From Avyorth Rolinson

Post 542: Avyorth said: "I'm not denying that there are emergent properties in molecules (simple or complex) that are not found in atoms. *But* I disagree that this means that atomic societies or atoms cultures (Wilber's Lower Quads) are more evolved, developed or 'higher'. As I understand the holarchy, an atomic society or culture is *not* a molecule, but is a galaxy or physical-pleromatic culture of prehensile holons! Molecules (simple or complex) are a higher *Individual* holonic manifestation whose societies are the planets. I personally follow Wilber on this - I think you are confusing Individual and Collective holonic aspects."

Andy replied: "No, I'm not confusing (what Wilber calls) Individual and Collective holonic aspects. I'm just applying the rules consistently, which he fails to do. First he defines galaxies, or some group of celestial bodies, as atomic societies. I agree that these celestial bodies have no or relatively weak emergent properties not found in their constituent atoms. They are not higher than their atoms. They are really just heaps or aggregates of atoms (Wilber's failure to apply this term to them is a whole other story that I won't go into here), but if you want to refer to their relationship as individual vs. collective holonic aspects, fine. No problem with me. But then Wilber says that these galaxies are the lower level analogies of human societies, which means, according to his reasoning, that human societies are likewise not higher than their individual constituent members.

"This is simply false. Human and animal societies, unlike planets or galaxies or whatever, do have very substantial emergent properties not found in their constituents. This is patently obvious; no social scientist I'm aware of would dispute this. Moreover, human societies and their members also exist in the asymmetric relationship (eliminate the one and you eliminate the other; eliminate the other and you do not eliminate the one) that Wilber uses as the lower/higher criterion, and which also applies to atoms/molecules, and which (according to Wilber) does not apply to atoms/galaxies, or to molecules/planets. Elsewhere (e.g., Nothing Special; Lateral Differences; Different Views), I have discussed at length and refuted all the arguments that could be used to support the position that human societies and their members exist in a symmetric relationship. Basically, the refutation boils down to this. Any assumption one makes to allow one to demonstrate a symmetric relationship between humans and their societies must be applied to lower levels as well, and when we do that, we find that the holarchy collapses-nothing is higher than anything else."

Ok, trembling with anticipation of crashing through the thin ice I cautiously engage:

My understanding of Wilber's argument around this area is this:

All holonic levels have four components that must be taken into consideration when mapping out the Kosmos. His methodology of orienting generalisations points out that theorists generally favour one quadrant of a holonic level and consequently are, at best, partially correct in their conclusions. What the AQAL mapping does is attempt to integrate those partialities. In my view it is an extremely useful Integral tool and map. It's *not* the territory, and I don't think Wilber in his saner moments would claim otherwise.

Let's take Figure 4-4 'The Four Quadrants' in 'A Theory of Everything' as our reference. What Wilber says, correct me if I'm wrong!, is that in order for the holonic level '10' to exist/manifest we need individuals who have the cognitive ability (or interiority) to work with concepts (early conop perhaps) and that this also requires a neurology associated with a complex neocortex. The manner in which such individuals will be with, and see, each other (ideally, of course) will be that of Magic worldspace/view, and all that implies, and the society they will tend to live in will be tribal/village institutions with horticultural technology and commerce. This is a kind of base-line or template which will then vary according to many other contingencies, such as climate, geography, raw materials, disease.

Wilber's claim is that you can't have Magic worldview and Tribal-horticultural cultures and societies (the Collective Quads) without individuals at the level of conop and its correlates plus the necessary neurology/physiology.

As for your point:

"Moreover, human societies and their members also exist in the asymmetric relationship (eliminate the one and you eliminate the other; eliminate the other and you do not eliminate the one) that >Wilber uses as the lower/higher criterion."

I'm don't accept your claim above. As far as I understand this area if you eliminate Magic/Tribal/Horticultural societies you'd also eliminate individuals at the corresponding 'conop' level. Try developing the skills and consciousness of a 'conop' individual if you don't have the necessary supporting social/cultural environment. Likewise if all individuals of 'conop' consciousness were eliminated then were would Magic/Tribal/Horticultural societies and cultures be?

I do have a sense of your line of argument here, Andy, but I do also think you're mistaken in your claim.

"The proper lower-level analogy or correspondent of human societies is molecules, which likewise have emergent properties not found in their constitutent holons. Furthermore--and this was the whole point of this part of my response to you--these properties are to some extent shared, or participated in, by the individual atoms. Atoms within molecules have properties the same atoms outside of molecules don't have, just as humans within societies have properties humans outside of societies do not have. Your next quote brings us back to this issue."

I don't follow you here. I'm still stuck in my view that it is not *atoms* within molecules that have higher properties, but it is the *molecule* of which the atoms are now constituent parts (transcend and include) that shows the higher properties. The atoms as free atoms no longer exist - you can't compare them with free atoms and say that they are just free atoms with higher properties. They're not! "This here atom is dead, deceased, popped its clogs, it's pushing up the daisies!"

"Cells in tissues, as you mention, might appear to respond to stimuli that no independent cell could - but its [sic] important surely to remember that we are then no longer looking at *cells* but at a new holon called, if you like, *cells-in-tissues*. Take those cells out of the tissue and you'll find they will revert to their previous 'dumbness'. Show me a single or independent *thinking* brain cell!" Of course-once you remove a brain cell from the brain, it is no longer part of a tissue or cell society."

Ooops!, sorry for the [sic], hope you've recovered - please add the ' to my previous mail.

Tissue, as I understand it, is not cell society in the sense of Individual-Collective of the AQAL. There are innumerable single cells that exist without tissue. In fact, if my evolutionary knowledge is correct, single cells existed long long long before tissue appeared. Single cells in the form of Prokaryotes existed within Protoplasmic/Gaia Systems quite happily and contentedly without any tissue. Tissue only appeared when a new level of the holarchical complexity manifested. So how can we limit cell *Collective* quadrants to tissues?

I think you are confusing Society as Lower Right Quadrant with a higher level transcending and including 'society'. I stress my point - if tissue is the Collective (social-cultural) Quad equivalent of cells, then how did single cells exist for millions of years without tissues? Single-cell societies of prokaryotes lived happily for millions of years without tissues. Ok, it may not be the sort of society or culture we'd find very fulfilling - it is only Protoplasmic, after all - but it seems to have done prokaryotes sufficiently!

"This simply confirms my point. The cell has the higher properties only by virtue of its participating in a complex organization of many other cells. When it is not participating in this organization, it loses these higher properties. And I do mean "the" cell. Neurophysiologists can record from single cells in the brain, and demonstrate these new properties. Perhaps this wasn't clear to you. I'm not talking about properties that are only manifested by the entire brain or some other large organization of neurons. There are such properties, of course, but the critical point I'm making here is that by being a member of such an organization, an individual cell can (to some extent) participate in these properties, so it itself has new properties. "

Yes, I accept your argument here in general, but I disagree with the conclusion that you then go on to make, viz that Wilber's AQAL is flawed in its Individual-Collective aspect. I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with all his examples of correlation or the time line he draws, but I'll leave it to the experts to adjust any mistakes. Nevertheless I do agree with his orienting generalisations.

Cells, when they are incorporated within higher level holons of tissues, can demonstrate higher properties than single, non-tissue, cells. And that's the beauty of the holarchy! But it is equally true that there have been, and still are, societies and cultures of single cells existing without ah-tishoo! in sight. Take away all tissues and there will still be societies and cultures of single cells!

"The same is true of humans. When humans live outside of societies, they do not have many of the properties humans within societies have, such as language, rational thought, certain kinds of emotions, morality, and so on. So if you want to say "we are then no longer looking at *cells* but at a new holon called, if you like, *cells-in-tissues*", to be consistent, you will also have to say that we are no longer looking at humans but a whole new holon called humans-in-societies."

Indeed! This is exactly what I understand Wilber to be doing. He's saying there is no such thing as an individual human being - all human holons are humans-in-society (agency-in-communion). But he's also insisting upon there are no societies without humans. Wilber is challenging the very point you seem to me to be suggesting, viz the ascendancy/superiority/higher nature of the Lower Quadrants.

There have never been just individual humans - just like there have never been individual brain cells. Humans have evolved in conjunction and inter-relation with their 'environment', ie the Collective or Lower Quadrants. What Wilber's AQAL attempts to do (for all its possible flaws) is to link the individual aspects of the holon with its collective aspects. As the old song puts it, "You can't have one without the other!"

Hi, again, Avy:

Thanks for the very stimulating dialogue, and a chance to explain my model to some people I feel still don't appreciate it. Some of my arguments are perhaps not easy to follow, and I refer you and others interested to consult some of my Reading Room articles (noted in passing below) where the discussion is developed in more detail. Since some of these points are scattered in a number of different articles, I may post an article collecting them all.

I do feel that you, and probably most other followers of Wilber, take his model as a starting point or given, not really challenging its root assumptions. (Or perhaps more accurately, not challenging the ones I challenge). Thus when you make statements like "all holonic levels have four components", or "if tissue is the Collective … of cells, then how did single cells exist for millions of years without tissues?", you are making certain assumptions rather than, I feel, appealing to the evidence. I will get into these and other specific points shortly. Here I just want to emphasize that to appreciate my model, indeed any alternative to Wilber's, one must be careful to distinguish what we actually know about holons and their interactions, on the one hand, from certain definitions and concepts that Wilber provides, and which so many of his supporters now seem to take as a basic framework on which all further debate must proceed.

Finally, I want to say that I find you a wonderful intellectual opponent-in fact, opponent does not seem the right word. You have a very gentle way of challenging or questioning my ideas that makes responding to you relaxing and enjoyable. All of us tend to feel our feathers getting ruffled when some of our precious pet notions are put under fire, but I experience very little of that kind of stress in my dialogues with you. It's been fun.

On Sleep

"But, I suggest, [all these techniques for realizing a higher consciousness] all have generally the same aim - dampening down the din of consciousness (Gross or AQAL Realm) so that the 'Hidden Door' to Awareness might just be opened."

I agree with you to that extent. Let's leave it at that for now.

On the 4Q Model

"All holonic levels have four components that must be taken consideration when mapping out the Kosmos."

As noted above, this is not a given that we start with. That's the problem. So many people seem to think it is, or at least act as if it were, but it isn't. It's simply a conclusion Wilber has come to on the basis of an extensive literature search of the ways different disciplines have approached knowledge. As I note at the end of my previous piece, it hinges critically on the idea that societies are not higher than individuals. Without this assumption, there is no need nor basis for distinguishing social quadrants.

I will get into this issue later. For now, I just want to emphasize that I'm not saying there is no social. In my model, I distinguish between individual and social holons (much better, I think, than Wilber does, who conflates individual and social holons with individual and social aspects of holons-see Who's Conscious?, and also Gerry Goddard's Holonic Logic and the Dialectics of Consciousness). I'm saying that social holons can be represented on the same axis as individual holons. They are higher stages within the same level of existence as their individual components.

"Let's take Figure 4-4 'The Four Quadrants' in 'A Theory of Everything' as our reference. What Wilber says, correct me if I'm wrong!, is that in order for the holonic level '10' to exist/manifest we need individuals who have the cognitive ability (or interiority) to work with concepts (early conop perhaps) and that this also requires a neurology associated with a complex neocortex. The manner in which such individuals will be with, and see, each other (ideally, of course) will be that of Magic worldspace/view, and all that implies, and the society they will tend to live in will be tribal/village institutions with horticultural technology and commerce. This is a kind of base-line or template which will then vary according to many other contingencies, such as climate, geography, raw materials, disease."

I don't disagree with any of this. Yes, the individual, social and interior are all closely correlated at each level. I simply have another way of representing these aspects that does not require four quadrants, and which I believe shows much more clearly than Wilber's model why the correlation occurs. Why is a particular kind of interior associated with a particular kind of society? Because the interiority of individuals depends on the social stage they are part of. Why? Because social stages have higher properties than their individuals, and individuals to some extent share or participate in these higher properties. These higher properties include a particular kind of interior. I don't simply correlate interior with social, I show why or how the two must be related.

"I don't accept your claim above [that humans and their societies exist in an asymmetric relationship]. As far as I understand this area if you eliminate Magic/Tribal/Horticultural societies you'd also eliminate individuals at the corresponding 'conop' level. Try developing the skills and consciousness of a 'conop' individual if you don't have the necessary supporting social/cultural environment. Likewise if all individuals of 'conop' consciousness were eliminated then were would Magic/Tribal/Horticultural societies and cultures be?"

As I said in my previous post, I have refuted that argument (see, e.g., Different Views). The problem with this argument is that it basically defines societies a priori in a way that makes their relationship with their members necessarily symmetric. If we are going to argue that every kind of society is associated with a particular kind of human, then of course elimination of either society or individual will result in elimination of the other. But this same approach can be applied to other levels of existence as well--and must be if Wilber is to be consistent.

Consider the relationship of cells to organisms. In Wilber's model and mine, cells and organisms occupy different levels of existence, and in fact, he has several different levels of organisms, including those with reptilian, limbic and triune brains. What is the relationship of the cell to the organism? If we eliminate all cells, we eliminate all organisms, but what about the converse? Wilber would say that eliminating all organisms does not eliminate all cells. But suppose we define cells according to the type of organism they are found in, just as, in the previous argument, we defined humans according to the society they are found in. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, because in fact the cells in one type of organism are different from those in another. That is to say, the triune, limbic and reptilian brains all contain specific kinds of neurons that are not found in the other brains, or in any other tissues. These cells are very different from each other morphologically and biochemically, certainly at least as different from each other as humans of different historical periods, who were anatomically and genetically essential identical, and considered by all scientists to be members of one and the same species. So if we eliminate all triune brains, we also eliminate all cells of the kind specific to those brains. If we eliminate all limbic brains, we eliminate all limbic neurons, and so on. This argument is exactly analogous to the argument used to justify a symmetric relationship between individuals and societies, and as I have discussed in Different Views, it can be applied throughout the holarchy, to cells, molecules, and atoms, effectively collapsing the entire holarchy to a single level of existence.

Now of course Wilber believes he can define humans of different historical periods as different holons because of the very great differences in interiorities that they have, rather than on the basis of anatomy or genetics. We don't know what the interiorities of different kinds of cells are like, so we can't make a proper comparison in this area. But in Wilber's model, interiors and exteriors are supposed to be closely correlated, so the substantial differences in exteriors of different kinds of cells ought to imply substantial differences in interiors.

"I'm still stuck in my view that it is not *atoms*within molecules that have higher properties, but it is the*molecule* of which the atoms are now constituent parts (transcend and include) that shows the higher properties."

It's both! Yes, the molecule has higher properties, but the atoms within the molecule also have higher properties, by virtue of being within the molecule. The atoms share to a limited extent the higher properties of the molecule.

(This, by the way, is why I say molecules do not transcend atoms; they transform them. Cells do transcend atoms and molecules; their relationship to their components is very different from the relationship of molecules to atoms. Likewise, organisms transcend their tissues and cells, but tissues only transform their cells. These relationships are very well established scientifically, and have been noted by others. Cells and molecules have a mixed hierarchical structure, whereas tissues and molecules have a pure holarchical structure. In the latter, all lower holons are included within immediately higher holons. In the former, this is not so. Thus cells contain free atoms as well as atoms within molecules of various complexity. Organisms contain free cells as well as cells within tissues of various complexity.)

"The atoms as free atoms no longer exist--you can't compare them with free atoms and say that they are just free atoms with higher properties. They're not"

You're right-they don't exist as free atoms. I'm not saying that they are free atoms with higher properties. I'm saying they are atoms-within-molecules that have higher properties than atoms not within molecules. They are different creatures, as different from each other as humans of different kinds of societies are different from each other. Most physicists and chemists would be uncomfortable with this kind of claim, but then most social scientists would be uncomfortable with Wilber's claim that humans of different societies are so different as to constitute different kinds of holons. Wilber and I do see eye-to-eye in this important sense. We both recognize that when holons associate with one another, they can take on very different properties. The reductionist bias in science generally makes it blind or at least insensitive to this.

"Tissue, as I understand it, is not cell society in the sense of Individual-Collective of the AQAL. There are innumerable single cells that exist without tissue. In fact, if my evolutionary knowledge is correct, single cells existed long long long before tissue appeared. Single cells in the form of Prokaryotes existed within Protoplasmic/Gaia Systems quite happily and contentedly without any tissue. Tissue only appeared when a new level of the holarchical complexity manifested. So how can we limit cell *Collective* quadrants to tissues?"

I don't limit cell collectives to tissues. I simply claim that the collective reaches its greatest development in tissues. Of course, there are cells that exist without being in tissues, just as there are organisms that exist without being in societies. During evolution, new kinds of cells emerged that were able to associate with each other, just as new kinds of organisms emerged that were able to form societies.

In fact, as discussed in the Spectrum of Holons, we can define a range of interactions of individual holons, from weak to strong. The weak interactions of cells result in cell colonies, what Wilber calls cell societies. The strong interactions of cells result in tissues and organisms. Likewise, the weak interactions of atoms led to various kinds of celestial bodies, whereas the strong interactions of atoms led to molecules and cells.

Wilber and I agree up to this point. Where we differ is when we consider the next level. To be consistent with the lower levels, we should say there are weak interactions of organisms than manifest in colonies and the like, and strong interactions that lead to higher forms of life. This is exactly what my model says. There are many lower organisms that engage in relatively weak interactions with each other, whereas higher organisms, and particularly humans, exhibit much stronger interactions. In my model, these stronger interactions result in societies, which are a higher form of life, analogous to molecules and tissues. There is a consistency in these three levels.

Wilber, in contrast, says that the strong interactions of humans do not lead to a higher form of life. Why? Why do strong interactions lead to higher forms of life for some holons, like atoms and cells, but not for other holons, like humans and other organisms? Wilber is saying, in effect, that there are two kinds of horizontal or hetarchical interactions, those that lead to higher forms of life, and those that do not, but as far as I know, he never tells us how we are to tell, a priori, which is which.

"I think you are confusing Society as Lower Right Quadrant with a higher level transcending and including 'society'. I stress my point -if tissue is the Collective (social-cultural) Quad equivalent of cells, then how did single cells exist for millions of years without tissues?"

Your problem is that you are making the assumption that the collective must have evolved at the same time as the individual. This assumption is built into the Wilber model. But it is only an assumption, and is not consistent with the evidence-or perhaps more precisely, it only tells part of the story, and not the really interesting part. What the evidence tells us, very clearly, is (to repeat) that there is a range of interactions that holons can have with others of their kind, ranging from very weak to very strong. During evolution, the weak \ interactions emerged first, at every level, and probably were around almost from the very beginning. So not long (in evolutionary terms) after individual cells evolved, there were probably cell colonies or weak societies. But over time, much stronger associations emerged, resulting in primitive or pseudo-organisms (represented today by creatures like slime molds), and eventually what we consider genuine organisms. Likewise, soon after the emergence of the first organisms, there were probably weak societies or colonies of these organisms. Much later, more strongly interacting societies, such as human societies, evolved. In my view, all of these associations of holons can be called collectives or societies, but only the strongly interacting ones have substantial emergent properties, and result in higher forms of life. And these take time. They evolve later than the individual.

"Wilber [is] saying there is no such thing as an individual human being - all human holons are humans-in-society (agency-in-communion). But he's also insisting upon there are no societies without humans."

"There have never been just individual humans…"

Fine. If we take a sufficiently broad view of society, one that includes simple families, then humans have always been humans-in-societies. But Wilber claims that all holons have the social aspect (his four-fold nature of holons). So it must be true that other, non-human organisms also live in societies-for example, his triune, limbic and reptilian-brained beasts. But many of these organisms-not to mention many invertebrate species--are what biologists call asocial, having very weak interactions with others of their kind. So in order to claim that they too live in societies, we must take an extremely broad view of societies, one that includes these relatively weak interactions. We must then apply the asymmetry criterion to each organism and its "society" separately to demonstrate that neither is higher than the other.

