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DISCRETE STRUCTURES AS HOLISTIC MODELS
Florin Caragiu†editura_platytera@yahoo.com Mihai Caragiu‡m-caragiu1@onu.edu 
ABSTRACT
We provide a series of interesting examples of probabilistic discrete structures, which are sets of equally probable strings of 1s and –1s generated from binary linear codes,exhibiting surprising holistic features. We hope this will provide a useful methodological tool and a convenient database of classical examples for the use of researchers working at the interface between science and religion, area where holism-related ideas appear  frequently. Some of our examples show that the “part” itself may display holistic features – a fact with potentially useful implications in the theology of the person, where theholism of the human soul is reflected in a Trinitarian unity of integralities:Consciousness-Subject, Spirit-Being and Language-Self.
†PLATYTERA Publishing House, Bucharest, Romania (
corresponding author 
). In thewriting of the present paper, the corresponding author acknowledges the helpful supportreceived through the 2007-2009 Program for
Science and Religion in Romania
, under theaegis of Templeton Foundation.‡Department of Mathematics, Ohio Northern University, Ada, OH 45810, USA.
 
 
1. INTRODUCTION
In the Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology, the Church is holistic par excellence, being theBody of Christ, the living, corporate organism of the Divine Word or Logos. Within theChurch, existence itself acquires additional meaning, being transfigured by a liturgicaldimension emphasizing the spirit of Communion [10]. The temporality is a liturgical one,driven by the worship of the Holy Trinity – one may say that that the foundation of thisliturgical temporality is the “tri-affirmation” [5]. The persons of Saints themselves arefundamentally holistic: they radiate with an everlasting love whose source is the Triunemessage of healing and redemption proclaimed by the whole Church. The personal pathtowards salvation of an individual member of the Church cannot be understood inseparation from the healing mystery of the Church herself, and this very statement is anexpression of the spiritual holism proclaimed, explicitly or implicitly, by all EasternOrthodox believers.In general, the human being is a microcosm: the very fact that humans are
created in theimage and likeness of God 
(Genesis 1:26) confers to humanity an iconic dimension:personhood has a holistic character.The Eastern Orthodox theology, as articulated by Saint Maximus the Confessor, seesnature itself displaying a fundamental relationship with Christ - the Divine Logos,through the
logoi of creation
. The logoi may be seen as “vectors” of unifying spiritualmeaning pointing from the created realm towards the realm of the Uncreated - the DivineLogos, and thus facilitating the contemplation of created beings through the spiritual eyesof the nous or spiritual intellect [9].Holism appears, articulated in one form or another, in most modern endeavors: science(where ideas of chaos and complexity are penetrating the mainstream), philosophy(especially the philosophy of language), health and medicine, sociology, economics, etc.Especially interesting are the aspects of holism in the foundations of quantum mechanics,where it becomes – unavoidably – mingled with issues involving entanglement and non-locality. Holism is often associated, but not identified, with inseparability [7].In [1] holism is associated to the “deterministic” outcome of a certain globalmeasurement performed on a quantum macroscopic state whose proper parts behaverandomly. In the present paper we consider a class of discrete probabilistic mathematicalmodels based on error-correcting codes. Some of them exhibit the type of holism signaledin [1]: a global determinism with random proper parts. Others examples of the same typehave the surprising property of having “parts” which themselves have a holisticcharacter! All models considered in this paper are treated in a classical manner. For adiscussion of quantum analogues of the code-based models presented in this paper, see[3] and [4].
 
 
2. DETERMINISTIC WHOLE, RANDOM PARTS
To construct discrete models exhibiting features of holism, we will use sets of sequencesof 
1
s and s, of equal length. This first example will be based on the parity check codeof length 3. It involves the following four sequences:
1
−
 
( )( )( )( )
1,1,11,1,11,1,11,1,1
+ + ++ − −− + −− − +
 Let us imagine every such sequence as a possible state of a three cells device, with everycell hosting a local variable (spin). For simplicity, we will assume that allthe states are equally probable, that is, our toy system can be with probability
1,2,3
i
=
1
±
i
 s
14
in eachone of the four states. Note that the product of 
all 
the spins is
1
for each state sothat the expectation va
123
 sss
lue
( )
1
 Ess
1.
23
 s
for the product of all the spins of the system is On the other hand, if we consider a set of cells which is nonempty and not equal to thewhole set
{ }
1,2,3
, then it is no hard to see that the expectation value for the product of thespins hosted by all the cells of that particular subset is zero! That is,
( ) ( ) ( )
123
0
 EsEsEs
= = =
 
( ) ( ) ( )
122331
0
 EssEssEss
= = =
 For example
( )
12
0
 Ess
=
follows from the fact that out of the four possible states, two of them (the first and the fourth in the above listing) have
12
1
 ss
=
while the other two (thesecond and the third) have. Note the technical requirement for the set of cells tobe non-empty: an empty product is by definition equal to 1 (and similarly, an empty sumis defined to be 0) but there could be no measurement in that case.
12
1
 ss
= −
 Thus, one can see that the “parts” of our system behave in a “random” fashion, while the“whole” is deterministic. A new feature (determinism) emerges when we pass from therealm of (proper) parts to that of the
whole
system. This is a classical way of illustratingthe quantum phenomenon described in [1]. We will see that this model can be furthergeneralized by using binary linear codes.We can construct similar examples of holistic models with four or more cells: in the listof states we will include all strings of length with the product of the spins being
1
.
1
±
n
The number of such states is and, as before, we will assume that the states of the
1
2
n
−
of 00

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