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A unifying overview towards a
Natural Philosophy of Wholeness ?
by
Heiner Benking
There is much argument over whether one particular "map" or view of the world is correct over all the others. It would appear that it is this argument which is wrong, as there are many ways to see things, from different angles and from different perspectives. The point is to have a simple coherent and practical model, which truly makes sense and can be utilized adaptively. The main issue is to go beyond -- and connectively among -- the isolated models and coordinate them together, see the whole construction, and learn from being part of it all ... individual while yet linked everywhere.
Fig 1. Beyond the Battle of Perspectives
A remedy for the problem given above may be to provide orientation within a Panorama of Understanding . Designed in the following three modules it allows integral thinking and coalescence of different aspects, facets, and views:
1. The definition and concept of Ecology to visually and conceptually integrate and interact along and across hierarchical scales (like the subjects axis, and magnitude and time scales), to present proportions and consequences and allow indication and communication about the interconnectedness of Nature. This building block is called: Blackbox Nature or Rubik s Cube of Ecology and was developed 1990 for the German Chancellery to exhibit GLOBAL CHANGE - Challenges to Science and Politics (presently up-dated). The Cube combines high resolution art work and scientific visualizations to show selected windows or frames into the precious scale-transcending germ we call Nature. With many windows left blank or black we are to realize our limited understanding, our only intuitive approach to beauty and harmony we find in Nature, and why decency and cautioning any action is recommended.
As black-box is a term which typically used in engineering to approach a subject as a whole, taking as a first preliminary step the details not into question, we feel it is indicated to not only say that the box could also be called a 'white open space'. But as the box is physically a black box exponent and does not allow to look inside, with the intention to make us curious, widen our attention and make us humble the more we gaze and as the term blackbox was used in the intended sense of an INNOVATIVE SOCIETAL LEARNING tool and concept in an early Club of Rome report as follows: "Innovative societal learning seeks to restore active learning to those in society conventionally confined to a passive role of assimilation. Key to this goal is participation that goes beyond mere invitations to accept given products. To encourage innovative societal learning, true participation must enable people to open and inspect the "black-boxes" of knowledge, to question their relevance and meaning, and to re-design, re-combine, and re-order them where necessary. Effective participation therefore does not mean paying lip service to those who in the past have been deemed to count less than others, but rather ensuring a real contribution of the entire society". ("A Report to the Club of Rome") No Limits to Learning; bridging the human gap, James W Botkin, Mahdi Elmandjra, Mircea Malitza, (pp 80-81) Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1979
Fig. 2: The Blackbox Nature or Rubik's Cube of Ecology.
Bridging and composing subjects, magnitudes, and time frames is the challenge of ecology
and will ease understanding and caution us by making us aware about how little we know.
The open box, bridging beyond boxes and domains, presents an implicate higher order which
allows us to map patterns, processes and dynamics by providing a pointer or global index
by a top-down approach. The Box and Panorama display wholeness and interconnectedness and
allow us to point at and store relations, scales, proportions and consequences in a
repeatable format. Bridging disciplines and other hierarchical scales and interacting
along and across scales is required for people studying the multi-disciplinary field of
ecology. This is necessary as day-to-day, scientific and political discourses are mixed
up. This general concept not only applies to ecology, but also to the exchange of
information between different disciplines.
2. Integrate what we know and focus on what we do not know in one framework or picture. As this framework needs to be deeply structured within a higher order, (similar to implicate orders), we propose the following set of three connected nested scaffoldings, which form one conceptual superstructure and leave time as a dimension ruling all master reference schemes.
2.1 The land-scape as the native and basic space for human experience and
understanding, for panning and zooming, using telescopic approaches to scapes (deep
structured spaces). As optics and ethics are etymologically grounded we see approaches
from varying distance in any environment as a way to clarify and enlighten structures and
patterns. (The resulting understanding and transparence through means like lenses, the
"characteristica universalis" by Leibnitz, or computing in modern times was
always exciting and considered mystic as long as people could not see and follow what was
going on). - Scape is a term we use to indicate deep structured spaces.
Fig 3: The different forms of imaginary Black boxes show conceptual theme-scape or issue-scape. The original subject axis of the Cube was based on the Ekistic grid, as conceived by Doxiadis in the field of planning sciences. Ekistics is also derived from term oikos (Greek base for ecology). We can search not only for words, but for areas or bodies of data and knowledge if we consider word as fields as Jan Smuts, the founder of the concepts of Holism, proposed. So if we embody concepts, we can the an overlying of of concepts, meanings located in different domains and as spheres broader and narrower reach of word in certain disciplines. There is a highly debated concept in the filed of linguistics which proposes to put words into space. In such a way we can imagine space between words, as Aldous Huxley wrote... After agreement on location and content of words, like core or peripheral meaning, genuine capabilities of man can come into play which allow fast visual access and assimilation of very large volumes of data.
