From Paul Davies, God and the New Physics, Simon & Schuster, Touchstone Books, 1983, p61:

The distinction being made here is sometimes referred to as "holism versus reductionism". The main thrust of western scientific thinking over the last three centuries has been reductionist. Indeed the use of the word "analysis" in the broadest context nicely illustrates the scientist's almost unquestioning habit of taking a problem apart to solve it. But of course some problems (such as jigsaw puzzles) are only solved by putting them together, -- they are synthetic or "holistic" in nature. The picture on a jigsaw puzzle, like the speckled newspaper image of a face, can only be perceived at a higher level of structure than the individual pieces.

The argument presented here is essentially a simple one: all conceptual structure and logical processes can be seen as organized through a single hierarchical framework that defines the relationships between parts and wholes. This hierarchical framework is implicit in all cognition, and its characteristics account for many of the observed properties of cognitive and logical systems.

From Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, quoted in God and the New Physics, p224:

We have a way of discussing the world . . . at various hierarchies, or levels. Now I do not mean to be very precise, dividing the world into definite levels, but I will indicate, by describing a set of ideas, what I mean by hierarchies of ideas.

For example, at one end we have the fundamental laws of physics. Then we invent other terms for concepts which are approximate, which have, we believe, their ultimate explanation in terms of the fundamental laws. For instance, "heat". Heat is supposed to be jiggling, and the word for a hot thing is just the word for a mass of atoms which are jiggling. But for a while, if we are talking about heat, we sometimes forget about the atoms jiggling -- just as when we talk about the glacier we do not always think of the hexagonal ice and the snowflakes which originally fell. Another example of the same thing is a salt crystal. Looked at fundamentally it is a lot of protons, neutrons, and electrons; but we have this concept "salt crystal", which carries a whole pattern already of fundamental interactions. An idea like pressure is the same.

Now if we go higher up from this, in another level we have properties of substances -- like "refractive index", how light is bent when it goes through something; or "surface tension", the fact that water tends to pull itself together, both of which are described by numbers. I remind you that we have got to go through several laws down to find out that it is the pull of the atoms, and so on. But we still say "surface tension", and do not always worry, when discussing surface tension, about the inner workings.

On, up in the hierarchy. With the water we have waves, and we have a thing like a storm, the word "storm" which represents an enormous mass of phenomena, or a "sun spot", or "star", which is an accumulation of things. And it is not worth while always to think of it way back. In fact we cannot, because the higher up we go the more steps we have in between, each one of which is a little weak. We have not thought them all through yet.

As we go up in this hierarchy of complexity, we get to things like muscle twitch, or nerve impulse, which is an enormously complicated thing in the physical world, involving an organization of matter in a very elaborate complexity. Then come things like "frog".

And then we go on, and we come to words and concepts like "man" and "history", or "political expediency", and so forth, a series of concepts which we use to understand things at an ever higher level.

And going on, we come to things like evil, and beauty, and hope...

Which end is nearer to God; if I may use a religious metaphor. Beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? I think that the right way, of course, is to say that what we have to look at is the whole structural interconnection of the thing [emphasis added]; and that all the sciences, and not just the sciences but all the efforts of intellectual kinds, are an endeavor to see the connections of the hierarchies, to connect beauty to history, to connect history to man's psychology, man's psychology to the working of the brain, the brain to the neural impulse, the neural impulse to the chemistry, and so forth, up and down, both ways. And today we cannot, and it is no use making believe that we can, draw carefully a line all the way from one end of this thing to the other, because we have only just begun to see that this is a relative hierarchy.

And I do not think that either end is closer to God.

After years of study, and based on the evidence I have gathered, I have become persuaded that the Universal Hierarchy of Abstraction, whether viewed as an as-yet imperfectly perceived ontological (Platonic) a priori, -- ie, an existing structure and property of being awaiting discovery, -- or merely as a very interesting and useful general engineering heuristic, is the constant background context and logical framework of all human discussion, analysis, logic and thinking. I believe that this underlying idea is essentially quite simple, and that a clear recognition of this general structure can provide a powerful and comfortable insight into the epistemology of both science and intuition.

If this general and rather simple idea were properly expounded and widely recognized, I believe the resulting insight could clear away an enormous amount of conflicting and overlapping theoretical terminology. There are thousands of philosophical theories which tend to discuss aspects and properties of this abstract general structure, each from a different point of view, and in terms of a different system of categories, -- and each of which don't quite fully perceive this underlying general principle. The Universal Hierarchy of Abstraction is basically a simple idea, but I believe it provides powerful and reliable approach to addressing most problems in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and epistemology.

