Beyond being and becoming: Result of non-normative transformative holistic thinking

Thermodynamics based understanding of life informs us that we are all self-organized living systems. As such systems, we actively receive and send energy (including mass) signals to other living systems by creating sound signals (that includes language) or visual motor signals, or by engaging ourselves in activities that lead to the creation of other signal sources, such as written pieces, waste, food, things. These energy signals, on receipt, are then processed by our inner configuration in such a way that our structures are preserved. In other words, our body's internal mechanisms help us adapt to our surroundings when we receive new energy signals (or whenever we detect change). And due to this continuous adaptation, we become more complex beings. This leads to a drop in system adaptation efficiency, and we experience aging, or errors (i.e. diseases), leading to our endpoint i.e., death. This cycle of self-organized systems, which includes coming into existence, followed by growth in complexity due to changing environment with ultimate decay, is common for all living systems. Here, change in environment is the result of adaptation by all living systems. These living systems exist outside one’s body but may also exist inside one’s body. Moreover, the change experienced by all these living systems occurs at different rates, depending on the sensorium capabilities of these living systems. With this, a dynamic image of a whole earth system as a network of living systems, which is completely immersed in non-living media, and where energy relations with objects and other living systems determine the creation, maintenance, and destruction of living systems, emerges. It’s an image where being (i.e. closed self-organized system – experience centric) and becoming (i.e. open network system – emergence centric) exist together dynamically.
To this end, a conceptual basis is provided for a guided evolutionary holistic system design towards a sustainable future, where all forms of life flourish. By embracing Einstein's philosophy of science-inspired research attitude, proposed theory amalgamates thermodynamics, information theory in ecology, and autopoiesis theory to create a visual and imagistic dynamic holistic model of the Earth system network. Operationalization and analysis of which has revealed three key principles that humans must embed in all action situations. These include: (a) maintain (if increase not possible) diversity, where diversity means difference in developmental capacity between any two living systems (b) maintain (if increase not possible) distribution of developmental capacity among all types of living systems (c) the principle of non-violence, where non-violence means any type of memory build up that leads one to act against the other two principles is avoided. It is argued that the implementation of these principles is the only choice available for human society to truly achieve sustainability on planet Earth, where all lives flourish. Theories internal validity is established by extensive quality assurance tests, while its external validity has been established by triangulation with other theories. In conclusion, discussion to mainstream philosophy of naturalism backed moral realism, to establish cooperation as a background for human -human relations and human-nature relations is provided.