The concept of living structure

<- [[ Why do the 15 properties occur in nature? ]]

The repeated appearance of the fifteen properties in natural systems is a profound result, not merely a by-product of presently available mechanical explanations about the world. Rather, it suggests a new view of all nature as living structure. It implies that […] the distinction between degrees of life in things, the role played by the fifteen properties in creating life in space — is not merely appropriate for artifacts, but must be extended to include all naturally occurring structures. In this scheme of things, nature itself then becomes visible as something quite different from the mechanical nature that 19th- and 20th-century physicists used to imagine.

There is life — more of it and less of it — in inanimate nature, too. But all this — all of what we loosely and traditionally call “nature” — is then characterized by just that actual life which I have identified in the better human artifacts. Within the terms of my definitions, then, nature as a whole — all of it — is made of living structure. […] Whether organic or inorganic, most of it is alive in the terms that I have defined. The living character of these structures is different from the character of other conceivable structures that could arise, and it is this character which we may call the living character of nature.

Among natural phenomena, the fifteen properties seem to appear, pervasively, in almost everything. Yet among human artifacts, the fifteen properties appear only in the good ones. How can the very same properties be marks of good structure in human artifacts, and yet be present in all of nature? What is it about nature which always makes its structures “good”?

The essence of the problem is that we have not, as far as I know, ever yet concentrated our attention on the fact that in nature, all the configurations that do occur belong to a relatively small subset of all the configurations that could possibly occur. It is that which permits, I believe, the characterization of a certain class of structures as living structure.

For some reason nature, when left to its own devices, generates configurations in L [configurations which have living structure], but […] human beings are able, for some reason, to jump outside L, into the larger part of C [all possible three dimensional arrangements that might exist]. That is, human beings — and designers, above all — are able to be un-natural.

The sum total of all that could occur (C), is the set of all possible (imaginary and actual) configurations that might appear in the world. But nature does not create all possible configurations. In fact, what we call nature only creates things from a drastically limited set of configurations (L), which are constrained by restrictions on the types of process that occur in nature. Essentially, nature always follows the rule that each wholeness which comes into being preserves the structure of the previous wholeness, so that all of nature is just that structure which can be created by a smooth structure-preserving process of unfolding.

That is why we see the fifteen properties throughout almost all of nature, at almost all scales. And, even though this living structure in nature is a product of natural laws, in buildings and human artifacts, which are works of imagination, these restrictions on structure-preserving processes do not necessarily apply. It is possible — very easily possible — for human designers to design unnatural structures of a kind which could not (in principle) occur in nature. In nature the principle of unfolding wholeness […] creates living structure nearly all the time. Human designers, who are not constrained by this unfolding, can violate the wholeness if they wish to, and can therefore create non-living structure as often as they choose.

-> A new view of nature

#book/The Nature of Order/1 The Phenomenon of Life/6 The fifteen properties in nature#