"Three cosmoses taken together include in themselves all the laws of the universe."

We have now followed the holarchy from atoms up to the highest levels of existence for which we have any knowledge of. We have seen that despite the enormous variety of existence, differences in form, function and scale, life at all levels follows certain fundamental principles. In Part 2 of this book, we will examine how the holarchy was created, and how it continues to grow and change, through the process of evolution. To conclude this Part, however, it would be useful to summarize the major principles that we have found. I will do this in the form of ten laws or rules governing the holarchy.

1. Universality. All aspects of existence can be understood in terms of holons, which contain holons as well as are contained within them.

2. Classes. There are two kinds of holons, autonomous or fundamental holons and intermediate or social holons. Fundamental holons, including atoms, cells and organisms, can exist independently of higher-order holons as well as within them. Social holons exist only within higher-order holons.

3. Subclasses. There are two kinds of fundamental holons, inert and interactive. Inert holons exist independently of higher-order holons. Interactive holons associate with each other and form all the higher stages (social holons) of their level of existence.

4. Emergence. Each holon has emergent properties not reducible to those of its component holons. These properties generally include a longer lifetime and greater stability, as well as more specific properties.

5. Properties. All holons exhibit three fundamental properties: a) assimilation or growth; b) adaptation or self-maintenance; and c) communication. Assimilation is broadly defined as interaction with a lower-order holon; adaptation as interaction with a higher-order holon; and communication as interaction with a holon of the same stage or level. In addition, fundamental holons exhibit a fourth fundamental property, reproduction.

6. Organization. Fundamental interactive holons simultaneously complete one level of existence and begin the next higher one. They contain all the lower holons in the level they complete, preserving as well as transcending their properties. Social holons form intermediate stages within a level of existence. They do not preserve the properties of their component holons, but transform these properties into emergent ones.

7. Dimensionality. Within any level of existence, each holon exists in one more dimension of space or time than holons on the stage immediately below it. The holon's emergent properties are directly related to this additional dimension.

8. Participation. Fundamental holons may participate in some of the emergent properties of the higher stages in which they exist.

9. Perspective. Any holon's perspective of itself and other holons is relative, and depends on its relationship to them. A holon's perspective of holons below it is most nearly complete and real; these holons are perceived as exterior to the holon. Holons above it but on the same level of existence are perceived as interior to the holon. Holons on levels above the holon are not perceived to exist at all.

10. Asymmetry. a) Any level or stage of existence depends on the levels or stages below it; the converse is not true. b) Any single holon depends on the holons directly above it; the converse is not true.

This list is not meant to be complete, of course. There are many other important properties of holons, some of which will be discussed later. But these ten rules summarize most of the essential points that were presented in the preceding chapters, and more specifically, provide powerful evidence for one of the central themes of this book--that there are many analogies between different levels of existence. We could regard this point as a metarule, that is, as a higher-order rule that emerges from all of the other rules:

Analogy. Holons on equivalent stages in different levels of existence are analogous to one other, with respect to both their properties and their relationships with other holons.

In addition to being a central unifying principle of the holarchy, the analogy metarule provides a very powerful tool for investigating the holarchy--which is to say, all of existence--further. To the extent that analogies exist between holons on one level of existence, and those on another, we can use them to predict new properties of holons with which we are not very familiar, or even to predict the existence of new holons themselves. We got a taste of this approach in the preceding chapter, where I speculated on the form that a higher level of existence would take, based on what we know about our own level and lower levels.

In the second part of this book, where I will be discussing evolution and other processes of change in the holarchy, I will use this analogical approach extensively. Evolution, of course, is a process about which we have very little direct evidence. The physical and biological levels of the holarchy were completed millions of years ago, and many of the most important transitions during this period, such as those from atoms and molecules to cells, and from cells to organisms, left few if any traces visible to us today. Thus the views of science about how these new forms of life emerged are based almost entirely on intelligent speculation, on how the known properties of atoms, molecules and cells might have enabled them to associate into more complex forms of life. Even the evolution of organisms, for which we do have fossil evidence, still presents major unresolved problems. For example, we know from fossils some of the major stages that occurred in the evolution of the human brain, but we still don't understand exactly how our brains evolved. How was it, for example, that the modern Homo sapiens brain could emerge 50-100 thousand years ago, apparently with all the intellectual potential that our brains have today, even though most of that potential would not be used for millions of years? Even less do we understand, as I emphasized earlier, how consciousness fits into the process of evolution.

