4. THE MIND'S EYE

"The great difference between animal societies and human societies is that in the former, the individual organism is governed exclusively from within itself, by the instincts...On the other hand, human societies present a new phenomenon of a specific nature, which consists in the fact that certain ways of acting are imposed, or at least suggested from outside the individual and are added on to his own nature."

-Emile Durkheim1

 

"I never say that people want to act communicatively, but that they have to."

-Jurgen Habermas2

 

Beginning with atoms, we have now traversed two entire levels of existence: the first level took us to cells, the second to organisms. Just as atoms are the fundamental or zero-dimensional stage on the physical level, and cells the fundamental stage on the biological level, organisms are the fundamental stage on a still higher level, which we can define as the mental level.

 

Properties of Organisms: Physical, Biological and Mental

Just as cells have many properties not possessed by atoms, organisms have many properties not exhibited by cells. However, all of these properties, like those of cells and atoms, can still be understood in terms of the four basic properties described earlier: assimilation, adaptation, communication and reproduction. All of the very complex and sophisticated properties of organisms, including ourselves, can be understood as some specific manifestation of these properties.

As fundamental holons on the mental level of existence, organisms contain within them holons representing the two lower levels, the physical and the biological. Thus all of their fundamental properties have a physical aspect and a biological aspect, as well as, sometimes, a mental aspect. It's the presence of this additional level or levels that provides the emergent aspect of each property of the organism.

To appreciate this, let's consider the process of assimilation, in which the organism ingests food, which is transformed to provide energy and substances to sustain itself. The physical aspects of assimilation are all those which take place within cells. Large, complex molecules are degraded by a series of chemical reactions; as a result of this degradation, energy released by the breaking of chemical bonds becomes available for synthetic reactions, all of which occur within the cell. Assimilation in this respect is essentially identical to the process as it occurs in single-celled organisms. The nature of the molecules ingested into the cell may differ, as may some of the chemical reactions, but from a holarchical point of view, the same kinds of holons are involved.

The biological aspects of assimilation by organisms, in contrast, are those that require the coordinated interaction of many cells and multicellular stages. These include ingestion of food into the mouth; digestive processes there and in the gastrointestinal tract; and transport of the nutrient products through the bloodstream to other cells of the body.

The processes I have just described are familiar to most people. The important point, though, is that every process in the organism has this dual set of aspects to it. There are the physical aspects, which are very much the same as those that occur in individual cells; and there are the biological aspects, which involve multicellular holons, and which provide the process with its emergent properties.

In addition, some processes in the organism bring into play a third level of existence, the mental. Consider communication, as, for example, when one organism exhibits some display of behavior that functions as a signal to another organism of the same species (Tinbergen 1976). In order for an organism to communicate in this manner, its nervous system must send signals to certain muscles, resulting in a coordinated series of contractions as it moves in space and time. This nervous transmission is mediated by specific chemical substances, called neurotransmitters, which are released by the electrical activity of the nerves; upon binding to special molecules called receptors on the muscle surface, they induce contractions in the latter.

On the physical level, then, communication takes place between the neurotransmitter molecules and their receptors. (It also occurs at other points in the nervous pathway, but for the sake of simplicity I will just consider the interaction at the muscle). This communication is just like that occurring between atoms or molecules that we saw in Chapter 2. On the biological level, communication takes place between the nerve cell and the muscle cell. This communication involves a very large number of physical level communications, which moreover take place in a certain pattern of both space and time. And finally, on the mental level, communication occurs between the two organisms. One organism exhibits a pattern of behavior, and the second organism in some manner recognizes and responds to it. Just as the biological aspect of communication involves a large number of physical-level events over space and time, so the mental aspect of communication involves a large number of biological-level events that occur over space and time.

Notice also that not only does a process on one level of existence include the process on the lower, but also is analogous to the lower. The biological communication of neurons with neurons or neurons with muscles involves hetarchical interactions between holons on the same stage of existence, just as the physical communication between atoms or molecules does. Likewise, the mental or behavioral communication between organisms involves interactions between holons on the same stage of the mental level.

 

Reproduction of Organisms

Like the other processes of organisms, reproduction also occurs on multiple levels. As every beginning student of biology knows, almost all multicellular organisms reproduce sexually. Special reproductive cells, known as gametes, undergo a process called meiosis in which the genetic material, packaged in chromosomes, is divided into half, with each half going to one of two daughter cells. During sexual reproduction, one gamete from a male organism fuses with one gamete from a female, to form a fertilized cell, or zygote, which contains the original number of chromosomes. This cell then develops into a new organism through numerous rounds of cell division, and various differentiation processes.

The reproductive process can therefore be divided into four steps. In the first step, meiosis, the cell divides its contents, including genetic material, in half, forming gametes. In the second step, the two gametes fuse, to form a new cell with the full complement of genetic material. In the third step, the new cell begins a long series of divisions, creating many daughter cells. Finally, these cells differentiate into different types, allowing them to form the various tissues of the organism.

The relationship between reproduction in organisms and that of cells is more complex than the relationships of other processes at these two levels of existence. The first three steps described above can be considered aspects of cell reproduction, since all of them occur, or can occur, in the process of reproduction of individual cells. However, only one of these three steps, fusion of gametes, has a clear higher-level analog, which is simply sexual activity, or copulation, between male and female organisms. Their is no higher level analog of meiosis, nor of cell division.

On the other hand, the last step, differentiation, is not a component of the reproductive process of individual cells, and it has no true lower-level analog. As we saw in the previous chapter, the process of differentiation requires translation, or expression, of the information in the genome. This kind of expression does not occur in the reproduction of individual cells.

So reproduction of cells and reproduction of organisms are, in some respects, not highly analogous processes. Their unusual relationship has some possible implications for our understanding of our future evoution, which I will consider later in this book. However, in one vital respect, the two processes are highly analogous, and this is in the way that they make use of information.

In Chapter 3, we saw that reproduction of cells involves transcription of information in the genome. This information codes for, or specifies, the amino acid sequences of all the proteins in the cell, and thus enables the cell to make a copy of itself. In the organism, an analogous informational holon exists: the brain. Just as the genome contains all the information needed to specify the functions of the cell, the brain contains all the information needed to specify the functions of the organism. These functions are embodied in the activity of the large internal organs--the heart, the lungs, the gastrointestinal tract, and so forth; the voluntary or skeletal muscles; and the organs of sensation that mediate sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. All of these tissues and organs are regulated by the brain, in the form of patterns of nervous activity. The brain, for example, tells the heart how fast to beat; the lungs how much air to take in and expire; the gastrointestinal tract how to digest food; the muscles when to contract and how much; and so forth.

The brain is therefore the analog, in the organism, of the genome in the cell; and the organs and tissues it regulates are the analog of enzymes3. Just as the genome contains all the information necessary to make a physical copy of the cell, the brain contains all the information necessary to make a biological copy of the organism. The physical structure of the organism, as we have seen earlier, is specified largely by the genome: the kinds and arrangements of cells in various tissues. But the biological aspects of the organism, which we saw emerge at this level in the processes of assimilation, adaptation and communication, are specified by the brain.

 

The Origins of Sociality

In Chapter 3 we saw that the genome in the cell actually plays a dual role. It directs reproduction of the cell by a process of transcription, in which all its information, which constitutes its deep structure, is copied. In this way, the genome actualizes all the physical stages. On the other hand, the genome is also translated, or expressed, in different ways in different cells. That portion of its information which is expressed in any one cell at any one time constitutes its surface structure, and enables it to contribute to the formation of higher biological stages, culminating in the organism.

The brain plays an analogous dual role. Its total informational content, represented in its relatively gross, hard-wired anatomy, is its deep structure. This information is copied during the process of reproduction, and allows all the lower biological stages to be actualized in the new organism. As I just pointed out, this actualization is accomplished by the regulation of the activities of all the other major organs in the body.

In addition, however, the brain contains the potential to create still higher stages of existence on the mental level. This occurs through translation or expression of different portions of this information in different organisms, or in the same organism at different times. This information constitutes the surface structure of the brain, and the higher stages of mental existence it helps to create are various kinds of animal and human social organizations.

