About halfway into Adrian Bejan’s book Design In Nature now.
Still good food for thought, but reading it feels like constantly “stroking against the hairs” (how should I translate this saying?).
An example: I find it irksome how Bejan usess the word ‘life’, ‘live’ etc. According to him, a running flow means the presence of life: as long as the river runs, it lives. (B.t.w., at other times, he adds in the word pulsating, which makes this more difficult to spot.)
If I make a slope in my (E-primitive) sandbox, take a garden hose and softly douse the sandy surface, a flow pattern like a river basin will emerge. True indeed. But does it mean I created life? Not in my view. When I stop dousing, the flow will stop a bit later, too. A river basin pattern develops well enough, but the availability of the water doesn’t pulsate.
In my view, only when the river pulsates because the water moving away from the top gets replenished regularly, the river pattern becomes alive. Then, at the same time, it becomes a flow pattern that will allow other life to grow as well - even serving as a channel for life to move through. Note that the pulsating can be really slow, even making the river fall dry regularly - as long as it pulsates, it will fill up again.
Similarly, following this line of thought, I do not agree with Bejan’s saying that a company like Ford lives. Yes, things flow through it, people move in it, and it has run for a while already, but fundamentally the flow is only one-way, not pulsating.
In this view, even death can flow, following the patterns of (or even inside) living beings (E prime?). But surely that makes death not ‘alive’? It just flows.
Thus, I also do not share his view that the (civilized) pattern of moving more and more stuff faster and faster, further and further enacts merely an ‘unavoidable’ matter of physics. Instead, the responsibility for this conscious choice to create a not-pulsating flow lays with certain individuals.
To summarize: my view is that flow is just flow, and only becomes alive when it starts to pulsate. The downward forces can be called “death-bringing”, the upward ones “life-giving”, and given enough time they will dance together in more and more complex ways, moving in each other’s channels, like fish swimming upstream, parasites moving in other lifeforms, and so on.
To call memes and flow patterns that cause death and decay on a massive scale ‘alive’ gives the impression that no alternatives for civilization’s way of increasing flow exist, let alone need exploration.
Looking forward to hear your thoughts on this, Willem. And others, of course.