.
In
fact, it is Bohm's vision that has been expanded to synthesize all the great
works of the pioneer philosophers from the holistic wing of postmodernism with
an old philosophical perspective of the continental phenomenology that has been
totally deconstructed by the French post-structuralist wing of post-modernism.
It was so strange to me who was educated as a physicist far from the deep
speculative metaphysics or ontology. But I want to learn more about it. This
article is part of my learning process.
My
strategy of studying a philosopher work is to know about his life, cultural and
educational, background. For that purpose I surfed around the author's website
and eventualIy discovered that Kent Palmer actually is a real-time software
engineer. That explains some of my incomprehensions while reading his work more
deeply. But the most significant background information to comprehend his work
is the fact that Palmer was graduated as Ph.D. in sociology in the tradition of
social phenomenologist such as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.
In
his dissertation, he expounded the Theory of Fragmentation of Being. Almost all
his works after that are intricate elaborations of the theory with the
paraphernalia of current state of the art mathematics and physics such as
hypercomplex algebras, topological structures and solitons. It is quite
difficult to get into the author's understanding on such complex mathematical
concepts, but the wildness of his philosophical speculative association is very
interesting indeed.
This
article is an attempt to delve into the complexities of Kent Palmer's
computational sociology and social phenomenology as a part of my holosophical
exploration on the diversity of worldviewings that can be seen as a complement
to his theory of worlds building. If his theory is based on the concept of the
Fragmentation of Being, my holosophical work is based on the discovery of the
Integrality of Being. So, the starting points of both investigation, the
Holonomic view of Kent Palmer and the Holosophy of Integralism of mine, are in
diametrically opposite sides of mindscape.
The
radical difference between our views, I think, can be traced to the fact that
we live in different geographical hemisphere of the earth and different cultural
parts of the world civilization. It is also due the fact that we have different
approaches to knowledge brought about by different educational disciplines: the
soft and the hard science. So, this article will not be a critical review but a
creative examination from the other side of world and mind. Hopefully, it will
synergistically enrich and deepen ach other views.
Special Systems :
from General Systems to Metasystems
Epistemologically
speaking, Kent Palmer view of knowledge is based on the observation on soft
systems as expounded by George Klir in his work Architecture of Systems Problem
Solving
Klir’s
Four-level Epistemological Hierarchy
In
Batesonian theory of learning, the first level is learning to change our
behavior to be more adaptive to the environmental changes. The second level of
learning, the meta-learning, is learning how to learn the first level of
learning. The third level is learning how to change the paradigm of learning.
The fourth level of learning is changing the whole worldview. So learning1 is
the ordinary learning. Learning2 is learning to learning1 and so on.
Klir-Bateson Four levels of Learning
After
expanding the Klir epistemological hierarchy with the Batesonian learning
hierarchy, he inserted another hierarchy. It is the special systems hierarchy :
the dissipative, the autopoietic and the reflexive. The three levels systemic
hierarchy form the bridge between the Klir's epistemological and Bateson
learning levels to get a greater Hierarchy: the ontological hierarchy.
The
ontological hierarchy seems to be a shadow of his older version Fragmentation
of Being Hierarchy as shown in his book The Fragmentation of Being (page ) as
it is shown in the following picture.
Palmer’s Four Ontological Levels of Fragmented Being
Later
on, Palmer replaced the learning levels with the four ontological special
system levels to get the full fledged ontological levels hierarchy.
Palmer's
ontological hierarchy is an odd combination of entities. The metasystem is a
basis for the languaging realities comprising the Domain, World, Kosmos and
Pluriverse as an ever expanding levels of extensional hierarchy. The System
itself is a top level of a formal/structural hierarchy of parts consisting of
Form, Pattern, Monads and Facets. In this lower wing of the ontological
hierarchy, substratum beyond form is pattern. Substrata beyond pattern are
called traces by Derrida. Substrata beyond traces are propensities or
tendencies.
Let
us examine the ontological hierarchy more closely. The great ontological
hierarchy is divided into three parts the lower, the middle and the upper small
hierarchies. The upper languaging hierarchy, up from meta-system, essentially
is an ontological reality which is segmented by language. The lower systemic hierarchy,
down from the system, is essentially a pre-verbal perceptual or epistemological
reality. Lastly, the middle hierarchy of special systems is in fact a hierarchy
of processes with increasing complexity, from the self-organizing, to the
self-making and finally to the self-describing.
Palmer’s Ontological
Hierarchy
The
three-level structure is resembling the three-story structure of reality as it
is envisaged by the Chinese tradition in the image of Heaven/Man/Earth. It is
also resembling the stratified worlds of the shaman who divide the world into
three stories: the lower, the middle and the upper. But the three-level
structure is collapsed into the binary
structure of Reality, where the higher and the lower are tightly interconnected
whole like the Tao of the Chinese.
Palmer’s Nesting of Ontological Levels
The
nesting step is quite understandable, because the epistemologic levels do not
have substance of its own. It is nothing but a shadow inside the mind of the
reality outside. This is so, if we talk in dualistic terms. In a neater
speaking of terms, we can say that the ontological and the epistemological
realities is nothing but aspects of a single Process Reality as envisaged by
Whitehead.
Seen
from a Whiteheadian vision of process, it is not surprising if Palmer focussed
his vision on the middle hierarchy where the most dynamical process emerge. He
saw it as the emergence of meta-systems from the systems through three
successive intermediate special systems. So we have a five levels structure of
systemic emergence process. So far what Palmer had done is nothing but
reformulating of whiteheadian process philosophy with all of the latest
conceptual discoveries of complex system theory. But he does more.
To
crown his last step, he characterized the five systems with properties of five
hyper-complex algebras from the 1-dimensional real number algebra to the
16-dimensional sedenion algebra. The ordinary system is correlated to the real
numbers, the dissipative systems to the 2-dimensional complex numbers, the
autopoietic systems with the 4-dimensional quaternions, the reflexive systems
with the 8-dimensional octonions and, lastly, the meta-systems with the
16-dimensional sedenions.
Palmer’s Emergent Meta-system Cycle
I
think this association step is the most original contribution by Palmer to
system theory and process philosophy, but I have reservations to accept the
bold speculation until there exist some empirical evidences to corroborate the
generalized system theory.
However,
beside the speculative algebraic association to the general/special/metasytem
hierarchy, Palmer saw another structure: the Emergent Meta-System Cycle.
Following Goertzel, who suggested the algebraic association for his ontological
hierarchy, Palmer pictured the emergence of meta-system as a cyclic process
where each cycle is consisted of five steps. Each cycle corresponds to the
discrete sub-steps of the iterative cycle of Ben Goertzel Magician System model
of mind dynamics. But Palmer invented his own terminology.
He
called the system as a Seed and the emerging meta-system as a Field. In
between, he called the dissipative, the autopoietic and the reflexive special
systems as Monad, Viewpoint and Candidate respectively. Examining the
terminology we can see that the Emergent Meta-System Cycle actually is an
epistemological cycle. Ontologically speaking, I think, the direction of the
cycle is: the system is emerging from the metasystem, not the other way around.
It is more promising if we include the reversely directed ontological cycle
within Kent Palmer’s holonomic espistemological cycle.
If
we put the modified bi-directed cycle back to the the Palmer's ontological
hierarchy, then we can see that the emerging metasystem yields the upper wing
of the great hierarchy: the higher post-systemic hierarchy comprising Domain,
World, Kosmos and Pluriverse. In the same way, we can see that the emerging
system in the reverse ontological cycle yields the lower wing of the great
hierarchy: the pre-systemic hierarchy of Form, Pattern, Monad and Facets. In a
sense, the the upper hierarchy is an ontological wing and the lower hierarchy
is an epistemological one.
Where
Palmer started his philosophical journey with observations on software systems,
the holosophy of Integralism began with reflections on the structure of natural
systems. One of the implicit philosophical basis of modern science is
reductionism: the belief that any system’s behavior can be completely explained
by the dynamics of its interacting structural parts. As a consequence of this
belief, we have a picture of a nested system from the smallest elementary
particles to the whole universe: the largest physical system.
Superspace Universe galaxies natural stars environmental geosphere systems biosphere --------------- technospheresociosphere human Individual system organs --------------- cells atoms/molecules natural nuclei constituent nucleons systems quarks vacuum
Natural System
Hierarchy |
So,
instead of starting with the epistemological soft conceptual system levels like
Kent Palmer philosophy of holonomics, Integralism started the holosophical
investigation with the ontological hierarchy of hard physical systems. In fact,
I came to this starting point as an end result of the reconfiguration of the
paradigmatic structure of human existence, which had been discovered in a
structuralist journey, and expanding it integrally to include the fundamental
belief of religion.