Before discussing these stages further, I want to point out that only certain types of organisms form social groups, just as we saw earlier, only certain types of atoms form molecules, and only certain types of cells form organisms. There are inert, non-reactive atoms that have an autonomous existence outside of cells, and there are reactive atoms that form the molecules found within cells. There are non-interactive cells (prokaryotes) that lead an autonomous life outside of organisms, and there are interactive cells (eukaryotes) that associate into organisms. The same fundamental distinction occurs within organisms. There are non-social organisms that live outside of groups, and social organisms that form groups. This division is approximated by, though is not quite identical to, the well-known division of animals into vertebrates and invertebrates. Most of the higher vertebrates are social organisms, and most invertebrates are not. Though there are some significant exceptions to this generalization, such as the social insects, social organizations formed by the higher vertebrates are more complex than those formed by invertebrates.

In Chapter 3, we saw that a major difference between interactive cells, the eukaryotes, and non-interactive cells, the prokaryotes, is that in the former, the genome is much larger. A larger genome can code for a larger number of proteins, which in turn creates a greater variety of communicative or hetarchical interactions between cells. These interactions are what enable cells to form higher, multicellular stages, culminating in the emergence of organisms.

The same relationship is apparent on the mental level of existence. The higher vertebrates have larger brains than lower vertebrates and invertebrates, and these larger brains create more possibilities for communication. The more sophisticated the forms of communication between organisms, the more complex forms of social organization can emerge.

So it is that we see a fairly strong correlation between the degree of intelligence of organisms and their degree of social organization. Human beings, the most intelligent, live in the most complex social groups. Lower primates, such as apes and many species of monkeys, are next on the scale in both respects. Non-primate mammals live in still less complex groups or just families. The social organization of the lowest vertebrates, reptiles, amphibians and fishes, is generally least.

In the case of our own species, the amount of information expressed in societies is immense. These societies now include, of course, not simply an astronomical number of human interactions, but a stupendous amount of information in the form of technologies, printed material, electronic information, and so on. Though the amount of information that can be stored in the human brain is vast, with all its billions of synaptic connections between neurons, it constitutes no more than a tiny portion of this social information.

In Chapter 3 we saw that the genome faced a similar problem in storing the information needed to express a complete organism. If every position of every cell in any organism had to be specified by even just one separate bit of information, there would not be room in any cell for all the information required. The genome, however, compresses this information, storing only enough to specify a relatively few basic cell types and the rules of their interaction.

In the same manner, the human brain compresses the information needed to elaborate the most complex human societies. Though the brain of any one person does not specify all the interactions possible among different human beings, let alone all the information that has arisen from such interactions, it stores enough information, in the form of certain rules about human interactions, to enable a large, complex society to emerge. Thus a very small number of human beings--probably as few as one male and one female--could colonize another planet and eventually create complex societies much like those on earth. They would require certain natural resources for food and energy; and they would require a certain amount of external information to create a level of technology similar to that we have on earth today. But much of the complexity of modern civilization could be created simply from the information compressed in our brains.

 

Emergent Properties of Animal Societies: Dimensions of Experience

Most types of human and animal social organization are thus created through hetarchical, or communicative, interactions between organisms. As shown in Table 4 , these stages are represented by groups such as families, tribes, and various kinds of societies. As with the higher stages on the physical and biological levels, there is some arbitrariness in this classification. Clearly, however, there are several higher stages, with each stage composed of the holons below it. Thus a family is a group of several people; a tribe a group of families; societies were originally composed of tribes, and so forth.

The social organizations listed in Table 4 include not only human but also animal societies, that is, organizations composed of several or more members of a single species. Most animal societies are no more complex than the simplest human ones, consisting of families or relatively small groups of organisms of the same species. Most of the higher vertebrates have a family organization, and in some vertebrates, particularly non-human primates, families are organized into still larger social groups. So non-human societies, in the holarchical model being developed here, extend no more than one or two stages up in the mental level of existence.

Like social stages that we have seen on lower levels of existence, however, animals societies do exhibit some emergent properties. This should be evident in that even the simplest forms of social organization--families and bands or tribes, which are found in many species of animals and the most primitive of our ancestors--have obvious advantages over autonomous individuals. Families can care for the young more effectively than one parent; even in the simplest nuclear family, one parent can watch the young while the other forages for food. This is a critical advantage for higher organisms, because the larger brain that makes possible social organization requires more time, and more attention, in order to develop and mature. Bands or tribes extend this concept of division of labor further, not only freeing individuals from certain tasks, but making possible the accomplishment of other tasks--such as hunting large game, defending against predators, and guarding the food supply--which would be difficult or impossible for individuals (Dunbar 1998).

Perhaps the most important example of emergent properties in animal societies, however, are higher forms of experience in their individual members. In Chapter 2 we saw that higher social stages of the physical level exist in a greater number of dimensions than their fundamental holons, which the latter, to some extent, could participate in. In Chapter 3, we saw that the same was true for higher biological stages. Furthermore, cells in these stages as a result exhibit higher forms of experience. Thus neurons in the brain can experience the world in two, three or four dimensions, as demonstrated by their ability to respond to various kinds of stimuli presented to the organism.

The same principle is evident on the mental level (seeTable 5 ). The higher invertebrates and the lower vertebrates experience the world in three dimensions; they can distinguish other organisms and objects in space. In higher vertebrates, however, beginning with birds and mammals, four-dimensional experience emerges. One line of evidence for this is that these organisms can learn and remember, a definite indication of an awareness of a temporal dimension. While lower organisms (Murphey 1977; Byrne et al. 1991; DeZazzo and Tully 1995), and even some single cells (see Chapter 3), show some ability to learn, this capacity is much more highly developed in the higher vertebrates.

However, four-dimensional experience is particularly well illustrated in the way these organisms communicate, and at the same demonstrates the very close relationship of this form of experience to the degree of social organization they live in. As the classic studies of the Dutch ethologist Nikolas Tinbergen demonstrated, higher vertebrates communicate with each other through stereotyped behavior patterns (Tinbergen 1976). A behavior pattern can be defined as a series of movements in time of an organism in three-dimensional space. In order for an organism to communicate in this manner, therefore, it must be able to experience not only three dimensions of space, but a fourth dimension of time. It must be aware of a difference between another organism that is motionless, and one that is moving in a specific way over a particular period of time. The latter is a four-dimensional view of the organism.

Significantly, these behavior patterns are most often used in courtship rituals, nest building and raising the young--all behavior that strengthens the family or band. This illustrates that the behavior is emergent with this social stage, and supports the conclusion that the organism exhibits it by virtue of participating in this stage. The sociologist Emile Durkheim could have been speaking of animal as well as human behavior when he noted that "a ritual is a moment of extremely high social density."4

In our own species, and perhaps to some extent in other primates (Griffin 1992; Russon et al. 1996), a second temporal dimension emerges, and we can speak of five-dimensional experience. In addition to being aware of behavior patterns as they occur, we can remember them over time. That is, we can store in our minds the previous actions of ourselves, or of another person, and use this information as a reference for interacting with that person in the future. The four-dimensional behavior pattern is repeated, again and again and again, in our thoughts. As I discussed earlier, this property of repetition is characteristic of new dimensions.

The repetition of certain thoughts may not seem to represent a genuinely different dimension of time. After all, doesn't each repetition occur successively in our familiar dimension of linear time? The answer to this is no. When thoughts are repeated in our minds, they can occur in a different dimension. That is, a single thought can be repeated many times in the same moment of linear, first-dimensional time. In order to appreciate this, however, we will have to understand more about how the mind perceives time. I will put off discussion of this until the next chapter.

This repetition of behavior patterns, both of ourselves and of others, is the basic source of our identity. We perceive ourselves and other people in terms of behavior patterns that we have seen or experienced, and which we carry around with us in our minds. This perpetuates their existence in time. An identity is simply a relatively permanent view of ourselves or of others. The importance of repetition in this process was recognized by the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann:

 

"All human activity is subject to habitualization. Any activity that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern...institutionalization occurs when there is a reciprocal type of habituated acts by types of actors."5

 

The preceding quote also suggests, in agreement with the entire thrust of this section, that there is a very close relationship between our degree of awareness or conciousness or mentality (using all these terms somewhat loosely for now), and the degree of organization of the societies we are members of. I will discuss this relationship further as we go along.

 

Emergent Properties of Ecosystems: Diversity and Stability

The animal societies I discussed in the previous section are all homogeneous, that is, consisting of a single type of species. In addition to such homogeneous societies of organisms, however, there are an enormous number of societies in the natural world that are heterogeneous, that is, composed of different species. Known generally as ecosystems, they may contain hundreds of different populations of a wide variety of plants as well as organisms, interacting in very intricate ways and extending over vast reaches of space and time. The interactions among their members may involve competition, as between two or more kinds of species which require similar sources of food; mutualism (cooperation), when each species has a benefit for the other; or other kinds of relationships that are neither competitive nor cooperative. Indeed, one ecologist, not entirely in jest, has pointed out that the possible different kinds of interactions between just two different species are so numerous as to form a kind of periodic table (Cockburn 1991). So a large ecosystem, which may contain hundeds of different organisms, is fairly complex.