But as we have seen, atoms and cells also exhibit such weak interactions, as well as stronger ones that lead to higher forms of life. So to be consistent, we must also apply the criterion of asymmetry to each type of cell, molecule and atom as well. When we do this, the hierarchy again collapses. That is, for any kind of individual holon, we can always identify some kind of weak interaction with others of its kind. This interaction is at one end of a range which, at its other. strong end, manifests itself in the emergence of a higher-order holon. So there is no holon without some kind of society, and some of these societies are what Wilber defines as higher levels. See Different Views (the second half of the article) for more detail.

Notice that Wilber's entire argument-indeed, his entire classification of societies-hinges on his definition of a holon, that is, where he draws the boundary between one kind of holon and another. The only way he can avoid the conclusion that there is a symmetrical relationship between organisms and cells is by arguing that the differences between humans of different historical periods are greater than the differences between cells of various tissue types-thereby allowing him to define humans of different historical periods as different kinds of holons, while defining holons of different tissue types as the same type of holon. But as I noted earlier, this certainly isn't true biologically.

Perhaps Wilber would like to sidestep the problem that many organisms have such relatively weak interactions, and just concentrate on humans, which always are found in some kind of society, even if this society is relatively simple, like a family. Instead of applying the asymmetry criterion to each type of human and its society, and to each type of organism and its "society", he might choose to lump all humans together, and say that they have a symmetric relationship with their society, because if all societies broadly defined to include families are eliminated, so are all humans. But again, there are cells like neurons that are always found in tissues like the brain. We can lump all these cells together, and show that they have a symmetric relationship with their society.

Avy, your own words support this argument: "There have never been just individual humans - just like there have never been individual brain cells." This statement says, in effect, that brain cells exist in a symmetric relationship with the brain, just as humans do with their societies. So neither is higher than the other. But brains exist in a symmetric relationship with organisms. No triune brains, no triune brain organisms, and vice-versa. So by this criterion, organisms are no higher than their brain cells. And we can repeat this argument with other kinds of cells (heart, liver, lung, etc.), all of which emerged with particular types of organisms, and which would not exist without these organisms. QED.

So either the hierarchy collapses completely, or the asymmetry criterion can only be applied in certain ways. I get into that in Different Views. I just mention this because I don't want you to think that I believe brain cells are as high as the brain or as the organism. They aren't, and the fact that they aren't is what shows us there is something wrong with the way Wilber applies the criterion.

To reiterate, because it is so critical, the argument hinges on how different holons are defined. The evidence is very clearly on my side here. There are very substantial differences between cells in different tissues as well as between them and cells that exist outside of organisms. Because Wilber is not very familiar with this area, he casually lumps all cells together, and applies the criterion to them as a group. Because he is very sensitive to the differences between humans of different historical eras and the differences between them and other vertebrates, he carefully separates them-many social scientists would probably feel he goes overboard in the opposite direction--and applies the criterion to each group separately. I'm calling Wilber on this. I'm saying he has an unbalanced view, that if he appreciated better the differences between different kinds of cells, he would realize that his asymmetry criterion won't work.

Finally, note that all of this argument is simply aimed at Wilber's preferred criterion of asymmetry. I am taking his own argument and using it against him. He also has to deal with the fact that human societies have emergent properties-the preferred criterion of almost all hierarchical theorists--and that they set the probabilities of their members, two other criteria by which societies are higher than their members. Still further, there are many other inconsistencies that grow out of his failure to make this conclusion, which I have discussed in, e.g., The Spectrum of Holons, All Four One and One For All, Nothing Special, and Why it Matters. Believe me, this entire argument-which I have presented very briefly here-is only the tip of the iceberg.

From Mark Palmer

Hey Avy and Andy,

I've been loosely following your dialgoue and it's great. I just wanted to mention a couple of important points or assumptions, as Andy indicated, that many of us who reference Wilber's basic framework seemingly do so as if it were a done deal, so to speak.

HOLONS

First, there is a substantial difference between individual holons and social holons and I would recommend re-reading Wilber's latest comments on this (see Shambhala.com). For example, true social holons have members and not parts (like atoms as parts of or subsumed within molecules, both of which are INDIVIDUAL holons).

Second, social holons do not simply embody one level of complexity but rather tend to include at least several levels. For example, in the US culture (LL quadrant) there are perhaps 3 main centers of gravity in awareness. Thus, social holons embody an average mode of conscioussness and not simply one. Some of its members will be developmentally more complex that others.

4 QUADRANTS

I believe Ken's point is not that 4 is a final number, but rather that existence can be described in at LEAST 4 dimensions that situate all beings. G. Spencer Brown, in Laws of Form, remarked that to start a universe it must at least have: singular, plural, inside and outside. Just that simple, nothing really fancy. It's simply that Existence gives us at least those four. You could get very technical and dice it up, but for necessity and simplicity we could arguable say at least these 4 aspects.

So, here I can definitely agree with Avyorth. But again, we have to be very careful with how we interpret individuals and collectives and how they're correlated. Very simply, the collective holons are the necessary intersubjective contexts and social structures that situate individual holons.

You can't really say that collective in this sense is "higher" than the individual from the standpoint of awareness, simply because the collective embody's an average of awarenesses. And a very evolved person can have a worldview that greatly exceeds the limitations of that collective holon. I truly think the more accurate understanding is that individuals are SITUATED within collectives. All beings exist in SOME context.

ON CELLS AND ORGANISMS (SOCIAL HOLONS CONT)

I think that Andy's point about eliminating specific cells is perhaps somewhat trivial. We're simply talking about, in general, the developmental existence of cellular structures. It's not the variation among cells that is the point but rather the fact that there are any cells, period. Eliminate those pouppies and you loose organisms.

Now, in talking about collective holons, both in culture (LL) and social structure (LR), we have to keep in mind that these are different animals than individual holons. (Incidentally, I don't know that tissue constitutes a true holon. In other words, there are certain charactersistics, like autopoeisis (sp?), that determine whether or not an entity is really a holon.) Again, I would refer to Wilber's latest discussion of this on the Shambhala.com site.

At any rate, only individual holons follow this asymmetrical pattern because, again, social holons don't work that way since they embody an average of many different modes of awareness. Andy, I think you are confusing Wilber's use of asymmetrical here. You seem to be talking about the specific interactive quality among like individual holons.

When Wilber uses asymmetrical here, he simply means that, for example, atoms can develop into molecules, but not vice-versa. I mean, that's basically true of all growth in general. Children grow into adulthood but not vice-versa. Your use of "symmetrical" refers to a relationship where Wilber's asymmetry is specifically developmental.

I wish I had more time to elaborate, but mainly, I think that perhaps you are overcomplicating a very basic understanding here. But I would love to read your articles and see a different view and get a much better idea where you're coming from.

I'll finish with Wilber's own words taken from his website on the nature of individual and social holons:

"Briefly: individual holons are holons with a subjective interior (prehension, awareness, consciousness); they have a defining pattern (code, agency, regime) that emerges spontaneously from within (autopoietic); and they have four drives (agency, communion, eros, agape). Examples of individual holons (or compound individuals) include quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms....

Social holons emerge when individual holons commune; they also have a defining pattern (agency or regime), but they do not have a subjective consciousness; instead, they have distributed or intersubjective consciousness. Examples include galaxies, planets, crystals, ecosystems, families, tribes, communities.... Both individual and social are holons, and they both follow the twenty tenets. Actually, individual and social holons are not different entities, but different aspects of all holons, since all holons have an interior and an exterior in singular and plural forms (the four quadrants), but they are indeed different aspects that cannot be merely equated."

Likewise: "With individual holons--for example, atoms to molecules to cells to organisms--each junior holon is a constitutive part or element of its senior holon. A whole atom is literally a part of a whole molecule; a whole molecule is a literal part of a whole cell, and so on. In this case, as Whitehead pointed out, the senior holon subsumes the junior holon, and then the junior holon is to some degree subservient to the senior holon. That is, the regime of the senior holon supervenes the regime of the junior. When an organism, such as a dog, decides to get up and walk over to the tree, all of the atoms in the dog obey--they all move over to the tree. The junior holons retain a certain amount of relative autonomy or agency, but that agency is to some degree subsumed in the agency of the higher holon (what Whitehead called the dominant monad or regnant nexus). Likewise, a hierarchy of individual holons is a nested hierarchy or holarchy where each junior or fundamental holon is a constituent part or element of the more senior or significant holon, and is relatively subsumed by the senior's regnant nexus.

But with social holons, things are quite different. This is particularly where many holistic theorists and ecophilosophers get confused, I think. First of all, individual holons are not so much parts of social holons as they are members of social holons. If I, as an individual holon, were merely a constitutive part of a social holon, such as United States, then I would be subsumed by the State. The State would have total control over me, and I should obey the dictates of the State, I should be subsumed by the State, since I am nothing but a mere part of the larger whole, the State. But if I am instead a member of the State, then I retain certain rights that the State cannot arbitrarily usurp. I am not a mindless cog in the state machinery, a mere part of the big clock, meant to do nothing other than the "greater whole" of the State commands.

And that's just the start. The State does not have a locus of subjective consciousness; it has, at best, an intersubjective matrix of consciousness. And most important, the State or social holon does not transcend and include individual holons (that would make the individual holon a constituent part of the social holon, whereas it is actually a member of the social holon); rather, each successive level of social holons transcends and includes the previous levels of social holons . For example, the laws of orange civilizations, such as the Western Enlightenment, rest upon--or transcend and include-- the legal foundations of the previous, blue civilizations, such as Roman Law. So "transcend and include" is still always the case for holons, but "transcend and include" means something quite different in individual and social holons--and it especially means that social holons do not transcend and include individual holons: social holons transcend and include social holons, and individual holons transcend and include individual holons, and confusing those two produces various disasters."

Hello, Mark, and welcome to the discussion:

"First, there is a substantial difference between individual holons and social holons and I would recommend re-reading Wilber's latest comments on this (see Shambhala.com). For example, true social holons have members and not parts (like atoms as parts of or subsumed within molecules, both of which are INDIVIDUAL holons)."

This is a perfect example of treating Wilber's assumptions as given. How do we decide what are individual holons and what are social holons? Because Wilber tells us what to believe? We have to have certain criteria, and apply them consistently. As I discuss in The Spectrum of Holons, I have three criteria, which are applied consistently, except for atoms, which don't fulfill all the criteria, but which are considered to be individual holons because they partially satisfy these criteria. Wilber's criteria, as discussed in the Shambhala post (which is not very recent now), and further developed or explained by Fred Kofman in Holons, Heaps and Artifacts, are not consistent. Two of the four criteria Kofman names, for example, do not distinguish at all what he calls individual holons from what he calls social holons. A third criterion is unverifiable. See The Spectrum of Holons.

You say, "true social holons have members and not parts." What is the difference between a member and a part? Why are atoms parts but not members of molecules? Why are molecules parts but not members of cells? Why are humans not parts but members of societies? Wilber typically uses words like "parts" and "members" without defining them precisely. We are apparently supposed to know, a priori, that we are members of a society, but not parts. If you press him or Kofman, they will say something like junior or senior members, or talk about control, and otherwise engage in what I consider to be very mushy and imprecise thinking.

I do define the differences very precisely. Individual holons have a mixed hierarchical structure. Social holons have a pure holarchical structure. These terms can be very clearly distinguished from each other, and used to build a model that is for the most part internally consistent, with the same rules applying on every level.

"Second, social holons do not simply embody one level of complexity but rather tend to include at least several levels."

Yes. That's why in my model, there are several stages of social holons within any level of existence. For example, molecules, which Wilber considers a distinct level of existence, are in my model stages within the same level begun with atoms and finished with cells. Small molecules like amino acids contain atoms in a pure holarchical arrangement. Larger molecules like proteins contain amino acids in a pure holarchical structure. Still larger molecules contain pure holarchies of proteins and other biological polymers.

This stage-like structure within cells is now very well recognized by scientists and is critical to understanding how cells function. Wilber's model, however, is blind to these distinctions, lumping all molecules together. While he might reply that he is aware that there is a great variety of kinds of molecules, which he simply hasn't bothered to express in his model, this misses the point. The variety of molecules is of a different kind from the variety of atoms, which begin one level of existence, or of cells, which begin another. The latter kind of variety is not of the stage type. Every type of atom exists independently of other kinds of atoms, as do cells. Molecules within cells, in contrast, (and almost all molecules of significant size and complexity in nature are found only within cells) are formed by assembling smaller molecules into larger units, in pure holarchies. So Wilber's model does not simply leave out this critical feature of molecules, but is incapable of incorporating it without the explicit recognition that there exist stages within levels.

Nor is this /level stage distinction applicable only to atoms, molecules and cells. The same is true for the relationship of cells, tissues and organisms. Like cells, organisms have a mixed hierarchical structure, while tissues and organs within organisms have a more or less pure holarchical structure. Cells associate into simple tissues, which associate in turn into more complex tissues, organs, and organ systems. Again, new properties emerge at each stage. Such multicellular holons are not even mentioned in the Wilber model, at least not in the commonly-quoted diagrams.

The stage/level distinction is thus supported by a large body of scientific evidence. It does not apply just to exteriors or structures, however, but also to interiors, and again, Wilber's failure to recognize this creates problems for his model. In this model, every holon has an interior--atoms, molecules, and cells, as well as organisms, including, of course, ourselves. Moreover, since Wilber distinguishes several different levels of humanity, corresponding to biological as well as historical development, he claims that humans of different levels of development have different levels of interiority.

One problem with this view, as others have pointed out, is that it implies that the differences between the consciousness of humans today and those in the past are as great as the difference between modern human consciousness and a higher state of consciousness. A second problematical implication of this view is that humans of the past were able to skip certain developmental stages in order to realize higher states of consciousness. While Wilber has gone to some trouble to address these problems, both are much more easily and simply avoided by recognizing that Wilber's historical or biological levels of consciousness all constitute stages, building up to a higher level that is realized by spiritual practice.

"I believe Ken's point is not that 4 is a final number, but rather that existence can be described in at LEAST 4 dimensions that situate all beings. G. Spencer Brown, in Laws of Form, remarked that to start a universe it must at least have: singular, plural, inside and outside. Just that simple, nothing really fancy. It's simply that Existence gives us at least those four. You could get very technical and dice it up, but for necessity and simplicity we could arguable say at least these 4 aspects."

Fine. But the four aspects do not require four quadrants or axes for their expression. They can be dealt with in a single-scale model.

"So, here I can definitely agree with Avyorth. But again, we have to be very careful with how we interpret individuals and collectives and how they're correlated. Very simply, the collective holons are the necessary intersubjective contexts and social structures that situate individual holons."

Yes. And as Wilber has pointed out, the members of intersubjective contexts can't know or access these contexts themselves. Why not? Because the lower can't know the higher. What other reason could there be?

"You can't really say that collective in this sense is "higher" than the individual from the standpoint of awareness, simply because the collective [embodies] an average of awarenesses. And a very evolved person can have a worldview that greatly exceeds the limitations of that collective holon."

The collective includes the individual. Ken Wilber may have an awareness that is greater than that of the average, but his awareness is also a property of the social holon of which he is a member. Our society is higher than Ken Wilber, because it includes Ken's awareness, but also that of many other people. So our society can be aware of things that Ken Wilber is not aware of. It can make use of Ken's awareness, but is not limited to it.

I think people are misled here by this idea of the average. The average person on the street may not have any awareness at all of some of the things Wilber is aware of. Moreover, society as we may commonly conceive of it may not be able to comprehend or make use of many of the things Wilber is aware of. But I contend this is a limited view of society. Society is not just the average mode of awareness, what the largest number of people are thinking, feeling or are conscious of at any one time. This is to make the mistake that society has a completely unified consciousness. I tend to agree with Wilber that it does not. It has lots of separate individual consciousnesses. And because it does "have" them, there is no way that "a very evolved person can have a worldview that greatly exceeds the limitations of that collective holon." The collective holon, to repeat, includes the worldviews of all its highly evolved members. Just because those worldviews haven't spread to large numbers of other people doesn't mean they aren't properties of the society. There is no rule that says a social property has to belong to all of its members. And if we take the concept of intersubjective contexts seriously, we have to accept that there are many social properties that no individual can be aware of. Only Wilber, perhaps, is aware of certain ideas or concepts, but he is not aware of other ideas or concepts that someone else is aware of. The society is aware of them all, even though not in a unified manner.

This contention, by the way, is quite consistent with the situation on lower levels, where we are limited to looking at exteriors. Certain atoms in complex molecules like proteins have properties that most of the other atoms don't have. These properties are also properties of the protein--they affect its function, even if they don't spread to all the other atoms. Likewise, cells in complex tissues like the brain can have properties most other cells don't have, properties which affect the function of the brain.

"I think that Andy's point about eliminating specific cells is perhaps somewhat trivial. We're simply talking about, in general, the developmental existence of cellular structures. It's not the variation among cells that is the point but rather the fact that there are any cells, period. Eliminate those [puppies] and you [lose] organisms."

I'm not entirely clear what you're talking about here. But I could reply, it's not the variation among organisms that is the point, but the fact that there are any organisms at all. Eliminate those puppies (organisms) and you lose societies.

The point is not trivial. Wilber is talking about eliminating specific organisms-human beings, non-human triune-brained organisms, and so on. That's how he manages to show a symmetric relationship. If you lump all organisms together, then the relationship is not symmetric, because you could eliminate all societies, and still have some organisms-just as if you lump all cells together, as Wilber does, then you can have an asymmetric relationship between cells and organisms. I'm talking about eliminating specific cell types, because Wilber is talking about eliminating specific kinds of organisms. The arguments are very closely analogous.

"At any rate, only individual holons follow this asymmetrical pattern because, again, social holons don't work that way since they embody an average of many different modes of awareness."

As I said before, it's not an average. It's a collection of different modes of awarenesses. Suppose I put several groups of balls on a table. One group has four, another ten, another three, another twenty, and so on, and so on. You could count up all the balls, divide by the number of groups, and get an average, but that average is just a mental concept you have derived. It is not a description of the system, at least not a complete description. To describe the system, we simply say it has all these groups of balls. Thus to return to the point above, our society is not simply an average of various awarenesses. It includes the highest awarenesses.

You are correct, though, that the criterion of asymmetry can only be applied to individual holons. It won't work when applied to social holons, as I define them. See Different Views.

"Andy, I think you are confusing Wilber's use of asymmetrical here. You seem to be talking about the specific interactive quality among like individual holons. When Wilber uses asymmetrical here, he simply means that, for example, atoms can develop into molecules, but not vice-versa. I mean, that's basically true of all growth in general. Children grow into adulthood but not vice-versa. Your use of "symmetrical" refers to a relationship where Wilber's asymmetry is specifically developmental."

I have no idea what you mean by "specific interactive quality". Yes, I refer to a relationship, and so does Wilber. It is a developmental relationship. Atoms can develop into molecules, but not vice-versa. And guess what? Humans and other organisms can develop into societies, but not vice-versa. Almost all societies developed long after the emergence of the organisms that form their individual members. Primitive human societies (i.e., families) may have emerged at the same time as Homo sapiens, and you may say that modern societies emerged at the same time as modern humans (which you define as different from members of earlier societies, even though both are Homo sapiens), to which I will reply, organisms with brains emerged at the same time as brain cells, organisms with hearts emerged at the same time as heart cells, and so on, and so on. And if you say, yes, but before there were any organisms there were cells (your beloved "puppies") that were not parts of organisms, I will say, yes, but before there were any societies, there were organisms that were not parts of societies. And if you insist that every kind of organism is a member of some kind of society, very broadly defined, I will counter, yes, and every kind of cell is a member of some kind of society, very broadly defined. When the interactions between cells become sufficiently strong, we no longer talk about colonies; we talk about tissues and organs and organisms, which have emergent properties not found in their individual cells. When the interactions between organisms become sufficiently strong, we no longer talk about colonies; we talk about human societies with emergent properties not found in their individual members. I don't know how much more analogous the two arguments could be.