Evolution of our past, then, is a major dark area in our understanding. But future evolution is even murkier. Where is the earth in general, and the human race in particular, going? Are we likely to be replaced by a new species? What kinds of new social organization will emerge? Even though evolution is occurring among us right now, we have a very dim understanding of it, because it occurs over such immensely large time scales, and because, as we saw earlier, it's difficult for us to observe ourselves and our connections with others as objectively as we can observe lower forms of life.

Analog thinking, it seems to me, is ideally suited to address both of these questions--how evolution occurred in the past, and how it's occurring now and will occur in the future. This approach, in effect, allows us to expand what knowledge we have of one part of the holarchy to another. The evolutionary principles that we find operating in one area of existence should be applicable to other areas--if we take proper precautions. As we saw earlier, these precautions include taking into account a) the differences between stages and levels of existence; b) the fact that our own level of existence is still evolving, whereas evolution of lower levels is complete; and c) our perspective of different levels of existence is different.

Even taking into account these factors, significant differences between equivalent holons on different levels of existence seem to remain. An atom, for example, seems quite different in its properties from a cell, nor is a cell completely analogous to an organism. So we must always use analog thinking carefully, and interpret those insights it seems to provide us with some caution. However, if we confine our comparisons, as much as possible, to adjacent levels of existence, we should be able to minimize these differences.

I will use this approach in the second part of this book, and in particular, a speculative tool that I refer to as holon substitution. The principle underlying holon substitution is very simple. We take a scientific law or scientific theory that is widely accepted and well supported by evidence, and restate it in terms of the holarchy. When we do this, the theory will contain terms that refer to certain kinds of holons and/or certain stages or levels of existence. We then substitute for these terms equivalent terms from the next higher (or lower) level of existence. To the extent that the two levels are analogous, the new law or theory so derived should have a degree of truth as an explanation of processes on that level.

Let me illustrate this principle with an example. A basic scientific law, more specifically, a law of biology, states that:

This statement is based, of course, on the fact that new individual organisms--animal as well as plants, higher species as well as lower--develop from single cells. Normally, these cells are specialized reproductive cells, or gametes, and in the case of the sexual reproductive process used by our own species and most other multicellular organisms, two gametes must fuse to form a single cell. However, the same genetic information present in a fertilized reproductive cell is also present in all the other, non-reproductive (somatic) cells of the organism, and as recent breakthroughs in cloning have demonstrated, any one of these other cells, if subjected to the appropriate conditions, has the potential to develop into another complete organism.

I don't mean this in a rigidly deterministic sense--that every aspect of an organism is specified by its genes--but only that the genes do determine the kinds of properties that distinguish one kind of organism from another. As we will see in Part 2, it appears that genes do not actually contain all the relevant information needed to create a new organism. Still, we can accept the above statement in a loose sense. Having done this, let's now restate it in terms of the holarchy:

This re-statement is bound to seem a little clumsy and confusing at first, because it replaces common terms we all understand with the more specialized language of the holarchy. To make it easier to see this repacement process, I have underlined the new terms. An organism, as we have seen, is a fundamental holon on the mental level of existence. Genes are contained in chromosomes, which are a higher physical stage within cells, which are fundamental holons on the biological level.

Having restated this biological law in this way, I will now substitute, for each term related to the holarchy, an equivalent term from the next higher level of existence:

Finally, we translate back from the specialized terminology of the holarchy to more familiar terms:

In this translation, note that I am considering the brain to be analogous to the genome, as was discussed in Chapter 4. This last statement, then, represents an application of a fundamental biological law to what we would call a social or cultural process. It says, in effect, that just as an organism can reproduce itself by means of the genetic information stored within any one of its cells, an advanced human culture could reproduce itself from the knowledge in the brain of any one of its members. In other words, one of its members (obviously, to be more precise, we would need at least two) would be sufficient to colonize another planet and create another complete human civilization.

