For distribution at *ICCS (NECSI) , September 1997, Nashua NH
Excerpted and adapted from: "Understanding the Integral Universe", "Integrity", and "Integrity: Getting Past Gödel",

*ICCS - 1st International Conference on Complex Systems

"Man might just do what the apes can't ... impose a reason for life ... on life."

Lorraine Hansbury

 

"FIRE WITHOUT, FIRE WITHIN"

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Being

"Cogito ergo sum" :: "I think, therefore I am"
Rene Descartes

Pretty words. An effort to distill the essence of Being into the fewest clearest words possible. I perceive my presence in the universe ... confirming and affirming

e x i s t e n c e.

But, "what" I am - whatever qualities and essences may or may not be expressed - requires that I "Be", before I can act out the characteristics of "what-ness", of "Being". And, what is "thought" and "thinking" and how much thought is necessary to qualify and admit to this thing we recognize as "am-ness"? Is one flicker of perception sufficient? Are several moments of self-organized self-consciousness necessary? Or thousands? Can one singular moment of recognition in the vast ocean of temporal oblivion be satisfactory? And even then, "am" in comparison to what else? To be, to think, to enact, requires not just my own (or any extant's) presence, but an environment of continuous consistent interaction. An environment that sends back information, that confirms and reinforces co-existence. If all of that ceases, "I" cease. And it makes no difference if the "I" disappears or the environment does ... the result is identical; existence truly being what the theologian Martin Buber called: the "I-Thou". Each "self" is incomplete without an "other"... force or sentience. Self-consciousness, self-organization alone is not sufficient to confirm "existence".

Imagine a universe that was totally empty except for a self-present cognizant YOU. Floating in a light-less sound-less empty nothing. Eyes opened, eyes closed, motionless or moving, you would exist in a total, vibrationless emptiness. Nothing you did would be discernibly different from anything else, because there would be no way to gauge anything. Your "lifespace" would be devoid of gravitational reference, of impulse, or of "experience".

What "usefulness" then would self-organization or self-consciousness serve? Exclusive of other "presences", it would serve no purpose. Therefore, we should be prompted to look carefully at all the situations where something responds to something-else. And that must include all possibilities. From the "responsiveness" of a human, to that of simpler organisms, even down to the "responsiveness" of subatomic particles; from nations responding to nations, to planet Earth's response to its moon, to Gaia's response to itself. Do life forms with less developed neural nets have a self-referenced ability to encounter and interact? Of course. Do particles and force fields encounter and interact? Absolutely. Self-organization and self-consciousness, in its broadest interpretation, is pertinent for all extants that endure in environments where encounters involve the maintenance and reinforcement of being. Holistic self-organization and self-consciousness is useful in situations where having it and embodying it makes a difference from not. And that infers all of existence where co-extancy and information access is the rule. This is the prime and most fundamental characteristic quality that is extancy.

What about a single celled animus like an amoeba or paramecium? Does it 'feel' itself? Does it sense the subtle variations in its shape as it bumps around in its liquid world? Does it somehow note changes in water pressure around it? Is it always "hungry"? What drives a single celled creature to eat? What "need", if any is fulfilled? Is it due to an internal pressure gradient in it's chemical metabolism? Is there a resilience to its boundary that not only determines its particular shape, whether amoebic or firm, but that variations in that boundary re-distribute pressures through its form to create a range of responsive actions? And, because it is coherent for that life form, is "this" primal consciousness? How far down into the structure of existence can we reasonably extrapolate this? An atom's electron cloud responds and interacts with its level of environment, but is this consciousness? We should not mystify all kinetic functions as different degrees of anthropomorphic consciousness. But, neither can we specify with any certainty a level where consciousness or self organization suddenly appears, where there was none before. In point of fact, there must be common pandemic behavioral dynamics involved, factors which flag the presence of self-organization. Characteristics present at the most fundamental levels which blossom into the extraordinary complexity and diversity exhibited by other levels of the universal hierarchy. Not novelly "emerge", necessarily, but rather "re-display" - using alternative mechanisms to enact identical relational behaviors.