The point, again, is that the way Wilber makes the relationship between human and society symmetric (or if you prefer, the way he defines the developmental process as one in which humans and societies emerged together) is by defining the individuals of different societies as different enough to constitute different kinds of holons. I can accept this, even though to almost all scientists, all humans of all eras are a single species. But having accepted this, to be consistent, one has to recognize that the cells in different tissues are also different kinds of holons. So organisms are not higher than these cells.

Nor does it end there, as I discuss in Different Views. These different cell types often contain specific proteins, what scientists call biochemial markers. These proteins are found only in these cell types. So there is a symmetric relationship between the molecule and the cell; we can't, by this criterion, say that either is higher than the other. But we have previously shown that the organism is no higher than the cell. So now we have partially collapsed the hierarchy. The organism is no higher than certain of its cells, which is no higher than certain of its molecules. This argument can be taken further to collapse the hierarchy completely, to a point where nothing is higher than anything else.

"I'll finish with Wilber's own words taken from his website on the nature of individual and social holons."

See The Spectrum of Holons and All Four One, among other articles.

I have thought a little bit about the recent postings by Avy and Mark, in our dialogue on flaws I contend exist in the 4Q model. I'm not sure, but I think I might now better understand what is hanging you two up on this cells vs. societies argument--that is, I think I better understand the basis of your objections to my argument. Let me try this on you, and on anyone else listening in, and I welcome more feedback.

My starting point is the argument that if humans and their societies have what I call a symmetric relationship (neither can exist without the other), then so do organisms and at least some of their cells. I think both of you followed that argument, but protest that there still are many autonomous cells, that exist outside of organisms, and therefore could survive in the absence of any organisms. That at least seems to be Mark's main objection to this argument.

There are two ways to respond to this. The first way is to point out that in claiming that the existence of cells outside of organisms establishes an asymmetric relationship, you are in effect lumping all cells of any kind into one large group, applying the asymmetry criterion to the group, and finding that some cells can exist without organisms. To be consistent, though, you must do the same thing on other levels. Thus you must lump humans and all other organisms into a large group, apply the asymmetry criterion to that group, and find that some organisms can exist outside of societies. Therefore, societies and organisms have an asymmetric relationship.

I can imagine two kinds of objections to this reasoning from Wilberites. The first objection is that I am assuming that organisms form one large class or group of holons in the same sense that cells do. In the Wilber model, organisms are actually divided up into many different levels, whereas (eukaryotic) cells are represented on a single level. However, to most scientists, organisms, however great their variety in complexity, form a group that is quite distinguishable from cells. That is, all but the simplest, most rudimentary organisms have more in common with each other than with any single cell. As I have discussed before, all organisms, like all cells, have the mixed hierarchical structure, and they share emergent properties not found in any cells. So I contend that any argument that depends on lumping all cells together must, to be consistent, also lump all organisms together. (Or we could limit the lumping to just vertebrates, since in my model, invertebrates are rougly analogous to prokaryotes on the level of cells). I think the burden of proof is on Wilberites to claim otherwise.

The second possible objection is to say that all organisms have at least some weak social interactions, so if all societies of any kind were eliminated, so would all organisms be. I reply to this objection by saying the same is true for cells. All cells have at least weak social interactions with other cells, so if all tissues were eliminated, so would all cells be. Now it's true that no respectable biologist would regard a colony of cells as a tissue, but it's also true that no ecologist would regard the interactions of what are commonly referred to as asocial organisms as a society in any sense remotely similar to that of society as applied to humans. If Wilber is going to stretch the definition of a society, I'm going to stretch the definition of a tissue.

In fact, the problem here, I think, is just semantic. When cells interact weakly, we call the group a colony. When they interact strongly, we call the group a tissue. Whether organisms interact weakly or strongly, however, some people might refer to the group as a society. My point is that the difference between a very rudimentary society of organisms and a complex human society is every bit as great as the difference between a simple cell colony and a complex tissue. It's just that we have two words to represent the differences in strength in cell interactions, whereas one word, for some people, commonly covers the range of interactions of organisms.

(Another problem, discussed in Worlds within Worlds, is that human social evolution is not yet completed. We have no reason to believe that societies will not become even more complex than they are now, with the interactions of their members even stronger. The proper analogy of human societies is not to tissues as they exist today, but to ones of some earlier evolutionary period. So when people object that humans are not associated as strongly with each other in their societies as cells are in tissues, I would reply, true, but we are evolving in that direction, and we have already proceeded some ways along that path).

This, then, is one way I would respond to the argument that the cell/organism relationship can be considered asymmetric under the same conditions that the human/society relationship is considered symmetric. But there is a second way to make the same point. We have begun, recall, by showing that the asymmetry criterion leads to the conclusion that cells in tissues are just as high as the tissues or the organisms. What is their relationship to cells that exist outside of tissues and organisms? According to Wilber, higher levels of existence are supposed to transcend and include lower levels. However, clearly cells in tissues do not transcend and include cells outside of tissues. Therefore, by Wilber's rules, cells outside tissues must be on the same level as cells within tissues. But the latter are, by the asymmetry criterion, on the same level as tissues and organisms. Therefore, cells outside of organisms are on the same level as organisms.

Obviously, this is a weird conclusion to make, and that's my point. In physics, theories sometimes lead to the conclusion that certain fundamental parameters have infinite values, and whenever that happens, all participants understand there's something wrong with the theory. In the same way, the criterion of asymmetry, when applied to Wilber's model, leads to nonsensical conclusions. This is a clear indication to me that the model is flawed. It can't be resuced by abandoning the asymmetry criterion. because as I have discussed elsewhere, this criterion does work when applied to different levels of existence, as opposed to what I call different stages.

Also, two other criteria commonly used to rank holons--emergence and the setting of possibilities/probabilities--also support my contention that societies are higher than organisms. So even if Wilberites think they can use the asymmetry criterion in a way that shows societies are on the same level as their members, they still have the problem of explaining why this conclusion does not agree with the conclusion reached using other criteria. Listening to Gerry Goddard, for whom I have tremendous respect as a thinker, suggest that both societies and their members have emergent properties not found in the other, and imply that maybe their relationship is like the particle/wave relationship of the quantum world, should give people a sense of the lengths Wilber sympathizers will go to prop up the four-quadrant model. My argument on the asymmetry criterion is greatly bolstered by the fact that it leads to a conclusion that is consistent with the use of other criteria.

In recent posts to this forum, I have argued that Ken Wilber's use of what I call the rule of asymmetry is inconsistent. He doesn't apply it in the same way to all holonic relationships. Here I want to clarify this charge, expose the root cause of the inconsistency, and explain what has to be done to avoid it, that is, to allow proper application of this rule. I believe the following discussion should go a long way to silencing many of the objections that Avyorth and Mark have offered to my claim. I have long felt that one of the most powerful arguments against a philosophical position is logical paradox (which is why Nagarjuna is one of Ken's favorite philosophers), and in his use of the asymmetry rule I think Ken is flirting with that.

Wilber's Hidden Assumption

Let's begin by going straight to the horse's mouth. Here is how Wilber states the rule that he uses to determine which holons are higher than others:

Destroy any type of holon [i.e., all holons on any one level] and you will destroy all of the holons above it and none of the holons [more precisely, not all of the holons on any level] below it

The words in brackets are mine. The original, unedited passage caused some confusion among Wilberites at another forum, and for good reason. Suppose we eliminate all cells. We eliminate all organisms, but we also eliminate a lot of molecules, namely, those that are found within the cells. So it simply can't be true that eliminating any type of holon never eliminates any of the holons below it. Surely we have to say, rather, that it does not eliminate all the holons below it.

But even this is not satisfactory. If we eliminate all cells, we don't simply eliminate the particular molecules that are within these cells. We eliminate whole classes of molecules. For example, we eliminate DNA, proteins and other biological macromolecules, which do not exist outside of cells under natural conditions, and which as far as we know never did. That is to say, these polymers are very unstable in isolation, and probably evolved within membrane-bound entities that were the precursors of modern cells. So these molecules have a symmetric relationship with cells. If either is eliminated-or if either failed to evolve-so, too, for the other. Unlike atoms, which were around for billions of years before molecules, and cells, which were around for billions (prokaryotes) or hundreds of millions (eukaryotes) of years before organisms, there is no definitive evidence that proteins and DNA, among other components of cells that exist today, ever had a period of independent existence.

As I noted in an earlier post, the same is true of organisms vs. cells. The kinds of cells found within organisms evolved with the latter. Neither could have emerged without the other. So organisms and their cells also have a symmetric relationship.

How do we avoid the obvious conclusion forced upon us by the rule of asymmetry-that many kinds of cells are on the same level with organisms, and that many kinds of molecules are on the same level as cells? Clearly, we have to lump all cells together-those within organisms and those outside-and apply the asymmetry criterion to them as a group. Likewise, we must lump all molecules together-those found only within cells and those found outside-and apply the criterion to the group.

But how do we justify this lumping together, and how do we know what to lump and what not to lump? For example, how do we know not to lump together not simply all cells, but also all molecules, thus requiring the elimination of all organisms to result in the elimination of all molecules as well as all cells? Or how do we know not to lump all atoms with molecules, and require the elimination of all cells to result in the elimination of all atoms as well as all molecules?

Clearly, the only way we can know what to lump and what not to lump is by having, beforehand, some notion of what a level is. This is the hidden assumption in Wilber's phrase "type of holon". For example, we assume that all molecules constitute one level, or type of holon, and that eliminating all cells must eliminate all molecules-it is not enough that some molecules be eliminated, and conversely, it is not necessary that all atoms be eliminated. Likewise, we argue that all (eukaryotic) cells are on the same level, so that elimination of all organisms must eliminate all cells, but not all molecules. This is why, in the above quote, I have added the words, "not all of the holons on any level" below it.

But wait a minute. How can we know what does and does not constitute a level of existence before we apply the asymmetry criterion? This criterion is supposed to tell us what levels are; its application is supposed to determine what is higher and what is lower. So how can we a priori say that all cells are on the same level, as all molecules are on the same level?

Someone might say, isn't this obvious? No, it's not obvious at all. There is a huge variety of molecules, ranging in size from molecular hydrogen with a mass of two to protein and DNA molecules with molecular weights in the millions, and with emergent properties like catalysis and reproduction completely absent from the smaller molecules. Likewise, there is a huge variety of cell types, ranging from fairly simple ones that do little more than reproduce themselves to neurons, which can communicate with thousands of other neurons and store and process large and sophisticated amounts of information. How can we be sure, a priori, that all belong on the same level? Just because all members of one group have certain features in common-such as atoms bonded together, in the case of molecules, or atoms and molecules arranged in certain basic ways, in the case of cells? But likewise, all organisms share certain basic features-as every beginning biology student knows--so what is to prevent us from lumping them together, too? What exactly is a "type of holon"? How do we define it, and distinguish it from other types of holons?

In this light, let's examine again this statement from Avyorth, which I think expresses very well the logic Wilber uses to apply the asymmetry principle to humans and their societies, and come to the conclusion that they exist on the same level:

As far as I understand this area if you eliminate Magic/Tribal/Horticultural societies you'd also eliminate individuals at the corresponding 'conop' level. Try developing the skills and consciousness of a 'conop' individual if you don't have the necessary supporting social/cultural environment. Likewise if all individuals of 'conop' consciousness were eliminated then w[h]ere would Magic/Tribal/Horticultural societies and cultures be?

Notice the a priori assumption here. Modern societies and their members, mythic societies and their members, and so on, each form a single level, or again, what Wilber calls "a type of holon" (for if you examine his model, you will see that what he calls a type of holon corresponds exactly to a distinct level of existence) to which the criterion is applied. The criterion can only be successfully applied to demonstrate a symmetric relationship if we make this assumption, rather than lumping all humans, all vertebrates, or all organisms together. But there is no justification for making this assumption. To repeat, if the asymmetry criterion is to be used to determine what is higher and what is lower, it must be applied without any assumptions about what constitutes a level of existence and what does not. Wilber does not do this. He already has, in effect, a classification scheme in place when he uses the rule. He is already assuming that certain humans and their societies are different enough from other humans and their societies to justify applying the rule to each separately. But he never specifies the criterion he uses to make this distinction, or shows why it shouldn't be applied to other holonic relationships.

To repeat, it is not enough to say, oh, but of course humans of different societies are different enough to consider them different types of holons! Of course, cells within organisms are similar enough to cells outside of organisms to consider them all the same type of holon. You have to have a very clearly stated criterion that establishes this. Obviously the criterion must be couched in very broad terms, if it is to be applied to many different levels. This may not be easy, but it has to be done if we are to construct a meaningful holarchy, one uniting many different kinds of entities.

Defining Holon Types

Is the asymmetry principle useless, then? And if it is, how do we determine higher/lower relationships? Are we limited to the concept of emergence? I do believe that emergence is the surest way to discern what is higher from what is lower, but it isn't always easy to decide when properties are significantly emergent, particularly when we are comparing holons that exist independently of each other. The asymmetry rule could be very useful, if we could define conditions under which it could be used more or less without ambiguity or inconsistency.

How do we do this? Since we apparently have to have some sort of classification scheme in place before we use the asymmetry rule, let's try using the simplest one we can imagine-one that just distinguishes between individual and social holons. Is there a way we can define these two types of holons without presupposing any knowledge of levels or higher/lower relationships? As I have discussed elsewhere (The Spectrum of Holons), I define individual holons as those that satisfy three criteria: 1) the ability to reproduce themselves; 2) the ability to exist autonomously, that is, outside of higher-order holons; and 3) having what I call a mixed hierarchical structure. The second and third criteria, however, as I have defined them earlier, both do presuppose knowledge of higher/lower relationships. While it might be possible to restate these criteria in terms that did not so presuppose, in an effort to avoid circularity as much as possible, I will simple drop them, for now, and begin using the criterion of reproduction alone.

Reproduction has to be very carefully defined, however, because there are several kinds of holons that reproduce, in a fashion, but which I do not regard as individual holons (because they don't satisfy the other two criteria): for example, viruses, memes, and computer software. To distinguish this kind of reproduction from the kind I am concerned with, I propose to state the criterion as follows:

Criterion 1 (reproduction) - an individual holon has the ability reproduce itself independently of association with holons of other types.

Thus reproduction of viruses requires cells, and reproduction of memes and computer software requires organisms, always or almost always humans. I don't claim that this definition is totally devoid of circularity-I'm presupposing that viruses represent a different type of holon from cells, and that memes are a different type of holon from organisms. If someone wants to challenge me on this, however, I'm pretty sure, given a little more time, I can come up with a definition that avoids this circularity. At the very least, I have reduced the presuppositions to ones that virtually everyone would agree are reasonable ones. And as we shall see in a moment, we can use a bootstrapping process to show that our original presuppositions are valid.

Using this criterion, we can identify two types of individual holons, cells and organisms. Cells can reproduce themselves independently of other holons, or in some cases, by the association with other cells. Likewise, organisms can sometimes reproduce themselves independently of all other holons, though more often do so by associating with other organisms (sexual reproduction). By this criterion, however, atoms are not individual holons, though they are in my model. The reason they are in my model is because they fulfill, at least partially, the other two criteria, autonomy and mixed hierarchy, that we have eliminated from this discussion. However, now that we have identified unambiguously two kinds of individual holons, cells and molecules, I propose to bring these other two criteria into play, by a bootstrapping process. We can now redefine them as follows:

Criterion 2 (autonomy) - an individual holon is able to exist independently (that is, as a non-component) of all other individual holons.

Criterion 3 (mixed hierarchy) - within an individual holon, not every component individual holon is a component of some social holon.

Criterion 2 is satisfied by cells, because some of them can exist outside of organisms, and by atoms, some of which exist outside of cells. It is not satisfied by tissues, which exist only within organisms, nor by most molecules, because with the exception of the very simplest of the latter, molecules do not exist outside of cells. Memes also do not satisfy this criterion. Viruses might be regarded as partially but not completely satisfying it.

Likewise, criterion 3 is satisfied by organisms, because some of their component individual holons (cells) exist outside of tissues, and by cells-if we regard atoms as individual holons--because atoms within cells can exist outside of molecules. Criterion 3 is not satisfied by tissues, because all their cells are contained within the tissue, nor by molecules, because all their atoms are contained within the molecule. It also is not satisfied by viruses or by memes (I define the latter, in exterior/structural terms, as patterns of neural activity; all cells are found within the pattern).

I realize these criteria are not perfect. They do have some significant exceptions, which I have discussed elsewhere (Worlds within Worlds; The Spectrum of Holons; All Four One). But I contend that they are much more consistently used in my model than Wilber's criteria (see Kofman's Holons, Heaps and Artifacts) are used in his model. Moreover, having defined these criteria, and used them to distinguish individual and social holons, we are now in a position to rank these holons, using a revised rule of asymmetry:

If we eliminate any type of holon (individual or social), we eliminate all holons (individual or social) above it, but not all of the individual holons below it.

This if we eliminate all cells, we eliminate all tissues, organisms and societies-which therefore are ranked as being above cells-but not all atoms, which are therefore below cells. If we eliminate all organisms, we eliminate all societies, but not all cells. If we eliminate all societies, we do not eliminate all organisms. Notice that this rule specifies that we are to be concerned, on the down or below side, only with individual holons. Why? Because one of the defining criteria of social holons, as we have seen, is that they can't exist outside of individual holons of which they are components. That being the case, they will always have a symmetric relationship with these individual holons.

How, then, can we determine the relationship of individual holons to the social holons contained within them? We simply add a second rule: individual holons are always higher than any of their component individual or social holons. Thus cells are higher than atoms and molecules, and organisms are higher than cells and tissues. In fact, this is a good candidate for an independent ranking rule. In my view, holons of any kind are always higher than their component holons, though if they interact weakly, the relationship may be nearly one of equality. But within individual holons, component holons always interact strongly.

Using these two simple rules, we can generate the entire holarchy, as it appears in my model, with individual holons representing levels, and social holons representing stages within these levels. I'm sure some will say I have simply devised rules that support my particular model. By defining "type of holon" so broadly, I have been able to conclude, contra Wilber, that societies are higher than organisms. But the very fact that there is any fairly consistent definition of holon type that can lead to a conclusion opposite to Wilber's ought to give everyone pause. And my definition, unlike his, 1) is about the simplest and least ambiguous one possible, a definition that distinguishes individual and social holons on the basis of one of the most fundamental procesess of existence, reproduction; 2) allows us to reach the same conclusion regarding the organism/society relationship that is reached using other criteria, such as emergence, and the setting of possibilities and probabilities; and 3) also leads to the conclusion that cells are higher than molecules, and that organisms are higher than cells. To the best of my knowledge, no other, narrower definition of "type of holon"-which can lead to the conclusion that societies are not higher than organisms, or at least human organisms-can simultaneously lead to the conclusion that organisms and tissues are higher than their component cells, and that cells are higher than their component molecules. If Wilber or anyone else knows such a criterion, I would be very interested to hear it described. Wilber hasn't stated it yet; indeed, as far as I can tell, he has never provided any definition for "type of holon" at all. It's all assumed in his model. This is the essence of the flaw in his model, and of his use of the rule of asymmetry. Without such a definition, clearly stated at the outset, the rule can't be used at all.

The Limitations of the Asymmetry Rule

I can imagine that many Wilberites will still feel that there is something fishy going on here. Why should it be possible to come to two different conclusions regarding the individual/social relationship, depending on how we define type of holon? After all is said and done, the fact remains that if we consider humans of different historical periods as different types of holons, they do exhibit a symmetrical relationship with their societies. Doesn't this somehow have to mean that the two holons are on the same level?

