Holism: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

From the outset, holism concerns not wholes but the strange seam between parts. From Plato’s Forms and Spinoza’s substance to cybernetics, ecology, and dynamical systems, holism persists as an intuition of unity. Each turn sought not larger aggregates but subtler grammars of interaction—non-linear feedbacks, attractor basins, emergent orders.

Unorthodox approaches—Prigogine’s dissipative structures, Bohm’s implicate order, Mandelbrot’s fractals—mapped systems as flows rather than hierarchies, replacing fixed boundaries with phase transitions, bifurcations, and strange symmetries. Yet all of these, orthodox or not, still orbit a deeper puzzle: how the act of dividing and connecting generates the reality it claims to describe. Our descriptions don’t contain the world—the world contains, invokes, and sustains the very possibility of coherent description, and of its authors. Humility is free.

My own philosophy begins from that puzzle. What variously appears as topological phase mystery in cosmology or critical centrality uncertainty in subatomic physics is not a gap but a kind of active absence: the absence of absence. This critical centrality defines the logical eigenframe of a system’s contour—where coherence pivots in higher, even hyperdimensional, space and order and fluctuation become indistinguishable. It also represents a metastable symmetry, a lattice of topological and logical geometry that stabilises the system’s form much as a sphere resolves minimal energy under spatial or temporal constraint. The logical orbit, though unannounced, arises here as the ontic template of holism itself—the implicit structure through which coherence, symmetry, and communication fold into one another.

It gestures toward what Yoshiki Kuramoto formalised as the order parameter—what I regard as a hidden control plane emergent from phase alignment across distributed systems, subtle as topology itself yet vast enough to encompass the probabilistic architectures of reality. This plane is not metaphorical but real: an ontic infrastructure through which systems coordinate themselves, the self-generated surface where causality and geometry converge, guiding behaviour across dimensions.

It is neither negation nor void but the world’s way of encoding the fact that it encodes itself—relational, transient, self-translating—a recursive economy of thingness, of antisymmetric ontic identity, where relation precedes form. Identity arises only through its opposite, maintaining coherence by negation—a principle Hegel glimpsed in the negation of negation, not as circular abstraction but as the constitutive logic of incompleteness (Hegel, 1812 [1969]).

Boundaries are arbitrary; systems arise as entangled communications, each defining its inertial frame through entropy transduction across channels. These communicative abstractions imply a harmonic structure: an infinite-dimensional lattice whose differential-geometric topology defines the orbit of relation itself. The relations between things precede the things and form a far vaster, more intricate continuum: an unbounded bulk of synchronised systems, cyclical and self-reflective, in which connection itself is the fundamental act of being.

It is the minimal self-consistent system, stabilised not by uniformity but by internal contradiction—the systemic attractor where identity yields to coherence emergent through recursive self-negation.

References
Kuramoto, Y. (1984) Chemical Oscillations, Waves, and Turbulence. Berlin: Springer.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1812) Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969.