Though I am not going to propose that this statement is a fundamental cultural law, it makes enough sense, I believe, that we can imagine it could be true. We could certainly conceive of two human beings, a man and a woman, being transported to another planet where, given the appropriate physical and biological conditions, they could start a self-sustaining colony that over time would develop into an essential replica of the earth's civilization. To reproduce all our modern technology, they would presumably require a great deal of external information. Yet much of modern civilization could be reproduced simply on the basis of the knowledge the two colonists contain within their brains--mental knowledge about how to interact with others in families, groups, societies and still larger social organizations. As I discussed in Chapter 4, this is compressed information. It enables human beings to reproduce themselves--not just physically and biologically, but mentally--by specifying a relatively small number of units of interaction, and the rules governing these interactions.

To the extent that we can fairly easily conceive of this scenario, the holon substitution process we used to arrive at it is fully justified. For even if this hypothesis turned out not to be true, it is undoubtedly close to being true, and in science, hypotheses that are simply close are valuable steps towards getting at a more complete picture of reality. If a hypothesis is not true, we might then ask why it isn't true, what about the hypothesis would have to be modified. And this brings us to our next point.

We saw earlier that analogies between lower levels of existence and our own may be incomplete to some extent because our level is not complete; it's still in the process of evolving. To the extent that our hypothesis about cultural reproduction is not true, then, the incomplete evolution of our culture could provide an explanation for this. Notice that the hypothesis specifically refers to reproduction of a hypothetical higher level of existence which, so far as we know, does not yet exist. Thus if cultural reproduction is not yet possible in this manner, it might become so later. That is--and this is a very important point about analog thinking--not only do we see an interesting and feasible possibility, but we see how the realization of this possibility might depend on further development of our culture. In other words, this is not only a hypothetical law, but a prediction of how future evolution will occur.

Let's take the process of holon substitution a step further. We have just seen that this technique predicts that the human brain contains the information needed to reproduce a larger culture. The same approach also predicts that this larger culture has its own informational holon, analogous to the brain in the organism, and the genome in the cell. This larger holon, on the one hand, would play an important role in actualizing the superculture--just as the brain actualizes the organism by regulating the activity of internal organs, and the genome actualizes the cell. On the other hand, it would contain all the information needed to create a still larger holon--a holon that would transcend many complex forms of planetary organizations.

That last statement implies the existence of a second level of existence above our own--a level as far above a postulated planetary culture as the latter is above we individual human beings. At this point, we are getting into the range of very far-out speculation. However, if we confine the discussion to this postulated mental level informational holon, we can see a great deal of evidence for its emergence. It would consist of all the information associated with our technology, our scientific, philosophical and academic knowledge, our institutions of government, business, and so on.

Furthermore, we would predict that as the planetary holon or superculture evolves and emerges, this informational holon would become increasingly compressed, just as the information in the brain and the genome is compressed. Evidence of this compression, too, is quite clear. Gregory Chaitin, who we have seen originated this concept, points out that scientific theories represent a compression of observable information. Indeed, one measure of the validity of a scientific theory is the extent to which it compresses information--that is, abstracts and generalizes data and observations about the world. Darwinism, for example, compresses an enormous amount of information about observable changes in individual organisms into a few rules of evolution. Relativity theory--and before it, Newtonian theory--compresses an enormous amount of observations of the cosmos into a few concepts of mass, force and energy. Genetic theory compresses observations of DNA into a few rules of heredity.

Compression is also evident in many other areas of knowledge. For example, almost all large insitutions in our society--government, business, medical, educational, and so on--are in the process of transferring all their records to the computer. Putting information on a computer doesn't reduce it, but it does compress it, not simply in a physical sense (getting rid of paper), but in Chaitin's more precise sense. Information in the computer is stored in the form of not only files, but in the applications that run the files. The applications contain the rules that allow the compressed information in the file to be expanded into the form in which it becomes user-friendly.