No, it doesn't have to mean this, and the reason it doesn't reflects a fundamental limitation in the asymmetry rule. Wilber assumes that the rule has universal application, that it can always be used, but it can't. To understand why it can't always be used, we have to examine why the rule works at all, the basis for its application. During evolution, lower forms of life generally preceded higher. Atoms evolved before cells, cells before organisms. This general trend is the basis for the asymmetry criterion. There has to be lower before there can be higher to come into existence, but if the higher never evolves, the lower remains. As Mark correctly noted, the asymmetry rule reflects a developmental or evolutionary process. But the lower does not always precede the higher during evolution. Sometimes lower and higher co-evolve, each necessary for the development of the other.

This is very well recognized by scientists. Thus most of the molecules found in cells could only evolve along with the cells, which were necessary to protect the molecules from degradation. The cells could not emerge without the molecules, but also vice-versa. A symmetrical relationship. Likewise with tissues and organisms. It is an obvious observation that there are no tissues found in nature outside of organisms. There are some very simple organisms that have some resemblance to tissues, but nothing like the more complex tissues and organs found in all higher organisms is found outside of the latter.

Why not? Because individual tissues can't survive outside of organisms. So again, there is a symmetric relationship. Notice that both molecules and tissues, in my system, are social holons. They represent stages within levels which can't exist autonomously, that is, outside a higher-level individual holon. Also note that the individual holons composing these stages also co-evolved with the higher-level holon. Thus cells in organisms, though sharing many of the most basic features of cells outside organisms, also have evolved new ones, primarily those enabling them to communicate with other cells like themselves. In the case of atoms, on a lower and more rudimentary level, the co-evolution is not so obvious.

As I have discussed before, atoms within molecules do have properties not found in atoms outside of molecules, though chemists consider them the same entity. In my model, humans and their societies represent an analogous situtation. They are co-evolving in a process that, perhaps, will eventually result in the emergence of a new, higher-level individual holon. But whether it does or doesn't, the existence of the co-evolutionary process is what results in a symmetric relationship. Humans of the kind who exist today do not and cannot precede their society in this developmental process, but this does not mean that they can't be lower than the society.

This, then, is why the asymmetry rule can't be applied indiscriminately. To repeat, the process of co-evolution means that the lower does not always precede the higher, and the nature of interactions between individual and social holons is such that co-evolution always involves both kinds of holons. This is why it's so critical not only to distinguish these two types of holons, but to formulate the asymmetry rule in a way that takes into account their interactions.

In my previous post, I began with one criterion for distinguishing individual and social holons, and bootstrapped from there to develop two other criteria.

I have since realized that all three criteria can be expressed in a way that avoids both circularity and higher/lower relationships, without the need for bootstrapping:

Criterion 1 (reproduction) - An individual holon can reproduce itself outside (that is, as a noncomponent) of other holons.

Criterion 2 (autonomy) - An individual holon can exist in a fully-functional form outside of other holons.

Criterion 3 (mixed hierarchy) - Within an individual holon, not all component holons are nested, that is, some component holons do not exist within any other component holon.

Cells and organisms satisfy all three criteria, while tissues fail to satisfy any of them. Molecules fail to satisfy criteria 1 and 3, and most molecules fail to satisfy criterion 2 as well. Societies fail to satisfy criteria 1 and 3; some societies satisfy criterion 2, but as I have discussed elsewhere (Worlds within Worlds), this is because social evolution is not yet complete.

Each of these three criteria also fails to be satisfied by either viruses or memes, and if, in criteria 1 and 2, we substitute for "other holons" the term "other entities", computer software also fail these criteria. (Whether software should even be considered a holon is a matter I won't concern myself here; I only want to make the point that it doesn't fulfill the definition of an individual holon).

The most significant weakness of these criteria, as I have discussed before (The Spectrum of Holons; All Four One), is that atoms, which I consider to be individual holons, do not reproduce. They do satisfy criterion 2, however, and I believe they satisfy criterion 3. So every holon I define as an individual holon satisfies at least two of the three criteria, and every holon defined as social fails to satisfy at least two of the three.

From Avyorth Rolinson

Andy wrote:

On the 4Q Model

"All holonic levels have four components that must be taken consideration when mapping out the Kosmos." As noted above, this is not a given that we start with. That's the problem. So many people seem to think it is, or at least act as if it were, but it isn't. It's simply a conclusion Wilber has come to on the basis of an extensive literature search of the ways different disciplines have approached knowledge.

Avyorth replies:

I actually wrote in my previous post:

"My understanding of Wilber's argument around this area is this: All holonic levels have four components that must be taken into consideration when mapping out the Kosmos."

This context does actually make quite a difference to what I wrote. I'm not saying that *you*, *me* or *anyone else* must start with this premise - merely that Wilber has come to this conclusion as a foundational basis for his Integral map. Let's admit it; there is no law why we must have four quadrants in planar spatial orientation (eg north-south, east-west) yet it is, I've found, eminently functional to do so. There are many ways of mapping the world's surface onto a map but don't they all use a quadrant system of N-S-E-W?

Jung's work on the 'mandalic' principle of psychic orientation may well be helpful here in understanding the 'archetypal' underpinnings.

Andy wrote: I don't disagree with any of this. Yes, the individual, social and interior are all closely correlated at each level. I simply have another way of representing these aspects that does not require four quadrants, and which I believe shows much more clearly than Wilber's model why the correlation occurs. Why is a particular kind of interior associated with a particular kind of society? Because the interiority of individuals depends on the social stage they are part of.

Avyorth replies:

I have difficulty with your implicit reductionism here. I don't think that "the interiority of individuals *depends* on the social stage they are part of." I believe the situation is more flexible than a implied simple causal relation. Again we may disagree on this, but I state my view that there is a two-way inter-dependent relationship between the individual (KW's Upper Quads) and the collective (KW's Lower Quads).

In Wilber's map societies (or individuals) are not simply historically or temporally delineated, but developmentally also. Any apparent society is actually a complex of numerous levels - from the lowest to the highest. (Wilber's principle of transcend and include comes in here.) Three individuals (eg a formop adult, a conop child and a preop infant) may appear to belong to the same society-culture, but the actuality, according to Wilber's model, is that whilst the infant is limited to the 'preops' society, the child is able to access/participate in both the 'preops' and the 'conops' societies, and the adult is able to access/participate in all three 'preops', 'conops', and 'formops' societies-cultures (Collectives).

Thus we have:

1. an individual (the infant) equal to the 'preops' collective, but lower than the 'conops' and 'formops' collectives;

2. an individual (the child) higher than the 'preops' collective, equal to the 'conops' collective, and lower than the 'formops' collective;

3. an individual (the adult) higher than the 'preops' and 'conops' collectives, and equal to the 'formops' collective.

Remember, for Wilber, (as I understand him!) the Lower Quads are simply the intersubjective and interobjective spheres of exchange-engagement. Structured societies and cultures, in a sociological sense, are only one aspect of these areas.

I'm going to finish off here and send a fresh post that will restate some basic or fundamental points that will, so I'm hoping, allow me to see the wood and the trees! But I must just say that I found your arguments about weak and strong interactions of interest and use in unpacking the development, structuring and functioning of collectives. I do not believe that Wilber has said the final word, nor that *he* believes that he has done so. If we look at the process of the unfolding of the Rational world-view and -space and 'roughly' project it onto the emerging Integral worldview/space, then we will probably have to conclude that we all have a long way to go. Differences of mapping and of view are important - thanks for presenting me with yours.

Hi Mark, and thanks for your comments and clarification of some of the aspects of holons in Wilber's map. I also found the Wilber quotes of interest and help.

One of the issues that I hold around Andy's tenet, if I may so call it, that the social holon is higher than the individual holon, is that it has potentially disastrous political implications. Wilber touched upon this in the quotes. If social holons are accepted as higher than individual holons then it would be incumbent upon any reflective individual holon to recognise it's 'subservience' to that which is higher than itself. Individuation, in Jung's sense, would surely be mere hubris. The door to a totalitarian state or society would beckon us in.

Personally I am unwilling to accept such a path!

Avyorth said: "I have difficulty with your implicit reductionism here. I don't think that" the interiority of individuals *depends* on the social stage they are part of." I believe the situation is more flexible than a implied simple causal relation. Again we may disagree on this, but I state my view that there is a two-way inter-dependent relationship between the individual (KW's UpperQuads) and the collective (KW's Lower Quads).In Wilber's map societies (or individuals) are not simply historically or temporally delineated, but developmentally also.

"Any apparent society is actually a complex of numerous levels - from the lowest to the highest.(Wilber's principle of transcend and include comes in here.) Three individuals (eg a formop adult, a conop child and a preop infant) may appear to belong to the same society-culture, but the actuality, according to Wilber's model, is that whilst the infant is limited to the 'preops' society, the child is able to access/participate in both the 'preops' and the 'conops' societies, and the adult is able to access/participate in all three 'preops', 'conops', and 'formops' societies-cultures (Collectives).

"Thus we have:

1. an individual (the infant) equal to the 'preops' collective, but lower than the 'conops' and 'formops' collectives;

2. an individual (the child) higher than the 'preops' collective, equal to the 'conops' collective, and lower than the 'formops' collective;

3. an individual (the adult) higher than the 'preops' and 'conops' collectives, and equal to the 'formops' collective.

"Remember, for Wilber, (as I understand him!) the Lower Quads are simply the intersubjective and interobjective spheres of exchange-engagement. Structured societies and cultures, in a sociological sense, are only one aspect of these areas."

My reply: I don't disagree with any of this. My point is simply that the same kinds of relationships occur on lower levels, between holons that Wilber considers do have higher/lower relationships. Thus in a complex tissue (e.g, the brain, or some portion of a brain), there are cells that have higher properties than other cells within the same tissue (e.g., the ability to recognize certain kinds of stimuli), and within a complex molecule (e.g., a protein) there are some atoms that have higher properties than other atoms (e.g., the ability to recognize certain other atoms or configurations of atoms). There is in a fact a whole range of properties, with some cells or atoms playing the most critical role, others less important, others still less important. See my article Excelsior for more discussion of this.

There is also a "two-way inter-dependent relationship" between the atoms and the protein, and between the cells and the tissue. This latter point is one many Wilberites don't seem to get. Just because one holon is higher than another doesn't mean that all control or influences flow in one direction. They don't. On the contrary, if there is a problem with reductionism, it's that it tends to see control flowing only from the lower to the higher. Mutate certain critical atoms in an enzyme molecule, and the enzyme can no longer catalyze specific reactions. Delete certain critical cells within a tissue, and that tissue may no longer be functional. Or if you don't like these pathological examples, when certain atoms interact with other atoms, the entire conformation or shape of the protein molecule can change, with numerous other atom-atom interactions changing. When certain cells secrete certain substances, the function of the entire tissue can change.

But tissues and molecules, acting as units, exhibit behavior that flows back and influences individual cells and atoms, respectively. Every scientist recognizes this two way interaction. Scientists generally don't say that the tissue controls the cells or that the cells control the tissue. The relationship is more complex than that. But for all that, the tissue is still higher than the cells, and the molecule higher than the atom, as Wilber recognizes.

"One of the issues that I hold around Andy's tenet, if I may so call it, that the social holon is higher than the individual holon, is that it has potentially disastrous political implications. Wilber touched upon this in the quotes. If social holons are accepted as higher than individual holons then it would be incumbent upon any reflective individual holon to recognise it's 'subservience' to that which is higher than itself. Individuation, in Jung's sense, would surely be mere hubris. The door to a totalitarian state or society would beckon us in."

I have discussed this issue in The Spectrum of Holons. See also Jim O'Connor's article "Development in the One-Scale Model" on Visser's site (he makes the excellent point, which I won't discuss here, that "society" is not the same thing as government. Society includes rebels and individuators.) First, of course, even if it were true that ranking social holons above individual holons provided justification for totalitarian forms of government, this would hardly constitute proof that societies are not higher than individuals. Darwinism has been criticized for rationalizing a laissez-faire form of society in which the strong prey uninhibitedly on the weak, but this is not an argument against the validity of Darwinism as an evolutionary theory.

However, ranking societies above individuals in the hierarchy does not justify authoritarian governments. Thinking that it does, I believe, reflects a misunderstanding of hierarchical relationships. This brings us to a second reason why, in my view, Wilber promotes the idea of individuals and societies as "separate but equal" aspects of holons. He seems to believe that higher-order holons exert a great deal more control on lower ones than is actually the case. I noted this above, but let's continue to examine the issue, from Wilber's point of view.

As evidence of this control, Wilber provides the example of a body part such as an arm, which has no choice but to move wherever the entire body moves (Shambhala interview 2000). He contrasts this with the individual/society relationship, where individuals are free to oppose social control, even if in the extreme case it costs them their life. There are several problems with this comparison, though, including a) it mixes physical with mental forms of control; b) it overlooks the fact that while the body may control the arm, the arm also influences the movements of the body; and c) it ignores the distinction between levels and stages.

Let's begin with c). An organism exists on a higher level of existence, in my model, than any portion of it, whereas a society exists on a higher stage within the same level as its members. As I have emphasized in many articles, the relationship between social holons and their component holons (transformation) is different from that between individual holons and their components (transcendence). So to say that societies are higher than their members is not to imply that the relationship is necessarily like that of an organism to its component holons.

But let's look at the latter relationship a little more closely. The relationship of an organism to its component individual holons (cells, not tissues or limbs) is like the relationship of a higher level holon, perhaps the earth (understood not just physically, biologically and mentally, but in some still higher sense as well), to individuals. This is the higher-level analogy that is proper for a comparison. It's certainly true that all people on earth must remain attached to the planet (the physical manifestation of this higher-order holon), and move wherever it moves, just as the cells within an organism must move wherever the organism moves. Even astronauts can't sever this connection. It may happen some day that some earthlings colonize another planet, truly breaking free of the earth. But that is rather like the gametes of an organism breaking free from their creator to begin a new organism. Not all cells of an organism are forever bound to it.

Notice also that even though we are constrained by our existence on earth, we do enjoy a certain degree of freedom within these constraints. In the same way, cells within the body have a certain degree of freedom in their functioning. To say that the organism/cell relationship is a model of dictatorial control is to say that the earth (again, thinking in terms of a holon that is more than just physical)/individual human relationship is also a model of such control. The control, the existence of rather rigid limits that can't be transgressed, is very much there, but because we have the feeling of freedom within those limits, we don't consider it as immediate or as oppressive as that of a rigid government. Or rather, most people don't; the kind of people who are most likely to worry about governmental control don't. Those of us who do feel this control, who understand that our membership on earth does prevent us from being completely free, seek to transcend it. This is precisely what the spiritual path is all about.

Now consider the very different relationship of a social holon to its components. Wilber notes that even in a dictatorship, individuals have the possibility of opposing control, even if fruitlessly. Yes, and in a biological tissue-the lower level analogy of a society-individual cells likewise have the possibility of defying authority-as in the development of cancer, for example. Or again, to cite a less pathological example, when a specific cell in a tissue is targeted by a message from another tissue, changing its behavior. In a molecule, a still lower level analogy of a society in my model, some atoms have the possibility of splitting off or dissociating from the group. The relationship of social holons to their component holons is not as strict or as ultimate as that of higher order individual holons to their components.

So Wilber's two examples are fully compatible with my model, when we keep in mind the crucial distinction between levels and stages. Moreover, in any higher/lower relationship, as I noted above, control or influence flows both ways; the higher exerts control over the lower, but also vice-versa. Wilber is well aware of this. Thus one of his famous twenty or so tenets of holons states that the lower sets or determines the possibilities of the higher, while the higher determines the probabilities of the lower. What Wilber seems not to understand, though, is that this rule applies perfectly well to the society/individual relationship. Do individuals determine the possibilities of their societies? Of course. Human societies have many more possibilities open to them than the societies formed by any non-human organism. Conversely, societies set the probabilities of their members. This is why the members of some human societies are much more likely to engage in certain forms of behavior than are the members of other human societies. All human beings have the potential to engage in certain forms of behavior; it is their membership in societies that determines to a very great extent which behaviors become realized.

Does this mean, then, that societies exert control over individuals? Yes, indeed, a great deal, much more than individuals generally appreciate. Does this control provide some rationalization for dictatorships? Well, I can't determine what some people may think on the basis of what they read. But if hierarchical relationships are properly understood, we can appreciate that there is no basis for this rationalization. On the contrary, we are most likely to increase our freedom when we confront, openly and honestly, the existing constraints on our lives.

Hi Andy,

Just going to have to 'drop' in a quick one here. Wilber has 20 tenets that define a holon. Surely, if a thing fails to meet certain tenets then it is not a holon. I am not sure that Wilber has said that all molecules are holons, they may be heaps or artifacts. Tenet 2 says that "Holons display four fundamental capacities: self-preservation, self-adaptation, self-transcendence, and self-dissolution." Your example of molecules dependent on the next higher level, say a cell, would surely break this tenet. I do not equate holons with actual physical entities. I'm reading Sean Hargen's piece at the moment, so in light of that I would argues that holons are in fact inter-objective structures. So when Wilber uses the example of molecules he is not talking about all molecules as such, but rather the inter-objective morphogenic field 'molecule'.

As I'm reading your writings at the moment, you seem to be ignoring the implications of all the tenets and conflating 'sensory reality' and 'holonic reality'.

Avyorth said: "I have difficulty with your implicit reductionism here. I don't think that" the interiority of individuals *depends* on the social stage they are part of." I believe the situation is more flexible than a implied simple causal relation. Again we may disagree on this, but I state my view that there is a two-way inter-dependent relationship between the individual (KW's UpperQuads) and the collective (KW's Lower Quads).In Wilber's map societies (or individuals) are not simply historically or temporally delineated, but developmentally also. Any apparent society is actually a complex of numerous levels - from the lowest to the highest.(Wilber's principle of transcend and include comes in here.) Three individuals (eg a formop adult, a conop child and a preop infant) may appear to belong to the same society-culture, but the actuality, according to Wilber's model, is that whilst the infant is limited to the 'preops' society, the child is able to access/participate in both the 'preops' and the 'conops' societies, and the adult is able to access/participate in all three 'preops', 'conops', and 'formops' societies-cultures (Collectives).

Thus we have: 1. an individual (the infant) equal to the 'preops' collective, but lower than the 'conops' and 'formops' collectives; 2. an individual (the child) higher than the 'preops' collective, equal to the 'conops' collective, and lower than the 'formops' collective; 3. an individual (the adult) higher than the 'preops' and 'conops' collectives, and equal to the 'formops' collective. Remember, for Wilber, (as I understand him!) the Lower Quads are simply the intersubjective and interobjective spheres of exchange-engagement. Structured societies and cultures, in a sociological sense, are only one aspect of these areas."

My reply: I don't disagree with any of this. My point is simply that the same kinds of relationships occur on lower levels, between holons that Wilber considers do have higher/lower relationships. Thus in a complex tissue (e.g, the brain, or some portion of a brain), there are cells that have higher properties than other cells within the same tissue (e.g., the ability to recognize certain kinds of stimuli), and within a complex molecule (e.g., a protein) there are some atoms that have higher properties than other atoms (e.g., the ability to recognize certain other atoms or configurations of atoms). There is in a fact a whole range of properties, with some cells or atoms playing the most critical role, others less important, others still less important. See my article Excelsior for more discussion of this.

There is also a "two-way inter-dependent relationship" between the atoms and the protein, and between the cells and the tissue. This latter point is one many Wilberites don't seem to get. Just because one holon is higher than another doesn't mean that all control or influences flow in one direction. They don't. On the contrary, if there is a problem with reductionism, it's that it tends to see control flowing only from the lower to the higher. Mutate certain critical atoms in an enzyme molecule, and the enzyme can no longer catalyze specific reactions. Delete certain critical cells within a tissue, and that tissue may no longer be functional. Or if you don't like these pathological examples, when certain atoms interact with other atoms, the entire conformation or shape of the protein molecule can change, with numerous other atom-atom interactions changing. When certain cells secrete certain substances, the function of the entire tissue can change.