Ecosystems clearly have a hierarchical structure, and frequently a holarchical (nested hierarchical) structure (Odum 1983; Ricklefs 1990; Perry 1994). So it appears that we should seriously consider the possibility that they are a higher form of life than the individual organisms that compose them. But how much higher? This is currently a matter of some controversy. Some ecologists view ecosystems as super-organisms, almost a new level of existence in their own right, while others believe that most or all of their features can be understood in terms of the properties of their component species (Ricklefs 1990).

Earlier, I discussed several characteristics of emergence on lower levels of existence. In order to gain a better understanding of how ecosystems fit into the holarchical view, we might try applying these criteria to them. The property of stability is particularly useful, because many studies of ecosystems have examined them from this point of view. That is, ecologists have tested the effect on the stability of an ecosystem of either adding or removing one or more species. As I discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, in the holarchical stages of the physical and mental levels of existence, removing one or a few lower-order holons usually has little or no effect on the higher-order holon. The function of a protein is usually not dependent on the presence of a particular amino acid. A tissue can survives removal of one of its cells. To the extent that an ecosystem is a genuinely emergent, higher-order association of its component populations, we might expect that it would in the same manner be little perturbed by minor manipulations.

The results of these studies have not been clear-cut, however. In some reports, elimination of a single species or a few species from an ecosystem has had a drastic effect. For example, removal of starfish from an intertidal community allowed mussels, on which the starfish preyed, to multiply and eventually force out most other species from the community (Paine 1974). The hunting down of a few major predators--large cats and an eagle--on the Barro Coronado Island near Panama had a ripple effect, leading eventually to the replacement of most species of trees (Diamond 1992). On the other hand, the cutting down of blight-stricken chestnut trees in the Eastern U.S. resulted in only the loss of a few species of moths (Perry 1994).

Another controversial area in ecology is the relationship of ecosystem size to stability. Traditionally, ecologists have believed that the larger an ecosystem, the more stable it is; and as we have seen, this is a typical feature of holarchical organization on lower levels of existence. Theoretician Robert May, however, challenged this conventional wisdom by arguing that larger ecosystems, being more prone to positive feedback loops, were actually less likely, not more likely, to be stable (May 1974). This result seems paradoxical in any simple holarchical view. However, it has been contradicted by some studies reporting that increasing the number of species in an ecosytem increases its stability. For example, grasslands with numerous plant species were more resistant to drought than those with one or a few species (Tilman 1994). Other studies have found that resistance to insect or parasite infestations was also enhanced by larger numbers of plant species (Perry 1994).

Despite these apparent inconsistencies a few principles that seem to govern the stability of ecosystems are beginning to emerge--and they generally support the view that these systems are higher stages of holarchical existence. Many ecosystems have so-called keystone species, which are much more critical to the stability of the system than the other members (Perry 1994). The role of these species can account for why removal of certain, but not all, species from an ecosystem may destabilize the latter. The keystone concept is quite consistent with the situation on lower levels of the holarchy. Thus we saw in Chapter 2 that certain atoms are critical to the properties of amino acids, and that certain amino acids, in turn, may be critical to the function of an enzyme.

In contrast, many species in an ecosystem may be not critical. In this case, ecologists refer to their interactions with other species as redundant. For example, some fungi can live on different species of trees, so if one species of tree is lost in that ecosystem, the latter may be little affected (Perry 1994). Redundancy, again is clearly a key aspect of lower levels of existence. One amino acid in a protein may often be replaced by another, as seen by the fact that proteins in different species of organisms that play virtually identical catalytic roles may have differences in some of their amino acids (Creighton 1993). The nature of the interactions of the first amino acid with the rest of the protein are sufficiently general so that the second amino acid can fulfill them.

Redundant species, while not critical to an ecosystem, probably make some contribution to its stability. Nearly two decades ago, the ecologists Paul and Ann Ehrlich proposed the "rivet" theory of ecoystems, in which they compared removing species, one by one, with removing the rivets, one by one, from some human-made structure, such as an airplane or a building (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1981). Removing one or a few rivets may have no noticeable effect on the structure, but eventually a point is reached when the structure is weakened. At this point, while still preserving some stability, it may be more sensitive to stress. Thus the structurally compromised airplane, while capable of performing under normal weather conditions, might crash during a heavy storm.

In the same way, if several or more redundant species are removed from an ecosystem, the latter may not immediately collapse. But if the system in the weakened state is subjected to an unusual form of stress--a drought, for example, or a very harsh winter, or perhaps a minor change in the numbers of a keystone species--in its weakened state it may not be able to survive intact. The rivet theory probably applies to other holarchical forms of existence as well. To take the well-worn example of a protein again, removing a few non-critical amino acids may not affect the protein's enzymatic activity under normal physiological conditions. This is because the amino acids are not part of the active site of the protein, where the catalytic process occurs. But the amino acids probably make a contribution to the conformation (the three-dimensional shape) of the protein, which is ultimately required for the catalytic site to have the proper shape of its own. When these amino acids are removed, that conformation may be less capable of withstanding abnormal conditions, such as a high or low concentration of salt or hydrogen ions.

Many of the factors determining whether a species is a keystone or redundant, however, remain to be worked out. Some recent work suggests that ecosystems with a great number of interacting species frequently depend very heavily for their stability on predators, while for simple ecosystems, plants are likely to be more important (Pimm 1984). Out of such work may come new principles that do not apply, or perhaps apply in much more rudimentary form, on the physical and biological (intercellular levels) of existence.

The study of ecosystems is still a relatively new science, and experimental ecology, in which features of ecosystems are probed by intentionally altering their composition, is an even more recent development. This experimentation may be made easier by the use of ecotrons, very small, laboratory-sized systems in which the number and kinds of species can be rigorously controlled (Naeem 1994). These studies are vitally important, of course, because the earth is in the process of losing large numbers of species, and no one really knows how the human race will be ultimately affected by this loss (Lockwood and Pimm 1994; this will be discussed further in Chapter 13). As data from such work become available, it should be possible to form a clearer picture of where and how ecosystems fit into the holarchical worldview. It will be particularly interesting, I believe, to determine whether they have other emergent properties of the kind discussed earlier, and also whether their component organisms participate in these properties. Does a bird that is part of a large ecosystem, for example, exhibit behavior that can be considered higher than that of a similar bird that lives in a much simpler ecosystem?

A final point I want to make is that in ecosystems are still in the process of evolving. Cells and organisms are completed levels of existence; the relationships of the holons within them are no longer changing in any significant way. In contrast, ecosystems are changing, and may evolve into new forms. This is a critical point to keep in mind when comparing the organization of any forms of life on our level of existence with that on lower levels, and I will return to it later. First, though, we will consider the highest forms of life on this level, human societies.

 

Emergent Properties of Human Societies

Regardless of how complex ecosystems are, they--and animal societies composed of a single species--are much less complex than human societies. Our societies are clearly the highest form of life on earth today, and are quite analogous not simply to the multicellular tissues and organs within an organism, but to the highest biological stages--the central nervous system. It isn't just that societies are holarchical arrangements of organisms, just as tissues and organs are holarchical arrangements of cells. The rules governing their formation are very similar, involving expression of compressed information in a particular kind of holon associated with each level. I discussed this last point earlier.

The notion that human societies are a higher form of life is not new. More than a century ago, Herbert Spencer, and later Emile Durkheim, argued that societies could be viewed as superorganisms (Ingold 1986). In the holarchical model developed here, however, we must carefully distinguish between fundamental and social holons. Human beings are fundamental holons, capable of reproduction and a somewhat autonomous existence. Societies are social holons and differ from fundamental holons in ways that I discussed in earlier chapters. Thus I don't regard human societies, no matter how advanced, as analogous to organisms.

Nevertheless, human societies, like social holons on lower levels, clearly have emergent properties not found in their individual members. I mentioned some of these in connection with simple animal societies. To this discussion we can simply add the observation that human societies can not only accomplish tasks impossible for their individual members, but can invent previously inconceivable tasks. Human interactions result in new ideas and new forms of technology that expand our mental as well as our physical horizons. Societies can do this because they have the ability to think, feel, perceive, learn, remember, just as their individual members do.