Says Feynman:

We have a way of discussing the world. . .at various hierarchies, or levels. Now I do not mean to be very precise, dividing the world into definite levels, but I will indicate, by describing a set of ideas, what I mean by hierarchies of ideas.

Any concept or comment we make is posed at some level of abstraction, for some reason which makes one particular level appropriate.

When Feynman says he doesn't mean to be precise, "dividing the world into definite levels", he is not saying that the hierarchy of ideas is not distributed across a series of "levels", but that these levels are not fixed and immutable, and are flexible, adaptive, and conformable to our purposes.

"For example, at one end we have the fundamental laws of physics."

Please note: Feynman has mentioned here, very quickly, that there are "ends" to this hierarchy of ideas, and "at one end" are the laws and ideas of physics. This is exactly what I am describing when I outline the structure of ideas in terms of the following hierarchy, through which I classify branches of knowledge in terms of the "implicit dimensionality" (ie, the number of implicit distinctions) of their concept types.

|<--Absolute Unity-Wholeness-Oneness/Absolute Abstraction/God (?)
|<--Theology/Metaphysics (ungrounded very complex composite variables)
|<--Relatively "molar" (holistic) sciences (complex composite variables)
|<--Relatively "molecular" (empirical) sciences (simple composite variables)
|<--Physics (simplest possible "atomic" variables)
|<--Actuality/Absolute physical ground of being

Then we invent other terms for concepts which are approximate, which have, we believe, their ultimate explanation in terms of the fundamental laws. For instance, "heat". Heat is supposed to be jiggling, and the word for a hot thing is just the word for a mass of atoms which are jiggling. But for a while, if we are talking about heat, we sometimes forget about the atoms jiggling -- just as when we talk about the glacier we do not always think of the hexagonal ice and the snowflakes which originally fell. Another example of the same thing is a salt crystal. Looked at fundamentally it is a lot of protons, neutrons, and electrons; but we have this concept "salt crystal", which carries a whole pattern already of fundamental interactions. An idea like pressure is the same.

Feynman repeats this same point in terms of concepts such as "surface tension":

Now if we go higher up from this, in another level we have properties of substances -- like "refractive index", how light is bent when it goes through something; or "surface tension", the fact that water tends to pull itself together, both of which are described by numbers. I remind you that we have got to go through several laws down to find out that it is the pull of the atoms, and so on. But we still say "surface tension", and do not always worry, when discussing surface tension, about the inner workings.

When Feynman says "we don't always worry about the inner workings", he is saying something very fundamental about the nature of meaning and conceptual structure. Higher-level concepts or abstractions have "implicitly nested meaning", which we don't necessary specify (ie, we use the concept "ice" without talking about atomic structure), largely for reasons of convenience and economy, even if our definitions begin to become "presumptive", in that they *imply* the implicit undefined meaning, without making it explicit.

Now Feynman begins to discuss truly complex holistic gestalts:

On, up in the hierarchy. With the water we have waves, and we have a thing like a storm, the word "storm" which represents an enormous mass of phenomena, or a "sun spot", or "star", which is an accumulation of things. And it is not worth while always to think of it way back.

It is not "worth while to think of it way back", by which he means that we don't necessarily need to trace the "fine structure" of a phenomenon such as a star or a sunspot or a storm, but can discuss it as a gestalt, a single concept containing many implicit and non-specified distinctions. This "worth whileness" is a function of mental economy. We need a direct one-word shorthand description of a general phenomena, even if all the details are not explicitly defined. We are content, in this case, to leave these details "implicitly nested", or implicitly contained within the larger concept.

And he says "the higher we up we go the more steps we have in between, each one of which is a little weak. We have not thought them all through yet". This is probably one of the most important observations in all of epistemology, and has to do with the weak chain of definition that tends to link high-level abstractions with their empirical grounding in physics. It is the weakness of this conceptual bridgework which results in the fragmenting of the body of human knowledge into distinct and separate categories which cannot communicate with one another.

Our inability to recognize that all ideas are fundamentally distributed across one single hierarchical continuum, as a function of their block variable size (ie, number of implicit dimensions/distinctions), is probably the single most important reason for the non-scientific weakness of philosophy, and the traditional animosity between "science" and "religion". A major objective of this ORIGIN conference, and these theories, is to define this intervening conceptual bridgework with exact algebraic precision, showing how the linkage between these levels of knowledge can be accurately created.

As we go up in this hierarchy of complexity, we get to things like muscle twitch, or nerve impulse, which is an enormously compl