But tissues and molecules, acting as units, exhibit behavior that flows back and influences individual cells and atoms, respectively. Every scientist recognizes this two way interaction. Scientists generally don't say that the tissue controls the cells or that the cells control the tissue. The relationship is more complex than that. But for all that, the tissue is still higher than the cells, and the molecule higher than the atom, as Wilber recognizes.

"One of the issues that I hold around Andy's tenet, if I may so call it, that the social holon is higher than the individual holon, is that it has potentially disastrous political implications. Wilber touched upon this in the quotes. If social holons are accepted as higher than individual holons then it would be incumbent upon any reflective individual holon to recognise it's 'subservience' to that which is higher than itself. Individuation, in Jung's sense, would surely be mere hubris. The door to a totalitarian state or society would beckon us in."

I have discussed this issue in The Spectrum of Holons. See also Jim O'Connor's article "Development in the One-Scale Model" on Visser's site (he makes the excellent point, which I won't discuss here, that "society" is not the same thing as government. Society includes rebels and individuators.)

First, of course, even if it were true that ranking social holons above individual holons provided justification for totalitarian forms of government, this would hardly constitute proof that societies are not higher than individuals. Darwinism has been criticized for rationalizing a laissez-faire form of society in which the strong prey uninhibitedly on the weak, but this is not an argument against the validity of Darwinism as an evolutionary theory.

However, ranking societies above individuals in the hierarchy does not justify authoritarian governments. Thinking that it does, I believe, reflects a misunderstanding of hierarchical relationships. This brings us to a second reason why, in my view, Wilber promotes the idea of individuals and societies as "separate but equal" aspects of holons. He seems to believe that higher-order holons exert a great deal more control on lower ones than is actually the case. I noted this above, but let's continue to examine the issue, from Wilber's point of view.

As evidence of this control, Wilber provides the example of a body part such as an arm, which has no choice but to move wherever the entire body moves (Shambhala interview 2000). He contrasts this with the individual/society relationship, where individuals are free to oppose social control, even if in the extreme case it costs them their life. There are several problems with this comparison, though, including a) it mixes physical with mental forms of control; b) it overlooks the fact that while the body may control the arm, the arm also influences the movements of the body; and c) it ignores the distinction between levels and stages.

Let's begin with c). An organism exists on a higher level of existence, in my model, than any portion of it, whereas a society exists on a higher stage within the same level as its members. As I have emphasized in many articles, the relationship between social holons and their component holons (transformation) is different from that between individual holons and their components (transcendence). So to say that societies are higher than their members is not to imply that the relationship is necessarily like that of an organism to its component holons.

But let's look at the latter relationship a little more closely. The relationship of an organism to its component individual holons (cells, not tissues or limbs) is like the relationship of a higher level holon, perhaps the earth (understood not just physically, biologically and mentally, but in some still higher sense as well), to individuals. This is the higher-level analogy that is proper for a comparison. It's certainly true that all people on earth must remain attached to the planet (the physical manifestation of this higher-order holon), and move wherever it moves, just as the cells within an organism must move wherever the organism moves. Even astronauts can't sever this connection. It may happen some day that some earthlings colonize another planet, truly breaking free of the earth. But that is rather like the gametes of an organism breaking free from their creator to begin a new organism. Not all cells of an organism are forever bound to it.

Notice also that even though we are constrained by our existence on earth, we do enjoy a certain degree of freedom within these constraints. In the same way, cells within the body have a certain degree of freedom in their functioning. To say that the organism/cell relationship is a model of dictatorial control is to say that the earth (again, thinking in terms of a holon that is more than just physical)/individual human relationship is also a model of such control. The control, the existence of rather rigid limits that can't be transgressed, is very much there, but because we have the feeling of freedom within those limits, we don't consider it as immediate or as oppressive as that of a rigid government. Or rather, most people don't; the kind of people who are most likely to worry about governmental control don't. Those of us who do feel this control, who understand that our membership on earth does prevent us from being completely free, seek to transcend it. This is precisely what the spiritual path is all about.

Now consider the very different relationship of a social holon to its components. Wilber notes that even in a dictatorship, individuals have the possibility of opposing control, even if fruitlessly. Yes, and in a biological tissue-the lower level analogy of a society-individual cells likewise have the possibility of defying authority-as in the development of cancer, for example. Or again, to cite a less pathological example, when a specific cell in a tissue is targeted by a message from another tissue, changing its behavior. In a molecule, a still lower level analogy of a society in my model, some atoms have the possibility of splitting off or dissociating from the group. The relationship of social holons to their component holons is not as strict or as ultimate as that of higher order individual holons to their components.

So Wilber's two examples are fully compatible with my model, when we keep in mind the crucial distinction between levels and stages. Moreover, in any higher/lower relationship, as I noted above, control or influence flows both ways; the higher exerts control over the lower, but also vice-versa. Wilber is well aware of this. Thus one of his famous twenty or so tenets of holons states that the lower sets or determines the possibilities of the higher, while the higher determines the probabilities of the lower. What Wilber seems not to understand, though, is that this rule applies perfectly well to the society/individual relationship. Do individuals determine the possibilities of their societies? Of course. Human societies have many more possibilities open to them than the societies formed by any non-human organism. Conversely, societies set the probabilities of their members. This is why the members of some human societies are much more likely to engage in certain forms of behavior than are the members of other human societies. All human beings have the potential to engage in certain forms of behavior; it is their membership in societies that determines to a very great extent which behaviors become realized.

Does this mean, then, that societies exert control over individuals? Yes, indeed, a great deal, much more than individuals generally appreciate. Does this control provide some rationalization for dictatorships? Well, I can't determine what some people may think on the basis of what they read. But if hierarchical relationships are properly understood, we can appreciate that there is no basis for this rationalization. On the contrary, we are most likely to increase our freedom when we confront, openly and honestly, the existing constraints on our lives.

This post is my response to the questions, issues, etc that Andy (and others) have raised about holons - and the use of the concept of holons in Wilber's Integral map.

I need to go back to Wilber's basic definition (derived, I believe he says, from Koestler) of what a holon is - a whole/part. All phenomena, all things, all functions, etc are holons (yes, including the dreaded artefacts). As I've said before now, I hold that only phenomena of the Gross Realm can actually be designated as holons that follow his tenets of AQAL.

Holons, like turtles in the famous BHOE analogy, are 'all the way up and all the way down'. There is neither a fundamental holon nor a final holon - someone ought to tell the nuclear physicists.

Holons, we are told, arise out of Shunyata (Emptiness or the seamless web of the Kosmos), abide (exist) and then dissolve back into Shunyata. As expressions or manifestations in the space-time continuum of the seamless and timeless Reality of Shunyata which is Primordial Awareness, holons, by necessity, issue an IOU (Incomplete Or Uncertain) to the Kosmos. In Buddhist philosophy terms, all holons (dhammas or dharmas) are Relative Truths arising out of previous causes and conditions (paticca-samuppada or pratitya samutpada) - whilst the Ultimate Truth of all holons is Shunyata (Emptiness). Thus, and this is crucial in my view, holons lack self-existence or inherent existence. This means that if one 'looks for' a holon as an entity existing 'from its own side' or independently, then one will not find anything. I suspect this may well be worthwhile taking into account in analysing or categorising holons. In Prasangika Madhyamaka terms, holons are mere imputations of mind.

I think a potential danger for us holon-hunters is to view holons as a kind of Integral equivalent of atoms (in the Greek definition of the term 'indivisible'). By this I mean that we may well believe holons to be self-existent entities 'out there' in the world waiting to be discovered - surely yet another Rational or Enlightenment project of Modernity. In BHofE Wilber spells out one aspect of the shift from Modernity to postModernity wherein the mapmaker is inserted, as it were, into the map. No longer are the world and its objects seen as given but instead recognised as arising in dependence upon the subject/self or view. We need to bear in mind that many of the categories into which we distinguish reality are the constructs of the Enlightenment Project snipped and stitched together by the (often) extremely partial sciences.

I'm not suggesting that we fall into some relativism of extreme postModernity where holons can be anything you want, stacked in any order or non-order. We need to steer between the two extremes of nihilism and essentialism.

This is perhaps where Wilber's AQAL comes into its own. It may or may not be the 'Periodic Table' of the Integral Age. I suspect it is far too early in this emerging Age's history to decide finally. But it does, I believe, serve the purpose of a constellating template of noospheric tension that helps realign our conceptions of reality. The need to find genuinely new and Integral methodologies and models of episteme to supplant the old wine skins of rational science is, without doubt, a pressing issue.

Yet there is surely another pressing issue, and one that ever-increasingly draws my attention - that of the Gnosis of the Integral Age. The epistemology of the nature of Relative or Conventional Reality of the Holonic/AQAL Realm will, doubtless, press ahead driven as always by those human, all too human, needs and drives. But what of the need to situate our personal existence within the fabric, as it were, of the Kosmos, of Shunyata? The redeeming, to use Wilber's terminology, of our Kosmic IOU?

From Avyorth Rolinson

Andy wrote: "I don't disagree with any of this. My point is simply that the same kinds of relationships occur on lower levels, between holons that Wilber considers do have higher/lower relationships. Thus in a complex tissue (e.g, the brain, or some portion of a brain), there are cells that have higher properties than other cells within the same tissue (e.g., the ability to recognize certain kinds of stimuli), and within a complex molecule (e.g., a protein) there are some atoms that have higher properties than other atoms (e.g., the ability to recognize certain other atoms or configurations of atoms). There is in a fact a whole range of properties, with some cells or atoms playing the most critical role, others less important, others still less important. See my article Excelsior for more discussion of this."

I'm not sure how/why you'd want to say that because one type of eg neuron can recognise certain kinds of stimuli then it is 'higher' (or 'lower') than another cell that can't recognise it. Are our auditory cells higher or lower than our visual cortex cells? Likewise within the Rational (or any other) worldspace there are individuals attuned to a whole differing range of social and cultural stimuli - assuming that they all have a reasonably developed formops and other lines of personal development (moral, conative, etc) - what would it mean to say one individual was higher or lower than another. I don't understand how this relates to Wilber's use of a Quadrated orientational model? Wilber surely acknowledges that within all levels there will be differing abilities.

Reading your material is really useful, to me, for filling in a more detailed picture of the inter-relationships of holons within levels - but I don't see it supplanting, as it were, the role of AQAL.

"There is also a "two-way inter-dependent relationship" between the atoms and the protein, and between the cells and the tissue. This latter point is one many Wilberites don't seem to get. Just because one holon is higher than another doesn't mean that all control or influences flow in one direction. They don't. On the contrary, if there is a problem with reductionism, it's that it tends to see control flowing only from the lower to the higher. Mutate certain critical atoms in an enzyme molecule, and the enzyme can no longer catalyze specific reactions. Delete certain critical cells within a tissue, and that tissue may no longer be functional. Or if you don't like these pathological examples, when certain atoms interact with other atoms, the entire conformation or shape of the protein molecule can change, with numerous other atom-atom interactions changing. When certain cells secrete certain substances, the function of the entire tissue can change. "

I've no problem with pathological examples - I'm becoming evermore at home with pathology. Perhaps it's one of the joys of aging?

Again, I can't see anything here that is contra Wilber. You do an excellent job of filling out the holonic levels and their interactions for me since I have a very limited knowledge of 'these things', but on the basis of the above I'm still AQAL-ing.

"I have discussed this issue in The Spectrum of Holons. See also Jim O'Connor's article "Development in the One-Scale Model" on Visser's site (he makes the excellent point, which I won't discuss here, that "society" is not the same thing as government. Society includes rebels and individuators.) First, of course, even if it were true that ranking social holons above individual holons provided justification for totalitarian forms of government, this would hardly constitute proof that societies are not higher than individuals. Darwinism has been criticized for rationalizing a laissez-faire form of society in which the strong prey uninhibitedly on the weak, but this is not an argument against the validity of Darwinism as an evolutionary theory. "

Ok, I'm going to try the Alexandrian approach to this Gordian knot you've presented me with. I was lying on my chest having my back massaged with Eucalyptus, Menthol and Lavender by my partner (beats Luther's closet anyday) when the following point arose in my consciousness:

If the collectives (societies or whatever) are really higher than individuals, how come individuals are conscious of the collectives they are a (lower) part of? How come we individuals can analyse, model, etc the collective. Let's use Wilber's much loved Piagetian example of the thin and fat vessels with water being poured one to the other whilst the preoperational child sees the water volume change as the containing vessel changes. A few years later, as Wilber says, the child (now concrete operational) sees 'the rules', 'the functions', and so on of the conservation of mass. In other words, we are unaware, unable to see, the operations of that which is at a higher level on the holarchy than our own level. So how can we as individuals talk and theorise about societies/collectives?

It seems to me that using your assertion that the collective/social is higher than the individual means that the higher/highest will forever be unknown to us - the Unknown God perhaps?

In the model you are presenting us with I do have the image of society/collective as a 'mystical' presence hanging over us. In a sense I agree with you but there is also a mystical presence of the Ubermensch hanging over us as well. This is, I suspect, Soul and its Church/Sangha.

Avyorth said: "I'm not sure how/why you'd want to say that because one type of eg neuron can recognise certain kinds of stimuli then it is 'higher' (or 'lower') than another cell that can't recognise it. Are our auditory cells higher or lower than our visual cortex cells? Likewise within the Rational (or any other) worldspace there are individuals attuned to a whole differing range of social and cultural stimuli - assuming that they all have a reasonably developed formops and other lines of personal development (moral, conative,etc) - what would it mean to say one individual was higher or lower than another. I don't understand how this relates to Wilber's use of a Quadrated orientational model? Wilber surely acknowledges that within all levels there will be differing abilities."

I guess I didn't make myself clear. My point is that just as we say that there is a developmental and holarchically related range of mental abilities of humans or other organisms-e.g., ability to recognize signs, ability to recognize symbols, ability to manipulate symbols in various ways-we can say the same thing about cells. I'm not saying auditory cells are higher or lower than visual cells, just as you wouldn't say an artist is higher or lower than a scientist. In fact, that is a good example of the parallels in horizontal or translational differences between the two levels, cells and organisms.

What I'm saying is that there are parallels as well in the vertical differences. I'm saying that some visual cells engage in much more complex forms of signal processing than do other visual cells (and the same for auditory cells); they recognize, if you will, more levels of meaning. For example, some visual cells only recognize or respond to differences in light intensity. Other cells can not only make intensity discriminations, but also differences in the orientation of lines, in other words, have an awareness of more than one dimension of space. Still other cells can recognize more complex dimensional relationships, along with color. Each type of cell starts with the properties of the lower cell, and builds on it. Of course these properties of cells are necessarily but crude analogs of human mental properties, but my point is that this exhibits the very same kind of relationships as are found between the higher-level properties.

And to bring it all back to my original point, the different kinds of cells that exhibit this developmental range of properties should be considered to be on different levels of existence, to be consistent with Wilber's treatment of different human beings on different levels. The analogies are very close. Human beings of different periods (or of different stages all existing within current modern societies) are imbedded in societies of different degrees of complexity, experience different degrees of communicative associations with other humans, and exhibit different degrees of mental abilities. Cells of different tissues (which are all present in a higher organism, but which were created through a long historical developmental process) are imbedded in tissues of different degrees of complexity, experience different degrees of communicative associations with other cells, and exhibit different degrees of "mental" abilities.

Wilber recognizes that tissues like the brain are higher than their component cells, so to be consistent he should also recognize that societies are higher than their individual members. He comes to the conclusion that societies are not higher only by applying his asmmetry criterion--other criteria like emergence don't work, they support my point that societies are higher--and this criterion only works if it is applied selectively to humans of different developmental stages, rather than by lumping all organisms together. To be consistent, Wilber should also apply the criterion selectively to cells of different developmental stages, rather than lumping them all together. If he did that, though, he would have to conclude that these cells are on the same level as the tissues, which are on the same level as the organism, which (according to him) are on the same level as the society. So cells, tissues, organisms and societies are all on the same level. This is the problem, where Wilber's inconsistency leads him.

"I've no problem with pathological examples - I'm becoming evermore at home with pathology. Perhaps it's one of the joys of aging?"

Thank yo' for that one, w'orth-y man. Yes, aging teaches us that the boundary between pathology and normalcy really is in the mind of the observer. Or at least we want it to be nowhere else.

"Again, I can't see anything here that is contra Wilber. You do an excellent job of filling out the holonic levels and their interactions for me since I have a very limited knowledge of 'these things', but on the basis of the above I'm still AQAL-ing. "

Again, the point is these relationships are between what everyone recognizes as higher and lower. Yet when the same kind of relationships occur on our level, Wilber says they aren't higher and lower, but different quadrants. This is inconsistent.

" If the collectives (societies or whatever) are really higher than individuals, how come individuals are conscious of the collectives they are a (lower) part of? How come we individuals can analyse, model, etc the collective. Let's use Wilber's much loved Piagetian example of the thin and fat vessels with water being poured one to the other whilst the preoperational child sees the water volume change as the containing vessel changes. A few years later, as Wilber says, the child (now concrete operational) sees 'the rules', 'the functions', and so on of the conservation of mass. In other words, we are unaware, unable to see, the operations of that which is at a higher level on the holarchy than our own level. So how can we as individuals talk and theorise about societies/collectives?"

Excellent question! My answer is a) we aren't really aware of very much of society; that's why, as Ken notes, the intersubjective matrix is inaccessible to us. We really have a very poor grasp of the rules that govern us; and b) we are a little bit aware of society because, again, in my model, individual holons participate in the properties of the social holons they are members of. Organisms in societies are higher than organisms not in societies, just as cells in tissues are higher than cells not in tissues. They get their emergent properties through their communicative associations with other organisms or cells like themselves. Organisms that are not members of societies can have no awareness, or virtually no awareness, of these societies.

Your family dog, for example, may have some awareness of family relationships, because it is to a little bit of an extent a member of your family. Not as much a member as the humans, of course, but it does have a little participation in the family. It can have no awareness of larger American society, though. We can, because we are to some extent as high as that society, by our participation in it. Again, this participation is limited. Nobody can know or do everything that the society knows or does. But we do have enough participation in the society to have some awareness that there is a society.

In a previous post I developed a definition of type of holon I use when I apply the asymmetry principle, and showed that with this definition, the principle leads to the conclusion that societies are higher than individuals. I challenged Wilber to come up with an alternative definition that supports his conclusion that societies and individuals are of equal hierarchical rank, yet which also generates all the higher/lower relationships found in the rest of his model.

Here I'm going to take up this challenge myself, that is, I'm going to try to develop such a definition of holon type, and see where it leads us. We begin by considering some of the higher levels in the 4Q model-humans of various developmental stages, triune brained organisms, limbic brain organisms, and so on. What definition of holon type could we come up with to distinguish these from each other, allowing us to apply the asymmetry principle separately to each?

Wilber claims that every level transcends and includes the levels below it, so we might consider this as a defining feature of holon type. But the use of transcendence as a criterion is problematical. One problem, which I will discuss later, is that Wilber uses the term inconsistently, applying it to different kinds of higher/lower relationships. For now, though, I will just point out that transcendence is inappropriate as a criterion for defining holon type because it seems to presuppose a higher/lower relationship. If we say, for example, that humans of today transcend and include humans of an earlier period, we seem to be assuming a priori that they are higher than the earlier individuals. As I emphasized in a previous posting, all we should be allowed to do at this point, before applying the asymmetry principle, is specify what are levels, not which are higher and which are lower. Thus my definition of holon types includes atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organisms and societies, but does not assume, until the asymmetry principle is applied, what their hierarchical relationships are.