In conclusion, if we take analogies between different levels of existence seriously, we can see the outlines of where our civilization might be headed. Different in some respects as this civilization may be from lower levels of existence, there are general principles that it would seem to follow. In particular, a re-organization and compression of information seems to be essential to the emergence of a new level of existence.

In the final chapter of this book, when I discuss ongoing and possibly future transitions in the earth, I will return to the subject of information at the social level. I will also discuss other organizational changes consistent with the emergence of a higher level holon.

The holarchical model I have been developing is relentlessly linear. Every form of existence is placed on one vertical scale, with all differences being ascribed to a single (conceptual) dimension of higher vs. lower. Many theorists strongly object to this idea, which seems to smack of reductionism. In Chapter 4, for example, I pointed out that Ken Wilber has proposed a four scale model, in which inner and outer, as well as individual and social, aspects of reality are distinguished. I tried to show there how neither of these distinctions is necessary, that both of them can be understood in terms of higher vs. lower.

Critical to my argument in Chapter 4, however, was ignoring the hard problem aspect of consciousness--the actual experience we have of the world. I agree with Wilber that consciousness in this sense is not simply emergent from physical, biological or even mental processes--that is, it is not related to them in the same way that they seem to be related to each other. In Chapter 6, I suggested the simplest way to view consciousness was as a transcendent phenomenon, some portion of which is experienced by holons on different stages and levels of the holarchy..

Nevertheless, the relationship of consciousness to holarchy seems to be a complex one. The essence of the problem is that we human beings--a particular holon on a particular stage of a particular level of existence--are capable of accessing many different states of consciousness. There is our ordinary waking consciousness, of course, and deep and dreaming sleep, recognized by everyone. There are various kinds of altered states of consciousness, some of them induced by certain drugs, others perhaps inducible by unusual experiences or practices. Then there are higher states of consciousness, discussed in the previous chapter. How are we to make sense of all these states of consciousness? Is it really possible to understand them all in terms of a single scale model?

The central issue of the debate, I believe it's fair to say, revolves around the number of "dimensions" a model of consciousness requires. By dimensions, let me again emphasize, I don't mean spatial or temporal dimensions, as I discussed them earlier in connection with my model of the holarchy, but rather conceptual dimensions, or variables. Allan Combs distinguishes between three such dimensions, which he calles states of mind, states of consciousness, and structures of consciousness. He defines their relationship to each other as follows:

The most significant disagreement between Wilber and Combs, though, which I want to focus on here, concerns the relationship between structures and states of consciousness. Though as I just pointed out, both men seem to define both structures and states in a very similar manner, Wilber argues that their conceptions of the relationship between these two are very different:

How do we sort this argument out? I think the key lies in the definition of structure of consciousness, so I am going to begin by providing my own definition, seemingly somewhat different from that of either Combs or Wilber, but which will be much more familiar to scientists. I will define structure of consciousness as a particular type of brain, or more precisely still, a particular pattern of neuronal connections/activity within a brain. Actually, this definition is not quite right. The most accurate definition is a particular type of social organization composed of human beings with a particular type of brain. I mention this now because it will be important later. However, for now, we can simply associate structure of consciousness with an individual human brain. Some lower forms of consciousness do not imply any social organization, and the higher forms that do always imply a particular type of brain.

We obviously have a different structure of consciousness, so defined, from that of other animals, including other primates, but we also have a different structure from that of people of earlier cultures. We differ from other animals with respect to the deep structure of our brain, whereas we differ from our ancient ancestors with respect to the surface structure of our brain. Differences in deep structure are of course more profound, but differences in surface structure are genuine differences as well. They are associated with different states of consciousness.

