16 • Dynamical systems
Turning our view from the structural aspects of cognition to its procedural nature, we discover surprising connections to the act of designing things.
Just as Alexander spends the whole first book of the four volumes of The Nature of Order on static structure, like centers or frequently recurring structural characteristics, we have so far mostly looked at structural aspects as well: how we can pick apart several components that form the whole of our cognition. It good to start with looking at structure — how things are structurally and functionally organized at one moment in time, to lay foundations for understanding.
But of course, nothing is really static. Everything changes over time, grows, develops, evolves. We have to take this development over time into account. We have to look at a dynamic process.
A dynamic perspective
Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book II, The process of creating life (highlights mine):
In many sciences, it has become commonplace to consider process as an inescapable part of order.
In physics, for example, forces themselves are now seen as processes, and the structure we observe in the world of atoms and electrons is known to come about as a result of the continuous play of subatomic processes defined by quantum mechanics.
In biology, the structure of an organism is understood to be inseparable from the process which creates and maintains it: an animal, at any instant, is the ongoing result of certain genetically controlled processes which create the organism to begin with, and which continue to create that organism throughout its life.
A cloud is a transitory by-product of the condensation of water in the atmosphere. The waves of the ocean are the flowing product of the process of interaction between wind and water. The sand ripples in the Sahara are the product of the process by which the wind takes sand, picks it up, and drops it. The mountain is the temporary product of the folding and heaving of the earth. The flower is the temporary product of the unfolding of the bud and seed pod under the driving influence of DNA.
In each case, the whole system of order we observe is only an instantaneous cross section, in time, of a continuous and ongoing process of flux and change.
We are fairly good at analyzing a static cross-section of something and figure out which parts form the whole. There is a reason why Descartes’ machine model is so effective. But each perspective we choose to take, makes certain things more salient than others.
In a mechanistic view of the world, we see all things, even if only for convenience, as machines. A machine is intended to accomplish something. It is, in its essence, goal-oriented. Like machines, then, within a mechanistic view processes are always seen as aimed at certain ends. We think of things by the end-state we want, and then ask ourselves how to get there.
The mechanistic view of architecture we have learned to accept in our era is crippled by this overly-simple, goal-oriented approach. In the mechanistic view of architecture we think mainly of design as the desired end-state of a building, and far too little of the way or process of making a building as something inherently beautiful in itself.
But, most important of all, the background underpinning of this goal-oriented view — a static world almost without process — just is not a truthful picture. As a conception of the world, it roundly fails to describe things as they are. It exerts a crippling effect on our view of architecture and planning because it fails to be true to ordinary, everyday fact. For in fact, everything is constantly changing, growing, evolving.
It’s time to take all the identified parts of cognition and observe them in the context of time, and make sense of the process that enables us to make sense.
From actuality & potentiality to causes & constraints
Here's the marker. I push it. Why did it move? And immediately the Newtonian grammar just comes into place: "It moved because you pushed it!" And then you might step outside of physics and say, "Well, I wanted to push it." But that's not what I'm asking. It could also just be that some other object bumped into this and it moved. Why else did it move?
Think about what has to also be true in order for this to move: There has to be empty space, relatively empty space in front of the marker. This [table surface] has to have a particular shape to it. This [marker] has to have a particular shape to it. Those aren't events, those are conditions.
Causes are events that make things happen. Constraints aren't events, they're conditions. They don't make things happen, they make things possible.
There's a big difference between a condition and an event. The Newtonian way of thinking has us so fixated on [causes], so foregrounded on this, that we're not seeing [constraints] anymore. Aristotle, because of his Platonic view, actually considers [constraints] more important. Why? Because when I talk about a structural-functional organization, when I talk about a pattern, I'm talking about [constraints].
This is where you will find form. This is sometimes called the formal cause. This is where you will find the structural-functional organization. Conditions are structurally-functionally organized such that motion for this [marker] is possible.
This is important because [causality] is, of course, actuality, and [constraints] is where we get potentiality. When I shape possibility, that's what I mean when I say something is potential: I mean that possibility has been shaped by constraints so that these events are more possible than these events.
Forgotten behind the Newtonian world of mechanistic cause and effect, lies the Aristotelean world of form shaping possibilities — the world of design.