So suppose we drop the term transcend, and just define holon types as holons that include other holons. This may appear to be a circular definition, with every holon defined in terms of other holons. In fact, because of the interlocking nature of holons, which by definition include and are part of other holons, it's very difficult to define holon type without some recourse to circular reasoning. In all three criteria I used previously, holon types were also defined in terms of other holons. This is a problem I believe we cannot completely escape. However, we can minimize it by distinguishing between holon type, which we are attempting to define, and the broader and vaguer term holon, which does not specify whether the holon is a holon type. While this approach may not avoid circularity completely, I obviously can't criticize Wilber here, since I'm stuck with the problem as much as he is.

But for Wilber there is a more serious problem with an approach based on defining holon types as holons that include other holons. In Wilber's higher levels, it is not organisms that include other organisms, but the brains of organisms that include the brains of other organisms. Humans of today do not include humans of earlier periods, nor do they include non-human organisms. Rather, the modern human brain includes (according to Wilber) the brain of earlier humans, which in turn includes the triune brain of higher vertebrates, which includes the limbic brain, and so on. This is a serious problem for Wilber, because while the brains may have inclusive or nested relationships with each other, it's the organisms that form societies. We don't say that human brains associate into societies, or vertebrate brains associate into societies. We say human individuals, or individual organisms, form societies. It seems to me this leaves Wilber with two choices: either he bites the bullet and, ignoring human individuals completely, just applies the asymmetry principle to the brain/society relationship; or he defines holon type in a way that brings the organism into the equation.

Surely the first alternative is not acceptable. Any model of holarchy that does not have a place for individual organisms obviously is seriously flawed. How could someone who has spent all his adult life studying human beings create a comprehensive model of existence in which they are in an important sense absent! And not only them, but all the numerous different cell types of organisms that are not found within brains. If Wilber is going to follow this approach, he has to offer a model that strips away all non-neural tissues and cells, as well as whole organisms.

So let's consider the second alternative. How would Wilber define holon type so that human individuals were included? He would have to say something like this: a holon type contains a holon that includes a holon contained within another holon type. Thus an organism contains another holon (a brain) which includes another holon (a different kind of brain) which is found within another holon type (organism). This definition is obviously awkward. It is also more circular than a definition that specifies holon type in terms of just other holons. Another holon type has to be specified in the definition, because obviously any holon contains a holon which includes another holon found in another holon. This latter statement simply says that every holon contains at least three lower kinds of holons. For example, an organism contains a brain which includes cells which are found in tissues. A cell contains molecules which include subatomic particles which are found within atoms.

Even more than any of this, though, this definition quite obviously does not apply to other levels of existence, as Wilber defines them. Consider a cell, for example. Does a cell contain a holon that includes a holon that is found within another holon type? Eukaryotic cells, according to Wilber, include prokaryotic cells, in the sense that mitochondria and certain other intracellular organelles are thought to have been originally derived from prokaryotes. But do these organelles contain some other holon which is found within some other holon type? Remember, prokaryotes cannot fit that last term, because they are already playing the role of "brain", that is, of the holon within the original holon type. But there is nothing else available to play that role, because prokaryotes, according to Wilber, exist on the level just below eukaryotic cells.

If this discussion seems confusing and hard to follow, it should! It just illustrates that Wilber's 4Q model can't be generated from a definition of holon type that specifies humans and other organisms. Any attempt to leads to nonsense. The only alternative to do doing this, though, is to dispense with organisms and humans entirely-leave them out of the model-and apply the asymmetry principle to the brain/society relationship. This, too, is obviously not satisfactory.

Wilber's hangup here is that he clearly sees the holarchical relationship of brains-with the reptilian within the limbic within the triune-and tries to build his higher levels of existence on that basis. It is true that the different brains include each other-again, I will put off till later the question of whether they transcend each other-but the organisms that actually contain these brains do not. Different organisms, including human beings, do not transcend and include each other.

Wilberites might respond to this by pointing out that the properties of different organisms do exhibit this inclusive relationship. For example, Wilber has made much of the fact that a nested holarchical relationship is demonstrated by various kinds of mental processes, such as concepts, symbols, signs, and so forth. Each type of process or property includes the previous, yet features something new, something beyond the previous. I accept this view. Different kinds of organisms do have emergent properties that have an inclusive relationship. Some organisms can communicate with each other using various kinds of behavioral displays, while others cannot. Some organisms can not only use behavioral displays, but language, in which symbols can stand for things that the symbols have no direct resemblance to. Still other organisms can manipulate these symbols in various ways.

How can it be that organisms-in the sense of physical bodies--are not holarchically arranged, and yet many of their emergent properties are? To answer this question, we have to appreciate that the emergent properties of organisms result from their participation in social holons, societies. Holarchical relationships do exist between different kinds societies, just as they do between different kinds of brains. Modern human societies can be said to include earlier societies, in the sense that the kind of social organization that existed during various historical periods-for example, nation states--can still be found within our society. And these earlier societies, in turn, contained within themselves the kind of organization-such as bands or tribes-that constitute in toto certain animal societies. The latter, in turn, include families, which are the entire form of social organization in still lower organisms.

In my model, organisms, as individual holons situated within social holons, participate in or experience to a limited extent the properties of the latter. So modern humans have some of the higher properties of societies, such as language and the ability to think in certain ways, while members of earlier societies also had language and perhaps a different kind of thinking. Members of animal societies have no language, in the sense that we apply the term to our own species, but do exhibit other forms of communication which are not found in organisms that do not exist in such societies. It is this participation in the higher properties of social holons that gives the emergent properties of organisms their holarchical relationships.

The same situation is observed at a lower level, with cells. Different kinds of cells, like different kinds of organisms, do not transcend and include each other. We can't say that a brain cell transcends and includes a liver cell, nor that it transcends and includes a micro-organism. But it does have properties that "transcend"-again, I will discuss this term shortly-and include those of these other cells. Any cell, such as that of a micro-organism, can communicate with other cells like it in very rudimentary ways, such as through direct physical contact. But cells within organisms can communicate not only in this manner, but also indirectly, through chemical or electrical signals. And again, they have these emergent properties by virtue of their participation in social holons which are holarchically arranged. These social holons are in fact just the tissues of an organism, including the various kinds of brains that Wilber recognizes as holarchically arranged. So again, we see that whatever we can say about the relationships of different kinds of organisms, we can also say about cells.

Now let's consider the nature of these holarchical relationships more closely. Wilber says higher forms of existence transcend and include lower. This is certainly true some of the time, but is it always true. What does "transcend" mean, anyway? This word may very well be the most commonly used one in all of Wilber's opus, but to the best of my knowledge, he has never defined it precisely. Even more problematical, he does not use it consistently. He maintains that a molecule transcends its atoms; a cell transcends its molecules; the triune brain transcends the limbic brain; and the modern human brain transcends the earlier human brain. But these four relationships are very different from one another.

Consider the lower two relationships first. A molecule is a nested hierarchy or pure holarchy of atoms, while a cell is a mixed (nested and non-nested) hierarchy of molecules. In a molecule, there is only one type of subcomponent, the atom (or if we want to maintain that there are several types, as when we say a protein contains amino acids which contains atoms, each is nested within the next). In a cell, there are several, in fact, a great many, subcomponents, and these are not all nested within each other. Thus amino acids do not exist within sugars, and protein molecules do not exist within DNA molecules. All these different kinds of moleucles exist within the cell, but within this higher-order holon, they maintain some autonomy from each other.

This difference in structural relationships results in very different functional relationships of the holons. For example, a molecule is not completely independent of all of its individual atoms; there are at least some atoms in any molecule that are critical to the molecule's function. The larger the molecule, the fewer the number (or percentage) of such critical atoms, but there are always some. A cell, in contrast, is completely independent of any of its molecules, except for the very largest. Any single protein molecule, for example, could be deleted from a cell without changing its function or identity as a cell in any significant manner. In other words, a cell has a great deal of redundancy built into it, whereas a molecule has very much less.

Now consider the brain relationships. The relationship of the triune brain to the limbic brain is clearly more like that of a molecule to an atom than a cell to a molecule. It is a nested holarchy. But whereas a molecule contains many nested atoms, the triune brain contains but one limbic brain. Numbers matter. While a molecule is dependent on some of its atoms for its properties, it is usually not dependent on all of them. Remove or replace some atoms, and the molecule may retain its properties. But the triune brain depends vitally on the limbic brain. Remove the limbic brain, and the triune brain ceases to function at all.

Finally there is the relationship of different human brains to each other. Wilber believes they are nested, in the same way that the limbic brain is nested within the triune brain, and the reptilian within the limbic. There is no evidence for this, though, that the brain type of earlier humans is in some manner included within the modern human brain. In fact, there is no evidence that any differences at all exist between brains of humans of different historical periods. Presumably there are some differences, but we have no way of knowing that they are of the holarchical type. For example, it could be that the brains of earlier humans had certain patterns of activity that are completely absent from modern humans, as well as vice-versa. The differences in activity might lead to emergent properties in modern humans, but they would not necessarily constitute holarchical relationships of structure.

This kind of situation is known to exist on lower levels. Protein and RNA molecules are both biological polymers, but composed of different small molecules (amino acids and nucleotides, respectively). Neither is included within the other. However, one could argue that some RNA molecules are higher than proteins, because some RNAs, in addition to being able to reproduce themselves (which proteins can't do), can also catalyze reactions, which is what proteins do.

Wilber of course is free to define transcendence any way he wishes. My point is that all four of these examples, which in Wilber's model all constitute transcendent relationships, are too different from one another to be grouped under the same term. In my model, I distinguish between transcendence and transformation. Transcendence can be defined as the relationship of an individual holon to its components, while transformation is the relationship of a social holon to its components. Thus a cell transcends its molecules and atoms, while a molecule transforms its atoms. The triune brain/limbic relationship might be characterized as one of partial transformation, while that between different human brains is apparently even more partial.

Some Wilberites may protest that I have largely been concerned with exterior or structural properties here. Well, yes, because that's the only common language we have to compare lower levels of existence with our own, since we can't access the interiorities of lower forms of life. But that shouldn't make any difference, because according to Wilber, exteriors and interiors are closely correlated at every level. If the exteriors of different holons bear relationships to each other than can't be considered transcendent, the same should be true of the interiors. And in fact, as I have discussed elsewhere (Over the Rainbow), the relationships of the interior properties of humans of different historical or developmental stages fit my definition of transformation rather than transcendence.

Many people seem to think Ken Wilber is an authority on holons. That's arguable. He's an authority on states of consciousness, or more precisely, on what has been written about them by other people. But most of what we know about holons comes from studies of lower states of existence, with which Wilber has a competent but hardly expert acquaintance. Wilber has attempted to extend the holarchy to levels of being beyond those of ordinary humanity, and this is a courageous project, but the fact remains we really have no way of knowing whether holarchy is an adequate way to describe the relationships of higher states of consciousness. We only know for sure that it applies well to lower levels, and at these lower levels Wilber's description of holarchy is riddled with inconsistencies, many if not most of which derive from his failure to begin with clear definitions of his terms.

Hi, Ray:

"Just going to have to 'drop' in a quick one here. Wilber has 20 tenets that define a holon. Surely, if a thing fails to meet certain tenets then it is not a holon. I am not sure that Wilber has said that all molecules are holons, they may be heaps or artifacts. Tenet 2 says that "Holons display four fundamental capacities: self-preservation, self-adaptation, self-transcendence, and self-dissolution." Your example of molecules dependent on the next higher level, say a cell, would surely break this tenet. I do not equate holons with actual physical entities. I'm reading Sean Hargen's piece at the moment, so in light of that I would argues that holons are in fact inter-objective structures. So when Wilber uses the example of molecules he is not talking about all molecules as such, but rather the inter-objective morphogenic field 'molecule'."

I would have a lot of trouble with a definition of holon that excluded entities like proteins and DNA. In any case, Wilber could not exclude them without being inconsistent, because he identifies various kinds of brains as holons, but these are clearly dependent on the organism in just the same way that complex molecules in cells are dependent on the cell. They co-evolved with the organism, and can't exist outside of it.

We can argue about whether a holon should be limited to a physical entity, but surely the latter is an important aspect of it in the Wilber model. Wilber's exteriors seem to me to be very clearly what scientists commonly refer to as physical entities. And so relationships between these entities should mirror the relationships between other aspects of holons.

" And to bring it all back to my original point, the different kinds of cells that exhibit this developmental range of properties should be considered to be on different levels of existence, to be consistent with Wilber's treatment of different human beings on different levels. The analogies are very close. Human beings of different periods (or of different stages all existing within current modern societies) are imbedded in societies of different degrees of complexity, experience different degrees of communicative associations with other humans, and exhibit different degrees of mental abilities. Cells of different tissues (which are all present in a higher organism, but which were created through a long historical developmental process) are imbedded in tissues of different degrees of complexity, experience different degrees of communicative associations with other cells, and exhibit different degrees of "mental" abilities. "

I accept your differentiation of cell complexity and levels of development/evolution in the world of cells. My understanding is that Wilber would also accept such a differentiation. I guess that he has lumped cells into two basic categories (Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes) in his AQAL diagram simply for the purposes of clarity. If all the differentiations of eg atoms, molecules and cells were illustrated on the diagram it would be totally unwieldy. I guess as with any map we need to change the scale and legend as suits our needs. It seems to me that, for good reason, Wilber - whilst giving a spectrum from 'the Big Bang' to the Integral/Informational - has focused upon the noospheric stages of development/evolution. Perhaps someone will, some day, produce an Integral AQAL Atlas with maps of the general territory supplemented with detailed maps of each of the stages, eg atoms, molecules, cells, and organisms.

Are there any Integral cartographers out there?

"Wilber recognizes that tissues like the brain are higher than their component cells, so to be consistent he should also recognize that societies are higher than their individual members."

Doesn't Wilber actually recognise that organisms - with tissues like the brain and its central nervous system, complex autonomic nervous system, and so on - are higher than single cells or less complex organisms. I don't believe Wilber would agree with your statement above - but please point me to a relevant section of his work.

I don't think that we have tissues developing/evolving *before* organisms - organisms are 'organised-tissues', as it were. Isn't it the chicken-egg issue?

I'll pick this point up again when I seek a point of clarification in your reply to Sean.

" Excellent question! My answer is a) we aren't really aware of very much of society; that's why, as Ken notes, the intersubjective matrix is inaccessible to us. We really have a very poor grasp of the rules that govern us; and b) we are a little bit aware of society because, again, in my model, individual holons participate in the properties of the social holons they are members of. Organisms in societies are higher than organisms not in societies, just as cells in tissues are higher than cells not in tissues. They get their emergent properties through their communicative associations with other organisms or cells like themselves. Organisms that are not members of societies can have no awareness, or virtually no awareness, of these societies. "

Would you direct me to where "Ken notes, the intersubjective matrix is inaccessible to us"? If that were the case why does he include fairly detailed developmental stages within the Lower Left Quadrant - the intersubjective matrix? He draws upon the work of Gebser, Habermas, Neumann, and many others. I'm reminded of the titles of two chps in Peter Berger's 'Invitation to Sociology', viz 'Man in Society' and 'Society in Man'.

I don't think your claim that we have a poorer grasp of the social rules (Intersubjective) than the psychological rules (Intrasubjective) that govern us stands up, personally speaking. Who, other than yourself, makes such a judgement - and how do they substantiate it? I mean by that, who can or could be the speaking voice for society per se?

"Your family dog, for example, may have some awareness of family relationships, because it is to a little bit of an extent a member of your family. Not as much a member as the humans, of course, but it does have a little participation in the family."

This is where I (and I understand Wilber also) disagree with your analysis. The 'family' dog is only a *family* dog to the humans - to the dog it's all about *the pack*, and a *pack* is not the same as a *family*. Therefore the dog only belongs or participates in the family from the worldview of the human - it has no comprehension of the dynamics of *the family*. The humans, on the other hand, may well be aware of the dynamics of the dog's worldview, viz *the pack* - in accordance with 'transcend and include'.

"It can have no awareness of larger American society, though. We can, because we are to some extent as high as that society, by our participation in it. Again, this participation is limited. Nobody can know or do everything that the society knows or does. But we do have enough participation in the society to have some awareness that there is a society."

Here I have the sense of the reification of holons as I remarked in a previous post. All holons, both in their individual and collective aspects, issue an IOU to the Kosmos - consequently there is always Incompletion or Uncertainty. Society knows no more about the individual than any individual knows about society. The only Perfect (in the sense of Complete) is in Gnosis - and that is surely another ball game from Episteme?

More on my ongoing dialogue with Avyorth:

"I accept your differentiation of cell complexity and levels of development/evolution in the world of cells. My understanding is that Wilber would also accept such a differentiation. I guess that he has lumped cells into two basic categories (Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes) in his AQAL diagram simply for the purposes of clarity. If all the differentiations of eg atoms, molecules and cells were illustrated on the diagram it would be totally unwieldy. I guess as with any map we need to change the scale and legend as suits our needs. It seems to me that, for good reason, Wilber - whilst giving a spectrum from 'the Big Bang' to the Integral/Informational - has focused upon the noospheric stages of development/evolution. Perhaps someone will, some day, produce an Integral AQAL Atlas with maps of the general territory supplemented with detailed maps of each of the stages, eg atoms, molecules, cells, and organisms."

I'm sorry to say this, Avyorth, but you still don't get the point. Of course the diagram would be unwieldy. But that doesn't prevent Wilber from making all those unwieldy differentiations with humans and other organisms, all those different levels. Why does he do it there and not with cells? It is NOT simply a matter of personal interest or preference. That is to say, that may well have been his original motive, but it makes all the difference in the world as to how higher/lower relationships are seen, and he surely ought to be aware of that.

The point, again, is that only by making all those differentiations among humans and organisms can he apply the asymmetry criterion selectively, allowing him to conclude that there is a same-level relationship of humans and societies. That was what my whole discussion of how we define "type of holon" was all about. As I explained in an earlier post, and in numerous other places, one does not come to this conclusion about a same level relationship if one lumps all organisms together. Conversely, if one makes all these differentiations among cells, one comes to the conclusion that cells within organisms are on the same level as their tissues and even the organisms themselves.

"Doesn't Wilber actually recognise that organisms - with tissues like the brain and its central nervous system, complex autonomic nervous system, and so on - are higher than single cells or less complex organisms. I don't believe Wilber would agree with your statement above [i.e., "Wilber recognizes that tissues like the brain are higher than their component cells"] - but please point me to a relevant section of his work."

You may be right. I frankly don't know whether Wilber's level of cells refers only to cells that exist autonomously outside of organisms, or includes cells that exist within them as well. The very fact that none of us really seems to know what Wilber intends ought to indicate, ipso facto, how poorly he has presented his model. This makes it more difficult for me to criticize it, because instead of just focussing on one set of assumptions, I have to consider every possible assumption he conceivably could have made, and demonstrate that none of those assumptions works. This contributes substantially to the complexity of my arguments, apparently making it difficult for some members of this forum to follow.

So let's consider it either way. If he does believe that tissues are higher than their component cells (as I do), then as I noted above, that is inconsistent with his human/society relationships. The cell/tissue relationship is very much like the human/society relationship-it is much more like it than is the cell/cell colony relationship that Wilber in his model makes analogous to the human/society relationship. I have gone over all this before.

On the other hand, if he does not believe this--that tissues are higher than their component cells--then where are these cells within tissues in his model? I see only two alternatives here. Either he has left them out completely, which is a major deficiency of his model. Or he believes that cells and tissues represent the same holon, with one an individual aspect and one a social aspect. If that's the case, then we come to the conclusion that cells within tissues are on the same level as the tissues. And this conclusion leads to a collapse of the holarchy, because tissues, by the same use of the asymmetry criterion, are no higher than organisms. And societies no higher than organisms. So cells, tissues, organisms, and societies of a particular kind are all on the same level. And to add insult to injury, this model still leaves out most cells within organisms, namely non-nervous cells, because only brains are shown on any of the diagrams of his model that I have seen.

"I don't think that we have tissues developing/evolving *before* organisms - organisms are 'organised-tissues', as it were. Isn't it the chicken-egg issue?"

