Blog of Collective Intelligence

... social holons are sentient holons; but they possess consciousness as intersubjective or distributed; there is no central subject of awareness. Groups have no subjective prehension or single agency, simply because their "parts" are members, not subservient elements. (There is, for example, a "group ego," but that ego is not a single entity that controls all the members in the group in the same way that my ego controls the voluntary movement of my arms. The group ego--or intersubjective consciousness, or cultural background, or Lower-Left quadrant--exerts its influence in more diffuse and subtle ways, creating a background or intersubjective space in which individual subjects and objects arise, but within which individual subjects are relatively free to move as they like. Put differently, the regnant nexi of individual and social holons are different in degree and in kind.)

Whole and Part --Social holons contain individual holons, artifacts, and heaps, but the individual holons are "parts" of a society, not as constituent elements of the whole, but as members of the whole. That is, for individual holons, "part" means ingredient or constituent element; but for social holons, "part" means member, co-partner, fellow, participant. The difference is obvious, but to spell it out: constituent elements have their agency subsumed by senior individual holons, but members retain a much larger degree of relative autonomy within the social holon. For example, when I raise my arm, 100% of the cells in my arm move upward. My will, as dominant monad, subsumes and overrides the will of the cells. When I move my arm, no cell can decide not to move with it. But there is no society where 100% of its members do exactly what the leader of the society says. Even in a powerful dictatorship, you can choose to disagree with the regime; you might get shot, but you can disagree. The reason is that social holons do not have a single dominant monad or regnant nexus (because they possess no single subject of consciousness, only an intersubjective distribution), and therefore the leader, ruler, king, president, or governing body has intrinsically limited powers. In fact, we generally condemn societies where one person or one ruling body attempts to dominate and control the society, because what that really means is that the controlling person is trying to treat the social holon as if it were an individual holon ... and the ruler its autocratic dominant monad ("L'etat, c'est moi"--"I am the State"--is the archetypal formula for totalitarian oppression, and that oppression comes precisely from treating social holons as if they were individual holons.)

Now that confusion of individual and social holons is quite common with systems theory and most forms of eco-theories. They construct their nested hierarchies by treating individual and social holons as if they were on the same ontological axis, with one being simply bigger than the other, failing to realize the significant ontological divide between them. Thus the typical eco/systems theory holarchy is: an atom is part of a molecule which is part of a cell which is part of an organism which is part of an ecosystem which is part of the biosphere which is part of the universe. Total nightmare.

The first half of that holarchy is of individual holons; the second half is of social holons. "Whole" and "part" mean something very different in both of them (namely, constituent element with its agency largely subsumed by the senior, versus member whose agency is a co-partner with other members in society). To make any individual holon--from a cell to a wolf to an ape to a human--a constituent "part" of a social holon is to make it merely a mindless cog in a machine that robs its of its relative autonomy. It is not only that this would be a morally reprehensible act, it is an ontological impossibility as well (although dictators--political or ecological--never cease trying).

Now social holons, from ecosystems to the State, for example, are indeed sentient holons, and as sentient holons, they have certain rights (all sentient wholes have agency and all agency has natural rights, just as all communions have natural responsibilities, and all sentient holons have both agency and communion, or both rights and responsibilities; see Brief History ). Among other things, the State has the right to curtail the rights of its individual holons or members, if those individual rights so threaten the welfare of other individual holons that it threatens the very existence of the State. And the State, by whatever name, is not a superfluous entity that we would do well without. All sentient holons have four quadrants, and the sociocultural quadrants (LL and LR), which include political dimensions, are unavoidable. What is avoidable is having the State exercise too many rights over individuals, on the one hand, or having individuals exercise so many individual rights that the communions and fabric of society come unraveled. How to draw this delicate line--between State right and individual right--is the ongoing saga of political action. But what we do not want to do, in any case, is confuse individual and social holons and treat them as the same type of entity (one being merely bigger than the other, instead of being different in kind), because that results in fascism (too much State or social agency) or communism (too much social communion), whether that be political fascism or eco-fascism, the latter resulting from treating individual holons as if they were only parts in the web-of-life, instead of members in extensive social holons.

Wilber's theory, no matter whether we agree with it or not, emphasizes the fact there must be different kinds of emergence whereas our natural tendency might be to put everything in the same basket.

For instance I recently asked myself whether a group of wise individual would emerge and act as a wise group. Or to put it in a more general frame, can a group benefit from the individual "social qualities" of its participants? My first reply was « yes », since we naturally advocate that if we want a group to have such or such quality, individuals need to get these qualities first. Then the second reply that came to my mind was: "maybe not", look at the nature of the water molecule, nothing in its structure and in its individual properties allow to anticipate the properties of water as a whole. Water's properties belong to another paradigm and today no one can really explain what happens in this meta-system transition. Shouldn't this dramatic shift occur the same way with a population of individuals? But wait, I am making here a confusion between individual and social holons as Wilber points it. In the social perspective, it is more likely that wise individual are wise because they have an awareness of the whole. This means there might be some sort of scale invariance that transcends the complexity levels. Compassion, wisdom, ethics seem to be about it. They are relational and multilevel, they exist because of a strong sense of "wholeness". From this perspective, YES, the individual and group properties are probably not that far, and we can have an influence on it.

On a more practical perspective, is it possible to envision emerging properties as the result of the mastering of these properties at an individual level? Do these properties have to be value-oriented? Will a group of wise individuals turn into a wise group or can it turn in a global mess with umpredictable side effects?