It should be noted that children accept the concept easily and are ready for new
conceptual or abstract understanding at about ten years of age. They then can focus
conceptually beyond the immediate environment into abstract or virtual contexts. Before
the age of ten, their thing is to experience space, motion and time physically and
conceptually. After ten years of age they can float in abstract realms (fantasia) and
sometimes have good command of imagination (eidetic). Children liked the framework as a
way to explain teachers and parents what is going on and that the 'View-of-Life' they
learn at schools is 'too flat'. Children have reported and written that at a Children
Communication Camp, where they were introduce to the concept of the blackbox model after
interviewing all futurists of the world about what the elder have in store for the futures
of the younger generations. As the concept of models is very central in this article, a
citation from a scholarly book on models will follow to support the experience with
children and some conclusions the author has drawn in his work over the last years.
Excerpt from: Models in Science Education, George Marx and Esther Tóth, In: Models of
Reality - Shaping Thoughts and Action, Lomond Books in cooperation with UNESCO 1984 (eds:
Jacques Richardson) After the first chapter Man and his Models starting with Man is a
model making animal. .. His outstanding predictive power gives him selective advantages
over his physically stronger rivals... starts the second chapter: Models in Schools with:
According to Piaget, the school-aged children think in a concrete operational way.
If the teacher refutes one of two alternatives, his pupils will not accept the other until
they can visualize it much as a motion picture. What they imagine, they would also like to
catch , to build and to take apart. Abstract logic matures in them only at the end of the
secondary school.
Fig. 4: The scale-platforms to harmonize environmental
information and find logical 'meeting places' between scales were produced by the
author for UNEP, the United Nations Environmental Programme HEM - Harmonisation of
Environmental Measurement office. The 'flying' magnifying glass - Environmental Protection
with the Eagles Eye in the German 'Scientific American' magazine: (Bild der Wissenschaft -
Fliegende Lupe - Umweltschutz mit Adlerblick are further exhibition pieces of the GLOBAL
CHANGE exhibition and were developed by the author to show epochal change and how we can
map ecological dynamics. As the human apparatus has no 'ecological feeling for time scales
(Gregory Bateson) (high-dimension of the cube) and no 'antenna' for scale-platforms (depth
dimension of the cube) and how these scales interaction, it was indicated to embody this
dimensions in an artificial situation or issue space, a space-scape with a nested higher
order. The key benefit is the possibility to move around the 'box' and share views and
relations and even point at such abstract and complex situations which can typically not
be outlined and combined. The background of the approach for selective exploration with
high resolution cameras and sensors (flying magnifying glass) was called by the author
TOPOGRAMM, a chain of methods to combine data acquisition and management. The picture is
taken from an article in GEO-ÖKÖ-DYNAMIC X,2/3- 1989, an article presented at the first
International Geo-ecological/Geo-morphologic Congress with the title: Large Scale
Biomonitoring for Renaturation. More details and publications are available on request.
Fig 5: Any subject can be explored in a holistic design with varying depth and flexible theme compositions. The flexible and nested crystal cell framework for understanding and orientation presents locations and relations and can display life-cycles and enfolded episodic and epochal change. In this new realm we can jointly discuss proportions and consequences with 'new eyes' and more importantly have a combination of three holarchies, or three hierarchical scales in one picture, as SPACE three dimension which help us to overcome heretical (one-dimensional) tree structures or for the human mind hard to follow and understand complex network structures.
2.2 The word-scape or term-/theme-scape (semantic space) based on samples used in universal library organization systems. One such scheme or global index is based on the square lambda, which is more suitable than spherical representations for this purpose, and is called the Information Coding and Classification (ICCa) by Ingetraut Dahlberg from the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO). The matrix of global subjects and general form concepts, and a depth dimension (specific facets or categories) is a semantic exploratory navigation space, based on harmonic principles, enabling storage without redundancies as well as access and permutations within underlying structures and patterns.
3. Navigation and Orientation in the three realms or conceptual spaces, including cut and paste operations allow overarching retrieval, correlations and configurations beyond narrow category definitions, semantic hurdles, and cultural stipulations.
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