The decisions we make as part of a design process, the way we structurally and functionally organize a thing, define its form and shape its possibilities. We cause structure to be and with that define which possible future events are more or less likely to happen.
Nature does that too.
Living things
In a tree you've got a bunch of events happening, biochemical events. What they're doing is they’re actually causing a particular form, or formula, or structural-functional organization.
Now think about it: Why do trees grow the way they do? Why do they grow like this? Why do they spread out their branches? Why do their leaves spread out? Because what they're trying to do is: they're trying to change the possibility of a photon hitting a chlorophyll molecule. The structure of the tree shapes the possibility of the events. The events cause this structure. They cause it, but this [form] then constrains the events.
Look at me! I'm a living thing. I've got a bunch of events happening in me. And that creates a structural-functional organization. That organization creates an internal environment in which the probability of events is dramatically altered. Events that have very low probability of happening out there have a high probability of happening in here. And events that have a very high probability of happening out there have a very low probability of happening in here.
That's what it is to be a living thing. The events cause a structure — a structural-functional organization, an eidos, a form — and then that constrains the events.
This is not a circular explanation, because I'm talking about two very different kinds of things: I'm talking about actuality and potentiality.
Potentiality is not abstract, it is as real as actuality
It's important to realize that the discussion of possibility — many of you were saying, "This is so abstract!" — this is actually integral to science. Science depends on there being real potential. The potentiality is a real thing.
Here's the object moving around. It's on the ground. Look at all this kinetic energy. Look at it moving. Oh, it stopped. Did I destroy all that energy? Where did the kinetic energy go? You can't destroy energy. The kinetic energy has become potential energy. If the principle of the conservation of mass and energy is real, then potentiality is real.
Look at something from Newton:
F = ma— Force equals mass times acceleration. Is that an event? Is that happening over there right now? Does it happen every Tuesday at 4 o'clock? This isn't an event. This is how things are shaped. It puts a limit on what's possible in the world. Talking about real potentiality is not talking fictional or abstract, it's a way of talking that's integral to our current science.Enabling and selective constraints
We're still not done though, because Juarrero points out that there are two kinds of constraints. Our explanations can become even more refined.
There are constraints that make a form of event, a type of event, more possible. She calls those enabling constraints.
And then there are constraints that reduce the possibilities, reduce the options for a system. These are the selected or selective constraints.
Now this is going give us a very powerful way of understanding development.
Living things basically shape themselves. The basic interplay between form shaping possibilities of events leads them to, at least partially, design themselves to change in certain (and often convoluted) ways. This happens over a period of time — it is a process.
While potentiality sounds like it is fictional or abstract, it is real, as physicists argue scientifically. But also as a designer or builder you know that your very physical and real shaping of matter (or less physical bits) creates real affordances to make future events happen, or to prevent them from happening.
As designers we want to get a good grip on these constraints we’re putting in place. The first step is to recognize that there are two different kinds:
selective constraints — decrease possibility, reduce options
enabling constraints — increase possibility, create options
It turns out that these happen to work together in a fundamentally important way.
Darwinian evolution: a dynamical systems theory
The theory of Darwinian evolution is probably the first dynamical systems theory in science, and it is a theory that is designed precisely to account for growth and development. Obviously not within an individual but across speciation.
Let's take a look at the theory. What you're looking for first of all: There has to be a feedback cycle for any dynamical system theory, because we're talking about a process that is self-organizing. What's the feedback cycle that evolution talks about? Of course, it's sexual reproduction.
Where do goats come from? Other goats. Goats are produced. There's the product, and then it feeds back into the system and becomes the producer, makes more goats that make more goats that make more goats. That's why we call it re-production. It's a feedback cycle.
What did Darwin realize? He realized that there were selective constraints operating on that. There were conditions in the environment that reduced the options for organisms. What are those conditions? Scarcity of resources.
I've been looking at some of the theories of early life and there's an argument by several biologists that there's no evolution for about probably 800 000 years or so, because there's no scarcity of resources when life first evolves. Life is static because there's no scarcity of resources. Scarcity of resources means there's competition. Scarcity of resources means not everything can live. And so that reduces the options for the system. Selection reducing options.
But that's not all that's going on. If that was the case, everything would just die. Evolution would end. That can happen — extinction events. But there's something else.
