Unresolved Forces - Copyright Richard Fabian 2024

• Music — Western world variety

  • Hierarchy of Cadences: almost levels of scale, but closer to echoes and alternating repetition but also local symmetries.
  • Harmony and Discord: contrast and gradient but also not-separateness.
  • Repetition with Variation: not roughness or alternating repetition, but strong centres or levels of scale or gradient.
  • Symmetry of Structure: like echoes and local symmetries.
  • Dynamics: like contrast and the void.
  • Gradient of Complexity: gradients and levels of scale.
  • Echoes of Motif: echoes, but also alternating repetition and simplicity and inner calm.
  • Segments in Time: like boundaries but also some of deep interlock.
  • Key: simplicity and inner calm, good shape, and not-separateness.
  • Clarity: positive space (not having three bass guitars and a singer).

• Food

  • Contrast: just one or two at most of each food group, but unrelated to the contrast property of forms. This is closer to strong centres.
  • Full Palate: the presence of most elements in the meal, if not each part of a meal, bringing balance. Good shape might be the closest property of forms.
  • Differing complexity: like levels of scale or gradients for the elements of a meal. If everything is trying hard to be the centrepiece of the plate, nothing is.
  • Separate but complementary: deep interlock and ambiguity by making foods that work well together because they offset each other’s weaknesses (a salty meat with a starchy side, a creamy sauce on dry food, or a tangy wet mixture, such as in lasagne).
  • Sequence of granularity: chunks of something in grains or sauce, not two types of chunky things together or two sauces mixing, but salads often break this.

• Art

  • All the same properties as architecture. This one sticks out to me as it’s the same for any art-form from weaving (Turkish rugs) to sculpture. Art is part of the lived visual domain so shares all the properties of forms as they often are forms and compound ones at that.

• Dance

  • Complementary Top and Bottom Half
  • Lead and Follow
  • Rhythm at Many Scales
  • Contrast with or against Co-dancers
  • In Place, Around, Along, Reverse
  • Flow and Lines
  • Balance and Energy

• Poetry or prose

  • Hierarchy of Subject
  • Reveal/Guide Alternation: sequences of pique interest, guide reasoning, reveal conclusion.
  • Variation at All Levels: line length, paragraph length, paragraph and line structure.
  • Repetition and Avoidance of Repetition: in words or style, repetition is a property of its own, but repeating a lot is a mess.
  • Level of Language audience-specific level of wording, keeping it consistent.

It may be my inability to produce good properties for these domains, but I have noticed something: music is not intensely full of properties. Many animals also use a dance or sound to indicate things, so some properties exist. However, they don’t appear to be fundamental. They are almost idiomatic of a species. We know music has changed over the centuries. Different cultures have different forms in their compositions. The set of properties of music is likely stronger than for prose and poetry but much weaker than for art.

Food is also weaker. This may be because we’ve only been making meals to satisfy the eyes for a few thousand years; before those times, perhaps food was just food. Are cakes and courses a relatively recent invention in an evolutionary time frame? Art is a strong contender for properties because it stems from the same roots as architecture. But dance is again only middling. Many animals dance, and we’ve likely been dancing as a species since before we had words to describe it. But I believe it’s idiomatic to a species, not a natural outpouring of the environment in which we exist.

As each domain moves further from our evolutionary basis, it loses the chance for us to have found or sought universal properties. This does not bode well for code or organisational structures.

Is there a reason these fundamental properties exist in differing strengths in these other domains? Why is it that the further we step away from our evolution, the weaker the properties seem to be?

Perhaps the answer is that 15 fundamental properties are fundamental to growth and adaptation. Similar fundamental properties will not exist where the natural reification of a compound is not via a sequence of steps. The fundamental properties only exist because they match the process by which things reach their final form. The properties relating to this unfolding process exist because these forms still exist after millions of iterations of unfolding processes.

Why do I suggest this? Because of the quality without a name. We judge with our evolved sense of quality, our innate sense of what is right. This sense of quality has been trained over millions of years to match what is supportive in the environment in which it was taught. These properties list the metrics our evolved self uses to determine what is good. I believe Christopher Alexander discovered the scientific metrics of quality for humans.

But there is some strange hope that some fundamental properties can be found outside the elements of our ancient world. For example, prose does not appear to be a naturally emerging element of the universe, so any set of fundamental properties can, at best, only loosely mimic the true fundamental properties. And yet, even in this domain, we have some evidence of the quality without a name.

Robert M. Pirsig wrote about the aspect of quality in rhetoric. He claimed his students could read two passages and know which was better[ZatAoMM74], even if they did not know why. And by know, he meant they would agree with him, but in essence, this is the same as Christopher Alexander’s experiments discovering overwhelming agreement in his test subjects.

Robert M. Pirsig explored the elements of quality much further in his second book, building a picture of how it works. He explained how quality is fundamental, and the sense of it preceded our development of analysis methods[Lila91]. To use his terms, we perceive quality without defining it (he called this ‘dynamic quality’) and only then name it, quantify it, and build our analysis methods and reasons around it (he called this ‘static quality’). But it’s all the same quality all the time.

If there are fundamental properties of prose, then this disproves any theory stating they only exist for something ancient and evolutionary. It also suggests the unfolding nature may not be required and may be specific to only some domains. Let’s assume the fundamental properties of architecture and art result from an unfolding process of nature. In that case, we should look for the fundamental properties in whatever process creates good quality in that domain.

We should be able to find fundamental properties of organisational structure or anything else humans can accurately compare. After all, we know the difference between a good-feeling organisation and a less-than-good one. Finding those fundamental properties is a complex task that will take a long time, but each domain will have some and will work to guide the production of a better outcome.

But for domains where we can’t trust human instincts, such as those where the environment and fitness are alien to us, we must first find the measure—the fitness function. Code has a growth process, but we can’t easily tell good code from bad. Finding the properties here will take more effort. A better, healthier process should lead to the properties, and if we were to chance upon the properties first, they could lead to the process. How we find either is still up for debate.