Some might argue that mentality is a property restricted to individual humans, and that social mentation is little more than the sum of its individual members. The holarchical model developed here says just the opposite. Mental abilities are largely properties of societies; individual human beings possess them only to the extent that they participate in these societies. As Durkheim noted, "collective life is not born from the individual, but it is, on the contrary, the second which is born from the first."6 We have seen in Chapters 2 and 3 how lower forms of existence, atoms and cells, acquire new properties by virtue of their association into higher, social stages in which these properties emerge. Thus atoms that are part of larger molecules may have some of the emergent properties of the latter, such as the ability to ionize; likewise, cells that are part of multicellular holons may have some emergent social properties such as a relatively advanced degree of perception. The same relationship, I contend, is true for the mental level.

Consider, for example, our ability to think logically. Conventionally, we may say that the potential to think in this way resides entirely within the individual human brain. But logical thought is only actualized when that individual is a member of a large, complex society, because logic, to be validated, requires feedback. We need to be able to compare our thought processes with those of others in order to verify them, as well as to expand them, that is, to be exposed to new ideas and information that our incorporated into our intellectual capacities (Habermas 1979). So logical thought does not simply emerge with the development of societies of a certain degree of complexity, but is a property first and foremost of these societies. To reiterate, because I feel it is such an essential and misunderstood point, we have this property only second-hand, so to speak, by accessing it through our participation in the society.

The relationship of mentality and social organization is strongly supported by our evolutionary history. The ability to think logically is a relatively new development in our species. While our ancient ancestors, by 50,000 years ago, had essentially the same biological brain as we have, their cognitive abilities were clearly inferior to our own (Habermas 1979). As societies became more complex, human thinking did also. Nor is this the only mental feature associated with social organization. Studies by developmental psychologists have shown that not only the ability to think logically, but many other aspects of mentality, including moral, affective and interpersonal behavior, appear in several somewhat discrete stages (Piaget 1977; Maslow, 1968; Loevinger 1977; Wilber 1980). It appears that similar stages emerged during our evolution, each of which was fairly closely correlated with the complexity of social groups that human beings were associated with (Wilber 1981). In each case, the emergence of these properties was possible precisely because of the higher degree of communication among individuals.

All of our mental behavior is an example of our ability to perceive the world in five dimensions, as I discussed earlier. In addition to being aware of three dimensions of space, our ability not only to perceive, but to perpetuate behavior patterns suggests an awareness of two dimensions of time. By virtue of carrying around this picture of ourselves, other people, and other things more or less permanently, we create a relatively permanent world somewhat independent the one we are immediately aware of.

Because our mentality is derivative from that of societies, however, it's different in some significant ways. We saw earlier that higher social stages have a greater stability and a longer lifetime than their component holons. In the same way, societies are generally longer-lived than any of their individuals; thus while the oldest human beings may live for a little more than a century, large societies may survive for more than a thousand years. Societies are also more stable than their individual members, being able to survive the loss of many individuals without losing their identity as particular kinds of societies.

Societies in general also function on a much broader scale of both space and time than do their individual members. Indeed, it is precisely because of this difference in scale that so much conflict and misunderstanding results when an individual confronts his society. Consider, for example, the emergence of a new idea, such as racial equality. This idea appeared first in certain individuals, in whom it might have taken anywhere from months to years to become established. In contrast, this idea has taken more than a century--from the time it became established in some individuals--to become established in society; and even now it still is not fully established.

Part of the discrepancy, of course, results from the fact that the idea still is not established in all individuals. Yet even when the idea has been established in a great majority of individuals, there is still a lag before it becomes effectively instutitionalized, through changes in law, government and other aspects of society. That is, even when an idea has taken over most individuals in a society de facto, it may still not have been established in society. This tremendous lag basically reflects the fact that analogous processes on the social level take much longer than they do in individuals--and the larger and more complex the society, the greater the difference in scale of time.

This difference can be seen with respect to virtually any new idea, and for a given degree of complexity of society, the difference, that is the ratio, between the scales of time I believe is about the same. An example of an idea that has been established relatively rapidly in society is the use of computers, and especially the internet. The rapid emergence of this information in technology reflects an even more rapid emergence within individuals. Unlike the idea of racial equality, which probably took a period of months or years to become accepted even by the earliest individuals, computer technology can be adopted in days or weeks. So while the emergence within society as a whole of computer technology seems quite rapid to all of us--well within our lifetimes--it does reflect a process that is far slower than the analogous process as it has occurred in most individuals.

In the preceding discussion, I have purposely used as examples of social ideas ones that are very similar to the way they appear in individuals; this makes it easier for us to understand them. But one must not be led into believing that mental activity in society is simply the sum of that activity in its individual members. Social ideas can be quite complex, and beyond the understanding of most of their members. I would argue, for example, that many if not most new theories by thinkers such as scientists and philosophers represent ideas that have already, in effect, been formulated and solved by society. All the pieces of the puzzle, so to speak, are out there, and have already been put together in some manner by the workings of society. Certain individuals, by virtue of their participation in this society, then become capable of experiencing these ideas in a form approximating the way they are held by the society. Much of the genius of these individuals then lies in being able to explain what they have experienced in a way that other individual minds can understand them.

 

Free Will

The recognition that there are holons higher than ourselves has important implications for our understanding of the origins of our actions. In the holarchical view, as I discussed earlier, higher holons exert a great deal of constraint on their component holons. Atoms are not free to move in all directions when bonded to other atoms. Cells in organisms are constrained not only physically, but biologically--for example, the decision of when to reproduce is largely out of their control. We would expect, then, that societies would constrain human behavior. If we gain certain things by virtue of being members of societies, we also give up certain things.

In a sense, this is obvious, and well-known to everyone. Societies have rules and laws that everyone must obey; these rules constrain our physical behavior. What is much less appreciated, however, is that societies necessarily constrain our emotional and mental behavior as well.

Most people can easily understand the idea of physical control. When the strings are pulled on a puppet, the puppet moves. It's far more difficult for us to grasp the possibility of mental control. When the strings are pulled, the puppet wants to move; it wills to move, it believes itself to be the mover. The inability to conceive of this is why so many people take it for granted that we have free will. Even hard-core scientific reductionists, whose worldview virtually compels them to believe that everything is determined by physical processes, go to great lengths to explain how we can nevertheless act freely--through theories of quantum indeterminacy, for example (see Chapter 5).

The reason why most people can't conceive of our minds being controlled by something else is because mind is the highest feature of existence of which we are ordinarily aware. We can see nothing above mind; therefore, we can imagine nothing controlling mind. When we experience ourselves desiring to do something, willing to do something, we have to believe that this will is ours.

A major implication of the holarchical view, however, is that our mind not only can be subject to control, but necessarily is, all the time. I am not talking here about so-called brainwashing, where an individual's mind is broken down through a process of torture and other procedures designed to bypass certain processes that normally maintain its integrity. I'm talking about the everyday relationships that all human beings have with respect to their societies. Our social organizations exist control over all aspects of our behavior, and they do this to a large extent--in our nominally free, democratic societies--by controlling our desires. They affect what we desire, what we experience ourselves as "willing" to do. And precisely because this control is from above, we ordinarily aren't aware of it. We experience ourselves as acting freely.

To be sure, the ability of society to influence individual desires is limited. A higher social stage can't shape our desires in any manner whatsoever. Just as there are limits to what we can do physically--we can't force someone to fly, or to run a three-minute mile, or to lift five hundred pounds--there are limits to what any of us can desire. A society can't easily get people to want to kill their neighbors--though we all know it has been done. Most people, except perhaps in extreme circumstances, have an aversion to killing. But societies can manipulate their members fairly easily by concentrating on desires that are already present in most of us to some extent to begin with (Cross 1996). Desires for possessions, comfort, stimulation, emulation can be channelled into certain areas, focussed on certain products, made to conform to certain beliefs, in such a subtle way that the individual believes they originated with her.