In order to properly evaluate this phenomenon we necessarily have to consider dynamic "perception", an activity ascribable to all living creatures regardless of how advanced on the evolutionary scale. It is an absurd and egotistic thing to call non-human creatures "mindless". If anything, humans are only more complex "stimulus-response" beings (in the historical clinical sense). But, for "interaction ability" (the de-facto operational quality of perception) to exist on any given level of functioning, there have to be real precursors, foundational forms, and functions. We shouldn't be surprised to know that we can find these foundational qualities even as far down as atomic structure and the activities occurring there. Something exists even at those levels which displays the behavioral qualities on which our own behaviors are built. This is the stuff we are made of, can it be alien to us, or we to it? Not likely. Neither is it reasonable to rely on the continual emergence of novel qualities, relationships, or dynamics totally unconnected or "analogously" isolated from its foundations!!

Complexity and consciousness are combinatorial orchestrations melding internal and external relationships. It is the activities of the diverse organelles/components that a creature or extant has - the structural ability and sensitivity to recognize energetics/information events and the capacity to hold the information in useful form - that drives interdependency with all internal structures and external environments, enabling such systems to operate self-conservingly. Enabling it to deal with the universe around it and within it. All functional extants must have the constructive capacity to absorb and incorporate energy/information, both in rate and in quantity, that does not over stress overall homeostatic functioning. Key is "vulnerability", "sensitivity" and "capacity to process" whatever energies and information the environment can offer. That means any environment, at any level of being. To accommodate this notion, to build a practical concept of Complexity, our definitions need to change in order to include everything ... without exception. And so, we begin....

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Integrity : framing its meaning

We come into the world neither self made nor self designed. Neither do we bring with us specific cognitive knowledge. All that we "know" is acquired during our stay. Every encounter we have impacts our current Integrity and survival, which in turn foundationally impacts the potential Integrity and survival of our offspring and everything that they have the potential to encounter.

It is important that we remain cognizant that we are not only "in" the universe, we are part "of" it. We are concurrent with existence and all the ramifications of existence. We are not separate outsiders examining something that is alien and foreign. We are one of the spawns of Creation which can know that we are this Creation. So, when we look at Creation - the Universe - we are looking at ourselves, no matter what we explore or what we incorporatingly learn by intention or even encounter through chance.

So, where do we begin coordinating this massive amount of innate and acquired information, both pre-extant and potential? We start with the recognition that all existence requires a mutual compatibility in order not to destroy itself just by the mere interaction of its several parts.

"Am-ness", on whatever level you want to imagine, requires that an extant have the ability to continue and maintain coherency of its innate qualities by successful adjustment to potentially wide ranges of interactions. Up to whatever event might be beyond the skill or structural ability of the "am" to cope with. When we think on those kinds of extreme experience it doesn't matter whether we consider an atomic nucleus being stripped of it's surrounding electrons, a vase shattered by a hammer, an animal electrocuted by a high intensity fence, a corporation dismantled by creditors, a planet de-stabilized by tidal force interactions with its moon, a spiral galaxy deformed by collision with another spiral giant, or any similar situation you can think of. Persistence and continuity are the hallmarks of existence, no matter what techniques or processes accomplish it.

Second, and most critically, we must always invoke the assumption that everything that once existed, exists now, or can exist in the future ... must be valid. Every idea, every material extant, every relationship, every action, every thought, everything must have its place in the schema of a total holistic embrace. The most moral deed, the most heinous crime, the most inconsequential event, the most convoluted perception or point of view (whether accurate or not), the most apparent and the most subtle anything must have its place in the archive of being. Even what we take for granted ... the a priori's of existence ... things, relationships, etc that we cannot find anything more fundamental to explain their presence, must all blend into coherence. The new perspective must be able to describe all recognized "opposites", such as commutivity and non-commutivity, and treat them as co-existing simultaneously, explaining the conditional proprieties of why and where and how...a holistic paradigm of existence needs to be strong enough to embrace everything, even seemingly mutually exclusive dichotomies such as Abelian and non-Abelian systems, or Cantorian and non-Cantorian ones. This is not a paradox. Mutually exclusive events exist within broader environments which allow each and either and both to exist. It cannot be any other way.

A Unified Field Theory, a valid and complete Theory of Everything, cannot by condition exclude anything known to exist....even varieties of infinity, even Consciousness. Behaviors, events, conditions, relationships, things and non-things, material and immaterial ... if we cannot conceptually embrace it all then we fall short of what is possible.

"In the beginning.." (according to one cultural creation-image) was Conceptual Essence - word. An information. This notion is a very useful foundation for us, to help us cut across all the seeming differences we perceive in the universe, no matter how diverse things appear. The universe can be perceived as a vast exposition of Energy/Information and all events and dynamics are part and parcel of a holistic flux of information forms in constant transition, motion, transcription, translation, interaction - a dynamically thriving interplay.

Our challenge is to discover a way of translating all the diversity of terms and knowledge accumulated into a distillate: that characteristic of extancy, of behavior, of relationship which underscores them and unites them together. "Four Plane Universe Conundrum" (1973) and "Understanding the Integral Universe" (1992,1995) presented the notion of Integrity as a paradigm which can achieve that holistic embracing goal.

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Integrity: Defined

Integrity is everything as defined by conventional usage: it is the "quality of being complete; sound, unimpaired, whole". But, in fact, dynamically, it is more. It is persistence and presence in extended environments. Things or systems or organizations are integrally distinct in relation "with" and "to" the rest of existence. This implies that wholeness needs else in order to be determined, to be defined and in fact, to be truly complete. Boundary conditions determine separation and distinctiveness. But, a boundary is also a binder of co-presence, a blending link joining two or more domains and presences, even things on either side of a Gödel Boundary, which ostensibly separates known from unknown. This observation is valid for all things, whether physically real, conceptually perceived, or idealistically modeled in language and thought.

Integrity implies the presence of appropriate information interaction processes which can achieve that end. Regardless of form. Regardless of structure.

 

All existence is: Transactions of Information.
And all transactions of information are factors of holistic
self-organization & self-consciousness.

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Integrity: Its Scope

Integrity is the ability of an extant, whether atom, animal, metabolic loop, or cosmic star to participate in a range of interactions and still maintain a continuity of form or function or development. Integrity, as we are capable of recognizing it, must be broad enough to embrace such examples as : 1) Primal universal construct: a stable proton existing for the entire life of the universe, 2) Metamorphosis: a caterpillar which transfigures into a moth or butterfly (being a singular organic life form which undergoes drastic alterations of its structure in order to deal with different environments, or bio-metabolism, or need-objectives pertinent to its survival as a holistic organism), 3) Maturation: as an organism (such as ourselves) matures through several distinct states or forms of body structure (subtle nuances effecting profound changes) while remaining essentially "individual" and uniquely the same, and, 4) Evolution: that occurs as organisms and astronomically integral systems interact successfully to a wide variety of encounters on many levels...external environment, random fluctuations in bio-metabolism and genetic sequencing, internal plasma dynamics and quantum states, and so on, where a chain of regenerating creation can produce wholly different life forms or stellar constructs...while relying on an unbroken lineage of reproduction-that-permits- alterations. Integrity is kinetic stability. It is simultaneously content and process acting in relationship with extended environments and is a range of functional capacities, not a nodal locale (like homeostasis). It uses a blending of 2 mechanisms: insulation and opportunity.

Integrity is the quality of self-organization, impelled and acted out through the primary dynamic forces science has already identified, and even appears in the ones we are not quite sure how to explain - such as the "force" that motivates one person to work in concert with another. At the more complex levels we don't really talk about "forces" anymore (in the sense that physics describes them). Rather, we talk about: needs, concerns, social considerations, power, etc. In point of fact all these activities hover around the same singular ability of an organized form to maintain itself or not as it encounters the rest of existence.

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Shinn-yu: Time, Space, Experience

We are born as part of a universe of experience. Our form and our consciousness are comprised of the bits and pieces and forces of the most minute components of creation, and we have existed - as those components - through the most dynamic and titanic events that ever were, are, or will be. At the very least, we have existed through those moments and in those places that temperatures and physical densities were nearly infinite. Where the plasma-soup of energy-matter was so extreme, that what we are made of at this moment, was yet to exist because everything was so collapsed that there was no room - no environment - to exist in, in the form (atomic structuring) that we discern ourselves now to be. Yet even at that originating Shinn-yu Event* there existed interactions, relationships and dynamics . There were causes and effects. On such a coherent and consistent scale that everything that was about to be formed would do so, such that the structures being made would be the same - of the same family - throughout ALL of creation. A relative handful of types of 'things' would automatically come into being...throughout that infant universe...no matter where or when they formed. Because the rules...the relationship pre-conditions...were 'already' there...in the fabric of space/time/energy.

*[Shinn-yu is the Nippon ideogram indicating "motion" and is used as the prime word-root for a panorama of concepts including "advance", "retreat", "holding still" - words that in other languages are sometimes unconnected from each other. This Japanese ideate is a foundation which thematically joins any and all aspects of motion - functions relevant to space and time. And what is important about the BigBang? Not that it was a singular event, but that it seems to have been the event which initiated Time and Space as we know it. Therefore, I use the term Shinn-yu Event to keep cognizant its true importance, and to honor the conceptual insights of our ancestors when they created language.]

