Holistic Worldview and Practice - navigating ‘edge of chaos’?

In this reflection we re-examine the notion 'edge of chaos' as presenting a fruitful milieu for human evolution. ?

Holos-Earth Project https://holos-earth.org/ ?offered a powerful message for this time. On Sunday evening introducing the on-line training programme, ‘Cultivating Holistic Worldview and Practice’ we?began to deliver that message. We offered that it is geared at empowering people of influence to co-create the perspective and practice that will enable us to better ‘navigate the edge of chaos’.

Yesterday we looked at Ervin Laszlo’s call for a new societal paradigm shift - from ‘Logos’ to ‘Holos’. We argued the case that it encompasses holistic perspective and practice - see: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/cultivating-holistic-worldview-practice-over-cyborgs-van-wyk/

New ideas

We pointed out that Roger Penrose predicted even more wonderful scientific insights than those that we have been blessed with in the 20th century, but suggested that for this to happen we ?needed powerful new ideas. Significantly he anticipated that such new ideas would take us in us directions very different from those currently being pursued. ?He mused:

“Perhaps what we might need is some subtle change in perspective - something we have all missed...”

We wondered though whether it has been scientifically missed or maybe even forgotten?

So what then is this ‘edge of chaos’ we want to navigate in order to get from ‘Logos’ to ‘Holos’?

Re-evaluating Logos

From a layperson’s perspective, Logos presupposes that the universe works with ‘reason’. Our logic can thus comprehend the structures of existence, identify the causes of our challenges, and address them with apt reasoned solutions. Our laws of physics and mathematical equations are best able to comprehend how life works, map that, and offer appropriate responses. We can quantify the dynamics operating in a situation, identify the causes, and take appropriate steps to change those we don’t want. It’s all about being able to ‘map the territory’, And, as we reported, Jay Forrester suggested sophisticated computer simulations can do that much better than the human brain, mapping the ‘high-order non-linear feedback loops’. This would close the huge knowledge gap. ?So then, over to James Lovelock’s Cyborgs we looked at yesterday? ?

Looking elsewhere

But, as we saw, Roger Penrose seems to be looking elsewhere. This computation is not consciousness, he says, artificial ‘intelligence’ is thus a misnomer. (Yesterday we asked whether AI computer creations of images, music, text, is really art?) ?So Penrose’s call for new ideas, a subtle change in perspective, 'something we might have missed', surely relates to consciousness. ???

Re-imaging Holos

And that then is probably the societal paradigm shift Laszlo is calling for with Holos. Holistic thinker, Daniel Christian Wahl, puts is succinctly when he suggest that there’s knowing the world through modelling it, and then there’s a deeper quality of knowing the world through ‘participation’ - being in it because we are of it, and it is in us. We are embedded in it and when we wake up to this apprehension of conscious existence and respond to it from that insight and relationship, then we are an embodiment of it. (Call this deep systemic WOKE?)

Metanoia?

Holism’s author, Jan Christian Smuts, who coined the word from the Greek root ‘Holos’, said: "The universe is individuating (through us) as we universalising (in it)". The shift from Logos to Holos is thus a fundamental shift in awareness and practice - we are no longer operating tactically and strategically through our mapping of the world (in the greater sense of the concept of world), we are responding to that which is moving through us in creative evolution. The Greeks called that ‘metanoia’ - beyond ‘knowing’ in the traditional sense. Now how can that happen and why would it?

Edge of chaos

Stuart Kaufman’s case for the fruitfulness of the ‘edge of chaos’ state - the potential it holds for transformation, is often hotly contested. On Sunday night we considered Max Langosco’s insight into the notion that life itself can only exist on the Edge of Chaos. “This fertile state does not hold itself because it is not a stable balance point. In order to maintain this dynamic balance point, effort and energy must be applied.”

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What does this all mean for the layperson?

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Mountain-biking

Take the simple example of riding a bicycle. You need movement and momentum in order to make the necessary adjustments to maintain balance. If the cycle track is smooth and level, ?minimal effort is required to maintain balance. If you are sitting in the saddle with the stationary bicycle stand firmly on the ground, you need no effort. But that ‘stable balance point’ is not life, it is mechanical. Life is about self-organisation, not only to maintain coherence with the dynamic context, but as is realised from the holistic perspective, also to support the enabling milieu in symbiosis, endosymbiosis and mutualism - cooperation. So life is about living adaptive relationship - and that takes work. ?

Now take mountain-biking. Note how cyclists are able to charge down rough tracks at speed; braking, cornering, putting in peddling effort where required with astounding agility. They’re on the edge of chaos, a false move and they come to grief. And it will be the cyclist who is able to maintain coherence a close to the edge of chaos as possible that will surely win.

Whilst Langosco says life can only exist at the edge of chaos, presumably through constant subtle re-adaptation to the changing and emergent dynamic conditions of complexity, with our Logos thinking, we suggest, we are might be in danger of tipping over that edge. Our linear modelling of existence might have compromised our inherent agility and hence adaptive capacity.

So the shift to Holos is to regain that subtle shift in perspective that Penrose suggests we might have missed - and we suggest we might have forgotten. ???

This then provides a background to the intention of the on-line training programme ‘Cultivating Holistic Worldview and Practice’. In it we will re-introduce accessing ‘Complex Human Adaptive Intelligence.’

?Sunday event

This coming Sunday 15th at 18h00 London time we will begin our examination in deeper detail of what could amount to the societal paradigm shift Laszlo is calling for?from knowing the world through measuring it (quantification), to knowing the world through ‘being’ in it (participation).

?Exploring creativity

To begin we will take a deep look at the notion of creativity through the holistic lens - especially as a factor of adaptiveness. Please be welcome to attend this module - it is not a requirement to attend the entire training program.?

E-mail me for details and the Zoom link: [email protected] .