The notion that desires can be manipulated in this way is not totally hidden from humanity, of course. Beginning in the 1960s, much of the political left made this the basis of their critique of capitalist society. This view was particularly prominent in the writings of the neoMarxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, an icon for radical students of this generation, who shocked academia by suggesting that democracies were no freer than police states:

 

"For 'totalitarianism' is not only a terrorist political coordination of society, but also a non-terrorist economic-technical coordination which operates through manipulation of needs by vested interests...The means of mass transportation and communication, the commodities of lodging, food and clothing, the irresistible output of the information and entertainment industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind consumers more or less pleasantly to producers and, through the latter, to the whole."7

 

Marcuse's philosophical heirs today, such as Jurgen Habermas and Noam Chomsky, express a similar sentiment in their unequivocal opposition to social organization they believe is directed largely by technocratic concerns (McCarthy 1978; Habermas 1984; Chomsky 1992). In this view, science and technology provide the rationale for all major decisions by government and business, which increasingly determine the lives of all of us. "Technology and science," says Habermas, "begin to take the role of a substitute ideology for the demolished bourgeois ideologies."8

The radical left was a decided minority even in its heyday of the 1960s, and is so small and quiet today as to go virtually almost unnoticed. One reason for this, surely, is precisely because it is so difficult to see that our own desires are being manipulated. By definition, we enjoy fulfilling our desires, and modern societies make this possible as long as we go along with their definitions of what should be desired. Marcuse himself, implications of totalitarianism notwithstanding, admitted that modern Western states provide "a good way of life--much better than before."9 But a deeper problem with the left's view is that it has never really been very clear about the source of the control (Kellner 1999). Is it social institutions themselves, beyond any one individual's doing or accountability, or certain members of these instititutions, the so-called "ruling class"? Certainly the left has often stated explicitly that our social institutions need to be changed. But it's difficult for any political movement to focus solely on institutions, because this suggests not only that no one is to blame--revolutionary movements need enemies--but also that the situation may be beyond anyone's control.

Jurgen Habermas, considered by some to be our greatest living philosopher, doesn't think the situation is beyond our control. Habermas, who is by no means an enemy of science and technology, has spent much of a brilliant career trying to show how society can be grounded in rational communication between individuals (Habermas 1979, 1984; Outhwaite 1994; White 1995). Much as science defines truth or "facts" as observations of the external world shared by different observers, Habermas argues that individuals in modern societies can come to a consensus on what transpires in our inner, mental world. By an intersubjective process, we share our observations of this world to determine the truth and meaning of our social interactions: "the condition for the truth of statements is the potential agreement of everyone else."10

The idea is that while science seeks one level of knowledge, which Habermas calls the empirical-analytical,there is a higher level, called the hermeneutical. It’s higher in the sense that it observes the mental world, which is higher than the physical world observed by science. Actually, science makes use of the hermeneutical world, too. Scientists must share their observations of the physical world with other scientists, as well as create testable hypotheses (Popper 1979). Both of these processes are intersubjective, requiring that we examine our mental processes and compare them with what others report about theirs. Without this intersubjectivity, science would be nothing but a descriptive process, with no attempt to find laws or rules explaining what we see. But whereas science simply makes use of this world to come to a consensus on events in the physical world, Habermas argues that hermeneutics can, and must, also understand this world: "hermeneutic consciousness remains incomplete as long as it does not include a reflection upon the limits of hermeneutic understanding."11

It's this ability to reflect on our mental operations that Habermas sees as the key to liberating individuals from the social constraints resulting from a science-based societey. In his view, the scientific program of explaining, predicting and controlling the physical world is inevitably extended to society, so that individuals and their needs become just one more aspect of this world. The remedy for this is to step up to a higher viewpoint, from which we see that science is not absolute, but can be subjected to criticism, bringing it under the control of society.

In Chapter 1 I argued that science confronts a paradox in the form of the mind-body problem. I will discuss this problem in detail in Chapter 5, but here we need to understand that science's inability to understand the mind completely in physical terms is not a problem for just one area of science, that which studies the brain and mind. It's a problem for all science, because all scientists use the mind to understand the physical world. Because we don't understand how mind is related to the brain, we don't really understand how we can know anything about the brain, or about any other physical or biological structure or process.

However, can Habermas' program of rational intersubjectivity escape this paradox? Hermeneutics attempts to learn about the mind by using the mind, but is this really possible? Can any process completely understand itself? If we can't understand the physical world without reference to the mind, a higher world, can we understand the mind without reference to a still higher world beyond that?

I further argued in Chapter 1 that what science was missing is spirit, a level above the mental as well as physical world. If there really is such a level, then hermeneutic knowledge, like empirical-analytical knowledge, is incomplete. Habermas presumes that rationality is the highest feature of which human beings are capable. But as I will discuss in Chapter 6, there is a great deal of evidence that this simply is not so.

This discussion about ways of knowing may seem dry and abstract, so let's try to put some life into it by looking at how our assumptions about what and how we know are directly related to the kind of social organizations we have, and the way we lead our lives within these societies. Consider first a science-based society, one that uses what Habermas calls instrumental reasoning. Because science understands the world in material terms, the primary orientation of this society is to satisfy our material needs. These are initially the basic ones of food, clothing and shelter, but are later extended to many other less basic needs that are still fundamentally material in nature.

Now many of us have needs that are not material, such as for meaning in life. Demonstrating how these needs arise in people was the great contribution of the psychologist Abraham Maslow (Maslow 1943, 1968; Noble 1970). A society based on instrumental reasoning can't readily recognize or deal with these kinds of needs, because they aren't easily understandable in material terms, that is, in terms of physical and biological processes. Meaning seems to emerge at a higher level of existence.

This is where social constraints are revealed. It's true that a science-based society doesn't necessarily forbid or prevent people from recognizing higher needs, and seeking to fulfill them. But it definitely puts great barriers in their way. A few individuals may be able to quit their high-paying jobs for another life in which they find more meaning. But this is often done in the face of considerable resistance, misunderstanding or pity of their peers, and always with the underlying presumption that if everyone did this--if no one bought large amounts of non-basic material goods and services--society would collapse. Western societies today clearly and vitally depend on most people being dominated by their material desires. This is what Marcuse meant by "prescribed attitudes and desires."

A society based on rational, intersubjective discourse would presumably be much more capable of recognizing the human aspiration for meaning. Because this kind of society is focussed on the mental world rather than the physical world, a world where meaning actually emerges, it would encourage people both to define what meaning is to them, and to seek it out. Rational communication would provide individuals with the tools to come to a consensus about such higher needs and how to organize society so as to allow people to seek to satisfy them. Such a society would not reject scientific materialism, but would subject it to control through the intersubjective process.

Some of us, however, have a need for not just meaning in the intersubjective sense, but for experiences of a spiritual nature. Spiritual insights are transrational, and so by definition can’t really be explained or communicated by a rational process. So a society based on intersubjectivity would as helpless and ill-equipped to understand and deal with them as a science-based society is to deal with people who seek meaning.

These needs are not rare or trivial. Polls suggest that a large plurality of Americans have had experiences of a higher state of consciousness (Laski 1968; Austin 1998). It may be questioned whether these experiences are always genuine, but as will be discussed in Chapter 6, there are ways of evaluating this. In any case, in some individuals the need for spirituality is so real and so strong that they turn their back on not simply materialism but on other things that Habermas would presumably regard as the rewards of intersubjectivity--family, friends, creative work, society at all levels. They do this for basically the same reason that those before them rejected materialism; not because the scientific worldview is wrong, but because it's incomplete. There are hungers that this worldview does not understand, and there are likewise hungers that a worldview based on intersubjectivity does not satisfy. Since society does not satisfy them, society must be rejected. The rejection is not of society per se, but of a particular level of society.

It might be argued that intersubjective society is free enough to tolerate such individuals. If a few people want to withdraw from society in a retreat, no problem. I would say this is about as true as to say that a society based on the scientific worldview can tolerate those who reject materialism. Yes, a few individuals can seek a spiritual life--often with the great resistance of their family and friends. But if large numbers of people did this, an intersubjective society, too, would probably break down. Since we don't have a society in Habermas' sense, we can't be sure what it would look like, but it would surely resist people who made decisions based on observations that can’t be communicated through rational discourse.

So Habermas’ social vision ultimately hinges on the premise that rationality is the highest feature of humanity, and that rational discourse is the ultimate means by which to organize society. To those who have never had a genuine spiritual experience, it may be hard to understand that anything could be higher. Even those who have had some experience of a higher state of being may not consider it real in the same way that we consider the world of science real, or the world of rational discourse real. At best, they may regard it as just as another way in which people seek meaning in their lives. But even those who have had no direct experience with higher consciousness should be able to understand that rationality is limited as a means of understanding ourselves. We are not simply rational animals but emotional ones, and our emotions affect all of our behavior.