There's enabling constraints that open up the system, open up the options. Look around, look at me, look at other people! There's variation. There's considerable variation. Variation increases the options.
Look what's going on here: You've got this feedback cycle. As it's cycling through, you've got the selective conditions reducing the options that are available, and then the variation opening them up.
You can think of it almost like an accordion model: The variation opens it up and then as it cycles, the selective constraint pushes it down. And then from there it opens up again and then it gets pushed back down, and then it opens up again, it gets pushed back down. And as it cycles like this, it's constantly changing in a way to be better fitted to the environment.
That's evolution. It's a kind of circular — "evolve" is related to words like revolve — it’s this revolution with change.
Darwinian evolution is an example for a theory about a dynamical system that self-organizes in the form of feedback cycles that are governed by selection and variation — by selective and enabling constraints. Over time, the interplay between selection and variation, between selecting and enabling constraints, between creating a variety of organisms and selecting from them, causes organisms better adapted to the current environment to have an advantage to reproduce.
As the whole system (r)evolves, better adapted organisms prevail.
Fitness emerges out of the dynamic nature of this process.
Evolution optimizes for fitness.
A virtual engine
Juarrero talks about [selecting constraints] as a virtual governor. A governor is any device that limits what you can do on a system. Like if you have a governor on a steam engine, it sets the range, it limits the range at which you can cycle. She calls it a virtual governor because it's not an actual machine, it's the shaping of possibility.
She stops there. In work that I've done with Leo Ferraro and Anderson Todd and Richard Wu, we think she should continue to finish the metaphor: [Enabling constraints are] a virtual generator, because it's a set of conditions that are generating options for a self-organizing system.
And here's the idea: When you put a virtual governor systematically together with a virtual generator, such that you are systematically regulating a feedback cycle, this whole thing is a virtual engine, because when you attach a governor to a generator you get a virtual engine.
This is what a dynamical system theory is: A dynamical system theory is basically a theory that lays out the virtual engine. It shows you how there's a feedback cycle, and why that's not just random and chaotic, why it produces growth and development precisely because there's a systematic relationship between a set of enabling and selective constraints.
Change over time amounts to growth, development, evolution. Design — at least in nature — is not so much a deliberate act of making changes towards a goal, but a continuous response to environmental changes in a dynamical system.
There is no grand plan upfront that is followed meticulously. There is only the present moment in time, and the constraints of the system limiting or enabling possibilities. Over the course of time, sometimes within seconds, sometimes within millennia (and sometimes on a remarkably consistent weekly schedule)1, things adapt. They grow, develop, evolve.
Christopher Alexander picks up on this in The Nature of Order, book II, The process of creating life (highlights mine):
Throughout the natural world, one sees myriad examples of systems which “come into being”. Indeed, as we think about it, in natural systems there is nothing else but this “coming into being”. Everything is coming into being, continuously.
A living process always has enormous respect for the state (and morphology and form) of what exists, and always finds a next step forward which preserves the structure of what exists, and develops and extends its latent structure as it creates change, or evolution, or development. This is the process which is “creative”.
While nature may well have a dynamical tendency to preserve wholeness, it is possible for human beings to violate this tendency, simply by acting in a way which is disrespectful of the wholeness (either on purpose to gain something, or by mistake simply because they fail to see the wholeness accurately).
A living system with a virtual engine respects the environment it operates in and adapts to it in tiny little steps. There is no growth target, no intention, just adaptation to change.
In contrast to nature, which is in a way limited to this evolutionary approach to growth and development, we humans have the capability to imagine, to anticipate, and to plan. We can “design in one big step” and don’t have to rely on an iterative process that moves in many tiny steps. We don’t have to incorporate feedback from the environment. And we don’t have to adapt to anything.
Luckily, we have started to realize that this might be a problem.
Mirror of the Self is a weekly newsletter series trying to explain the connection between creators and their creations, and analyze the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art. Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.
If you are new to this series, start here: A secular definition of sacredness.
For an overview and synopsis of the first 13 articles, see: Previously… — A Recap.
This is what I’m trying to do here. I’m trying to put this directly into action. When I say, “I don’t have a grand plan” for this newsletter, I’m not just being apologetic. This is “a work in progress” by design (ha!). Very meta, I know.