Emergence of living structure

Because a system is conservative — because it tends to preserve and extend the existing symmetries and centers — it also tends to reinforce the larger centers which exist, and to make them stronger.

This can also explain why the rich get richer and the poor poorer in capitalism and our current society.

At each moment in the emergence of a system, the system tends (“prefers”) to go in that direction which intensifies the already existing centers in the wholeness in just such a fashion that the new centers reinforce and intensify the larger configuration or wholeness which existed before.

I suggest that all nature appears as the product of the unfolding wholeness. This means that the living structure we see all around us — in the organic and in the inorganic world — is not merely a result of interaction of densely coupled systems, but that the wholeness which occurs in space necessarily unfolds in such a way as to create more and more life because through the impact of these transformations, larger wholes are created, intensified more often than they are destroyed or weakened. As a result the centers necessarily become more and more profound; and that nature is, in this sense, reaching forward to some kind of order; even though this order is invisible, unpredictable, and not “created”.
What this means is that life and living structure will appear in the world inevitably: not by some magic probabilistic occurrence, but because the nature of things — and, in particular, the mathematical way in which space gives rise to structure which reinforces wholeness — sees to it that living structure comes into being as part of its most normal evolution. This argument implies that all the processes we know — including the relatively simple mechanical processes, the physical processes governed by the law of least action, the coordinated behavior of complex systems which has been identified from recent work in chaos theory and catastrophe theory, and the evolution of organisms — are all governed by this simple, yet deep regularity, which binds these widely different cases together as a common underlying thread.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/1 The principle of unfolding wholeness in nature#

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