ecophilia - fasting, fungi & fractals #5, the fractal nature of reality

“Dendritic, or branching form, such as one sees in frost on a window pane, or in a plant such as a fern, is fractal. There is a main stem, with smaller stems coming off it, and ones smaller still branching off them, and so on. Interestingly, this has to do with symmetry-breaking: The reason for this kind of shape is that as something grows (ice crystals, plant), as it passes some critical size, the smooth edge becomes unstable and starts to get bumpy. Then the bumps grow, obeying much the same rules, and the process repeats. It’s actually another case of symmetry-breaking, analogous to ripples forming in a flat plane, but here the ripples form along a flattish edge. So again we see mathematical unity in very different physical systems”. 

“social life is of fractal nature, and that society consists of three interdependent dimensions that always repeat themselves but ultimately depend on one another: solidarity, trade and competition.” 

“When one compares the single cell to the whole organism to which it belongs – in other words, over the most colossal scale – one finds that common to each are the needs to co-ordinate information, to exchange energy with the surroundings, to have a functioning system of internal distribution, to have the ability to repair and protect itself, to exert ‘border control’, and to have the capacity to carry on producing itself. In fact, zooming outwards from the human individual to society, rather than inwards to the single cell, one finds the same fractal pattern – the same needs – much as one might expect. Those needs and drives that we know at one level as explicit are implicit at other levels; there is no absolute, merely a relative, difference in kind as the scale changes.”