I want to report some recent developments in thinking about the four causes of the holon. This is from a new paper just submitted for publication. It is a re-drawing of the holon to apply to ancient worldviews relating concepts of creation or spiritual origin to the material world. The holon analysis can apply to anything and should apply to cultural world views as well as organisms or corporations. I’ve rotated the diagram 90-deg. from the former orientation in the Axiomathes paper (and Rosen’s usual presentation of the modeling relation). This places the ‘higher’ causes above and the material causes below the horizontal line.
In arranging it this way, we can see that it corresponds well with a cultural world-view analysis done by Ken Wilbur, where he tried to find a common creation belief among hundreds of native cultures. But instead of finding one, he found four, and then discovered exactly this holon, as shown in the next figure. Wilbur’s mapping was reversed from the holon – a clockwise rotation. But that is just convention – how we present the diagram. So, I shifted his quadrants into this arrangement to show the agreement. Wilbur’s quadrant labels work fine for the R-theory holon.
Here I show Wilbur’s four quadrants. Also I indicate how we have had this four-quadrant idea since ancient times, and it even shows up in Indus Valley stamp seals dating to 2800BC! The paper cites convincing arguments that the Indus Valley culture was indeed Vedic or proto-Vedic, as the same four-cause system is describe clearly in the Chandogya Upanishad. We are looking at a holistic causality that was known from meditation in ancient times, that was lost since Abrahamic times, say beginning around 1900 BC it started losing its hold in favor of duality. Today, most experts are clamoring for a new holism, not realizing that we have one, but have refused to pay attention to it.
Here’s how it works for the Indus seal. Note, however, that they are correct in drawing it this way – There are really three “causes” as such. The material quadrant is the “caused”. Its were we measure and experience the results – the body of the sacred bull in ancient times.
Notice how the bull, here identified with the material world, is not a mythical creature, but a normal (albeit glorified) bull. The head is a normal head that leads the animal, and the body of the animal is what is caused to be moved by the head. But the other two heads are shown as mythical creatures, chimerical. One is a unicorn, which was commonly associated with Vishnu, or Krishna (or in Christian analogy, Christ). It is the guide for how to live – not the specific decisions on everyday matters, but the overall ‘shape’ or pattern of one’s life – how to live a ‘dharmic’ life. It is Jiminy Cricket. The other head is Oryx like, similar to the Scimitar Oryx, but mythical and the horns are backwards on the head. This head is looking backwards, at the past. It is facing and receiving input from the material world of results. In the causal holon, it then feeds that information forward to what needs to happen next. This is the ancient concept of karma – that past actions feed into future requirements through a larger universal context that orders the necessity. A really ignorant act in the past will emerge from context as a need to learn something better – it will then order events in one’s life, though subsequent actions, probably habitual, to bring about those experiences. Karma is neither good nor bad, just how the curriculum of experiences is organized.
Here’s a mundane example. Efficient cause head (lower left) says: “I’m going to walk that way”. Material body (lower right) responds: Walks foward into a muddy river bank. Karmic final-cause head (upper right) thinks: “What should one do when you are stuck in the mud on the bank of a river”. This enters a larger context in which there are more possibilities and emerges with the intentional, formal cause head (upper left) as: “Let’s think differently — get out of the mud”. Back to the efficient driver head (lower left) which thinks: “I’m going to walk the other way.” Something has been learned and there was karmic feedback. Suppose that everything happens this way, and that each one of these quadrants are equally real.
The paper has been submitted to the Journal of scientific Temper in India.
About John Kineman
Senior Research Scientist (Ph.D.) at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado,
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