Why "The Integrity Paradigm" ?

 

IN this closing decade of the 20th century, when notions and theories abound about the nature and structure of our universe and existence, what is so special or different about this Integrity Paradigm?    What could set it apart from other competent notions about complexity, dynamics, relationships, life, energy and information?

Its significance doesn't rest in its "unusualness", but instead, in its over-riding "commonality".  It uses the rudimentary notion that all systems have -- being made of universal natural components having shared characteristics -- the integrated ability to completely enact the capacities that their structures allow.   And,  humans represent one system which is sufficiently self/else integrated to note and communicatively codify its place-in and relationships-with the totality of holistic existence. That means every human, to one degree or another.

I assume, therefore, that I am a substantial representative of those skills and abilities, not necessarily someone absolutely unique or unusually qualified.  The thoughts I think, the sensations I have, and the abilities I have to process information are shared-capacities.  In fact, I rely upon this important notion - that other people have had similar thoughts, similar cognitions -- now and throughout history.  My mentality -- our mentality -- is built on the foundations of past generations' efforts to cope with being.   And as they did their job well, each succeeding generation had and continues to have the opportunities to bring along old wisdoms and so add to them. The body of knowledge is open to all successor minds. So it should come as no surprise that each generation produces duplications of shared insights and new-cognitive appreciations.

In one sense we might see it as Life's way of ensuring its perpetuation and growth. Parallel identical events or exemplars can arise in time/space together and provide alternative opportunities to insure system and social advancement.  Liebnitz and Newton for example.  Darwin and Wallace for another.  Individual minds looking at the same world and coming to similar new understandings.

In this light, the Integrity Paradigm is one-among-many, albeit a formidable one.  It is indicative of the way the universe is organized, proving self-consistency and innateness at its very best.  Therefore, you'll be able to find ideas similar to the Integrity Paradigm being co-expressed in many fields and areas of study.   But even as it's possible to note and refer to other concepts as being Integrity Paradigm parallels and comment, "Well, that particular Integrity idea is not so special, this-or-that other person has also asserted the same particular notion, (or some other one).", ... no other reflective theory or perception of existence combines so many aspects, all melded together.    That is the strength and uniqueness of the Integrity Paradigm.

It asserts a special criteria in our human search for meaning and understanding about our place in the schema and flow of existence ... which is, any Holistic Philosophy -- to be worthy of that name -- must be open enough, capable enough, and strong enough to allow for anything and everything that can or could possibly exist -- even other theories or perspectives. That is, it can never encounter any event or idea and assess it as wrong in its mere existence.   A phenomena may be conditionally incomplete or inappropriate, but never unallowed.  A formidable holistic philosophy must be able to account for parochial conditions, special schools of thought, perceptive differences, ideological options, and any forms or sets of information modelings and organizations possible. It must be wise enough to accept that, given one set of assumptions and data, it becomes reasonable to formulate, for example, a Ptolemaic model of the universe. And, in the natural course of accumulating and assessing other information and considered dynamics/relationships, it becomes reasonable to develop a Copernican one; then Newtonian, then Einsteinian, and so on... .

In our current era, with so much information and so many diverse relationships to deal with and to relate together, the challenge becomes even greater -- and yet simpler -- in one fell swoop. Can a proclaimed holistic model or perceptive philosophy talk competently about any and all other systems? The fully competent holism can.  That is the hallmark of holistic competence.  Period.

That is not to say that such a holistic paradigm will know or specify all the details of any given field or subject. It isn't required to. It doesn't stand as omniscient god-knowledge.  It does not stand or fail on lack of specific example-information. A viable holistic paradigm deals with relationships - which local mechanisms and processes simply illuminate and exemplify.   Therefore, a holistic paradigm will even have the ability to assess comparable viabilities between competing regional views and models.

"Complexity" is the current leading contender in this regard.  It has many adherents, many innovative thinkers.   Originally enunciated about 3 decades ago with the discovery of unusual mathematical functions, the abundantly observable relationships are being found in many -- actually all -- fields of study. That is not to say that those relationships weren't perceived by others even before then . They were. Particularly in fields of biological and organic systems. It's just that the "definition makers" -- the mathematicians and physicists -- had not provided any models to generally map the behaviors of organic systems.   At this point -- confirmed by presentations at the first New England Complex Systems Institute's conference in Nashua , New Hampshire, USA, September 1997 -- conceptual groping is still going on. Newly discerned models of fractal math and Zadeh logic are just now being applied, and, even co-ordinated with Boolean systems and other in-place computational models. Struggled copings and adjustments to theories are being explored by many leading edge thinkers like Penrose, Prigogine, Kauffman, Grossberg, Baars, Pribram and others.  But they haven't achieved holism yet.

This is partly because of proprietary intellectual competition. And, partly because they are cautious, having championed prior notions which were adequate and successful in their original local milieus. The Integrity Paradigm has leap-frogged them. Not because it is different in any substantive way, but because it takes the same information and organizes it more competently and completely. Fractal Complexity is retained, but plays a smaller role within the larger schemata.

