This was also the view that Wilber came to in his early-2000s “excerpts” from the yet-to-be-published 2nd volume of his Kosmos trilogy. He combined this with Whitehead’s notion of the “prehension” of actual occasions and creative advance into novelty to argue that what are called “laws” are actually just especially durable (maybe for entire universes) patterns of prehension; regularities of process.
Wilber added that the repetitive, deterministic nature of these patterns could be equated with karma, and that novelty-generating aspect could be referred to as creativity. Higher-level holons are capable of more creativity and are less subject to karma—they have more freedom—whereas lower-level holons are more strictly determined, however, never absolutely so; rather, as modeled by quantum mechanics, it is probabilistic how exactly a holon will behave.
Here the “level” is a technical descriptor for the inclusivity of the holarchy we are referring to. E.g., Humans include atoms in their makeup; but atoms do not include humans. Humans are more free than atoms. If I decide to move my arm, all the atoms in my arm must move along with it. However, the higher holon is still dependent on the lower. If all my cells get blasted with nuclear radiation and die, I will die along with them.
Arthur Young, who we studied a while ago, describes how higher level entities gain dimensionality and degrees of freedom. His view of evolution traces the emerges of greater-dimensional entities from the quantum realm through animals and plants to humans and what might be beyond us. These ideas are correlated.
Terminologically, “pattern” would seem a more accurate word than “habit” to describe a universal observation, since one can, with some will, change a habit, but a pattern could be innate to the phenomenon. It would be weird to say, for example, that gravity is just a habit that the cosmos is keeping going, which it could change if it really wanted to. What McLuhan calls “laws,” from what I gather from my perusing so far, could just as well be called “regularities” or “principles for the study of”; which, the latter, I think is the more to the point.
But who am I to quibble with a Law? These are perhaps ‘merely’ matters of semantics. Yet Langer has inspired me to take my logical sieve out of storage and sharpen my analytical word slicer-and-dicer. For this is how we tidy up the language of the tribe, one meaning at a time.