I think Habermas envisions a society where people are sufficiently integrated that their emotions and their intellect can work together, without conflict. Thus while not denying that we all have emotional reactions to any situation, he would presumably argue that we could nonetheless rise above these emotions and both understand and address the situation rationally. We would do this by using intersubjective communication to answer, for all forms of social discourse, such fundamental questions as "What is true?" "What do you mean?" and "Are you sincere?" (Outhwaite 1994).

This level of integration, however--in which the physical as well as the emotional and intellectual centers of the brain operate in harmony--is precisely what the next higher level of existence is all about (Ouspensky 1961). An essential principle of holarchical development is that stages on one level of existence don't become integrated until the level transcending them emerges. Spirituality is not only about realizing a higher level of existence, but completing the lower one we ordinarily exist on.

No amount of rational discourse can correct this situation. A great deal of evidence from cognitive psychology, some of which I will discuss in the following chapter, demonstrates that not only are we aware of very little of what goes on around us, but that our brain constantly deceives us about this. Our brain tells us that we are fully conscious, when we are not; that we have a unified self, which we haven't; and that we live in the now, which we don't. If we aren't fully conscious, how can we know what is true (i.e, make fully-informed decisions about events that affect our lives)? If we don't have a unified self, how can we be sincere (i.e., have any confidence that any social agreements we make at one time will be honored at another time)? And if we don't live in the now, how can we know what anything means (i.e., have any confidence that we understand others?

Perhaps some of us read more into Habermas than he himself intends. "I've never had any ambition of sketching out a normative political theory," he says more recently. "It's more a matter of the reconstruction of actual conditions....The 'emancipated society' is an ideal construct that invites misunderstanding. I'd rather speak of the idea of the undisabled subject."12 But from the holarchical point of view, we are always "disabled" by the constraints of the higher stages and levels in which we exist. We are freer than other animals and freer than humans of earlier, less complex societies. But we are not completely free, and can never be, as long as we exist in our ordinary state of consciousness.

 

The Incompleteness of the Mental Level

The basic argument I have been making is that the relationship between human societies and their individual members is much like that between multicellular biological stages and their individual cells, or between complex molecules in the cell and their component atoms. In one important respect, however, societies appear to be very different from higher biological and physical stages. As we saw earlier, the latter are incapable of independent existence outside of a higher level of existence. Indeed, this lack of autonomy is a key difference between such social holons and their component fundamental holons. Yet human (and animal) societies do seem to maintain such an autonomous existence. That is to say, there appears to be no higher level of existence embracing all of these societies, as cells embrace various kinds of molecules and supermolecules, and organisms embrace tissues and organs. Why not?

It may be that there is a higher level of existence, but because it is higher, relative to us, we can't see it. I will discuss this point a little later. However, another possibility is that the postulated higher form of existence is still in the process of evolving. Taking the lower forms of existence as an analogy again, it's widely accepted that there was an evolutionary period before the emergence of cells when intermediate structures were being created--primitive proteins or nucleic acid, for example, followed perhaps by encapsulated structures that had some but by no means all of the properties of modern cells (Ganti 1975; deDuve 1996; James 1998; Schwartz 1998). Likewise, in the evolution of organisms, there were undoubtedly transitional, tissue-like aggregations of cells (Smith and Szathmary 1995). The evolution of these earlier forms of life will be discussed further in the second part of this book.

Such transitional forms are not found today, because evolution of both the physical and biological levels of existence is complete. The cells in the human body are not very different from the cells of simple invertebrates (Bullock and Horridge, 1965), and the molecules in our cells are not very different from the molecules in yeast (Burgoyne 1988). Likewise, the biological evolution of the human brain is generally believed to have been completed between 100-50,000 years ago (Avers, 1989).

In contrast, human societies are very different now from what they were even one hundred years ago, and are still changing. While this point seems obvious, it's important to emphasize it, because it constitutes another reason why we should not expect the properties of these societies to be completely analogous to those manifested on lower levels. A major focus of this book is to explore the degree to which properties on a lower level of existence are analogous to those of a higher level. While many analogies have been identified, there are numerous places where these analogies seem to break down, and these examples tend to be used by critics of the holarchical view, those who deny that it has significant meaning or practicality. I have already suggested that one reason analogies seem to fail is because the distinction between stages and levels of existence is not made, with the result that holons are sometimes compared that should not be. Thus the idea that human societies are a higher form of life has often been criticized because societies seem very different from human individuals. Understanding the distinction between fundamental stages and social stages helps clear up this problem.

So does taking into account that human societies have not finished evolving, whereas physical and biological stages are complete. While our understanding of the early evolution of cells and organisms is very sketchy, and based largely on intelligent speculation, it seems reasonable to presume that the transitional stages were quite different from those that we see today. That is to say, the multicellular holons that are present in modern organisms, in the form of various tissues and organs, probably bear only a slight resemblance to multicellular aggregates of cells that were the precursors of organisms. In the same way, if a higher level of existence should evolve, we might expect that human social organizations within it would appear quite different from the way they do today.

 

How Do We See Ourselves and Our Societies?

In addition to these two factors, there is a third one at work that tends to obscure the analogies between different levels of the holarchy, in general, and to make human societies in particular seem very different from what I regard as equivalent stages on lower levels of existence. This is the problem of perspective. As we saw in Chapter 2, any phenomenon can be observed from different points of view, and depending where in the holarchy one is it will appear differently. Thus when a bond is formed between an atom and a molecule, the process can be seen as one of assimilation, communication or adaptation, depending on whether the viewer is the molecule, the atom, or the electrons being shared in the process.

This rule of perspective is relevant to our understanding of human societies in two ways. First, our own view of any part of the holarchy, like that of any other holon, is necessarily partial and incomplete. As holons on a particular level of the hierarchy, we can't see all the other holons in the same way. Holons on the physical level of existence look different to us from holons on the biological level, which in turn appear different from holons on the mental level, not just because they 'are' different, but because our point of view is different. The physical world is two levels below us, the biological just one level below us, the mental level at or just above us. To change our focus from one to the other we must pass through a scale that is so immense that I have argued it is like a complete set of dimensions, and these dimensions are not simpy spatial but also temporal.

The rule of perspective, then, suggests that we will view social holons on lower levels of existence as different from our own societies. But just how will our view of them differ? There is a well-known corollary of the rule of perspective, which can be stated as follows: the higher a holon is in the holarchy, the more complete or real its view of other holons. Thus our understanding of cells or molecules is better than their own understanding of themselves. From our position higher in the holarchy, we can see them in a very broad context, including their interactions with other holons on their own and higher levels of existence. Our understanding of them is necessarily incomplete, because. we can't experience what molecules or cells experience (to the extent that they do). We can't see them, in other words, as they see themselves. But our perspective, though incomplete, is more complete than theirs.

It follows, then, that our understanding of our own level of existence, the mental level, is less complete than that of the physical and biological levels. The mental level is of course much more immediate to us, because we are imbedded in it. We experience it in a much more direct way than we do the lower levels of existence. Nonetheless, our view of this level is less complete, because we can be much less objective about it; we are unable to understand it in as broad a context as we undestand lower levels of existence.

We can, of course, see even our own behavior somewhat objectively. We can observe it from the point of view of a psychologist or sociologist, detached from the subjects. This view, it should be apparent from what I said earlier, is made possible because we to some extent participate in higher stages of existence--our social organizations--and therefore share in their properties. It's from the vantage point of this higher position on the mental level that professional or even amateur observers of human behavior operate, and this enables them to see the individual in a somewhat more complete way than individuals themselves can. In 'folk psychology', this is expresssed in the idea that others can see us (though not experience us) better than we ourselves can.

Yet while we participate in these higher stages, we are still below them. We can't see these stages themselves objectively. This raises the question: how exactly do we see or experience them? This brings us to the second relevant aspect of perspective. Another well known principle of the holarchy is that existence on one level can't be aware of existence on a higher level. If there is truly a higher level of consciousness, we can't, as we ordinarily exist, be aware of it. In Chapter 6, I will discuss the possibility of such high forms of life, and how we can know anything at all about them.

But human social organizations, as we have seen, don't represent a higher level of existence, but higher stages. What, then, is our experience of them? How exactly do we see them? This question brings us to one of the oldest riddles in philosophy, one that I believe the holarchical view can cast in an interesting new light.

 

Up, Down, Inside, Outside

The mental level of existence, by definition, is where properties that we call mind first emerge. This is not to say that lower levels of existence have no mental properties. I pointed out in Chapter 3 that some kinds of cells exhibit a primitive form of learning. In fact, the holarchical view that I am developing in this book implies that emergent properties have analogs at lower levels of existence, so we might expect that in a sense no phenomenon is completely original at any level of existence.