It
is interesting to notice that each system in the natural hierarchy has its own
internal hierarchy orthogonal to the external hierarchy. For example, every
environmental and constituental systems has an hierarchy of subsystems
comprising the structural (its material components), the dynamical (its
energetic process), the functional (its informational laws) and the fundamental
(its valuational principles) subsystems.
Using
an informational metaphor, the four subsystems -the material, energetic,
informatic and normative subsystems- are analogous to the computer hardware,
the computational process, the programs and the programming paradigm of a
computer system respectively. Using a computational linguistic metaphor, they
are correlated to the machine assembly language, the higher programming
languages, the application programs and the purpose of the application
programs.
It
is more interesting to observe that, beside the nature/computer analogy, there
is certain parallelism that can be found between the four internal levels of
the natural systems with the the four existential strata of a human individual.
The four structural strata of human existence are the individual's body in the
world, the behavior within society, the mind within culture, and the conscience
within values.
In
other words, each one of the four human existential levels is correlated to the
material, energetic, informatic and valuational levels of natural systems. Now,
due to the noticed parallelism, any system, natural or human kind, can be be
thought as an integral system consisting four existential levels which are
related to the ontological realms of bodies, forces, meanings and values
respectively.
Finally,
all integral systems can be thought as forming an horizontal hierarchy, from
the smallest to the largest physical system. In the Kent Palmers's terminology
our horizontal or external hierarchy of integral systems is not an ontological
hierarchy, but an ontic one. But for now, let us concentrate to the four
existential levels of the vertical or internal hierarchy.
Scientifically
speaking, the physical and the only reality is the lowest level : the material
or structure level. The energy or process level is just the property of the
lowest level. The information or pattern level is just the property of both the
material and energetic levels. The valuational level is just the property of
all the three previous lower levels. All in all, the higher levels does not
have an independent existence. It exist only as the properties of all lower
levels.
For
a scientist, the whole immaterial levels are just mental abstractions. Such
hierarchy of mental abstraction is similar to logical type hierarchy as stated
by Bertrand Russel and Alfred North Whitehead in their book Principia
Mathematica. This logical type hierarchy is also mirrored in the hierarchical
theory of learning by Gregory Bateson.
Philosophically
speaking, the four existential strata of reality of Integralism are seemingly
similar to Kent Palmer's four Fragments of Being: the Pure Being, the Process
Being, the Hyper-Being and the Wild Being. Now, Kent Palmer, following the
steps of Bateson, posited that there are no other kind of Being beyond Wild
Being and called the Beyond of Being as the Unthinkable and identified it with
the Void or Sunyata of Budhism.
In
similar vein, integralism also posited the Beyond of the highest level of
existence --the realm of values-- as the transcendental essence rather like Atman (for the human existence) or Brahman (for the cosmic existence) from
the Hindu religion or simply Soul and God from the Abrahamic religions like
Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Negatively viewed, both Beyonds are nothing
but aspects of the Buddhist Void
In
Integralism, the Beyond of the vertical existential hierarchy of any integral
system is seen as its essence. But in the horizontal hierarchy of integral
systems, the Beyond is the Creator God whose Essence is none other than Being
Itself, the Ultimate and Absolute Being of the philosophers. For the Absolute
Being, its Existence is identical with its Essence, and in a sense the Essence
of God is the continuous Creation of Creatures.
Religiously
speaking, we are projecting our personality to the Creator God. The essences of
our personality, our souls, are projected to the Unknowable aspect of God
better known as The Spirit. Our super-conscious conscience is projected into
the totality of infinite qualities of God. Our conscious mind is projected to
His Creative Commands. Our subconscious behavior is projected to His Actions
manifested as Natural processes. Finally our unconscious bodies is projected to
His Creatures or Media of Creation manifested as the multiverse.
By
comparing the Holosophy of Integralism and the Holonomic Theory of Emerging
Meta-systems, I realized that my old version of Integralism lacked a
mathematical framework. So, Palmer's utilization of hyper-complex algebra as
mathematical paradigm for his philosophy is a very much inspiring idea.
