Arrangement in space (and time) is fundamental to how we understand our world

Our common conception of matter is wrong.
A better conception of matter can be summarized by the nature of order.

Our idea of matter is essentially governed by our idea of order. What matter is, is governed by our idea of how space can be arranged; and that in turn is governed by our idea of how orderly arrangement in space creates matter. So it is the nature of order which lies at the root of the problem.

As human beings we are trained in navigating and interacting with our physical environment and skilled in spatial awareness and thinking. In the physical world objects we interact with follow strong universal rules, for instance the laws of physics. For example, several different objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. The arrangement of matter in space (and to a certain degree also the arrangement of events in time) — in other words “order” — has a profound impact on how we understand the world.

Lots of connections to cognitive science, in particular categorization, metaphorical structuring, embodied cognition, and specifically the whole-part-configuration image schema. On the other hand this also connects to the very different field of category theory in mathematics (which has nothing little to do with categorization in linguistics).

#book/The Nature of Order/1 The Phenomenon of Life/Preface/2 How architecture depends on our picture of the world#

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