From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Oct 06 2002 - 16:21:42 MDT
Charles Hixson wrote:
> On Sunday 06 October 2002 12:52, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
>>Charles Hixson wrote:
>>
>>>I'm thrown by the word "holonic". For many possible meanings, the
>>>assertion is true. I want to say obviously true, but what I mean it
>>>true due to analysis at the level of propositional calculus (mostly) ...
>>>it wasn't obvious at first or second reading, because it was complex.
>>>And without knowing the meaning of holonic, I can't decide whether it's a
>>>small subset or (possibly) an identity. I.e., it's unchunkable.
>>
>>Sorry. "Holonic" refers to the way in which a thing can be simultaneously
>>a whole composed of parts, and a part in a larger whole. Due to
>>Koestler's "The Ghost in the Machine".
>
> Mnh... That looks like it's true of everything short of (possibly) quarks and
> electrons. (I.e., the kind of thing that gets described as "elementary
> particles".) What does creating a word for it add?
Talking about the "holonic structure" of a process is a faster way of
referring to "the way in which the process has bottom-up structure in
which elements come together to form systems and top-down structure in
which systems can be decomposed into elements, depending on which
direction you're looking at it from". That this is true of a great many
processes does not make it an unimportant truth.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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