Holism

Holism (from the Greek holos, "all, whole, entire") is the position that a system and its properties must be understood as a whole, and cannot be fully accounted for by decomposing it into parts and treating the parts separately. Its opposite is reductionism.

The term was coined by Jan Christiaan Smuts in Holism and Evolution (1926), who held that wholes are the real factors in the universe and that the tendency to form wholes is a fundamental principle in nature. The word has since been applied very widely — in philosophy of language, where the meaning of a sentence is held to depend on a whole language; in the philosophy of science, where Duhem and Quine argued that a hypothesis is never tested in isolation but only as part of a whole body of theory; and in systems theory, ecology and medicine.

In physics the mainstream position is not straightforwardly reductionist either. Emergent and collective phenomena — superconductivity, phase transitions, spontaneous symmetry breaking — are standard cases in which a system has properties that its constituents do not, and quantum mechanics describes entangled systems by a single state that cannot be factorised into states of the parts.

Holism in natural philosophy

On this wiki holism carries a stronger and more specific meaning than "the whole is more than the sum of its parts". A large part of the material catalogued here holds that the properties of a local object — its inertia, its mass, even its identity as a particle — are constituted by its relations to the rest of the universe, and cannot be assigned to it in isolation. That is a physical claim rather than a methodological preference, and it is one of the points on which the researchers documented here part company with the Standard Model.

Several distinct strands of that claim run through this wiki.

Mach's principle

The oldest and most concrete is Mach's principle. Ernst Mach argued that the inertia of a body is not intrinsic but is determined by its relation to all the other matter in the universe — that Newton's rotating bucket reveals rotation relative to the fixed stars, not relative to absolute space. If that is right, no local measurement of inertia is the measurement of a local property: the mass in F = ma is a fact about the whole cosmos. This is holism stated as a physical hypothesis, it makes a quantitative demand, and it remains a live thread here with its own category.

Bohm's implicate order

The most fully developed treatment is David Bohm's. In Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) Bohm argued that the apparent separateness of objects belongs to an "explicate" order unfolded from a deeper implicate order in which everything is enfolded in everything else — the hologram being his standing analogy, since each region of a hologram carries information about the whole image. Bohm regarded the fragmentation of the world into independent parts as a habit of thought imposed on the phenomena rather than read from them, and took quantum non-locality as evidence that the habit fails.

Absorber theory and the wave structure of matter

A third strand puts the whole-universe dependence into the equations. Wheeler and Feynman's absorber theory (1945) treats radiation from an accelerated charge as involving a response from all the absorbing matter in the universe, so that the radiative behaviour of one electron implicates every other. Milo M Wolff builds directly on this: in "Einstein's Last Question: What is an Electron?" the in-wave of each electron is composed of the out-waves of all other particles, giving the formula that every charged particle is part of the universe and the universe is part of every charged particle. Peter Kohut's "universal connection" principle, in "The Bipolar Structure of Particles and Interactions", reaches a similar position from a different starting point.

Plasma cosmology and the large scale

Anthony L Peratt and Eric J Lerner argue for holism of a different kind: that structures at galactic and intergalactic scale are shaped by currents and fields spanning enormous distances, so that a galaxy cannot be modelled as an isolated gravitating island. Here the objection is that the boundary conditions ordinarily imposed — treating a system as isolated — are the very thing in dispute.

Thermodynamic and cosmological objections

Glenn Borchardt and others in the infinite-universe tradition object to applying to the universe as a whole conclusions derived for closed subsystems, the heat-death argument being the standard case. Whether entropy reasoning transfers from a box of gas to the cosmos is precisely a dispute about whether the whole may be treated as a very large part.

Where the argument is weakest

Holism is easier to assert than to cash, and three cautions apply to material on this wiki as much as anywhere.

First, "everything is connected" is not by itself a theory. To do physical work a holistic claim must say what the connection is, how strong it is, and how it falls off with distance. Mach's principle is interesting precisely because it makes that demand; looser formulations do not, and cannot be tested.

Second, holism does not license instantaneous action. Quantum entanglement is genuinely non-local in the sense Bell's theorem makes precise, but the no-communication theorem forbids using it to send a signal, and a Bell violation does not establish a causal channel between distant systems. Arguments that slide from entanglement to instantaneous influence claim more than the result they cite supports. See Quantum Entanglement.

Third, the interesting question is not whether wholes have properties their parts lack, which no one disputes, but whether particular properties — inertia above all — are relational in Mach's stronger sense. That is an empirical question, and it is the one worth pressing.

On this wiki

• Implicate and explicate order — David Bohm's framework; Wholeness and the Implicate Order
• Category:Mach's Principle — inertia as a relation to the whole universe
• Holistic Physics — William Day's 1998 book
• "Holistic Physics in a Self-Organizing Universe"
• "On Measurements with Contradictory Results; Tracing the Roots of the Original Wholeness"
• Alfred North Whitehead — process philosophy, an influence on Smuts
• Standard Model, Entropy, Quantum Entanglement