The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life

[droqen]

P. 13, last paragraph of the chapter, "ON PROCESS"

     In this book I make an effort, perhaps for
the first time, to make this distinction and to
lay a basis for a theory-- and for a form of daily
practice-- which allows for a world in which
living process, hence living structure, dominates
the world and its creation.

[droqen]

CHAPTER ONE

THE PRINCIPLE OF

UNFOLDING WHOLENESS

IN NATURE

[droqen]

P. 18, INTRODUCTION

Living structure, as I have defined it, is . . . in a more general sense, the character of all that we perceive as "nature." The living structure is the general morphological character which natural phenomena have in common.
. . . why does living structure, with its multiplicity of centers and their associated fifteen properties, keep making its appearance in the natural world? Why, and how, does living structure keep recurring in these widely different domains? ["in rocks, animals, plants, clouds, rivers, landscapes, crystals", and "throughout the worlds studied in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, fluid dynamics, ecology, crystallography, cytology, and molecular biology"] What is the mechanics of the process by which living structure is made to appear, so easily*, in nature? What is the process by which this kind of structure repeatedly, and persistently, occurs?

[droqen]

I'm so overwhelmed by this last section (quoted above). Book one's fifteen properties reside in my mind, incredibly powerful conceptual tools. My all-overriding hope is that Book two presents such a functional taxonomy of properties of living processes by which I might judge mine.

[droqen]

Regarding order: I realized I have been --- erroneously --- thinking that it is impossible to tell whether the world follows the aforementioned 'fifteen properties' or whether we are merely pattern-recognizing machines, spotting 'nature' and 'centers' automatically, everywhere. But it finally occurred to me that of course that cannot be the case. It's as easy as picturing an artificial construction of non-natural character; it's extremely easy to produce a (simple) structure which would not occur in nature.

More importantly, it's extremely easy to produce a structure which does not follow the fifteen properties. Alexander gives many examples himself in Book 1 and I expect will provide some more throughout this book, whether he draws attention to them as examples of such or not. It's trivial to notice that it is not merely the presence of noise or detail or any simple character which activates our pattern recognition . . . it is something morphologically specific which we are tuned to detect and which is also produced everywhere throughout our reality, across our universe, on our planet, and in our lives.

[droqen]

I'm coming around steadily to Alexander's way of thinking, now that we're out of the first book. "Life" is a feature of space, an objectively measurable characteristic. But the interesting thing is that the objective measuring tool most available to us is also tightly bound to subjectiveness: it is our own minds. The objective measure of this property, "life," is our human pattern recognition. Our senses, our brains.

[droqen]

P. 19, under NOTE FOR THE SCIENTIFIC READER

In what follows, I shall argue that the emergence of new structure in nature is brought about, always, by a sequence of transformations which act on the whole, and in which each step emerges as a discernible and continuous result from the immediately preceding whole.
     This thought [is] obvious if taken naively, but profound and difficult if taken literally as a piece of science. . .

[droqen]

P. 35
Throughout centuries of study of nature, many, many cases of emergence of form from the whole have been observed and studied. . . . Generally speaking, the emergence of form in the world has been seen and understood as a relatively straightforward mechanical emergence of the product of different causal laws.

[droqen]

I just thought this was very funny:

P. 42
. . . many scientists have been spending their energy trying to insist, "no it is not God's design, Mr. Creationist, it is by a series of step-wise changes, gradually evolving," instead of answering the difficult question about how the very sophisticated machinery was actually arrived at, step by step. Of course (for me anyway) the question is not "Was it God's design, or was this step-by-step?" No doubt it was step-by-step. But how does step-by-step actually accomplish its results when the result requires sophisticated and complex global geometry to work.

[droqen]

P. 42
. . . is there a pattern-like tendency which makes transformations toward coherent patterns (based on the fifteen properties) which then tend to produce coherent mechanisms for geometric reasons --- and the selective process then finds a use for these beautiful and coherent mechanisms to gain advantages.

//

Alexander describes in book 1 his theory of how 'beautiful' and 'coherent' are one and the same. Rather, in that book, he says 'function' and 'ornament'. I would go back to check that out if I hadn't returned it to the library already. I can see him building upon this principle here. If there is something inherently functional about good geometry, it is much easier to imagine a geometry-producing principle in action at all levels than a functionality-producing one.

(Actually, the principle of least action is more functionality-producing in character than is the 'unfolding' principle which he gives later. I've never thought of the principle of least action as unscientific.)

[droqen]

P. 45-46
Underlying all these cases there is a geometrical principle, reminiscent of the principle of least action, but more general. This principle may be formulated as follows: the evolution of any natural system is governed by transformations of the mathematical wholeness and by a tendency, inherent in these transformations, for the whole to unfold in a particular direction.
     In more detail, I postulate that every natural system has a disposition, a tendency caused by the most simple way forward for the system to move in the direction which preserves wholeness. I do not mean that it preserves wholeness in some pious emotional sense, nor that it "wishes" to preserve wholeness. I simply mean that wholeness, which I have defined as a structure of symmetries and centers (Book 1, chapter 3 and appendix 1), will always have a natural dynamic of such a nature that as many as possible of these symmetries (and especially some of the larger ones) are preserved as the system moves forward in time. As the system evolves, it destroys these symmetries and larger centers AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE. It maintains as much of the structure of symmetries and centre as possible, and destroys as little of the structure of symmetries and centers as can be managed while yet moving forward.

[droqen]

P. 48
. . . living structure always arises slowly, by successive transformations of what exists, gradually, gradually, and then decisively changes slowly until a new thing is born. . .

[droqen]

CHAPTER TWO

STRUCTURE-PRESERVING

TRANSFORMATIONS

[droqen]

P. 52
. . . from now on I shall refer to these types of transformations as structure-preserving transformations. My claim in Book 2 is that the intricate and beautiful structure of living centers comes about naturally, and most of the time without effort, as a result of the repeated application of structure-preserving transformations to the wholeness which exists.

[droqen]

"the wholeness which exists"

"most of the time without effort"