However, mind becomes sufficiently developed at our level of existence to constitute a major property of life. One of the oldest and deepest mysteries of philosophy and science is how these mental phenomena are related to physical and biological phenomena. That is, does mind emerge from life in the same way that we have seen life emerges from matter? Can it be completely understood in terms of physical substance?

The answer to this question, surely, depends to a large degree on what we mean by mind. If we define it as certain functional properties such as the ability to think, learn and remember--or acquire, process, store and access information--and the like, then it may be that we can understand mind as an emergent property of the brain. For example, scientists are currently using procedures such as positive emission tomography (PET) and focal magnetic resonance (fMRI) to identify regions of the brain where certain kinds of thinking, learning, and other mental processes occur (Magistretti 1999). These studies, coupled with animal work identifying the molecular and cellular processes that enable neurons to interact with each other, may one day make it possible for us to understand, in very great detail, what is going on in the brain when we experience the world in various ways. We might be able to identify, for example, exactly which cells in the brain are active, and in what manner, for every kind of thought or other mental process we have13. Furthermore, work in cognitive sciences may be able to tell us, in some sense, how the activity of these cells is related to our mental processes--that is, the way patterns of neuronal connections perform certain kinds of mental operations (Crick and Koch 1992; Churchland and Sejnowski 1992; Taylor 1999; Koch 1999).

As remarkable as these promising future advances in the science of mind may be, however, they still fall short of describing the connection between brain and what we usually take as our most essential feature of mind--our direct experience of the world. Some philosophers of mind make this point by distinguishing between the soft problems and hard problems of consciousness (Chalmers 1996). The soft problems include all the functional properties that I alluded to a moment ago. The hard problem is simply understanding our consciousness of these processes--how we experience ourselves as all these activities take place.

Another way to express the same distinction is in terms of third person obervations and first person observations. Third person observations are made by one person of another, and are open to scientific study. For example, the measurement of activity in different brain regions when someone thinks certain thoughts is a third person observation. A third person, the scientist, makes the observations and measurements of events in the brain of the first person, the experimental subject. What this subject actually experiences during this experiment, however, is not open to direct observation by the scientist. She may tell the scientist what she experienced, describe it to the experimenter, but this description will still not enable the scientist to observe this experience. This is the essence of first person observation.

In the next chapter, I will discuss the hard problem or first person aspects of consciousness. Before doing this, though, I want to consider another important distinction associated with mind, one that is quite often conflated with the hard vs. soft problem, but which I believe is not quite the same thing. This is the distintion between inner and outer experiences. As we all know, we have conscious experience of two kinds of worlds--an inner one of our thoughts, feelings, memories, imagination, and so forth, and an outer one consisting of the natural world, other people, our material creations, and so on14. The mental level as I have indicated it in Figure 3 depicts existence from the outer perspective. Organisms and various societies of organisms are the holons on this level, as seen from the outside. But the mental level must also somehow include the inner point of view--the thinking, feeling and so forth that is associated with these holons.

As I said a moment ago, the inner vs. outer distinction is often confused with the hard vs. soft problem. The hard problem is sometimes defined by philosophers as the one of "inner experience". But surely the problem of "outer experience" can be just as hard. I experience the objects of the room I'm sitting in as "out there", but their qualities are just as far removed from the physical and biological processes of the brain as are the qualities associated with inner events like thoughts and emotions. The essence of the hard problem, it seems to me, is simply "experience". The inner and outer aspects of this experience are something else. We might refer to them as mind and body, respectively, with the understanding that we are using mind in a way that is not quite the same thing as consciousness.

Transpersonal theorist Ken Wilber, who uses the holarchical view extensively in his writings, has suggested that the only way to recognize and incorporate this distinction in the holarchy is to view holons at every level or stage of existence as having two aspects, an interior one and an exterior one. By interior Wilber means, I think, both the functional and experiential aspects of mentality15. He further argues that every level of existence also has both an individual and social aspect; thus our social aspect is represented in the kinds of social organizations we live in. Putting these two dimensions together, Wilber has proposed a four-fold or quadrant model of holarchical existence (Wilber, 1995; 1997; see Fig. 5), in which every level has four different aspects: individual/exterior (e.g., the human body); individual/interior (the human mind); social/exterior (human societies); and social/interior (human culture). In his view, none of these four aspects of any holon is higher in the holarchy than any other; they are all equivalent, though different, manifestations of the same level of existence.

At the outset, the reader will appreciate that I have a different view of the social vs. individual aspects of holons. In the holarchical model of existence that I'm developing here, social and individual (fundamental) holons are on the same scale, with social holons higher than the individual holons. I have already justified this type of organization by pointing out that social holons have emergent properties not found in their individual components. Since the distinction between my model and Wilber's is quite important, however, and as I have enormous respect for Wilber's views in general, I want to spend a little more time discussing the assumptions Wilber made in constructing his model. As we will see, the arguments that I will use to support elimination of the individual vs. social distinction will later be used to eliminate the exterior vs. interior distinction as well. The major thrust of the following discussion, then, will be to defend the single scale model of holarchy that I have been developing throughout this book.

Wilber's reasoning begins with a fundamental principle of holarchy, what might be called the law of asymmety:

 

"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."16

 

Thus if all cells were eliminated, all higher forms of life such as organisms would also be eliminated, but lower forms of life such as atoms and molecules would survive. If all molecules were eliminated, all cells would be eliminated, while atoms would remain.

Using this relationship, Wilber notes that it doesn't seem to apply to certain kinds of societies. For example, the system which geologist James Lovelock first called Gaia (Lovelock 1979), and which is responsible for regulating the concentration of oxygen and carbon dioxide on earth, is composed of an immense number of bacteria, that is, prokaryotic cells. If one eliminated all prokaryotes, clearly the Gaia system would also be eliminated; but the converse also seems true, or approximately so. If one eliminated the Gaia system, almost all prokaryotes would also be eliminated. Wilber points out that a similar symmetric relationship exists with respect to several other social holons and their individual components, such as the material universe, which he takes to be an immense society of atoms, and these atoms taken individually.

This rule appears to be correct, and the conclusion it leads to equally correct, as long as the population of holons is relatively unorganized and undifferentiated--in other words, a simple aggregate of individual holons. Destroy all atoms, and you destroy all galaxies; destroy all galaxies, and you destroy all atoms. Where this reasoning breaks down, however, is when the social holons are not simple aggregates of fundamental holons, but have a complex, organized structure--in other words, when there is a society, not just a population. I have already pointed out the emergent properties in complex molecules, in biological tissues, and in human societies. Such emergent properties are not found in populations of prokaryotes (the Gaia effect could just as easily occur, on a smaller scale, with a much smaller number of bacteria). Furthermore, for the kinds of social holons I have been discussing, the rule of asymmetry clearly does apply. If all atoms were eliminated, so would be all complex molecules, but the converse is not true. If all biological tissues were eliminated, so would all cells, but again, the converse is not true. And if all human beings were eliminated, all human societies would likewise disappear, but the converse is not true.

This conclusion ought to seem obvious, but in Wilber's model of the holarchy, both human beings and their societies are defined in such a way that this asmmetry is somewhat obscured. His model actually distinguishes several different stages of human beings, and each stage corresponds to a different type of social organization. As I noted earlier, there is a strong correlation between the degree of evolution of an organism's brain and the complexity of its social organization, and this relationship is especially clear and dramatic in human evolution. Thus those humans with a relatively primitive development of the neocortex live or once lived in a tribal/village organization, while those with a higher degree of brain development are found in our modern nation/state societies. When individual holons and their corrresponding social holons are defined this specifically, then elimination of either one almost logically implies elimination of the other. If a particular type of social organization is eliminated, we might presume that so would be the corresponding type of human being.

Nevertheless, there are several serious weaknesses in this approach. First, while elimination of either the individual or the social may eliminate the other, the relationship is still decidedly asymmetric. Elimination of all humans of a particular type would immediately eliminate the corresponding society. In contrast, elimination of the society would have no immediate impact on the evolutionary level of its members. If all nation-states broke down tomorrow, their members would not immediately lose all rationality, all their distinctions from lower forms of humanity (some of us would, perhaps). Such asymmetry is even more apparent with lower forms of human or animal organization. Break up families, and organisms do not suddenly lose their limbic systems. Break up tribes and people do not lose their neocortex. At these lower levels surely, and perhaps at higher levels, the organisms might persist indefinitely in the absence of their corresponding social organization.

A second weakness of Wilber's quadrant model is that it is inconsistent. If one is going to argue that highly organized societies of human beings are not on a different level from their members, but just represent a different aspect of the same level, then one should also argue that the tissues and organs within organisms (and perhaps the organisms themselves), which are highly organized societies of cells, are in the same way no higher than these cells, but just another aspect of cellular existence. Or to put it another way, if one is going to argue that particular types of human beings are associated with particular types of societies, and that therefore elimination of these societies logically eliminates these human beings, then one should also argue that particular types of cells are associated with particular types of organisms, and by eliminating all organisms, one eliminates all these types of cells. Pursuing this logic further, one should also argue that particular types of molecules are associated with particular types of cells and that therefore by eliminating cells we eliminate these molecules. In other words, the principle of asymmetry that Wilber uses to determine ranking in the hierarchy is rendered useless.

Wilber does not make these arguments, because he views all (eukaryotic) cells as comprising the same holon, and the same for molecules. But this is not really so. As I discussed earlier, there are important, qualitative distinctions between the kinds of cells that make up organisms, and the kind that live an independent existence; there are also distinctions between the kinds of molecules that are found in cells, and those that are not. A nerve cell in a human brain, for example, is a very different form of life from a yeast cell--actually, I have argued, a higher form--and is just as distinguishable from the latter as a human member of a nation state is from a tribal aborigine.

To conclude this lengthy but necessary digression, I believe that Wilber's distinction between individual and social aspects of holons is quite unnecessary. Social organizations of holons are holons in their own right, and can be viewed as existing on the same scale as their individual components. Though they lack some properties of the latter, such as autonomy and the ability to reproduce, they do have emergent properties not found in their members, and thus should be considered as legitimately higher forms of life.

Having established this, let's now apply the same arguments to Wilber's other major distinction, that between interior and exterior properties of holons. Again, Wilber's model says, in effect, that interior or mental properties of an organism are not a higher form of existence than the exterior or physical/biological properties. At this point, I want to remind the reader that while I am considering interior properties to be mentality in only the functional sense, interior in Wilber's sense includes both the functional and experiential aspects of mentality. So the argument that follows is targeted only at part of his interior qualities. Actually, it could apply as well to the experiential aspects; however, I will not do this, but defer discussion of them until later.

So we proceed, again, with the argument by asymmetry. Clearly, elimination of the exterior form, the human being or her brain, eliminates the interior form. If there are no human beings, there is no human mind. But is the converse also true? If there is no human mind, can there be no humans?

This is a tricky thought experiment to perform, precisely because we don't have a very clear understanding of what the interior properties of holons are. While we can envision, in a theoretical way, the consequences of removing all molecules, all cells, or all organisms from existence, it's much harder to imagine what removing all mentality (of a certain degree) would mean. It might seem at first that if this could be done, all organisms experiencing that type of mentality would also disappear. But keep in mind that we aren't really talking about organisms, about human beings, here--we are talking about their exterior aspects only, which Wilber has defined as their bodies and their brains.

Viewed in this way, it's clear that human beings could survive the loss of all mentality of a particular type. That is, we can imagine human beings biologically identical to ourselves who no longer have our rational form of mentality17. Indeed, such people are alive today, and of course predominated in earlier cultures.

To be sure, one might argue that human beings at a lower stage of mentality are not really biologically identical to us. They must have some differences in their brains accounting for their lower mode of conscioussness, though these differences apparently have no genetic basis (they would presumably result from learning-dependent formation of new connections among previously existing neurons). If we adopt this point of view, it's true that elimination of all mentality of a particular stage also eliminates all the corresponding exterior forms of that stage. The exterior does depend as much on the interior as the other way around.

However, as we saw earlier in the discussion about individual vs. social aspects of holons, the same reasoning can be applied as well to lower levels of the hierarchy. For example, if all organisms were destroyed, then all cells of the kind that exist in organisms would also be destroyed. Thus we can see that if we want to get very specific about the kinds of holons that form higher-order holons, we can never use Wilber's rule of asymmetry to determine what is higher and what is lower. This rule only works when we lump all fundamental or zero-dimensional stages together as one class. When we do this, destruction of all molecules spares some atoms. Destruction of all organisms spares some cells. And likewise, destruction of all rational consciousness spares some human beings.

In conclusion, then, the interior aspects of holons do appear to be higher forms of existence than their physical and/or biological correlates. This suggests that instead of placing interior and exterior on separate but equivalent scales of existence, they should go together on one scale. Thus we could place all forms of human consciousness (magic, mythic, rational, etc.) somewhere above all the corresponding brains or human exterior types.

But where exactly do we place them? We already have seen that human social organizations of various kinds can be placed above individual human beings. Do these interior stages go above or below the exterior social stages, or on a different scale entirely?

At this point, a simple though radical notion fairly leaps out at us: can what we have been calling interior aspects of individual holons be in some sense identical to what we have been calling social aspects of the same holons? We know there is a relationship involved, that rational consciousness is associated with the nation state, for example, and magical consciousness associated with tribal or village organization. Can we go further than this and say that they are really the same thing?

I suggest that we can, to this extent: a particular structure of human consciousness or interiority represents what a person sees when he looks at the highest form of social organization to which he belongs. Thus the interior experience of a modern human being is what results when that person looks at the complex groups of people of which he is a member. The interior experience of a primitive tribal villager is what that person sees when looking at the social organization she is imbedded in. And so on.

The apparent interior/exterior dualism of holons, in other words, results from the different views any holon is afforded when looking up, above its position in the hierarchy, compared to down, below its position in the hierarchy. When it looks upwards, at holons above itself, in which it is embedded, it experiences an inner nature, because it is within these higher holons. It experiences itself as a subject--i.e., subjected to the laws of these higher-order holons. When it looks downwards, at holons below itself, it experiences an outer nature, because it is outside or beyond these holons. It sees them as objects, that is, objectively. Arthur Koestler, who coined the world holon, understood this perfectly:

"The members of a hierarchy, like the Roman God Janus, all have two faces, looking in opposite directions; the face turned towards the subordinate levels is that of a self-contained whole; the face turned upward toward the apex, that of a dependent part. One is the face of the master, the other the face of the servant."18

It might be argued that we can see the social groups we belong to as exterior to ourself, just as we see inanimate objects in our environment. But what we see is simply other human beings exterior to ourself--other holons like ourselves who share our stage of existence. What makes a group a social organization is, of course, the relationships between its members, and these relationships we see only in an inward sense. We can't see relationships of groups (at least of very complex groups) as exteriors.

Yet when we look at holons below us, we can see relationships as exteriors. For example, when we look at our bodies, we see the relationships between our cells--from our vantage point, that is what tissues, organs, and bodies are. These relationships, which as we have seen have some analogies to the relationships among ourselves in our groups, are now understood as exterior forms, not as an inner experience. And likewise with molecules, atoms and so on19.

To reiterate, what we call interior aspects of a holon (H) are, in the view I have been developing here, simply the holons above H, as they are experienced by H. What we call exterior aspects of that holon are how the holons above H experience H. Thus, just as there is no real distinction between individual and social aspects of holons--every holon is an individual from one point of view, but a group or society from another point of view--so there is no real distinction between exterior and interior aspects of holons. Every interior aspect of a holon is, from the point of view of another holon, an exterior aspect20. And vice-versa.

Thus what we call mind (interior) is the same kind of holon we call body (or exterior)--i.e., there are no holons that are only mind or only body. That does not mean mind is reduced to body, first, because what we (or any other holon) experience as mind is a different holon from what we experience as body, and second, because there is no position in the hierarchy from which we can see what we call mind and what we call body in the same way. Mind always seems of a different nature to us from body, because the holon of mind, by definition, is always observed from a different relative position than is body.

In conclusion, we have achieved a unification in which interior and exterior aspects of holons, along with individual and social aspects, can all be placed on the same scale. Yet something is still left out. At the outset of this argument, I emphasized that by interior properties of holons, I was only considering the functional aspects of mentality. I have not dealt with the experiential aspects. The reader can see for herself that the same arguments I used to show that the functional aspects of mind are higher than the exterior holons they are associated with also apply to the experiential aspects. Nevertheless, I stop short of contending that the latter belong on the same scale. To put them there implies that conscious experience is emergent from these holons, that it has the same relation to them as they do to lower holons. As we will see in the following chapter, this argument is very difficult to buy.

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