Defined in this way, a structure of consciousness, though not quite the same as what Combs or Wilber call it, is, I think, completely equivalent. That is, every one of their structures--magic, mythic, rational, and so forth--is associated with a particular type of brain structure. Thus Wilber says:

We can make a similar argument with respect to other states of consciousness. The surface structures of the brain associated with deep sleep, or with dreaming sleep, are very different from those active when one is in the state we refer to as awake. Likewise, surely, for any genuine shamanic trances. Each of these states, therefore, has its corresponding surface structure, and to the extent that people of earlier cultures really could experience these states in the same way we do, I would argue they had the same surface structures we had. What they apparently lacked was that part of the brain associated with rationality.

Because of these considerations, I think "state of consciousness" should be defined in such a way that it always has a one-to-one relationship with structure. Rather than say that we ordinarily experience a "waking" state, why not just say we ordinarily experience a "rational" state? When we are awake we are usually in this state, and conversely, when we are, say, dreaming or under the influence of some drug, we are not in this state; so generally nothing is lost by not referring to waking state at all. It's true that we can experience nonrational or transrational states when we are awake, but these are generally not referred to by psychologists as "waking" states, so there should be no confusion by dropping this latter term entirely. Clearly, when we say we are in the waking state, we mean that we are in the rational state--and when we say that our mythic ancestors were in the waking state, we mean that they were in the mythic state. (So while I will sometimes use the term "waking" in the following discussion, it is intended to mean "rational", or in the case of some earlier human beings, the equivalent state).

To summarize the argument so far, I have a) defined structure of consciousness as the surface structure of the brain; and b) contended that for every such structure, there is one, and only one, corresponding state of consciousness. Structure and state now are unified, no longer requiring two conceptual dimensions, as they do in the models of both Combs and Wilber. By unified, I don't mean they are the same thing, that state is structure, but only that there is always a one-to-one correspondence between them. If we know the state, we know the associated structure, and vice-versa.

Now let's consider Wilber's third conceptual dimension, level of reality. As I pointed out earlier, this corresponds to the stages and levels of the holarchy, and thus at first glance, we seem to be able to conceive of a unification here, too. Surely every structure/state of consciousness as I have defined it is associated with a particular stage in the holarchy. The rational structure of consciousness we ordinarily exist in corresponds to our stage in the mental level, while the magic and mythic stages that preceded us correspond to lower stages. As I discussed in Chapter 4, these stages take the forms of certain kinds of social organization. By participating in these societies, we access some of the mental features associated with them. Indeed, as I noted earlier, a structure of consciousness, most accurately defined, is not a particular surface structure in the brain, but a particular social organization of such surface structures. So there is a very clear relationship between many states of consciousness--rational, mythic, magic, and so forth--and what Wilber calls levels of reality.

However, there seems to be a problem when we consider other states of consciousness that we can access, such as deep sleep, dreaming, and drug-induced states. I said earlier that there is a different structure for each of these states. If so, it seems we must postulate several different structures in any one human being--one for "waking" (that is, rational or mythic or magic, etc., depending on the level of development of the person), one for sleep, one or perhaps several for states associated with drugs, and so on. This threatens to complicate greatly the holarchical model, adding cumbersome epicycles to it, as Wilber would say. Is there any way we can avoid this?

What about states of consciousness associated with ingestion of various kinds of drugs? I think we can usefully approach this issue by distinguishing two different ways in which drugs may act (understanding that some drugs, under some conditions, may act in either or both ways). Some drugs induce their effects by altering part of our "waking" or rational structure of consciousness. The best example is alcohol. Inebriation is not a "natural" state of consciousness--that is, a state associated with some structure that in some form of life is the primary one of consciousness. It is "pathological" or "abnormal" in the sense (not necessarily pejorative) that it alters a natural state, preserving or enhancing some of its features, while repressing or modifying other features. The structure of consciousness associated with alcohol, then, or with other drugs of this kind, is not one we can readily identify on the holarchy, but this is not really a problem. A cancerous growth is not normally found on the holarchy, either. Nevertheless, we can understand where in the holarchy cancer fits in, without adding a whole new stage of existence. We can proceed in basically the same manner in conceiving of the structure of consciousness induced by drugs like alcohol.

