Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bit 'em.

And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

―The Siphonaptera

Holons as the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Part of a larger discussion of holism and how to develop holistic thinking.

The concept of holons was coined by Arthur Koestler who wrote a book called "The Ghost in the Machine."

What is a holon?

Mankind has been trying to categorize and classify nature for a long time.

And it's not so obvious what the right categories of thing are. What is the most fundamental thing in the universe?

1. Koestler and Ken Wilber came up with the notion that the fundamental building block of reality is holons.

Holon: both a part and a whole simultaneously.

Usually, we think of things as being just parts or just wholes but not both simultaneously.

And all of reality turns out is a nested hierarchy of these holons.

Usually, we think we are just an individual object, a human, and that this is where it ends. Yes, the body is a whole, but it's also a part of a larger thing like the entire Earth. And what we call the Earth is not separate from humans, humans make up the Earth.

And so as you're reading this you're a part of a larger whole called the Earth. (If you're on Earth reading this…)

The key insight of Arthur Koestler and Ken Wilber is that this is observable throughout nature. Whether you're zooming in or zooming out, holons everywhere.

And the Earth itself? It's also a whole and a part. The Earth is a part of the Solar System. And the Solar System is a part of the Milky Way Galaxy while also being a whole in itself.

So this goes all the way up and down. We could say that every object, in reality, is not a part and not a whole but a holon, both simultaneously, depending on which perspective you take.

Russian nesting doll.

Holons don't nest as neatly as these dolls, because holons aren't always mutually exclusive and interpenetrate.

You are part of many many holons: