I would argue holism is more of an ideal, than an explantion.
I think that to really sense the network, it is a matter of appreciating it as a network, rather than a larger whole. Making it a whole requires some sense of boundaries and focus, then it is a node in the network.
Cosmology, for instance, tries to explain the universe as a whole, as a singular unit, but now they have multiverses to give it context and explain details. Not that I’m a fan of current cosmology. I think we will eventually find redshift is an optical effect and that background radiation is simply the light of ever more distant sources, shifted off the visible spectrum.
If I may give a thumbnail description of reality, it is the dichotomy of energy and the forms it manifests. Galaxies are energy radiating out, as mass/form coalesces in, in a cosmic convection cycle.
Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with a central nervous system to sort through the information/form precipitating out and referee the emotions and impulses bubbling up from that heart and gut.
Society is the raw social energies and movements bubbling up, versus the civil anc cultural forms coalescing in. Basically liberal desires versus conservative orders.
So, for example, if you take one side or the other as an ideal, without understanding the larger dynamic, the result is social breakdown, not the normal give and take of politics.
Consider that the energy is the inherently holistic side of the equation, the light shining through the film, rather than the images on it, it is all that universal light, but lacking form. The problem with form, like conservatives, is that it is local and focused. We would not be conscious beings, without form. Yes, it can be taken to extremes, like conflating the absolute and the ideal, as monotheism does, where one’s cultural form is assumed to be some universal ideal, rather then the unique state it has evolved to be.
The problem of the ideal is that it loses context. For instance, efficiency is to do more with less, so the ideal of efficiency would be to do everything with nothing. Obviously though, more is not always better. There is the feedback and reactions which balance it out. Without the ups and downs, it would be a flatline.
As mobile organisms, we experience reality as flashes of cognition, in order to navigate. Then we narrate our journeys to one another and build civilizations out of the collective knowledge. Consequently this narrative passage of time is fundamental to our reality. Physics even codifies it as measures of duration.
Yet the reality is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
Time is not a dimension, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka causality and conservation of energy.
Energy is “conserved,” because there is no physical past for it to recede into, or physical future for it to arive from. It is the change inherent in the dynamic of this energy which creates the effect of time in the first place.
It is a tapestry, being woven of strands pulled from it. Feedback.
As an effect, time is like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.
So as energy churns along, it goes past to future, while the forms go future to past. Process and patterns.
Think of a factory, where the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
As with life, where the individual goes birth to death, while the species goes onto new generations shedding old.
Our consciousness goes from one thought to the next, as these thoughts come and go.
Process goes past to future, as the patterns generated go future to past.
So the problem with a monist idealism, is that it tries to fit this relationship into a whole, rather than seeing the relationships, between form and energy, nodes and networks, patterns and processes, in all its tensions, frictions and general interactions, as creating the reality.