This, too, was experience. Every extant present at that occasion affected and responded to an environmental panorama which it was part and parcel of. A dynamic inter-linked flow of energy, information, and experience.

To be very clear about this, the universe must necessarily be made of forces and particles that by their very dynamics are already the precursors to life. Particles, atoms, etc, are already self-containing functioning units that do nothing else except maintain their form/functions while constantly encountering forces/objects in their environment. The power and fire of life grows from within. The universe is organized so that life is a natural extension of non-life. It flows from the least of existence and expresses itself in all the forms and levels attainable. It is the slow and steady build up of complexity and history. And it is the daily expression that each regenerating form displays in its activities from moment to moment. Individuals or species or supernovas. We are all "creation". All our behaviors, our belief structures, our social institutions, our survival skills, our interpersonal actions, our transcendental concepts, all of this and more ... exist and are made up of all we have come to understand about the primal extants in the universe. We are what we are made of and more. Principally, whatever the quarks and strange matter are, that is what we are too. Our behaviors are necessarily derived from that level of existence. All our somatic biology and all our Spiritual cognitions.

If no other cognition guides our mentality, we must never lose sight of the fact that the great enormity of behaviors in the universe bespeak a fundamental "sameness" that permits the comfortable co-existence of all of these things in one location, the Universe, in the first place. An underlying "compatibility" is required. The search for it is what humanity is partially embarked on as part of "what we do" in the world. The search for it ... is the purpose of these writings.

We begin at the beginning: Shinn-yu. First: nothing. Then: extraordinary something. Then: moderate most everything (in very simple forms)...sub-atomic particles, atomic particles...etc., in random combinations. Afterwards, as cooling continued and space provided "elbow room", the Universe became the place we know of today. The option space becoming relatively reduced and clarified.

Beyond the extremes of "no interaction" and "too much interaction" there developed the middle latitude of existence, where stable dynamic continuance of forms is the hallmark of "being". Whether it is on the scale of nano-seconds for subatomic particles, or cosmic millennia for the galaxies, or minutes, hours, days, years, centuries, and eons, for biological and geological forms...there is always a duration of dynamic stability.

This "dynamic stability" is a phenomena relevant to everything that exists. It is the one pandemic concept of universal functioning that embraces all the mathematics, all the energetics, all the behavioral patternings, all the singularly distinct components, all the intricately interconnected processes, all ideas, beliefs and perceptions. All constants, regimens and gradients. All transferences and transmissions. All relevance and relativity and mechanics...both quantum and celestial.

Integrity dynamics refers to this universally applicable process of "dynamic stability". Each field of study may have it's own terminology for this activity, but they are all essentially the same function, merely considered apropos to each focus of discussion. Quantum plateaus, homeostasis, international balance of trade, econiches, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (an action produces an "equal" re-action), dynamic equilibrium, steady-states, stable social order, are some of the terms used.

A very special perspective must predominate here. It is that successful survival is a result of no one singular distinct process. Relevant to how a thing or organism is made, the integral continuation of its being is the result of how that construction can behave in regard to a vast spectrum of forces, affects and relationships. An orchestration of actions and reactions dealing with not only the Integrity of the organism itself, but with the Integrity of all its sub-processing parts with itself ... and itself as a nested part of the larger populations or environments which it is a member of. That is, we can recognize Integrity processes relative to quarks, then of neutrons protons and electrons, then of atoms, then of molecules, then of molecular process cycles, then of cells, then of cellular aggregations, then of organisms, then of biological familial groupings, then of social groups or even economic interactions. Likewise, under alternate energy circumstances, we can imagine quantities and temperature situations where the Integrity sequence extends from sub-atomic to atomic to the panorama of cosmic forms...galaxies, black holes, stars and comets et al.

We need to keep all of this in mind, and more. We must be diligently aware that "environment" cannot be limited to those things that are only external to some nebulously defined boundary called "integral entity". Behavior and Integrity and survival require a latitude of activities that relate to internal and external phenomena in order to assure continuation of being, each level having its own "internal" and its own "external". Each level having or not an immediate affect on the levels nested on either side of its Integrity bound, but always having the potential to inter-affect each other through present pathways of energy and information exchange. Always present and always active. Each working in regards to its own stability, and yet, interdependently affecting the dynamic stabilities of everything else.

