Some time ago, in a response to my post, Is the observer essential, my friend Gnomon recommended I take a look at an idea called TES: Theory of Enformed Systems, where enformy refers to “the fundamental, conserved capacity to organize.”

After reading the introductory paper, and realizing that there is more to the idea than I have read yet, I nevertheless have some intial reactions that I’d like to capture in print before they get away from me.

Firstly, I’ve talked about the dangers of reductionism for years. To explain something as a collection of parts, you first have to introduce boundaries that divide the object into the parts you want to identify. These divisions are artificial. For example, there is no clear point where the mountain begins and the surrounding plain ends; they merge together seemelessly, such that, while you can definitely note some points as being on the mountain, and other points as definitely being of the plain, there are many points which could be either. Similarly, it is conventional when discussing human anatomy to make a distinction between the circulatory system and the nervous system, but we all know that the two are inextricably intertwined, and the heart cannot function without the brain to regulate it, nor the blood vessels establish the correct blood pressure without the brain’s assistance. There isn’t really two systems there. There is only one, which we’ve divided for the sake of easing the job of description and understanding.

This artificial division of the objects leads to a problem trying to reconstitute the whole from the parts. It should be pretty obvious that there is no part of the gun which has the function, “to fire,” and yet somehow it becomes an inherent (and critical) function of the gun to fire. Which part gives rise to this functionality? The answer is that no single part does; it arises from all of them put together. Ultimately, this inability of the process of deconstruction to support the reconstruction of the object leads to what we call “emergent properties.” Emergent properties seem by their nature to be mysterious and magical, but in fact, they are nothing but the artifacts of the way the object is distorted by reductionism.

In other words, while it’s true that reductionism (analysis into parts) can be a helpful strategy for studying something, the symptoms of its errors are manifested as emergent properties.

Secondly, I like the way this theory of enformed systems makes the point that the object’s organization is non-physical — and they even dare to use the word “spiritual.” I don’t think we ought to confuse the spirituality being alluded to here has to do with angels and gods. It’s the kind of spirituality where we distinguish, in Aristotle’s very ancient way, between form and substance. The importance of form in our study of the world is as easy to see as the ubiquitous employment of mathematics: mathematics, especially geometry, but in fact all forms of mathematics, are a study of the forms of relationships, and these have nothing to do with the substances that exhibit the forms.

This is nowhere clearer than in our treatment of music. Originally, music was generated by simple instruments such as drums, flutes, and guitars, all of which operated by vibrating, and thus creating atmospheric pressure waves that we could hear. But the interesting thing about the music is the form of its tonality; not the use of pressure waves. So in more modern times, music was first recorded as written notations on paper (“sheet music”) and later by vinyl records, magnetic tape, and DVD disks. The type of the recording medium is irrelevant. What matters is the pattern itself that the medium encodes; and that pattern is a form.

An inability to distinguish form and substance leads to monist philosophies, and eventually to a distortion of our picture of the world, because the most important thing about the world is not the absolute meausres of its implementations, but the patterns it makes to our perceptions as distributed over time and space. And this is the kind of spirituality we have to grasp in our mathematics and our “enformy.”

Third and lastly, we have to understand that reductionism is not the only way we can understand things; in fact, it’s probably not even the most basic way. After all, think of this: before you can study how something is constructed in terms of parts and their connections, you first have to identify the thing you want to study. That is, you have to know what it is and be able to pick it out of a field of things before you’ve submitted it to your reductivist analysis. Otherwise you’re standing there in your lab with nothing to put on the table. My usual example of this is to object that science does not tell us what Gold is. We know what gold is. We give the scientist a sample of it, and then he knows what he’s studying. From a reductionist study, we can learn that gold is made of atoms, each with 79 protons and electrons, and on average 118 neutrons. But this isn’t how we identify gold. We determined it has those properties after first identifying that it is gold.

This observation leads to a statement of the basic method we use to understand objects: description. A description addresses the whole, and clarifies the inherent properties it has in a static way, and may also discuss behaviors and dynamic properties attendant to the object. For a discussion of the object at this level, we have no need to make a reduction. Indeed, we start out recognizing a gun by its form and design, and most of all by its dynamic property: that it fires. Trying to figure out which part provides the firing function isn’t something we need to do in order to understand that a gun fires, but by virtue of having started with this level of understanding, we can then attribute the firing both to the action of the hammer and the explosive properties of gunpowder; but you first have to know that the whole thing fires.

In summary, then, the theory of knowledge being presented in the papers on enformy seem to be taking an approach to the whole question that is easy to support.

I will have to read more, to see how this story unfolds. Thanks, Gnomon, for putting me on to this.