I don't recall saying that tissues evolved before organisms, except in the preliminary sense that there were crude cell associations before any real organisms. On the contrary, as I emphasized in earlier posts, tissues generally co-evolved with organisms. Again, this is much the same kind of relationship as organisms and societies. But the fact that two kinds of holons co-evolved does not mean that one can't be higher than another. I discussed this in an earlier post, Ken Takes His Lumps. Again, if you reject this idea, you must reject the idea that organisms are higher than their cells, since many of these cells co-evolved with the organism, and to reiterate this point yet again, this leads to a collapse of the holarchy.

"Would you direct me to where "Ken notes, the intersubjective matrix is inaccessible to us"?"

See Sean Hargens' excellent article, "Intersubjective Musings" (shambhala.com) in which he quotes Wilber at length on this relationship. Sean is certainly the expert on Wilber's views on this subject, as well as an authority on his own whom I deeply respect.

"If that were the case why does he include fairly detailed developmental stages within the Lower Left Quadrant - the intersubjective matrix?"

If you mean by this: why, if the intersubjective matrix is inaccessible, is it on the same level as or just a different aspect of the human individual-then I agree with you completely. Why, indeed? This was a major point of contention I had with Sean in my recent dialogue with him at this site. I contend that the unknowability or inaccessibility of intersubjectivity or interobjective structures indicates that they are higher than the individuals they inform, and that their placement in the lower quadrants indicates they are societies.

If, on the other hand, you mean: how do we therefore know anything at all about these structures if they are inaccessible to us--Sean argues that they are inaccessible to first or second person approaches (phenomenology or hermeneutics), but can be accessed by third person approaches, that is, structural analysis. See Sean's most recent work, "Morphic Fields as Interobjective Structures". I would just say we can know a little about these structures because we participate in their emergent properties. One manifestation of this participation is our very ability to perform the kind of third-person analysis Sean is concerned with. In other words, when we engage in structural analysis, we are exhibiting a higher-level analog of what nerve cells do when they process information in the brain, and what certain atoms in complex molecules like proteins do when they shift their relationships with other atoms in response to conformational changes in the protein.

"I don't think your claim that we have a poorer grasp of the social rules (Intersubjective) than the psychological rules (Intrasubjective) that govern us stands up, personally speaking."

I don't recall saying that we have a poorer grasp of one than the other. I just said we don't have a very good grasp of the social rules (using this term in a very broad and deep sense) that shape us, which is just another way of saying, in agreement with Wilber and Hargens, that intersubjectivity and interobjectivity are mostly not known to us. I agree that we also have a poor grasp of psychological rules, depending on what you mean by these. I would take these to mean both intersubjective rules-that is, much of our psychology is intersubjective-as well as lower, unconscious structures that are pre-social, but which we are also largely unaware of.

"This is where I (and I understand Wilber also) disagree with your analysis. The 'family' dog is only a *family* dog to the humans - to the dog it's all about *the pack*, and a *pack* is not the same as a *family*. Therefore the dog only belongs or participates in the family from the worldview of the human - it has no comprehension of the dynamics of *the family*. The humans, on the other hand, may well be aware of the dynamics of the dog's worldview, viz *the pack* - in accordance with 'transcend and include'."

I don't think we disagree very much here. I was using family very loosely, and when I say the dog does not understand the family as well as we do, I think this is quite consistent with your views about pack. I just meant that the dog understands that there is some kind of relationship between itself and each family member, and also between each family member and another family member. It knows, for example, that two family members have some kind of relationship with each other that they do not have with strangers on the street. I did not mean that the dog knows, for example, that one member is the son of another, or things on that order. (Though I'm sure some animal behaviorists would claim that dogs can have this kind of knowledge, and much more that I'm open to argument on.)

On the other hand, I disagree with your statement that the dog "has no comprehension of the dynamics of *the family*. Dogs in my experience do have some keen awareness of some aspects of family dynamics. They are often aware, for example, of human moods, and even more, of the interrrelationships that govern these moods-e.g., when one family member is angry at another. This simply reflects the fact that the dog has a perfectly good limbic brain. Not all family dynamics takes place on the intellectual level. Much of it, of course, is emotional, and dogs are genuine players on this level, even if not equal players with the humans.

"Society knows no more about the individual than any individual knows about society."

Again, I believe that society includes the individual, so everything that an individual knows about himself is also social knowledge. It's not necessary to believe that society has a unified interiority or sense of self to hold this view.

At the end of a post criticizing my model of holarchy, specifically my contention that societies are higher than individuals, a man I know only as Michael challenged me, through his friend Brian, to "explain it's significance, i.e. how the understanding helps, as the potential benefits of a clear understanding of the present AQAL model seem obvious?" In my earlier response, I avoided this challenge, falling back on some concept of truth I believe my model has over Wilber's. While I feel that alone is a sufficient response, I completely forgot a much more appropriate answer that Mark Feenstra suggested in a reply to one of my earlier posts:

"I should also share with you that I have some sympathy for the idea that socio-cultural holons can transcend and include individual holons. I have direct experience of this in transformative work within groups where, for example, the variety of perspectives articulated in the group brings a quality to the consciousness and work of the group that transcends and includes all the perspectives of the individuals of that group in a way that is more than the sum of even the higher perspectives of the individuals involved. It seems obvious experientially that we come together again and again in order to participate in that larger whole which is on a higher level than we are as individuals."

This simple observation reinforces two essential features of my model: 1) social holons are higher than their individual members; 2) the latter can participate to some extent in these higher properties. Is there anyone in this forum who has never been a member of a group where he/she directly experienced both of these features? I certainly have (this was a defining experience of my/Ken's generation in the 60s) and I'm a little ashamed to admit it took me so long to realize that this is the kind of answer Michael's question deserves.

This is a reply to Post No. 566, which should have preceded my Post No. 573, but which apparently got lose somewhere in the submission process. So I'm posting it again.

"Interesting. I checked as carefully as I could, it didn't seem to change anything in my part of the country, at least in regard to human holons. The 'individual' and the 'social' still simultaneously bring about each others existence, which would still imply some

kind of symmetry. Of, course, "dominator" social orders create an asymmetrical dynamic."

See my post, Ken takes his lumps. As I discussed there, I'm not

arguing against the idea that the individual and the society co-evolved. I'm arguing that co-evolution of two holons does not necessarily imply a symmetric relationship, in the sense of the term implied by the criterion I refer to as the asymmetry principle. Again, if you believe it does, you must believe that organisms are no higher than most of their cells, and that these cells, the organism and the society all exist on the same level.

"Asymmetry in the individual/social relation is the mark of a pathological holon."

Again, check my definition of asymmetry. I'm using this term in the sense that it is used in Ken's definition of the criterion by which higher and lower are distinguished. If this is pathological, then our relationship to lower organisms, for example, is necessarily pathological. Ken does not dispute that there are relationships that are asymmetric, in this sense. We just disagree over which ones are.

"Turning Mr. Smith's argument on its head, certain individuals have held asymmetrical influence over societies. This doesn't tempt me to claim the individual exists in superior relation to the social, except sometimes pathologically so."

As I have discussed before, there is always a two-way interaction between lower and higher holons. Atoms influence the conformation of molecules, cells influence the functions of tissues. As I said before, Wilberites simply can't seem to understand that the fact that a particular holon is lower than another does not mean that it can't have substantial influence on the higher. It can, and does, all the time.

See also Jim O'Connor's paper on Visser's site, where he notes that our definition of societies in any model is necessarily much broader than the society that some individual, such as one in political power, influences.

"Mark, maybe you can explain how Mr. Smith's model somehow improves on this understanding, especially since his model starts out with a dominator assumption?"

What is a "dominator assumption?" That some holons are higher than others? As I just said, Ken doesn't dispute that. We just disagree over whether that relationship holds for certain types of interactions, most particularly the individual/society ones. And in any case, my "dominator" view is not an assumption. It's a conclusion I came to simply by applying Ken's own rule consistently and fairly. If you don't like this conclusion, take up your quarrel with Ken. It's his rule, not mine, and the logic I used to follow this rule to its conclusion belongs to all of us.

"And, since I am not seeing it, if you are able to show the improvement, could you also explain it's significance, i.e. how the understanding helps, as the potential benefits of a clear understanding of the present AQAL model seem obvious?"

If the benefits of the AQAL seem obvious to you, what can I say? I know many people who find the benefits of their particular beliefs obvious, and are thus quite resistant to changing those beliefs. I'm simply claiming that logic and the preponderance of evidence are clearly on my side in this argument. For people who don't care about logic and evidence, but simply about how a particular model makes them feel, there are really no other persuasive tools at my disposal. I like to believe that in the long run truth will out, but the only thing I'm sure is out on that one is the jury.

"I should also share with you that I have some sympathy for the idea that socio-cultural holons can transcend and include individual holons. I have direct experience of this in transformative work within groups where, for example, the variety of perspectives articulated in the group brings a quality to the consciousness and work of the group that transcends and includes all the perspectives of the individuals of that group in a way that is more than the sum of even the higher perspectives of the individuals involved. It seems obvious experientially that we come together again and again in order to participate in that larger whole which is on a higher level than we are as individuals." This simple observation reinforces two essential features of my model: 1) social holons are higher than their individual members; 2) the latter can participate to some extent in these higher properties. Is there anyone in this forum who has never been a member of a group where he/she directly experienced both of these features? I certainly have (this was a defining experience of my/Ken's generation in the 60s) and I'm a little ashamed to admit it took me so long to realize that this is the kind of answer Michael's question deserves. "

Likewise I'd like to know whether there's anyone in this forum who has not experienced the opposite where membership in a group has lead to the degradation of the individual's level of consciousness? I've seen and read accounts of many, many such incidents - read Jung and Wilhelm Reich if you want some examples. The psychology of groups, collectives, societies, etc (ie Wilber's Lower Quadrants) are, I'm glad to say, infinitely more complex than a simple groups are higher than individuals.

Hi Andy,

Time and other project constraints restrict my responses but I would like to address a couple of points below:

" Wilber claims that every level transcends and includes the levels below it, so we might consider this as a defining feature of holon type. But the use of transcendence as a criterion is problematical. One problem, which I will discuss later, is that Wilber uses the term inconsistently, applying it to different kinds of higher/lower relationships. For now, though, I will just point out that transcendence is inappropriate as a criterion for defining holon type because it seems to presuppose a higher/lower relationship."

I really don't see the problem here - you yourself later down "define holon types as holons that include other holons". If a holon includes another holon then I can't see how it can be anything other than "higher" (ie more complex) than the other "lower" (ie less complex) holon!

"If we say, for example, that humans of today transcend and include humans of an earlier period, we seem to be assuming a priori that they are higher than the earlier individuals. As I emphasized in a previous posting, all we should be allowed to do at this point, before applying the asymmetry principle, is specify what are levels, not which are higher and which are lower. Thus my definition of holon types includes atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organisms and societies, but does not assume, until the asymmetry principle is applied, what their hierarchical relationships are."

Wilber certainly never says that humans of today are higher than the earlier individuals per se. In fact who does make this claim? Wilber lays down certain lines of development - drawing from the works of a vast range of research. Within these lines of development (or complexity), eg cognitive from preops to conops to formops, we can place humans at differing levels of development. BUT a 2 year old child of the 21st Century is not higher than Socrates in terms of cognitive development. I smell a straw man here - beware I've got my box of matches out!

"So suppose we drop the term transcend, and just define holon types as holons that include other holons. This may appear to be a circular definition, with every holon defined in terms of other holons. In fact, because of the interlocking nature of holons, which by definition include and are part of other holons, it's very difficult to define holon type without some recourse to circular reasoning. In all three criteria I used previously, holon types were also defined in terms of other holons. This is a problem I believe we cannot completely escape. However, we can minimize it by distinguishing between holon type, which we are attempting to define, and the broader and vaguer term holon, which does not specify whether the holon is a holon type. While this approach may not avoid circularity completely, I obviously can't criticize Wilber here, since I'm stuck with the problem as much as he is. But for Wilber there is a more serious problem with an approach based on defining holon types as holons that include other holons. In Wilber's higher levels, it is not organisms that include other organisms, but the brains of organisms that include the brains of other organisms. Humans of today do not include humans of earlier periods, nor do they include non-human organisms. Rather, the modern human brain includes (according to Wilber) the brain of earlier humans, which in turn includes the triune brain of higher vertebrates, which includes the limbic brain, and so on."

Thiis is really a distortion of Wilber's argument! When Wilber uses the terms 'reptilian brain stem', 'limbic system', 'triune brain' and so on, he is not simply referring to the brain per se but to the 'Exterior' (assumed) correlate of an 'Interior' structure. If we had the technology then I'm reasonably sure that we could see a child take on a neuological similitude of its parents, teachers, etc brains as it was educated and socialised by them. In fact we would see the child adopt a whole range of Exterior structures, patterns, modes of behaviour that were modelled upon its parents, teachers, and earlier generations. How else does the human race propagate? Sex kicks the game off but that's only step one.

"This is a serious problem for Wilber, because while the brains may have inclusive or nested relationships with each other, it's the organisms that form societies. We don't say that human brains associate into societies, or vertebrate brains associate into societies. We say human individuals, or individual organisms, form societies. It seems to me this leaves Wilber with two choices: either he bites the bullet and, ignoring human individuals completely, just applies the asymmetry principle to the brain/society relationship; or he defines holon type in a way that brings the organism into the equation. "

This "serious problem for Wilber" evapourates once we understand what Wilber refers to when he writes about the Upper Right Quadrant. Like the Upper Left Quadrant which doesn't just include Preops to Conops to Formops and so on, but includes many lines of individual Interior development, the Upper Right Quadrant isn't just about brains and neurology but includes all aspects of individual Exterior development.

Take this very important factor into consideration and I believe your critique collapses.

Hi there

My name is Mark Feenstra and I live in New Zealand. I'm new to this list and have been following recent exchanges with interest.

By way of background about myself I am involved in a non-profit organization called the Practicefield in which we are using action learning to develop a trans-traditional integral approach to transformative practice. I'm also involved in a fledgling business which is developing an integral organiser and virtual learning community infrastructure for transformative practitioners, initially for use on Pocket PC's. Our aim is to help people cultivate an all line, all level, all quadrant way of understanding and organising themselves, and to learn together how to gradually claim the field of transformative practice as the whole of life.

One point I would like to make about the quote Andy has used to support his argument, which was from an email I sent to him, is that in my email I claimed that social holons "can" transcend personal holons, not that social holons "do" so in all cases. This point does not seem to have been taken up by either Andy or Avyorth, but in my view it has important implications which they do not address. In this light it seems to me that a little more attention could be focused on the term "higher" when enquiring into the question of whether social holons are or can be higher than individual holons. From a quantitative perspective it seems to me to be self-evident that social holons are higher than personal holons, regardless of whether the social dimension of personal holons is also a way of differentiating between individual and collective aspects of personal holons. From a qualitative perspective however, it seems that social holons can be higher or lower than personal holons depending on the particular circumstance.

Any map, as the example above illustrates, is going to have the possibility to cause confusion if it is addressing developmental or hierarchical continuums and fails to differentiate between qualitative and quantitative dimensions of the territory being described. A further problem that occurs to me, and perhaps one more relevant to this exchange, is that if we include transrational levels in a hierarchical continuum we are naturally going to encounter rational problems in unpacking such a map from a rational perspective. Ken Wilber refers to this problem in respect of his own map making efforts and I think that it is a critical point his 4 quadrant map.

From a transformative practitioners perspective, perhaps intent on directly knowing the transrational nature of the territory described by such a map, then the question is only whether the map serves this end at the point in time it is referred to. Whereas from a rational perspective it appears to be impossible to use the map in this way, given that rational conscious is limited to reflecting on the nature of reality rather than knowing it directly. Furthermore, because such maps include transrational "dragons" and, even to a rational map readers mind, it is possible to accept that the effects of any transrational dragons on such maps cannot be known directly by the rational mind, then we can expect to find potential inconsistencies in such maps that are not amenable to rational critique.

And of course we are finding them. But how to tell whether such inconsistencies are because of transrational dragons, rational errors or pre-rational lack of differentiation?

All the skills built up by the more academically trained amongst us are going to have limited utility in addressing such questions given that they have been conditioned to place rationality in the position of having certain default settings that training and habit have made difficult to differentiate from other modes of enquiry. For the mystics amongst us there is the problem of accepting the results of intuitive or direct knowing without differentiating such direct knowing from the distortions in our unpacking of such knowing, due to the unconscious effects of, for example, habitual complexes of attachments and conditioning with which we remain at least partially identified.

I am therefore wondering whether a meta enquiry associated with this exchange could be how those of us seeking to reconcile rational and transrational ways of enquiring can learn together. What it seems to me that Ken Wilber and others have done is to help knock down some of the paper walls that have been confusing our appreciation of the nature of reality. But as creatures of habit, the mere knocking down of perceptual walls by someone else does not seem to be enough. I seem to need to have to knock down the very same walls myself, in myself, by my own practice, and to offer my own limited understanding from the midst of this process to others. Or at least this is how I'm seeing it.

Its as if my own and others work to knock down these paper walls allows me to enter more fully, inwardly and outwardly, individually and collectively, into the human project in some way, but that I also need to also learn to stably recognise the tendency in my personality to simulate this process as a kind of decoy. At least that is how it is for me! What I wish to leave behind in writing this is the sense I have that what matters is less the maps that others have made, and more my skill in learning to test such maps in the furnace of my own transformative practice, and out of such testing adding to my own map which I then share with people like you.

"Likewise I'd like to know whether there's anyone in this forum who has not experienced the opposite where membership in a group has lead to the degradation of the individual's level of consciousness? I've seen and read accounts of many, many such incidents - read Jung and Wilhelm Reich if you want some examples. The psychology of groups, collectives, societies, etc (ie Wilber's Lower Quadrants) are, I'm glad to say, infinitely more complex than a simple groups are higher than individuals."

The same argument, of course, can be turned just as well at Wilber's notion that societies and individuals are equal. When it is used in this way, Wilber responds by pointing out that there are pathological as well as healthy relationships. I can certainly take the same position. I could say more, but I think that's enough.

"I really don't see the problem here - you yourself later down "define holon types as holons that include other holons". If a holon includes another holon then I can't see how it can be anything other than "higher" (ie more complex) than the other "lower" (ie less complex) holon!"

Wow! Do you realize what you have just said, Avyorth? Societies include individuals, so they must be higher than individuals. Yes, I agree with you this is always the case, but the point is that we can formulate our criteria without making this assumption. We don't have to assume that holons are higher than the ones they include. We can simply define some holon types as including others, then apply the asymmetry principle or some other criterion to determine their relationship. When we do this, it is the asymmetry principle that in fact leads to the conclusion that holons are higher than the holons they include.

"Wilber certainly never says that humans of today are higher than the earlier individuals per se. In fact who does make this claim? Wilber lays down certain lines of development - drawing from the works of a vast range of research. Within these lines of development (or complexity), eg cognitive from preops to conops to formops, we can place humans at differing levels of development. BUT a 2 year old child of the 21st Century is not higher than Socrates in terms of cognitive development. I smell a straw man here - beware I've got my box of matches out!"

Obviously, when I claim Wilber says humans of today are higher than earlier individuals, I am making a comparison of adults. I didn't think I had to specify that. I'm also comparing members of the highest social stages with corresponding individuals of earlier times.

"This is really a distortion of Wilber's argument! When Wilber uses the terms 'reptilian brain stem', 'limbic system', 'triune brain' and so on, he is not simply referring to the brain per se but to the 'Exterior' (assumed) correlate of an 'Interior' structure. If we had the technology then I'm reasonably sure that we could see a child take on a neuological similitude of its parents, teachers, etc brains as it was educated and socialised by them. In fact we would see the child adopt a whole range of Exterior structures, patterns, modes of behaviour that were modelled upon its parents, teachers, and earlier generations. How else does the human race propagate? Sex kicks the game off but that's only step one."