Something is going on here. Something as powerful as the 4 fundamental forces which we have observed. A comparable dynamic of some sort that works in concert with them. It maybe as simple as some factor of how those forces already function, a factor they already have in common, which we may already be familiar with. It may be an aspect totally new. At the very least we can start defining Integrity according to the idea of "range" which this discussion opened with: the capacity to interact poised predominantly between too little information/energy and too much information/energy.

In the sense that information retention/processing/utilization is a function of energy/information translation/coding, then human perceptions and concepts and models and language are part and parcel of the dynamics of the whole universe...ALL its activities. Most importantly, language and thought are not 'mirrors' of a separate external reality, but an extension of it. Eventually, the incorporation of information is so instantaneous that familiarity is equatable with identity. Concurrently, we must also redefine "memory". Present usage restricts it some sort of data storage; information distinct from the holding system which utilizes it. That is no longer a viable or correct perception. Memory is also the innately embodied rules-of-behavior. It is the Function Rules intrinsic within being, which encounter and operate on the data, and which together - intrinsic and acquired memory - enact behaviors. First comes the memory called Laws of Nature. Next comes the memory called data. Together they produce and enact self-organized interactional extancy.

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Surpassing Gödel - the new mindset, new definitions

To broach the restrictive Gödel Incompleteness barrier I propose the BRIDGING-PARADIGM. It is a fundamental relational premise that audaciously connects the known with the unknown. It let's us speak confidently about what we may not have any knowledge of...yet(!)...and gets us past the boundary that Gödel so rigorously tried to buttress. The fundamental characteristic of "existence' is uniformity, coherence, consistency; the primal ability to interact & function. Nothing....absolutely nothing...."exists" in isolation. Energy, location, information, consciousness, perception, awareness, identity, innateness, self-ness ...... none of these activities or concepts have any meaning, purpose or relevance without co-extancy through which they are "active-ated" ("motive-ated") ("predicated") .... dynamically or kinetically referable.

To wit: systems may have "bounds", but those bounds are fundamentally arbitrary, malleable, and never formal. The pre-eminent dynamic is that once "operations" or "functions" are designedly acknowledged and fixed, those processes will be applicable in and along any place or time of the domain continuums, whether those locations, times or states have been encountered yet or not.

The Primal A Priori of function, in an energetic Universe, is: Processes have a normality of function beyond any "nominative" boundary limits. That is, Perpetual Interaction Capability (aka "potential") is fundamentally a "relation to performance on the far-side of any boundary of knowledge, energy event and information". It is a "guarantee of performance". Once a function or activity is recognized the behaviors will be exactly the same, no matter where or when they recur in space or time. Existential compatibility must exist on the far side of any and all Gödel Limits. Which means: we know something about the "unknown".

We may not yet have the specific knowledge (whatever energy or information it embodies) that exists outside of the information set we have at this moment, but just the fact that such things will be compatible with the world as we experience it, gives us information about the characteristics of extancy in total. We can reasonably talk about a quality of extancy which resides "beyond" our reach. It is not an ignominious blackness over there and Gödel is not the "final Word".

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Objectivity vs. Subjectivity: The new distinctions

In a very real sense, we can now specify a clearer definition of "objective" and "subjective" phenomena. "Subjectivity" is the result of physical energetic individuation. That is, the mere presence of separate and distinct extants. "Objectivity" resides prior to that, as a necessarily required foundation from which "subjectivity" arises. Thus, "Objectivity" is not extancy, in and of itself. "Objectivity" is a dynamic. It is another way of naming the pre-requisite of function. It is the relationship of kinetic activities, of informational correspondence, and not the actual quantae. "Objectivity" resides in the "event-occurrence" process rather than in the participants of the event.

We can arrive at an appreciation of "objectivity" only asymptotically. The "objectivity" of existence can only be appreciated as we (or any extants) are engaged in its constant "expression", through "subjectively" individual encounters. Constantly engaging in "subjective" and "relativistic" activities is the only window we have for recognizing the totally continuous and persistent objective nature of Existence to {predicate term} exhibit those various behaviors....invariably. Phenomenological cognitions.....after events....pointing to the "objective" primacy of behavior.

 

The "Objectivity" of interaction/experience is in the universality of the dynamics, the rules-of-action. The "Subjectivity" of interaction/experience is in, or due to, the specific local participants and examples.

