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The Partiality of Wholeness
Religious people believe in the existence of a supreme being. It has many attributes but two of the most striking are that it seems to both encompass and to pervade everything. Judaic sources are in the habit of saying that we all have a "share of the upper divine soul". Put more formally, we can say that we are both part of a Whole and permeated by it. But what are the relationships between the parts and the Whole? They could be either formal (a word in a sentence, for instance) or physical (a neurone in our brain, for instance). A formal relationship entails an impairment of the truth value of a sentence / proposition / theorem / syllogism with the removal of one or more of its parts. As a result, a part could be reconstructed to fit into an impaired Whole once the formal relationships (and the derivative truth value) are known. Things are pretty much the same in the physical realm: the removal of the part renders the Whole - NOT Whole (in the functional sense, in the structural sense, or in both senses). A part is immediately discernible: it is always smaller (size, mass, weight) than the Whole and it always possesses the potential to contribute to the functioning / role of the Whole. The part need not be active to qualify as a part - yet, it requires the potential to be active to do so. In other words : the Whole is defined by its parts - their sum, their synergy, their structure, their functions. Even where epiphenomena occur - it i...
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