Abstract
All living systems show tendencies to integration and wholeness. For example, the organized growth of plants and animals, spontaneous wound healing, gestalt perception of shadows in the dark, speech recognition at a cocktail party, the urge to understand and find meaning, empathy and group solidarity, visions of the fellowship of humankind.
These phenomena are expressions of an integrative principle that operates in bodies, minds and communities alike. These systems tend in the direction of pattern, order and wholeness (but often fail to get there). I propose that the structure of this wholeness is such that every part of the whole contains information about the whole; it is a reflection of the whole. Thus, each part has access to this wholeness, but from different perspectives.
For example, people may feel that the various roles they play during the day (father, commuter, office manager, family cook, bridge novice) are but different reflections of the same well-integrated and coherent self (or they may not, if integration has been somewhat unsuccessful).
I identify four integrative tendencies (not iron laws, merely tendencies) and suggest that they need a better ontological context that the object-based, naïve realism of Western science and common sense. A wholeness-oriented process ontology will serve us better, and I advance a number of concepts and models that facilitate such a view of physical, biological and human-social reality. They involve distinctions between flux and form, wave and particle, implicate and explicate order, and unity and diversity.
The present text is a synopsis, an overview I intend to elaborate in books and papers in the years to come.
These phenomena are expressions of an integrative principle that operates in bodies, minds and communities alike. These systems tend in the direction of pattern, order and wholeness (but often fail to get there). I propose that the structure of this wholeness is such that every part of the whole contains information about the whole; it is a reflection of the whole. Thus, each part has access to this wholeness, but from different perspectives.
For example, people may feel that the various roles they play during the day (father, commuter, office manager, family cook, bridge novice) are but different reflections of the same well-integrated and coherent self (or they may not, if integration has been somewhat unsuccessful).
I identify four integrative tendencies (not iron laws, merely tendencies) and suggest that they need a better ontological context that the object-based, naïve realism of Western science and common sense. A wholeness-oriented process ontology will serve us better, and I advance a number of concepts and models that facilitate such a view of physical, biological and human-social reality. They involve distinctions between flux and form, wave and particle, implicate and explicate order, and unity and diversity.
The present text is a synopsis, an overview I intend to elaborate in books and papers in the years to come.
| Originalsprog | Engelsk |
|---|---|
| Antal sider | 105 |
| DOI | |
| Status | E-pub ahead of print - 23 feb. 2024 |
Emneord
- implicate order
- explicate order
- holonomy
- holotropy
- flux
- ontology
- order
- wholeness
- integration
- systems thinking
- growth
- self-organization
- perspective
- David Bohm
- Poul Bjerre
- unfolding
- disease
- symptoms
- utopia
- money creation
- interactive planning
- wave mechanics
- quantum physics
- quantum mechanics