 

In scientific experimentation or any other activity where "repeatability" is the primary criteria, the only "things" that can ever be repeated are the processes and relationships (the intangible dynamics). No event can ever be constructively repeated, because the exact initial participants are temporally and entropically impossible to reorder.

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Nested Entropies - Complexity's principle dynamic

Integrity works using all the fundamental forces as mechanisms - all under the aegis of general and localizable entropy functions. Holism requires a pervasive and unflagging openness of functioning - the ability to coordinately and smoothly interact in consistent ways (even if energetically violent). The pre-requisite for holocoherent functioning is perpetual interaction capability of all things in the universe. And the process of Entropy can be discerned and defined as operating in appropriately definable "small-fields", and can account for negentropic building of complexity by establishing domains proper to the range of energetics going on.

Entropy is not a monolithic function. Not only can it operate in separately concurrent domains separated by determinable boundaries, entropy can also be treated as self-functionally relevant partial differentials. That is, several "entropies" (plural) affect and therefore effect the behavior of any given holistically bound system. Entropy is a function not restricted to "energy" but is applicable to a variety of variables. It may in fact be an assignable quality of each fluencial (dimensional) vector, and therefore, to every separate factor at the tensor/metric levels.

The simplest example of non-fractal Complexity formation is something we are all familiar with, the game of "catch". Imagine you and a friend have a ball. The one restraining rule is that the ball must always be in direct or impending control of one of you. That is, firmly held, or, on a trajectory towards being held. You start by yourself. You toss the ball into the air. You juggle it between hands. Sometimes if you throw a little harder and away, and you have to run under it and catch it before it hits the ground. Now imagine that your position is fixed, but we evaluate all the possible locations for where the ball could have existed around you while you were actively tossing it around. It is possible to define a region around yourself that the ball existed in under those original conditions. We can define a value for that region and call it entropy_ball . We can equally consider where you and your friend can roam to around a playing field, and assign that rather large freedom of distribution space the value Entropy_players. Now you call your friend to come closer, so that you can throw the ball to each other, without having it drop. Something fascinating and fundamental occurs. The relative entropy of the ball increases while, in order to maintain the game, the relative entropy of you and your friend - compared to your original degrees-of-freedom - decreases! Sub-sets which undergo changes in degrees-of-freedom can inversely affect the degrees-of-freedom of the next mechanistic level or order of existence, which level is intimately connected with determining the behavior-space of the sub-system. The statistics of such events do not cause the behavior, but they are useful for noting, tracking and verifying the behavioral relationships.

Nested interactive local entropies. Representing nested Cantorian infinities. Nested domains. Nested hierarchic levels, where energy and information is coded and communicated inter-level, not just intra-level. N agents, acting out N+ probabilities of communication of components among them, produce/enact/become a complex self-organized negentropic system. Fundamentally statistical and non-fractal. This notion does not negate or invalidate Fractal Complexity. It is merely its more pervasive and formidable sibling.

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Integrity: Non-Isolation

The Integrity Paradigm relies on this fundamental notion, that the universe consists of many nested layers of local entropies. They have functional boundaries which distinguish yet interrelate. That is, they can be treated independently even while they are open enough to affect each other and transmit information through their respective levels, because they share parameters in adjacent sets. The four fundamental forces of nature plus entropy create the activities we observe and affect each layer. The important notion is that though we can distinguish things and components and relationships from other things, in the final analysis, nothing exists totally independent of anything else. This means that all so-called "closed" sets are conditional exclusions of broader and larger environments. We can always co-discuss regions internal to and external to the conditional boundaries. There are always internal and external environments. These environments must be accounted for in the analog language we call Mathematics. Any representative formula has a relationship to the environment it exists in and to any and all other representative formulae for anything else that exists. The Integrity Paradigm looks to adjust Mathematics to account for and explain how the information of any one formula relates to any other, by altering and improving some mathematical grammar and definitions, thus showing topological mapping (analog correspondence) with the relational dynamics of information flow in the universe.

A principle functional characteristic of Integrity is that entropy gradients are reversed for each adjacent layer. At times they may be synchronized but for the most part are distinct if not the reverse of each other. This effect is due to localized entropy gradients pertinent to each layer. The interface is compatible thermodynamics. Each interface between layers is a phasespace where a particle or material body can increase its relative entropy either by increasing or by decreasing its region of functioning. This option state is the interface window between the nested layers. The only restriction is that the particle or material body must stay available to crossing the boundary. A particle which leaves the region by condition of its non-spin angular momentum being unrestrictedly brought to zero (by flying off linearly into undefined space; thereby going to its maximum entropy state) can no longer participate and therefore plays no role in residual entropy or behavior. Complexity is a result of localized (versus generic) entropies interacting at a mutual boundary.

