Composition as a foundation for Holon
Material Meaning: Composing the Collective
Collective cognition at Holon is about preserving meaning as relationships are established, and the structures that are formed as things come together. As the process of relating things together unfolds it is tempting to define the combined structure of relationships as a new individual, for which it is possible to ascribe a function or objective. An example of this would be cement, steel, wood and ceramics coming together to form a building; or letters and numbers combining into a computer algorithm.
We at Holon think that in order to allow for a true collective system to exist without collapsing into a new individual, the following two conditions have to be present:
No collective objective -Collective systems shall renounce any collective objective in order to make space for individual objectives to harmonize with each other.
Composition - The only function of a Holon intervention is to increase the compositionality of the nodes and system they form.
Part two - composition
Part one is about the tendency to think that as relationships are formed a new whole individual emerges and the importance of resisting this tendency in order for harmonious collectiveness to emerge and thrive. For now, however, we will start from part two, by describing why composition is also a critical condition to the emergence of collectiveness and harmonious cognition.
The bottom line is that compositionality brings into material awareness all the relationships that an entity, or node has within a system or network. To bring into awareness is to be able to realize the experience that everything is eventually interconnected.
We are aware of the implications and connotations of stating that everything is eventually interconnected. From the perspective of most engineers and managers this would be impractical, useless and esoteric, as in order to build stuff and manage them we have to limit their existence and scope within a boundary that is defined and understandable. What is inside the boundary is supposed to be the individual system that is in scope for the project or decision, and what is outside is the context or environment.
From another perspective, stating that everything is connected is just saying the obvious, as we all are interconnected in indirect ways by at least several degrees of separation.
Some people who study systems, like Derek Cabrera, or Laura Cabrera, from Cornell University, argue that stating that everything is connected is one of the biggest mistakes of the “sacred cows” of systems thinking, and that actually acknowledging that some things are not connected can derive value in analyzing what is actually not connected in a system as a way to understand better the structure and behavior of a system. The same school of thought also considers that “context is lazy” as it reflects negligence from the system thinker to incorporate within the system the things that influence its behavior. If context was important then it would be incorporated into the model and not just left aside as an influencer to the system.
The analytical paradox that comes from stating that everything is interconnected comes from two challenges: first, the fact that the representation required to reason about such system quickly becomes analytically overwhelming, as our minds and computational technology are simply not capable of processing the infinite meaning of that idea; and second, that complex systems are not necessarily centrally controlled but governed by the interdependency of many agents, which makes the effort of influencing its behavior by “understanding it better” futile as “understanding” is a collective endeavor not centrally executed or managed.
Holon’s philosophical departure from the discipline of Systems Thinking is that for us is not just about thinking, as relating to complex systems is not just an analytical effort but a phenomenological one.
The reason why we think this way is that the more we think about complex biological systems, the more we see the limitations of language, sensors, and processing. There are experiences we have as humans where no conversion is happening from the material world to the information world. When sunlight touches our skin, the body doesn't convert the experience into 0s and 1s and then transmit information to our brains. These are experiences we can’t represent as information. Something more direct and more profound is happening.
Information theory was not designed to account for the variety of material resources that form collectives. A truly collective cognitive system, like a garden, should combine the materiality of “bodies” that allow constituent entities to make their way through complex networks. By accounting for embodied cognitive tools, collective computers can connect phenomena, experiences and meaning that arise from sources beyond the human mind.
Biological organisms are known for combining multiple phenomena to relate to the world around them. They leverage material, biochemical processes that transcend human thought as an abstract information system. As these distributed assemblies of senses and neurobiological processes come together, the collective behavior is described by synchronization or temporal coherence mechanisms. These mechanisms ensure coherence of the collective that emerges and have been observed in varied experimental examples like metronomes synchronized by balancing forces.
Examples of technologies pursuing multi-phenomena ways of interacting with computers can be found in the Multi-Sensory Devices (MSD) group at University College London led by Professor Sriram Subramanian, the MIT Media Lab and many others. This points to a new architecture for collective computing based on the composition of phenomena and experiences as opposed to silicon-based processors and digitized bits of information that originate from human thinking (i.e., from the mind).
Researcher Irida Altman discusses combining multiple forms of knowledge delivery (e.g., visual, auditory, textual, haptic, etc.) in order to present multi-sensorial communications that are more effective. Our vision of the collective computer is informed by the idea that it is equally possible to achieve a collective harmonious experience of phenomena in this multi-channel way. Rather than trying to perfect the transmission of experience and meaning through a single delivery channel, we are capable of creating mechanisms that combine multiple experiences and phenomena to convey meaning.
New interactive physical channels to compose meaning allows entities of the collective computer to adapt and explicitly navigate the network structure of interactions. Using awareness to embrace experience is an emergent path in the cognitive sciences, replacing the current practice of reduction or compression of meaning through conversion into mere information or data. The advent of embodied cognition and the growing prominence of complex systems means that simple and reductionist approaches are no longer useful.
The response to the paradox that comes from believing that everything is interconnected could sometimes be nihilism, as it is despairing to face the complexity of reality and our own incapacity to intellectualize it. Asking an individual to relate to a system that is not understood is asking for trust.
We believe that the technological key to enable individuals to relate collectively in a healthy way with an infinitely complex system of reality is in the materialization of a new kind of affordances, specifically compositional affordances.
This means that a single individual doesn’t need to analytically understand the whole complexity of system that is relating to, as stated before that would be impossible, but to be able to interpret the material meaning of the immediate connections, trusting that the meaning will be carried throughout the network of relationships, allowing them to related to the broader system, or higher degree relationships, by only focusing on the immediate relationships, or first-degree connections.
We think that the material meaning of systems is already being carried by the phenomena that is present when complex systems relate to each other,
Establishing the relationships that are not obvious directly would be a 1:1 effort that would require for each relationship to be defined, this is for a network of 2 nodes, 4 relationships (considering both directions and the relationships of each node with themselves), for a network of 3 nodes, 8 relationships and so on in a 2n.
Wrapping up
In essence, Holon proposes a paradigm shift from individualistic, analytical approaches to collective, phenomenological understanding. By prioritizing compositionality and embracing the material meaning inherent in interconnections, we can move beyond the limitations of traditional information processing when dealing with systems that require coordination and integration. This shift allows us to engage with complex systems through direct experience and trust in the network's inherent coherence, ultimately enabling a richer, more harmonious, and genuinely collective form of cognition.