I used the prefix “hol” as in “holism” in constructing the word “holpathy”, referring to an awareness like “empathy” for systems that behave by themselves, but yes, you might write it “holepathy” too, to mean “thinking about what’s in the holes in our thinking” .   Empathy does mean that, for thinking about the hole in our thinking for what’s going on inside someone else, invisible to us.   

With empathy we go beyond logic and intuit and test our awareness of the internal feelings and perceptions that other people have, characterizing their internal mental and emotional organization.  Holpathy refers to going beyond logic to intuit an awareness of the internal organization of natural systems of any kind, that we observe behaving as individual wholes. 

Like for our own bodies, how we  behave as a whole is by how we are organized as a whole internally, but largely hidden from view and in many ways not reducible to logic.    The same is the case for how human cultures, businesses and languages work, working by their own internal organization to work as a whole.  Each is an individual organism-like system, working by a self-defining internal network of relationships that serves as a shared commons for its parts, like a business is an organized commons for its employees.  

If you can identify a boundary for a system and see that it behaves as a whole, like for storms, families, species, plants, animals, ecosystems, etc..  It implies they also have an internal organization by which they behave as a whole, serving as commons for their parts, that one might develop some greater intuitive as well as logical awareness of as a whole.   Extremely different individually behaving systems would still have similarities, but you wouldn’t expect, say, a forest fire considered as a whole system to have many properties like an economy or an ecology.   They all do consume energy, change by developmental processes, and have parts and internal organizations that do respond to limits and affect the organization by which they work.   

That we don’t yet have familiar terms for discussing natural systems as “organisms” of a sort, could be seen as a “hole” in our language from our natural lack of information about what happens inside other things.    To fill that hole in our terms of discussion I have been using terms of natural language generally, like “culture” to refer to both our customary meaning and the hidden organization within them, that allows them to be identified.    Natural words already identify lots of natural phenomena that way, and already contain complex meaning for the systems they directly refer to.   Coining a new word like “holpathy” was to reach for a rare chance that I might use the natural meaning of “empathy” as “awareness of what’s inside another person” to suggest the same sort of thing for “awareness of what’s inside another system”.

I think there is a fairly simple connection with “the HOLE story” according to Mr Lava(?)(or maybe it’s Barry Kort) on his blog… “Molton Lava”.    Lava’s idea is that “the original sin” and “curse of knowledge” is the pervasive common error in our reasoning of reducing nature to logic, and so representing the difference between things like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as absolute separations, instead of as a continuity of gradations like seen in an “S” curve: .     I think that idea is a great lead to going a little further.   A weakness is that it still defines nature as being in our logic, and not as complex systems, just advancing our logic from jumps to continuities.  Clearly such dichotomies are much more complex than a simple equations is the limitation of it.    I think the greater difference between our ideal concepts like “good” and “bad” and reality, of course, is to be found *in the environment* and not in either logical definitions of fuzzy ethical theories in our heads, no matter how we enrich them.   The information world in our minds is just no match, (is of inherently inadequate ‘variety’) compared to the complex organization of differences we find in experience, especially for systems that work as wholes and behave by themselves. 

It’s that “hole” in our thinking, for the hole in our information on how things work inside, I’m pointing to with the idea of “holpathy” for acknowledging what is going on inside whole systems in our environment.   It would seem kind of obvious that *something* must be happening inside things that behave by themselves, so you wonder how we might have “missed it”, really.    The evidence we really seem to have “missed it” is partly that throughout the sciences we do indeed persistently describe things that operate from the inside as being controlled by influences that are outside…  

I think it’s possible “we just prefer it”, as a way to represent nature as the logic in our heads.   In trying to explain how things with interior organization work by themselves I can certainly confirm that people both have much difficulty even understanding the idea, and also most often seem to find it distasteful.  Being that’s my experience, maybe we should use Lava’s definition where possible, that the “hole in our heads” is not recognizing gradations of differences.  

I also talk a lot about “S” curve gradations, for gradations in how change starts and ends .   I often focus on the turning point in the middle (*).  That’s where the curve changes direction, separating the whole change into two phases.  First the change has “start-up type of organization” of starting small and taking successively bigger steps for “breaking away from the past”, then at the (*) the process changes to have an “end-up type of organization” that proceeds by successively smaller steps for “homing in on the future”, to make the whole transition a continuous.  On either side of the turning point, you might have a mix or alternating “colors of change” as Nicolas was sketching, I think.    But to understand much more you still need to develop some “holpathy” or “empathy” to have a holistic appreciation for what’s happening to attach your bits of information to, to hole them together.   That’s what helps make real sense of what triggered, developed and was resolved as the whole process of change you’re considering happened.