Note for the scientific reader

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.

Makes me wonder how the Elm architecture and transformations on state (transformation-based architecture) might be a better representation of a living process? Certainly, simulations are a lot closer to living process than the abstract symbolic nature of coding.

This thought, obvious if taken naively, but profound and difficult if taken literally as a piece of science, relies entirely on the possibility that we can form a coherent and well-defined idea of what is meant by “the whole”, and of what is meant by a structure which grows from the whole, and preserves the wholeness while it is moving forward.
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We are able to approach clear thinking about this issue, and have enough of a well-defined formulation of what wholeness “is” to see the outline of a new theory built on this foundation.

Briefly, recapitulating passages of Book 1, the wholeness is what we think of as the “gestalt”, the broad gestural sweep of a figure, or of a configuration.

How are gestalt psychology and kinesthetic image schemas connected? There must be a connection here, where we can more easily “see” things that somehow resonate with our deeply learned and understood embodied patterns of how we experience the world.

As we go from picture to picture, or from stage to stage of the reaction, we see a continuous series of such configurations, in which the deep gestalt of each stage forms, grows, swells, develops, and gives rise to a new configuration.
It is this process, which I mean by “emergence of the wholeness” and by “emergence of the configuration from the wholeness”.

What I have said, in Book 1, is that this wholeness is in principle amenable to mathematical treatment and description. A wholeness consists of a recursively nested system of centers, all more or less living ones (according to the definitions of Book 1). It displays the fifteen properties, and in a sense one might say that the fifteen properties are the primitive configurations from which all wholeness is built. In more detail still, considering the arguments and examples of Book1, appendix 3, the wholeness may always be viewed as a nested system of local symmetries, and it is the configuration of the system of nested local symmetries which gives us the character of any particular wholeness, in any particular configuration.
I claim that even in continuous phenomena (such as curves, curved surfaces, organic forms in three dimensions such as leaves or organs, or in configurations of subtle gestalt such as gradients and smoothly meandering curves) it is always the wholeness, as defined here, in terms of the strong centers which appear, and in terms of local symmetries, which provide the handle of this wholeness.
What I call the wholeness is, to a very rough degree, a mathematical representation of the overall gestalt which we perceive, or which we are aware, which gives the character to the configuration, and which forms, what an artist might call, his most intuitive apperception of the whole.
Now, in simple outline, what I claim in this chapter, and in many succeeding chapters, is that natural process — and all living processes — come about as a result of sequence of transformations which emerge from, and act upon, this wholeness — bearing in mind that the wholeness is a well-defined thing, not an artistic thing — and that it is indeed from this wholeness, not previously identified in science with precision, that all growth and morphology emerge.

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