A metapattern is a pattern so wide-flung that it appears throughout the spectrum of reality: in clouds, rivers, and planets; in cells, organisms, and ecosystems; in art, architecture, and politics.
Perhaps the metapatterns are attractors—functional universals for forms in space, processes in time, and concepts in mind.
The sphere is the elementary division of inside and outside. If there were to be a symbol for the “thingness” of anything, I would guess we’d agree on the sphere, or, on the page, the circle.
Metapatterns can be thought of as those key patterns that exemplify the sphericity of the deepest forms of knowledge, the interlinking of all things and ideas in the universe.
Earth is our birth, our death, enveloping us within its component spheres of biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, technosphere, and noösphere. Planet Earth becomes our god, inspiration, truth, perfection, equality, and source of power.
The flows of vital fluids within tubes in similar-looking networks—rivers, plants, blood systems—can lead to a view of Earth itself as an organism.
The world as things (spheres) connected by relations (tubes.)
The goal is to reveal things and their deeply interfused, radiating relations: fields in physics, food webs and energy flows in ecology, money exchanges in economics, ocean oxygen fluxes in earth system science, crop responses to sunlight in agronomy, and on to a near-infinity of human concerns.
Borders hold at bay all that would destroy the difference between being and environment; they prevent universal homogenization.
If anything qualifies as a superorganism it is an ant hill or a bee hive. The border of each, with a few big orifices issuing forth from ground or tree, seems animal-like: barriers and pores spatially crisp and functionally formal. But when masses of workers disperse to forage, the edge of the superorganism is spatially even fuzzier than a cloud’s edge.
Our immune system—functionally formal with its select cell types, spatially fuzzy because dispersed throughout our blood—is a vital part of the human border. The fuzzy valence shells of electrons in atoms separate one atom from another by repulsion yet allow bridges of relationship for chemical bonding. Overall, to find the functional as well as the physical borders, we can search for where and how an entity separates from and connects to others, by looking for those parts that relate both to something inside and to something external.
Consider these sentences: Janice is in the house; Janice is in college; Janice is in business. This latter extends the meaning of a purely physical container, but no more so than the spatially fuzzy system of foraging bees. Now consider: Janice is in love. Thus the same physically rooted border concepts of inside and outside are also used for states of being.
Our legal limits do not just enclose us, they are us. What happens when a higher-level government makes a ruling that conflicts with local interests? Vexing issues and lasting disputes arise from the multiple bounded arenas we live within and identify with. Fuzzy-edged cultural and business groups, each with a distinct agenda, permeate all levels of the comparatively crisp land-based lines. Laws apply property concepts to our bodies and our extended skins of homes and habits in a plethora of privacy issues. At big scales, nations accost one another by entering each other’s trousers, by physical force, unfair trade, and nearly unstoppable cultural incursion.
The greater the variety of border patterns we contemplate from nature—the generative matrix of borders, formal to casual, crisp to fuzzy—the greater are the possibilities for expanding our minds. Sensory border patterns provide templates for those mental.
On the collective level, we incubate our society through the generations within cultural shells. In what ways do these fuzzy matrices of technology, language, art, science, and architecture, and of values, laws, and myths, separate us too harshly from nature? In what ways do they connect us to nature via bridges unachievable without such sheltering from the storms of time’s brutal uncertainties? The inquiries out into nature we have launched from such shells reveal new borders that serve as paradigms for the next stages of cultural evolution.
The sheets of soil and air do seem to be actual membranes of the largest living system, the biosphere. These two sheets do not merely exist alongside the biosphere; they were created by and are now intrinsic parts of the biosphere. Layer upon layer we have extended our selves with cultural shelters: clothing, buildings, cities, and nations. Now we can identify with Earth’s outermost membrane as shelter, too. Connecting all our invented squares is one great and sustaining sphere of air. As Liu Ling might remark today, I take the whole Earth as my body. Why then are my skins being defiled?
A sphere (and not just the idealized shape, but as symbol for any entity) cuts existence into two parts: inside and outside, thing and the rest of the universe. The two—entity & environment—relate, determine, create, and influence each other in a radically linked dance by which any thing is joined to its surrounding sea: ship & ocean, particle & crystal, galaxy & cosmos, genome & cell, organism & ecosystem, computer & network, person & society.
Do we walk through woods and see nature as red in tooth and claw or as plants giving oxygen to animals, fungi, and bacteria and then getting carbon dioxide in return? Do we experience city streets as battlegrounds of cars and bicycles and pedestrians, each trying to get ahead, cut across, or do we see them as busy corridors where vast networks of people and institutions accommodate one another—even more, cooperate just to get the food to market each day, to haul away the trash, to keep the whole crazy thing going?
One plus one can equal a new one, bigger in mass and enriched in attributes.
Terrestrial plants are a skin between earth and sky. Culture is a skin between humanity and nature. Its tools and machines (pen, spoon, tractor, airplane) are binary because they stretch between our bodies and the environment.
Particularly deep in human evolutionary history is yes & no. By coos of affirmation and snorts of disapproval, elders reinforce the successes and errors of the youths they teach—a pattern that must antedate any accompanying words. Primates condition each other with painful bites and comforting strokes. Reward & punishment imprints yes & no into the neuronal wetware, encouraging certain activities in life’s arena, banishing others behind walls of taboo.
These twirls that dance around the lurking grips of binaries go on and on—until enlightenment? Or is that another form of illusion?
Passing through any of the doors beyond binary—into oneness, pluralism, or swiveling parallels—begins with the binary to go beyond. Binary is both denied and affirmed. We aim not just to go beyond the binary but also to embrace it as the very way to go beyond.