To deal with this paradigm of existence we must redesign our mathematics system to account for and describe these relationships. This means that we have to determine how information is transferred and translated between levels. We can talk about the wave functions of atomic particles and photons, or, about the waves in the ocean, or, about radio transmissions, or, about economic cycles, or microtubules .. but we must find a way of getting from one level to another in a smooth continuum. We must redefine set theory as a progression of environments. We must show not just that a number line is useful in counting star systems as well as molar quantities of chemical molecules in a container, but how those two different counts are related to each other. The infinity of chemical compounds relates to the infinity of stellar bodies in some important fundamental and transcendental way. And so do their behaviors. We must be able to trace and relate them with each other.

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Complexity: Information Accessability

This means that the information of one level or environment must at least be transcribable if not immediately pertinent to another. Interlaced boundaries will define pertinence. And, the relative frames-of-reference can serve as benchmarks that enable presences and non-presences that can be accounted for at the same time under a single paradigm. The holistic dynamic processes can even be appreciated as consciousness, existing in varieties of form. This compounded-complexity relies on notions related to information-systems. Self-organized systems must be informationally open and sensitive to all internal component structures and behaviors, as well as substantially external information. In vernacular, any lack of access to information - whether self or else - is a reduction of behavior space, is tantamount to "numbing", and diminishes self-organization. For example, systems in which structural form can endure totally independent of the secondary information or energy it carries - like the architecture of current computers - are in effect isolated in their behavior space. They are essentially holistically unconscious , being only site-affected by state changes. There is no global reverberation of events. There is no integrated cascade of energy or information through the organization, vertical or horizontal. And that vertical trans-level flow is required for self-organizational competency. The universe uses entropy to achieve this requisite inter-level coordination. It uses local malleable-boundary entropies with competitive gradients - variously synchronized together, and, in opposition.

There is no one singular "entropy" at work. There is an orchestration of entropies which are inverted or reversed in their comparative gradients. When atoms coalesce and combine, several partial-differential components increase their locally bounded "entropies". The conclusion here is that, depending on the component or specific bounded region which might be under evaluation (co-referencing other relevant bounded regions or partial derivatives...as blends comprising a "mutual environment") it is eminently reasonable to have several "entropies" at work simultaneously. They can even function counter to each other, while having an affect on the net behavior of the systems. An entropic change in one component can effect a negentropic change in another component, and vice versa. It is on this foundation that complexity arises in the universe.   It is the "many-bodied" problem compoundly self-integrated.   Each "entropy" has  its own range of behavioral 'best-competence'.  And each -- struggling to stay competent and viable -- adjusts and is adjusted by its interdependent companion entropies.

Combining the notions of Integrity with simultaneous-plural-entropies having independently interactive gradients permits us an understanding of behaviors which are at one moment in compliance with our current concepts, yet also may run counter to our traditional intuition about things. It gives us a new framework for perceiving that a single activity can simultaneously embody constructive and destructive characteristics; or other types of opposites, because the defining context of an action is as equally crucial as an event itself, where we may or may not have complete information about the contexts involved, and, where we may or may not appreciate the diverse simultaneous impacts that are flavored or prioritized by the possible panorama of those contexts.

For example, when we see an activity where something appears to be spreading out and dispersing, we may in fact be seeing an activity that is simultaneously bringing things together and congealing them. If two people walking freely around a room with their arms gently swinging close by their sides then find themselves near enough to each other so that by spreading their arms away from their own bodies to reach around and embrace the other person they can join in a hug, then we can say that their individual actions of moving their arms away dispersingly from the normal position is, in the larger frame of reference, a gathering together of the 2 individuals who had been freely moving around the room. If we focus discussion on what the arms alone were doing, they were de-localizing and spreading out. If we focus on the people, they were clustering. The first behavior is entropic. The second is neg-entropic. Current scientific methodology treats the cases separately. That is not be the best way of doing things. A synergy and simultaneity is at work here, because a single activity is more potently interconnected with the rest of existence than simple evaluations might show us.

Endurance, survival, etc, are not issues of "isolation". It is not boot-strap behavior, who's sufficiency rests in "emergent qualities" - discovering what was nascent "within". They depend upon option-space ... to be able to process energy or information in many as-yet unencountered ways. As Shannon indicated, the more intricate and interlaced a system is, the more likely it is to be able to cope with and process a wider range of information. Complexity increases in concert with integrated information capacity ... reliance on the ability to deal with the unknown. That, in fact, is the true measure of fitness, not strength, or the ability to retain structure, or anything else.     Fitness is not a numerical measure.  Fitness is the ability to handle information/energy - and adapt to new information/energy - if qualified to do so.

To open ourselves to the awareness of these ideas - to the broadest extent attainable - means we have to look into all possible sources of knowledge (ones we familiarly know and even ones which are so much an ingrained part of us that we might inadvertently take them for granted). We have to co-explore not only what we are observing but also how we are making such observations, such as the transmission and incorporation of ideas via language. Because it is eminently probable that language and other information processes are constrained and channeled by this universal dynamic, whether the linkage is by way of our biochemistry, our biology, our social interaction, or the physics of the atoms we are made of.

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B. Whorf: The Human Face of Complexity

The Linguist, Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941) discovered so many differences in a spectrum of world wide languages where the conceptual links and forms were at odds with what Western-Europeans had thought were "universal", that he deduced that language ... as each person is born into a very specific culture with a very specific pre-existing language environment ... is the most formidable molder of how people think. Literally: we learn "how" to think, relying on the words, symbols and conceptual assignments which were created before us. We experience the real and we experience the symbolic. But, no matter what, we always experience.

It was his belief (and the perspective I champion) that we incorporate experience which then re-emerges as language, and after that, "language" exists as part of the experiential environment! We "experience" our own thoughts and words even at the very instant that we are "creating" them. Experience creates language which reintegrates as experience, creating more ideas, more connections, more language, which makes more experience, and so on. This extraordinary repertoire, this recognition, can open up infinite horizons for us. At the core of our language and thought are the experiences which evoked them. We can re-evaluate mathematics, psychology, sociology, economics, physics, biochemistry and a mélange of interconnected subjects in new ways, looking behind terminology, behind language and grammar, to recognize the processes that other original investigators saw and had created new words to label and describe. We can discuss how those labels and descriptions might have over simplified and rigidified what we have come to appreciate about these phenomena. Impressively organized within each subject category, yet deficient in exploring or expressing the overwhelming similarities between and among them en mass. We can expound on and enlarge what Whorf started, and show the true extent to which all this is expressed in human-universal behavior, Buber's I-Thou Universe.

To quote briefly from his writings:

... "When linguists became able to examine critically and scientifically a large number of languages of widely different patterns, their base of reference was expanded; they experienced an interruption of phenomena hitherto held universal, and a whole new order of significances came into their ken. It was found that the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but ... is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual's mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade." ...

... "This fact is very significant for modern science, for it means that no individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation even while he thinks himself most free. The person most nearly free in such respects would be ... familiar with very many widely different ... systems. ... We are thus introduced to a new principle of "relativity", which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in someway be calibrated."

I highlight the above remark and especially Whorf's off handed closing phrase because it is the single most crucial concept Whorf shares with us. What he probably saw as simply a technique for evaluating languages and ideas together is moreover the fundamental key for appreciating the reality of holism. Things can only be calibrated vis a vis each other if there is some pre-extant quality that permits information encounters and translation, that enables relational possibilities to even occur. That is, ideas can be cross topically translated because of an underlying mutuality that strongly links the events, the analogues, the terms!

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We are the Universe

I challenge you now to think about things in a slightly different way, from a slightly different perspective than what you are used to. Allow yourself to look at, re-view and re-examine familiar ideas, perceptions, events, understandings and belief cognitions in possibly new ways.

"We are the Universe, seeing itself and understanding itself". As simple as that. We are fortunate enough to be one of the sentient portions of the Universe that can examine, understand and appreciate the rest of our co-existence.   When we focus our attention on any portion of experience, we see qualities embodied even within us, and vice versa.  We are the special piece of creation that "knows" the rest of it. We are part of the mind of the Universe ... a universe exploring its own existence. The challenge is to discover the machinations of how all this grandeur is connected.

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  THE INTEGRITY PAPERS  (LINKS TO CEPTUAL READINGS)

                         GENRE WORKS (OTHER WRITERS)
            POETICS
             MINDWAYS (LINKS TO GLOBAL THINKERS)
                
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