600 Transformation

I have not posted anything on my blog for some time, because I was involved in writing a book, with the title ‘Transformation’. It is a sequel to a book entitled ‘Process Philosophy’, published in 2021 by Anthem Publishers. That book is now in reprint, in paperback, to be published in 2025.The new book is currently in review at an international publisher. In the upcoming items in this blog, I will elaborate and give illustrations in different areas.
 

In the book ‘Process Philosophy’, I discussed change, distinguishing gradual, incremental change, treated as the realisation of potential, and radical, structural change, treated as the breakthrough to new potential. An example of the realisation of potential is how an oak grows from an acorn. I formalised the subject with the notion of a ‘script’. A script is a network of nodes that model component activities of the whole, each node with a repertoire of ‘subscripts’. The subscripts are connected by sequence in time, causality, or shared resources. Minor change is the selection of a different subscript from the repertoire, in response to what happens in the environment. A situation can arise where this change is not adequate, usually in a new environment, and attempts at adaptation are made by adopting subscripts or entire nodes from other local scripts, which succeed where the focal script fails, and threatens to collapse. The script as a whole is subscript in some encompassing ‘superscript’. Transformation, radical change, then is a new script with familiar and new nodes in a new structure.

 The example used was that of a restaurant, where the nodes are entry, seating, ordering, eating, paying and leaving. The superscript is the built environment, with its streets, zoning, lighting, ducts, parking, regulations, and supply chains. Minor change, realisation of existing structure, is the selection of a new subscript in a node, such as chopsticks replacing cutlery, or cash payment by payment by card or telephone. An example of transformation is that of a shift from a service restaurant to a self-service one. The nodes are similar, but their order is changed to entry, food selection, payment, seating, and leaving. The subscripts of nodes are not necessarily identical. There no longer is the service of a waiter, and seating involves carrying a tray with selected food.

 This is a model of systems in general. A system is a structure of elements that are connected in interaction, yielding effects of the whole system that the elements do not have by themselves. This is called ‘emergence’. The system as a whole interacts with others in its environment. An isolated system will decay, falling apart, in the striving of nature towards maximal ‘entropy’, disorder. That happens in death, for example. Systems need outside connections, but this does not mean that ‘everything is connected  with everything else’, though they may be connected indirectly, through a direct tie.

 Everything is a system in movement, with interaction of its parts and its environment. That view is the basis of ‘Process Philosophy’.

A stone is a structure of atoms that move with temperature, and above a critical temperature I will break apart. In thawing frost, water molecules break loose from the crystal structure of ice, and when the water cooks, they break loose from the water and evaporate in steam. That belongs to the potential of H2O. Oxygen feeds fires and metabolism in animals and plants, and in the process is transformed into CO2 In electromotors, electrons  are transformed into kinetic energy, or vice versa. .

 There are wider networks of connected systems They will be discussed in a later blog.