"This "serious problem for Wilber" evapourates once we understand what Wilber refers to when he writes about the Upper Right Quadrant. Like the Upper Left Quadrant which doesn't just include Preops to Conops to Formops and so on, but includes many lines of individual Interior development, the Upper Right Quadrant isn't just about brains and neurology but includes all aspects of individual Exterior development."

This is a good point, but the problem is that the brain is only one player in the exterior game. Sure, it's the most important one, but exteriors are also shaped by other organs in the body, and by the whole body structure itself. So while it's true that many aspects of the exterior have a somewhat inclusive relationship, this relationship is not very inclusive over the whole range of behaviors of organisms. Can we say, for example, that locomotion in humans transcends and includes locomotion in birds or fish? Obviously not. As I have said, I do agree largely that interiors have an inclusive relationship, and I have explained why I believe that comes about.

Avyorth wrote in response to Andy: "Likewise I'd like to know whether there's anyone in this forum who has not experienced the opposite where membership in a group has lead to the degradation of the individual's level of consciousness? I've seen and read accounts of many, many such incidents - read Jung and Wilhelm Reich if you want some examples. The psychology of groups, collectives, societies, etc (ie Wilber's Lower Quadrants) are, I'm glad to say, infinitely more complex than a simple groups are higher than individuals."

Andy then replied:

"The same argument, of course, can be turned just as well at Wilber's notion that societies and individuals are equal. When it is used in this way, Wilber responds by pointing out that there are pathological as well as healthy relationships. I can certainly take the same position. I could say more, but I think that's enough. "

Avyorth now writes:

But that's the whole point of my last post - I was simply turning your claim on its head thereby raising, at least in my weak mind, serious doubts about the claim of yours that it was supposed to be proving!

I agree that there are indeed "pathological as well as healthy relationships" but, from my perspective, it is between two 'equal' and mutually inter-related 'spheres', viz the Individual and the Collective - Wilber's Upper and Lower Quads.

Avyorth had earlier replied to Andy's post with:

"I really don't see the problem here - you yourself later down "define holon types as holons that include other holons". If a holon includes another holon then I can't see how it can be anything other than "higher" (ie more complex) than the other "lower" (ie less complex) holon!"

To which Andy 'responded':

"Wow! Do you realize what you have just said, Avyorth? Societies include individuals, so they must be higher than individuals."

Nice joke, but doesn't help clarify our analysis of this point! Society does not 'include' individuals as 'contained' holons - societies as Collectives are the Lower Quadrant correlates of individuals, in my (and Wilber's) view.

"Yes, I agree with you this is always the case, but the point is that we can formulate our criteria without making this assumption."

Tut! Tut! I don't think we really do "agree" on this point - in fact I believe, with your astute mind, that you see quite clearly we have been clarifying our disagreement on the Society - Individual relationship in our lively dialogue. I'm grateful for your assistance in teasing out some of the complexities within levels of holons, but am at *odds* with your conclusions!!

Andy's final point in his post was: "This is a good point, but the problem is that the brain is only one player in the exterior game. Sure, it's the most important one, but exteriors are also shaped by other organs in the body, and by the whole body structure itself. So while it's true that many aspects of the exterior have a somewhat inclusive relationship, this relationship is not very inclusive over the whole range of behaviors of organisms. Can we say, for example, that locomotion in humans transcends and includes locomotion in birds or fish? Obviously not. As I have said, I do agree largely that interiors have an inclusive relationship, and I have explained why I believe that comes about. " Avyorth now replies:

Yes I believe that we can say "that locomotion in humans transcends and includes locomotion in birds or fish"! Why do I say that? - because of the shift from locomotion as basically a biospheric activity in (most - the higher primates are a fuzzy area) animals to a noospheric activity for (hopefully most) humans. There is a most noticeable shift in the complexity of locomotion in humans. Seen any birds or fish driving down the freeway recently?

Likewise with the other organs of the human biospheric body - I believe that we are seeing a very sharp transcending with the development of eg genetic science and technology. In a relatively few years (decades?) time I suspect the differentiation of biosphere and noosphere will be mind-boggling - a sort of equivalent to the Industrial Revolution. I haven't seen any hint that birds and fish have cottoned on to it yet! Noospheric transcending of the human body has been mostly 'exomorphic' and rather crude/simplistic until now.

Welcome to the list, Mark, and thank you for introducing yourself.

"One point I would like to make about the quote Andy has used to support his argument, which was from an email I sent to him, is that in my email I claimed that social holons "can" transcend personal holons, not that social holons "do" so in all cases. This point does not seem to have been taken up by either Andy or Avyorth, but in my view it has important implications which they do not address."

I agree with your point that social holons *can* transcend individual holons - I think this is built into Wilber's AQAL. Thus a Mythic social holon transcends (is more complex than) a preops individual holon. BUT the converse is also true, a conops individual holon transcends (is more complex than) a Magic social holon - although we must remember we're measuring/comparing different scales.

Yet in my view the comparing of 'height' or 'depth' of a conop individual with a Mythic social holon is like, er umm?, comparing apples and pears. There is surely no such thing as an Individual or a Collective holon in or by itself? They are inter-related, co-evolving/developing aspects - not self-existent and independent entities. At least in Wilber's model. Like yourself, I'm interested in how well the model allows us to transport ourselves from a Rational worldspace towards the emerging Integral one.

As you mention in your post, there is a problem in that we are habituated to the Rational view. I tried to draw attention to this in my post '

"I think a potential danger for us holon-hunters is to view holons as a kind of Integral equivalent of atoms (in the Greek definition of the term 'indivisible'). By this I mean that we may well believe holons to be self-existent entities 'out there' in the world waiting to be discovered - surely yet another Rational or Enlightenment project of Modernity. In BHofE Wilber spells out one aspect of the shift from Modernity to postModernity wherein the mapmaker is inserted, as it were, into the map. No longer are the world and its objects seen as given but instead recognised as arising in dependence upon the subject/self or view. We need to bear in mind that many of the categories into which we distinguish reality are the constructs of the Enlightenment Project snipped and stitched together by the (often) extremely partial sciences. .......... This is perhaps where Wilber's AQAL comes into its own. It may or may not be the 'Periodic Table' of the Integral Age. I suspect it is far too early in this emerging Age's history to decide finally. But it does, I believe, serve the purpose of a constellating template of noospheric tension that helps realign our conceptions of reality. The need to find genuinely new and Integral methodologies and models of episteme to supplant the old wine skins of rational science is, without doubt, a pressing issue."

"In this light it seems to me that a little more attention could be focused on the term "higher" when enquiring into the question of whether social holons are or can be higher than individual holons. From a quantitative perspective it seems to me to be self-evident that social holons are higher than personal holons, regardless of whether the social dimension of personal holons is also a way of differentiating between individual and collective aspects of personal holons. From a qualitative perspective however, it seems that social holons can be higher or lower than personal holons depending on the particular circumstance. "

I don't understand how you are using the terms "higher-lower" and "quantitive-qualitive" in conjunction with each other. If we accept that 'higher' in Wilber's holarchical model means 'more complex' - what does it mean to say "From a quantitative perspective it seems to me to be self-evident that social holons are higher than personal holons"?

"Any map, as the example above illustrates, is going to have the possibility to cause confusion if it is addressing developmental or hierarchical continuums and fails to differentiate between qualitative and quantitative dimensions of the territory being described. A further problem that occurs to me, and perhaps one more relevant to this exchange, is that if we include transrational levels in a hierarchical continuum we are naturally going to encounter rational problems in unpacking such a map from a rational perspective."

I agree with you that this is an issue not to be overlooked. I have written about my fledgling understanding of the AQAL vis-a-vis Transrational (Transpersonal, Spiritual, etc), and have come to the conclusion that we need to differentiate two ontologically different Spectra, one of Consciousness (AQAL) and one of Awareness (Esoteric, 'Spiritual'). Such a differentiation will, in my view, help address the "knocking down of perceptual walls" question that you raise.

Hi Avyorth, Andy and all

Thanks for your reply.

A preliminary comment.

I'm primarily interested in the utility of Ken's 4Q model in relation to the path of integral transformation as it is lived by transformative practitioners. My sense from this "practitioner-centric" perspective is that I can't usefully take on models developed by other people without having done essentially the same work they have done in order to arrive at the model, and so made it my own. This seems particularly important for any model that claims to include transrational elements where the work I would need to do would necessarily include transrational elements.

So whilst I admire what Ken Wilber has done in developing such a powerful model, which I have found very helpful in testing and refining my understanding, I find it essential to differentiate between his model and my present understanding of reality, out of which my present practice of living arises. The way I presently see it, your ability or mine to articulate and contest Ken Wilber's understanding of the nature of reality is not nearly as significant as the impact of his model on your or my present understanding of the nature of reality and most importantly on the way we live our lives.

What I'm pointing towards seems to perhaps be an enquiry into how to cultivate the sort of worldview within which I notice and own my own worldview as well as those of others, but don't mistake one for the other. Its something to do with an underlying assumption about the healthy and unhealthy roles that worldviews (LLHQ) can play in human functioning. I think a healthy role a worldview can play is to provide meaning to me at the level at which I am presently operating. This does not mean that I cannot appreciate the value of more inclusive worldviews, but implies that I must be careful not to lose my own sense of what is real for me at this point in time in terms of how I live my life. If I lose my own present sense of reality as embodied in the way I actually live due to adopting a more advanced worldview before I'm ready to, in terms of my capacity to embody it in my practice of living, then an unhealthy dissociation can easily arise between the worldview I am identified with and my actual practice of living. I see this being a bit of a disaster from the perspective of the transformative journey as it requires the person affected by it to deny the worldview that corresponds to the present state of their evolution in order to protect the gap between how they are ready to live and their adoption of a more advanced worldview. I see this problem as almost endemic given the prevailing lack of a hierarchical theory of human development that includes transrational stages and the associated dominance of translative rationalist experts in our social systems.

Of course this is only a limitation within the frame of reference I selected, but I wish to be as clear as I can about it, given that it may vary from that used by others in this email exchange.

You wrote:

I don't understand how you are using the terms "higher-lower" and "quantitive-qualitive" in conjunction with each other. If we accept that 'higher' in Wilber's holarchical model means 'more complex' - what does it mean to say "From a quantitative perspective it seems to me to be self-evident that social holons are higher than personal holons"?

To which I reply:

I'm not at all sure about identifying higher with more complex. Take values for example. They do not need to be more complex in order to be higher. Perhaps they need to be more conscious and better integrated throughout the whole of my being. I think that this is a good example of the difference between quality and quantity that I was referring to. Complexity is more quantitative. Values are more qualitative. A hierarchy based on complexity is still flatland in my view. This is not to say it has to be so, only that complexity in itself is insufficient to differentiate quality, and this can cause confusion.

To respond specifically to your question, I propose that if you use a quantitative measure, such as complexity, to assess what is what is higher between individual and social holons, then clearly social holons are more complex than the individual holons of which they are composed, given that they include all the complexity of each individual holon, plus the complexity that arises in the relations between the individual holons and the emergent properties of the social holon itself. However, if you take a qualitative measure such as values, then a different set of dynamics arise in the relation between social and individual holons. For example the point I was attempting to make in my email to Andy was that qualitative properties can emerge in a social holon that transcend and include all the individual holons in that social holon. I personally do not think that this shows any weakness in Ken's 4Q model. It only points to the extraordinary potential of certain types of relationships between individual and social holons on different levels, which I see as a source of potential for the future evolution of transformative practice. As someone wrote in an email I read a while ago, maybe next time a Buddha equivalent shows up maybe it will be in a group rather than an individual :-)

You wrote:

I have written about my fledgling understanding of the AQAL vis-a-vis Transrational (Transpersonal, Spiritual, etc), and have come to the conclusion that we need to differentiate two ontologically different Spectra, one of Consciousness (AQAL) and one of Awareness (Esoteric, 'Spiritual'). Such a differentiation will, in my view, help address the "knocking down of perceptual walls" question that you raise.

To which I reply:

Yes, I read your email about that notion. Perhaps you can unpack that idea a little more for me, as my sense is that the way that the self-system is transformed at various stages of the transformative journey indicates a kind of two way flow that some people refer to as Eros and Agape. My sense at the moment is that the awareness of which you write is perhaps something to do the with underlying relation of Spirit with embodied existence, not matter what stage of awakening appears to be unfolding for a particular being?

At the end of my last response to Avyorth ("To the Relentless Mr. R.") I gave, as an example illustrating that higher levels in the Wilber model do not include lower levels, the observation that human locomotion does not include that of lower animals. What a flagrant error this was on my part. Locomotion is of course controlled by a lower brain that we share with other animals, and differences in the way we and they do it reflect nothing more than translation. This example does not support my argument at all.

How would I respond to Avyorth, then? Simply by reiterating that the human body as a whole does not include the bodies of lower organisms, in the way that the brain does include lower brains. This may seem like a trivial point, but again, compare this with how Wilber treats lower levels. Cells within organisms do not include other cells within organisms, either, nor cells outside of them, but as I explained briefly in an earlier post, many of their exterior behaviors do include the exteriors of other cells. So again, to be consistent, we must recognize that there are many levels of cells within organisms. I don't think Wilber does this, but if he does, as I noted earlier, he must collapse societies and organisms onto the same level as these cells.

Also note that other Wilber levels do include lower levels in this purely physical sense. Molecules include atoms; cells include molecules; tissues include cells; and so on.

More gentle dialogue between Avyorth and me:

"But that's the whole point of my last post - I was simply turning your claim on its head thereby raising, at least in my weak mind, serious doubts about the claim of yours that it was supposed to be proving!

I agree that there are indeed "pathological as well as healthy relationships" but, from my perspective, it is between two 'equal' and mutually inter-related 'spheres', viz the Individual and the Collective - Wilber's Upper and Lower Quads."

I guess I just don't get it. Why are these examples of pathological societies more supportive of an equal social/individual relationship than of a higher/lower one? Wilber and I do agree in one important sense. We think there is a general kind of relationship between individuals and societies. In your recent dialogue with Mark Feenstra, I think I see an antagonism towards that point of view, which I can appreciate. You're trying to point out some of the complexities involved. But the antagonism should apply equally to Wilber. He's generalizing as much as I am. You seem to think that by calling societies and individuals equal, you are somehow "nearer" to pathological relationships, so that the scale can be tipped either way. Why can pathology be better understood "between two 'equal' and mutually inter-related 'spheres'"? What is your reasoning? As one of my readers pointed out, when the emergence of a single cancerous cell leads to destruction of a tissue, we don't take that as evidence that the cell is as high as the tissue. Our best models of pathology remain the human organism, where higher/lower relationships are clearly obvious.

"Nice joke, but doesn't help clarify our analysis of this point! Society does not 'include' individuals as 'contained' holons - societies as Collectives are the Lower Quadrant correlates of individuals, in my (and Wilber's) view."

Wow! (Again). You think that was a joke? Why, Avyorth, why? What is your basis for saying "Society does not 'include' individuals as 'contained' holons"? Why could I not say molecules do not include atoms as contained holons, or organisms don't include tissues or cells as contained holons. Define contained holons! (And explain how something can include something without containing it). Without some serious defining, your reasoning seems to me to be circular. You are presupposing that societies and individuals are equal-"societies as Collectives are the Lower Quadrant correlates of individuals, in my (and Wilber's) view"--and from that assumption concluding that societies don't include individuals. And by the way, if societies are the lower quadrant correlates of individuals, where are the social aspects of holons (individuals and social)? I thought they were supposed to be in the lower quadrants, too. Seems to be getting mighty crowded down there.

"Tut! Tut! I don't think we really do "agree" on this point - in fact I believe, with your astute mind, that you see quite clearly we have been clarifying our disagreement on the Society - Individual relationship in our lively dialogue. I'm grateful for your assistance in teasing out some of the complexities within levels of holons, but am at *odds* with your conclusions!!"

OK, fine. Let's start with the assumption that inclusion means higher. It was your idea, not mine. So societies are higher than individuals. See the previous comment.

"Yes I believe that we can say "that locomotion in humans transcends and includes locomotion in birds or fish"! Why do I say that? - because of the shift from locomotion as basically a biospheric activity in (most - the higher primates are a fuzzy area) animals to a noospheric activity for (hopefully most) humans. There is a most noticeable shift in the complexity of locomotion in humans. Seen any birds or fish driving down the freeway recently?

Likewise with the other organs of the human biospheric body - I believe that we are seeing a very sharp transcending with the development of eg genetic science and technology. In a relatively few years (decades?) time I suspect the differentiation of biosphere and noosphere will be mind-boggling - a sort of equivalent to the Industrial Revolution. I haven't seen any hint that birds and fish have cottoned on to it yet! Noospheric transcending of the human body has been mostly 'exomorphic' and rather crude/simplistic until now."

I agree with you here. See also my "quick concession" post. Also note my posts on the difference between transformation and transcendence.

"I'm not at all sure about identifying higher with more complex. Take values for example. They do not need to be more complex in order to be higher. Perhaps they need to be more conscious and better integrated throughout the whole of my being. I think that this is a good example of the difference between quality and quantity that I was referring to. Complexity is more quantitative. Values are more qualitative. A hierarchy based on complexity is still flatland in my view. This is not to say it has to be so, only that complexity in itself is insufficient to differentiate quality, and this can cause confusion.

"To respond specifically to your question, I propose that if you use a quantitative measure, such as complexity, to assess what is what is higher between individual and social holons, then clearly social holons are more complex than the individual holons of which they are composed, given that they include all the complexity of each individual holon, plus the complexity that arises in the relations between the individual holons and the emergent properties of the social holon itself. However, if you take a qualitative measure such as values, then a different set of dynamics arise in the relation between social and individual holons. For example the point I was attempting to make in my email to Andy was that qualitative properties can emerge in a social holon that transcend and include all the individual holons in that social holon. I personally do not think that this shows any weakness in Ken's 4Q model. It only points to the extraordinary potential of certain types of relationships between individual and social holons on different levels, which I see as a source of potential for the future evolution of transformative practice."

I claim that what you consider higher values are more complex. Give me an example of two values, one of which you think is higher than the other in your qualitative sense. As I'm sure you know, several values hierarchies have been proposed, and I imagine you would agree that the higher values in these hierarchies are higher in the qualitative sense that you refer to. If you don't agree, however, provide your own examples. I will argue that these higher values are also more complex, in the sense that they required and continue to require more interactions among different individuals to arise and be sustained. I have discussed this further in Excelsior. I really don't think Wilber would have a major disagreement with me here, since he includes values as properties of holons that exist on different levels.

By the same definition of complexity, which is close to or at least consistent with other definitions of complexity provided by other theorists, a cell is more complex than a molecule, and an organism is more complex than any of its tissues. But from some points of view they might not seem more complex, because they're more unified. When we were growing up, and we dissected an organism for the first time in biology class, we might have been amazed at how complex what had seemed before to be fairly simple really was. What you call higher values may have an apparent simplicity to them, because they pull together several other values or ideas or concepts, and mesh them together so well that they seem to disappear. To someone not acutely aware of the developmental history of the values, they may seem so simple as to be obvious. The same can be said of some scientific theories.

Or maybe this is a better example. To speak and understand a language is a more complex form of behavior than what goes on when certain parts of the brain hear words and process that information into a definition of what the word means. That latter processing event is only part of what goes into speaking and understanding a language. But speaking and understanding a language, to us who do it all the time, seems very simple, whereas the processing that goes on in various steps in the brain seems hopelessly complex.

As for your conclusion "I personally do not think that this shows any weakness in Ken's 4Q model", I can only throw up my hands in despair and wonder why you do not think so. As with Avyorth, you seem to think that by postulating a holarchically equal or horizontal relationship between societies and individuals, all kinds of inequalities can somehow be accounted for. To me, this is magic, not logic.