Philosophy for Programmers
Moments of cohesion form in the midst of change.
A structure is anything that has form, whether natural or artificial. All living structures seem to have feedback mechanisms to determine how it affects itself and implicitly, its environment. This is because in a sense, the form of structures are a function of the very pressures and constraints placed on them by their surrounding environment. But in another sense, no matter how many pressures and constraints are placed on a bounded context to seemingly produce a structure, ultimately, it can never fully describe its “what-ness” but only approximate it.
Form is a thing’s unifying principle — a thing’s determining wholeness. With enough pressures and constraints, like a dotted outline that appears to approach the outline of a circle, an approximation of a form may begin to emerge from the negative space, but it is only a mere privation, not the rule. When looking at the unity or wholeness of a thing, we are speaking of its form. For example, if we were to talk about a circle, there would be no part of the circle, abstractly speaking, (no matter how much we “zoomed in”) that did not in-form what a circle is. Now it is true that there are accidental qualities, for example, no matter how accurately we desire to draw an actual circle, there will always be some imperfections, but that isn’t due to our lack of understanding of what a circle is but due to the material cause by which we are drawing the circle. The form remains the unifying principle by which we intelligibly understand what we have drawn and not something else, although we only ever understand that we’ve drawn a circle through a particular circle, however imperfect it is.
Feedback mechanisms along with their corresponding inputs, and some intrinsic principle or rule to guide its next action are what allow these living structures to “grow” or move toward some end. In another sense, we could say there is a “returning to oneself” that all living structures desire, for the sake of its wholeness or unity and the more unified a substance, the more its effects will return to itself. The rate of a living structure’s growth toward some intelligible end (which can also be thought of as its fullness or its perfection), is a function of the feedback’s appropriateness and timeliness but also of the living structure’s effectiveness in making changes accordingly.
What do we mean by the word “nature” or “natural”? There is a sense in which something is because of its form or what makes it intelligible. Or to put it another way, by way of a thing’s very wholeness, every action flows from its intrinsic principle of being. A thing can only be what it is. And due to the principle of existential goodness, a thing can only be good in so far as it is what it is. So in order to contribute towards successful change, that is, change that will last because it flows with the very nature of the thing, we need to be mindful of not breaking the very wholeness of the thing we are trying to change while trying to change it. In everything that we want to change, there is what changes, and that which remains. The living structure already has a good and intrinsic principle by which it will produce more goodness and wholeness which may include removing or cutting off. When its parts are out of proper proportion, one to another (internally or externally), one need only to use what natural feedback loops that already exists to properly reflect back to the living structure so that *it* can make the changes internally proper to itself.
Humans are much better at seeing the examples, or the particulars or to put it another way, the effects by which we then abstract and see the underlying universals that they inhabit. At some point, we begin to notice patterns that are more stable than the particulars that inhabit them, and we abstract those. Once we’ve done this, we can name it, use it, and verify it as a single point of thought as opposed to spreading it across many concretions with their various edge cases and exceptions, exhausting our energy for progress.
“Since an effect is known through its cause, it is clear that a cause is by its nature more intelligible than an effect, although effects are sometimes better known than causes from our perspective, because we acquire knowledge of universals and intelligible causes from sensible particulars.”
— Aquinas, Preface for Liber De Causis