Organisms with nerves as centers made possible another novelty of evolution: social systems. Those organisms with protected, aggregated, and swollen spheres of nerves could begin uniting into larger units, which could move coherently. Flocks of birds, schools of fish, and migrating herds of wildebeest or caribou consist of a large number of nearly identical beings. They are dispersed systems. In a way, they are motile rocks. Within flocks and schools and herds, tubes of behaviors and signals stretch from each individual to a usually close range of neighbors, which stabilizes the whole. The organisms are to their wholes in these social examples as the cells within lichens or sponges are to the whole organism—smaller, centered systems arrayed in larger, dispersed systems.
The hive is both centered and dispersed—and the binary of centered and dispersed systems is a tool for thinking, not an either-or.
The alpha mammalian center is not a specialized individual, but a role. Perhaps because this role embodies a greater degree of whatever metaphysical substance makes up the network of dominance and cooperation, mammal societies with dominance hierarchies should be considered more dispersed than centered. At the very least, however, they are a step along what is clearly an evolutionary trend toward centering, the prime mammalian manifestation of which is as striking as that of the atom, the cell, and the organism. Out of primal dominance hierarchies have emerged centralized human systems and civilizations.
As whole-body movement of physically linked cells drove the development of animal nervous systems, so the need for complex, fast, coordinated behavior channeled groups of human nervous systems into centered social systems.
The soul may be the social body, like mind built from neurons, like an ant superorganism from ants.
Consider: cells had to encase large amounts of DNA in a bounded nucleus (the evolution of the relatively large eukaryotic cell) before groupings of such cells could differentiate into tissues and start evolving as unities called fungi, plants, and animals. So perhaps the relatively large nation-state, with formalized government and constitution, may be a stage of political evolution necessarily prior to the formation of an as-yet unrealized unity.
The whole of human society can be like Gaia, which is highly dispersed. I take Gaia to be the synergy of biota, atmosphere, marine and fresh waters, soils, and rocks—a whole whose organizational properties we are just beginning to explore.
That’s the beauty of nature—no bosses—and it disperses our thoughts on blossoms gliding down a stream.
We, Homo sapiens, after nearly four billion years of evolution, are the de facto nervous system of Gaia. We are the planetary brain species.
Arguably the most important ordering that one will ever contemplate is existence in its totality.
Nature works by steps. The atoms form molecules, the molecules form bases, the bases direct the formation of amino acids, the amino acids form proteins, and proteins work in cells. The cells make up first of all the simple animals, and then sophisticated ones…. The stable units that compose one level or stratum are the raw material for … the climbing of a ladder from simple to complex by steps, each of which is stable in itself.
The rise of complexity through layering—through stratified stability—is seen everywhere. A symbiosis of prokaryotes created eukaryotes. Around the gymnosperm’s “naked seed” evolved the additional layer of the angiosperm’s “covered seed.” Solitary insects came before the hive and the hill. Computer programmers ensure that each subroutine checks before assembling the whole. Fax machines incorporate prior stable units: telephone, microchip, printing, paper, and alphabet. Words preceded sentences, which preceded books. All are composites, layer stacked upon stabilizing layer.
The emergence of wholes from parts exudes an aroma of mystery, of elusive but profound truths.
One example of an amazingly complicated complex system that is nonetheless “adaptive” is seen in what is called the paradox of New York City. Consider: millions live with only a few days of food stocked in restaurants and markets and even homes. Yet every day enough replacement food is distributed and made available to make the whole thing work—all without any centralized control or master plan.
[One] worldview envisions evolution as heading somewhere, but then, where? Toward increased complexity? Perhaps progress?
To focus on life’s ability to create bounded structures with relatively low internal entropy, Erwin Schrödinger invented the term negentropy. Buckminster Fuller proffered syntropy to stand for the geometry of concentrating, which puts it in opposition to the dispersing flow of entropy. Architect and futurist Paolo Soleri has diagrammed a creative evolution of “superstructuration” countering the “crushing megamachine of decay.” To describe a life-related counterflow to entropy’s inevitable drift downstream, neurobiologist William Calvin has coined the phrase “the river that flows uphill.”
Here we find not the collapse of order, like the one-way dissipative crash of Humpty-Dumpty. Rather, things build up, from small to large, from pebbles to rocks layered with moss. This upward process sings to stratified stability. Step by step, the development of complexity from level to level is an arrow in possibility space.
The overall arrow from subatomic particles through prokaryotic cells thus made use several times over of this sequence: parts combine into wholes; these wholes engender new types of relations, giving rise to the possibility that the wholes become parts in turn for still larger wholes.
Huge vistas of possibility space are yet to be discovered right here on Earth. The civilizations and cultures have only recently bumped into one another around the whole sphere. The arrows can test synergies between humans and computers, humans and nature, and humans together in kinds of groups scarcely imagined.
Globally, we humans have never shared a goal. But today the vacancy of common purpose matters.
Cycles are the heartbeats of understanding. A thing perceived is just an event. Repeated, it opens up to the instruments of science, the ruminations of philosophers, the imaginations of shamans.
From the metabolism of a swan to that of Gaia, the main force that dynamic entities must counter is faceless, disruptive entropy, which disperses heat and in general works to dissipate concentrations and complexities that may have been carefully sequestered and built by life.
Arrows within arrows, cycles within arrows, arrows within cycles, and cycles within cycles: these holarchies in time are present in the patterns that make and surround us. They evince harmonies and changes, repetitions and variations, at scales from atomic vibrations to galactic carousels, from the shimmers of nucleotides to the sighs of kings and the groans of societies. It is all a totality that, to me, most resembles music.
Even though we may think we are riding a one-way road into an ever-enlivening, cola-commercial future, the legions of fossils in museums and the now-homogenizing landscape ought to give us pause. For the organisms and taxa extinguished, it matters not whether the bludgeon is a comet from space or one klutz of a species here on Earth.