Category: Order
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The principle of order from order
The word order entered into physics in the nineteenth century with the notion of entropy in thermodynamics. Entropy is associated with the negation of order, of disorder. Entropy is highest when a closed system has arrived at a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.1 Erwin Schrödinger put forward the principle of order from order in his essay…
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Classical physics is a limiting case of the physics of life
Robert Rosen points out in his Essays on Life Itself that one of the striking features of Erwin Schrödinger’s essay What is Life? is his apologies, both for his physics, and for himself personally.1 While repeatedly proclaiming the ‘universality’ of contemporary physics, he equally repeatedly points out (quite rightly) the utter failure of its laws…
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Life and unfolding wholeness
We need to discover how to sense what is unfolding rather than simply trying to execute a plan… —John Huss 1 …all our experience…is…a complex flow, a constant unfolding, responsive dance of reciprocal gestures. It exists in process and in relationship… —Iain McGilchrist 2 It is…a process of unfolding…, in which the whole precedes the…
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We can only see deeper order with the heart
Christopher Alexander’s concept of living structure gives us a unifying picture of reality and an ethical view of things. The life (goodness) of any portion of the world arises from this structure.1 Living structure is, furthermore, deeply connected to the human self.2 Our mechanistic world-view has disconnected us from our selves. We have a disconnected…
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Wholeness is implicate order
Christopher Alexander had a conversation with David Bohm in 1988. Bohm told Alexander that, in his mind, the wholeness defined in The Nature of Order: Book 1 essentially is the same structure that which he calls the implicate order.1,2 Whether Bohm’s idea is true or not, the mathematics of quantum mechanics asserts that particles are…
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We nurture order into being
We nurture order into being, or not. Attentive response, of something which we have only inklings at first, comes more and more into being if we are truly responsive to it. It has something of the structure of love.1 The world we experience is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it.2 The…
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Personal feeling is directly connected to deeper order and life
Personal feeling is directly connected to deeper order and life. It is my vulnerable inner self being connected to the world, participating in all things. It is, for example, the feeling of being part of the ocean. The personal nature of deeper order appears in nature. The ocean, with its waves, is personal, and has…
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Christopher Alexander on the Personal Nature of Deeper Order
Christopher Alexander laid a foundation for order to be understood as living structure.1 Living structure, furthermore, cannot be understood as something separate from ourselves. It is both structure and personal. It is related to the geometry of space and to how things work. And it is related to the human person, deeply attached to something…
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Centers suffer from the same deficiency as patterns
Christopher Alexander came to believe that patterns themselves are not enough to generate life in buildings. After many years of thinking, Christopher Alexander came up with the idea that any part of space is defined by centers. They are focal points in a larger unbroken whole. It is important to remember that the centers are…
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The order of the whole cannot be reduced to parts
The idea of a Gestalt is central to Ian McGilchrist’s book The Matter with Things. The form of the whole cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature.1 The flow of the universe is always creative. The world is always a matter of responsiveness, a process of creative co-creation.2…