The HoloNexus idea is founded on the principle that everything is connected to everything else. All thoughts, all concepts, all thing relate to all other things. Everything is connected to everything else by these relationships, directly or indirectly.
How do these relationships create connections? What does it mean to be connected? And if everything is connected, how do we distinguish one thing from another? Many questions, and I have many answers. But since this idea of everything being connected is also connected to everything, we have to try not to drag in the whole universe of ideas just to understand this one. I'll try to paint a picture to suggest enough of the idea so you ... um .. get the idea.
Let's start with the idea of biological relationships.
It should be fairly obvious that every person is related to everyone else. You have your parents, and perhaps some siblings, who you are directly related to. But your parents had parents, and they had parents, etc, going back up the web of inheritance many thousands of generations. You are related to all your ancestors. And all the children of all those ancestors are related, and all their children's children, etc, all the way back down to our present day, and thus everyone is related to everyone else.
When we are reaching back to find our most ancient ancestors, there is no stopping point, no place where you can say one individual is not related to its parents and to all the other offspring of those parents. We evolved from more primitive humans, and they evolved from earlier primates, etc all the way back to the earliest mammals, all the way back to the earliest animals, the earliest lifeforms. Thus, all animals, all plants, all life on Earth is related.
This relationship that connects all life is one of inheritance, where each individual grows out of another, inheriting many characteristics from its parents, but also creating some variations, some differences from the parents. Each generation accumulates a few more differences, until many generations later, it may be difficult to tell what is still the same.
But there are many other kinds of relationships that connect us. Predators and prey are related to each other in the struggle for survival. When a predator eats a prey, the prey becomes part of the predator and its offspring. Ecological systems are complex systems of relationships between many, many individual organisms. We are related as individuals, but also more abstractly as groups of individuals, communities, populations, species, etc. These relationships that are not about inheritance are at least about other kinds of interactions on a physical level.
Continuing on this path, broadening our horizons to consider more and more indirect relationships, the next stop is to consider how life is related to non-life. We can see this in a couple different ways. We can extend the idea of inheritance of the earliest lifeforms back to what we might consider non-life, but it doesn't really make sense that there should be such a boundary between life and non-life. Rather, it is all on a continuum, and we can talk about more or less complex lifeforms.
A rock is not very lively, whereas a growing crystal has something more interesting going on. And consider the evolution of types of rocks, and the metamorphosis of sedimentary rocks composed of volcanic debris on geological time scales. Consider the evolution of elements within stars, and the emergence of planetary systems and clusters of galaxies All life and all non-life have relationships with one another, and many similar patterns of those relationships at many levels.
Returning to individual humans, to what goes on in your head, we have another realm of things to consider. We sense things in the world, and reflect on those sensations and have feelings, thoughts, ideas and concepts about the world, and we can reflect on ourselves and all these things we do, and have more feelings, thoughts, etc about those. And all these things are related, both to things in the world, and to each other.
Words, used as expressions of our feelings, thoughts, etc, are all related. Words have temporary relationships in combination with other words in phrases, sentences, paragraphs and compositions. Words have historical relationships with earlier words. Languages have evolutionary relationships with earlier languages.
Similarly, music, dance, art, architecture, and everything we create in the world, or in the world of ideas, has relationships with all other things, in the present and past.
Each relationship also defines a connection or a way of interacting. When there is a relationship, there is a connection and vice versa. The connection may be physical or actual, for a physical relationship. Or the connection may be conceptual for a conceptual relationship. The negative is also true: if there is no relationship, there is no connection, and if there is no connection, there is no relationship.
So everything is related. So what? That doesn't mean everything is the same. In fact, two things can be related by how they are different as well as how they are the same. We generally describe a relationship by identifying how the things are different assuming other things are very much the same, or not relevant regarding the type of relationship. A father is related to his son in a father-son relationship. They are not the same person, but they are generally very similar, and more closely related than any two randomly picked people.