Integrity's edge over fractal Complexity can be shown in a simple example.   Where the fractal-eigenspace biologist S. Kauffman is only just now {1997} recognizing the fact that his general autocatalytic model for organic systems is really Carnot's Engine in another guise -- this was an evaluation I was able to do in 1993 (and so include in "Understanding the Integral Universe") -- after reviewing Kauffman's "Origins of Order" shortly after it was published {Critique of "Chaotic Autocatalysis"}.   Using dimensional information analysis and  local entropy regimes as understood via Integrity principles, the isomorphic parallels were more than obvious.  

At the 1997 NECSI conference Kauffman openly begged for conceptual assistance in formulating a computational model that might supply a "work" factor, requisite in order to keep his autocatalytic model viable.   Earlier this year he had proposed a related notion he calls the "adjacent possible", still being formulated.   In contrast, a similar but more extensive notion -- one fundamental to the framework of Integrity -- was developed 20 years ago and had been offered to SFI in 1992. {Notice #2}

From the formal outset of the Integrity Paradigm [Rose 1972,1973] it was clearly specified that the behavior of any system is co-dependent with its function-space -- the physical and temporal options open to it at each moment during it's functioning competence.  And that function-space has to be permitted to run far off any computational scale, into conditions of behavior dynamics, into transfinite "quantities".  That is, potentia doesn't pertain only to next-step options.  It pertains to the full set of all subsequent options.  Not adjacent-possibles, but extended-possibles.  This is because it is only by contemplating all potential eigenspaces that patterns become apparent ... including the absolute importance of indeterminancy.   The more complicated, the more complex a system is, the more degrees of freedom - open and unused options - are required in order for it to remain functionally competent!     Systems endure and survive not because they are locked into predictable behaviors but because they have latitudes of behavior options and have the flexibility to deal with panoramas of events ... on all the coordinated levels of assembly.

This requires that information be open to transductive alterations and to codings as it ascends or descends the hierarchy of universal organization. Mappings of diverse infinities onto one another. There is nothing restrictively adjacent about it. "Adjacent" information is too cautionary and limiting.  Full stochastic-potential is not just a computational "random walk" done in small stepping-stone Boolean fashion between so-called "fitness landscapes".  It is Josephson's quantum jumps, it is Bohm's and EPR's non-locality, spatially and temporally binding distant option-spaces together.   It is my opinion, therefore, that computational models will probably be formulated eventually. But only when Greg Chaitin's Omega Function is understood and disseminated to future mathematicians.  Chaitin's is the latest generically applicable mathematical tool to competently manipulate varieties of infinity since Calculus was originally developed four centuries ago. It will turn out to be a crucial mathematical mechanism, able to help humanity with future computational needs.

Integrity Paradigm embraces and enthuses over all these infinities. This, in contrast to standard physics which has typically seen infinities as problematic, as factors to be cancelled out. Not so vis a vis Integrity. Any addition of a single bit or unit of information not only automatically changes and enlarges a system's local "gödel limit" (it's definable "set-boundary"), but, the relational-information -- the function-space potentia at that moment and at all subsequent configurations -- leaps quantumly off the scale, factorially and exponentially. To try and keep track of that in some inductively methodical step-by-step fashion of adjacency is not only not practical, it's not parochially reasonable. The process will outrun the evaluation technique.  Quite like ancient Zeno's runner, who ably and casually blasted right through Zeno's conceptually disjointed, restrictive and conservative framing ideas.

The universe is a thriving expanse of environmental and behavioral potentia.  Not just an adjacency.    It is its openness which provides vitality and continuance, not its determinism.  The Integrity Paradigm is strong because it recognizes this fact and accepts the applicability of it to every subject, every topic, every field --- everything. There may be determinable patterns of behaviors in systems, but missing information is just as important. It bears on each and every system's openness to achieve unimaginably wonderful potentials, new states, new relationships, new possibilities. The universe thrives on achieving new-ness, exploring its organizational futures, not just acting specific ones out.   It is environments fulfilling environments.

A modest increase in a DNA codon (or delay of an off codon) chain, for example, which sends a hormonal message to permit slightly longer active growth-time for certain brain tissue in a developing fetus, which tissue then encroaches into the brain case and forces co-developing circulatory tissue to shift its path slightly, and so alter and improve blood flow, which in turn leads to affective improvement of the animal's reaction time and thought processes and postural formation once the adult stage is reached, and therefore has behavior repercussions for the animal in its social and environmental context, is but one example of the real working nature of "complexity" in the world. This scenario did in fact happen (see: Falk/Integrity).   It was one of the seminal events which diversified our Australopithecine relatives into Gracile and Robustus specie-lineages some several million years ago.   Variability in the option space of biochemical and metabolic configurations, having impacts on intervening complex assemblies, and having most profound impacts on the evolution of our species -- all the while in the mix of a whole planet full of co-evolving life forms and their enduring in individual and shared option-spaces. Infinities impacting infinities. A typical complex scenario, quite easy to understand with a perspective like the Integrity Paradigm.

Copyright © James N. Rose, 1997        

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