"Smuts defined holism as “the tendency in nature to form wholes, that are greater than the sum of its parts, through creative evolution” … spontaneous self-generation of higher levels of order, and of course, this is one aspect of emergence.

Through time and usage, the meaning of the term has come to mean something related, but quite different, so it's now generally used to mean something like “viewing something as a whole rather than just as parts”… his definition was echoed in the term ‘self-organization’, meaning the spontaneous self-creation of order and this is also a term that has lost its meaning through common usage so self-organization is now commonly meaning used to mean ‘self-managing’. These original meanings are about something really important in system thinking and the degrading of terms to mean something more commonplace is just one sign of how hard it is to hang onto these ideas and how easily they can be watered down."

Slots and Values
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