Drugs of the other class induce higher states of consciousness, at least under some conditions. These would include psychedelics such as LSD and mescaline. These drugs, I contend, do not simply alter our ordinary, rational structure of consciousness, but transform it, creating a new structure of consciousness. What is this new structure? Recall that our ordinary, rational structure is a particular social organization composed of human beings with a particular brain surface structure. Drugs that enable access to a higher state must create a different surface structure that is part of a different social organization. As I suggested in Chapter 6, we might think of the next higher state of consciousness as associated with the entire earth, and that to realize this state, one must break the ordinary connections between oneself and other people. This new structure of consciousness, then, results from this process of breaking connections.

A similar type of argument, I think, can be applied to any other state of consciousness of which human beings are capable of accessing. The essence of the argument is that every state of consciousness is associated with a specific structure, and this structure, if not that associated with ordinary, "waking", rational consciousness, is either a) a lower structure, corresponding to a lower holon in our body; b) an altered form of our rational structure (or even, perhaps, of some lower structure); or c) a higher structure, associated with a higher state of consciousness.

In summary, the holarchical model developed here allows us to understand what others call structures, states and levels of consciousness, all within a single conceptual dimension. Any stage or level in the holarchy, I contend, corresponds to one, and only one, structure of consciousness; and any one structure of consciousness, in turn, corresponds to one, and only one, state of consciousness. Such a unification not only provides, in my view, a simpler way of understanding how and where consciousness fits into the holarchy; it also avoids some apparent problems with the multidimensional models. As I pointed out earlier, Wilber and Combs both see a disconnect between states and structures, the one arguing that one state can coexist with many different structures; the other, that one structure can be associated with many different states. I think all three of us agree on what are different states of consciousness--at least with respect to lower states. By defining structure in a somewhat different way from either Wilber or Combs, however, it becomes possible to set up a one-to-one correspondence between structures and states.

This correspondence is not just a matter of convenience, of going with the simplest way of looking at things. If we don't adhere to it--if, for example, one kind of state is compatible with several different structures--we can fall into some apparently paradoxical situations. Consider this passage from Wilber:

How can one level of consciousness "investigate" another level of consciousness? I don't believe it can. When we meditate, we don't investigate another level of consciousness "from" our own; we change our level, from one to another. To the extent that we experience a higher level, we no longer experience, or identify with, the lower level we were associated with. True, we can "investigate" higher consciousness by writing or discussing our experiences of it, but this clearly is not what Wilber means, or should mean, by this term. Surely what he means is "experience", and once this word is subsituted for "investigates", it seems to me, the impossibility of the project becomes obvious.

Wilber, I think, would agree with this, and say that he was using "investigate" in a somewhat loose sense. But his assertion that one state can coexist with different structures does strongly imply that something can exist simultaneously in two modes of consciousness, so to speak, and in other usages, I think he really accepts that it can. Consider the earlier part of the above quote: "consciousness can turn its attention to the material plane...the intermediate plane...or the celestial plane." The key phrase here is: "turn its attention to." One state of consciousness can look at or observe these different levels (stages), but it can't experience them all. We can look at a dog, but we can't experience the dog's consciousness. That's obvious, of course, but it implies a less obvious, and more profound, truth: we can't experience the stage of existence on which the dog exists. (I can't experience your consciousness, either, but I can experience the stage of existence on which you exist).

It might be that we could experience the dog's stage of existence while in another state of consciousness (induced, for example, by some hypothetical drug that basically inactivated the higher portions of our brains that dogs don't share). But then we could no longer be able to experience the rational level in which we normally inhabit. We can only be in one state of consciousness, associated with one structure of consciousness, at a time. If we experience a different state, that is through a different structure.

Having observed the holarchy in some detail, we are now ready to consider how it came to be. In this first part of the book, we have seen what the holarchy is--the different kinds of holons, their properties and their relationships to each other. In the second part of the book, we will try to understand what the holarchy was, and what it may yet become. We will look at how it grows and develops over time.

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