Interplay of the properties

<- Fifteen fundamental properties

The fifteen properties are not independent. They overlap. In many cases we need one of them to understand the definition of another one. This is because it is the field of centers itself which is primary, not these fifteen properties. The properties are simply aspects of the field which help us understand concretely how the field works.

Although the fifteen properties seem distinct at first, they are in fact intertwined and interwoven.

When I first identified the fifteen properties this pattern of interdependence seemed very puzzling and troublesome. It meant that the properties are not “atomic” or fully independent features of systems. However, I soon began to think this was significant and important rather than troublesome. The interdependence of the properties seemed to contain a hint of something else, something richer and more complex than the properties themselves — and also more unitary — which somehow lay behind the properties. I began to realize that these fifteen properties were indicators, rough approximations of some deeper structure which looked and felt like “all of them together”. This “deeper” structure had to be an extended thing in space, a “something” which existed across space, and which allowed the fifteen properties to emerge from it. During the late seventies, I began thinking that this “something” must be some kind of field in which centers create wholeness and wholeness intensifies centers. I finally recognized that it is the field of centers which is primary, not these fifteen properties, and that the properties are simply aspects of the field which help us to understand concretely how the field works. At that stage I began to formulate the basis for a new view of space based on wholeness, in which these fifteen properties appear naturally and inevitably from the nature of wholeness, and in which it becomes clear how and why life occurs in space, not as an attribute of living organisms, but as an attribute of space itself.

#book/The Nature of Order/1 The Phenomenon of Life/5 Fifteen fundamental properties#