I
appreciate much such a bold speculation. But, as for myself, accepting that
particular mathematical paradigm will mark another milestone to the
quantitative methodological imperialism of physical sciences to other sciences,
because in reality hyper-complex algebra is a generalization of real and complex
number algebra that has been used to calculate natural scientific prediction
for centuries.
I
think, for a more fruitful employment of mathematics to deeper levels of
reality, we have to search for more qualitative branch of mathematics such as
Topology, Combinatorics, Category Theory or its generalizations.
Paralleling the internal hierarchy of integralities, in general terms, there
should be a hierarchy of mathematical structures for describing the subsystems
of an integral system correlated to their existential levels of the
integrality.
The
lowest existential level of integrality, the material base, can be described as
geometrical structures in the three dimensional physical space. The ancient
Greek had developed the geometry as the mathematical foundation for describing
the static objects of this realm of matter. Rene Descartes developed the
analytic geometry to describe the physical space algebraically.
The
next existential level of integrality is the world of energetics
processes, has more coordinative dimensions. The additional dimension is
time. The additional time coordinate made possible the development of
Newtonian Classical Mechanics using calculus. Differential equation systems is
necessary to describe the motion, the changing of the external space
coordinates.
The
higher existential level of integrality is the informatic level can be
described with the help of discrete symbolic substitutional grammar system. All
informatic structures essentially are symbolic substitutional structures or linguistic
systems. The simplest for of such grammar is algebraic symmetry group for
classifying the forces between fundamental particles. The most complex grammar
is the human language grammar.
In
general terms, informatics can be viewed as the a form of discrete mathematical
logic, a special kind of formal language, plus discrete time steps. The time
dimension is helping informatics to escape from the suicidal paradox of a
static formal mathematical system by the Goedel theorem of
incompleteness. It make possible form a linguistic hierarchy which relegates
the paradox to higher system levels
The
highest existential level of integrality, the realm of values, meanings or
principles, I think, has a general lattice structure or more probably it can be
described by an infinite simplicial complex of values. The last mentioned
approach has been used by the well known process philosopher, Alfred North
Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World, to describe an Actual Occasion or
event reality
Unfortunately,
I have not yet succeeded to elaborate it as a mathematical foundation for the
theory of values, but Ron Atkin structural studies in his book Multidimensional
Man can be used as a starting point although he used it for describing
epistemological structures. In fact, a new science has to be developed for
axiological structures in the realm of values. I will call such a science as Normatics.
The
development of a qualitative mathematical foundation of Normatics probably will
be the greatest challenge of the 21-st century following the holosophical
integration of science, technology, arts, philosophy and religion as it is
envisaged by Integralism. Normatics is supposed to be a science of values
complementing informatics as science of information.
To
develop Normatics as a proper science of values I initiate a Principia
Normatica Project. I am sure that this project has paralells in other
people’s thought. For example it is seemingly parallel to the Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics
of Values or to Jane Roberts’ vision of reality as a Fulfillment of
Values
Posting
this article in the Internet is a way put Principia Normatica Project in
particular, and Holosophy of Integralism in general, to be more widely known,
criticized, appreciated and refined. This article is the first of a
series synergistic comparisons of the integralist vision to other comprehensive
visions so we can joinly enrich and deepen each of them.
Your
comments, criticism and suggestions to this project will surely be appreciated.
You may post it to my integralist mailing list at
integralist@egroups.com by email or
visit my Integralism on the Web discussion forum with your browser at http://www.egroups.com/group/integralist .
References
Armahedi
Mahzar, Integralisme, Pustaka
Salman: Bandung 1983
Kent
Palmer, Fragmentation of Being and
Journey Beyond the Void, Apeiron Press 1993
Kent
Palmer, Reflexive Autopoietic
Dissipative Special Systems Theory: an Approach to Emergent Meta-systems
through Holonomic, Apeiron Press 1995
Alfred
North Whitehead, Science for the Modern
World,
Robert
M. Pirsig, Lila : an Inquiry into Morals,
Corgi Books 1992
Jane
Roberts, The Nature of Human Psyche :
Its Human Expression, Bantam Books 1984
Ron Atkin, Multidimensional Man : Can Man live in
3-dimensional Space?, Penguin Books 1961