Necessary features of all living process

No matter how it is expressed, I believe future understanding of living process — if the concept survives in future generations — must have at least the following features:

1. A living process is a step-by-step adaptive process, which goes forward in small increments, with opportunity for feedback and correction at every increment (Chapter 8: Step-by-step adaptation).
2. It is always the whole which governs, in a living process. Even when only latent, whatever greater whole is latent is always the main focus of attention and the driving force which controls the shaping of the parts (chapter 9: Each step is always helping to enhance the whole).
3. The entire living process — from beginning to end — will be governed and guided and moved forward by the formation of living centers in such a way that the centers help each other (chapter 10: Always making centers).
4. The steps of a living process always take place in a certain vitally important sequence, and the coherence of its results will be dependent to a large extent on the accuracy of this sequence which controls unfolding (chapter 11: The sequence of unfolding).
5. Parts which are created during the process of differentiation must become locally unique; otherwise the process is not a living process. This means that all repetition is based on the uniqueness of the locally shaped parts, each adapted, by the process, to its situation within the whole (chapter 12: Every part unique).
6. The formation of centers (along with the sequence of their unfolding) is guided by generic patterns which play the role of genes (chapter 13: Patterns: generic rules for making centers).
7. Every living process is, throughout its length and breadth, congruent with feeling and governed by feeling (chapter 14: Deep feeling).
8. In the case of buildings, the formation of the structure is guided geometrically by the emergence of an aperiodic grid which brings coherent geometric order to built form (chapter 15: Emergence of formal geometry).
9. The entire living process is oriented by a form language that provides concrete methods of implementing adapted structure through simple combinatory rules (chapter 16: Form language and style).
10. The entire living process is oriented by the simplicity transformation, and is pruned, steadily, so that it moves towards formation of a beautiful simplicity (chapter 17: Simplicity).

I am reasonably certain that, for any process to be a living one, these ten essential features, at least, must be present.

To create living structure in our world, profound sequences originating in the fundamental process, in some form, must be used again and again. The more we understand about creating life — in buildings, towns, pictures, artifacts — the more we will gradually come to realize that life comes about in them when, and because, and only because, we are repeating the fifteen structure-preserving transformations again and again and again: And when we do, when we unfold the structure of the world successfully through differentiation, the results will always be the same, in some profound fashion, through infinitely various in their detail.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/7 The fundamental differentiating process#