DEFINING LIFE AND THE LIVING ONTOLOGICALLY AND HOLONOMICALLY

摘要

The distinction between "Life" and the experience of "Living" is a variety of subject/object dualities. In order to understand what it means deeply, we need to move through the meta-levels of Being because the distinction takes on a life of its own as we go up through the thresholds of the meaning of "living life" when the subject/object distinction breaks down and successively reveals deeper and deeper levels of significance. Finally, we reach a level that is unthinkable in which we become immersed in complete nonduality. But at that level, things become more clear balancing the successive obscuration of the meta-levels of Being. At this fifth meta-level of Being, we encounter something different which is Existence. Existence has its own structure which defines life, the social and the negatively entropic thermodynamicism. We find that these Holonomic non-dual structures reach around to define the levels of Being themselves so we get a picture like that of Escher of two hands drawing each other. This picture illustrates the symbiotic nature of Being and Existence. In that symbiosis living, the social and the thermodynamicly neg-entropic are defined in existence where they could not be defined in Being.rnConsideration of the distinction between Life and Living takes place in the context of a broader theory that extends General Systems Theory by looking at the theory of General Meta-systems and between them sees the existence of Holonic Special Systems. Meta-systems are seen as being produced by the interaction of normal systems and the holonic special systems which is called an Emergent Meta-system. Special Systems Theory and Emergent Meta-systems theory as it appears in the paper Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory is precisely about the nature of life and the living. It is a theory based on the work of Ilya Prigogine on neg-entropic dissipative ordering structures and Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's theory of autopoiesis as well as the theory of John O'Malley and Barry Sandywell concerning reflexive social theory.