See synapse9.com\/signals<\/a> for recent Posts, YouTube talks, Papers, and Comment\u00a0<\/h4>\n
_______________________<\/p>\n
Apr 2026 Note: Efficiently farming nature for only its more useful rules, as for maximizing profit, is not useless at all, but it omits the nature of the system. That alone may also have caused several of our greatest civilizations to become so detached from nature that they profoundly collapsed: Babel, Bronze Age Atlantis, Greece 2, and Rome. Modern civilization is, sadly, also clearly on the way.<\/p>\n Not realizing that the useful rules of natural systems are limited by the fragile forms and coordinated organization of their working relationships seems to have caused our great self-interest-driven ancient civilizations to collapse profoundly, erasing their cultures and histories, as we also see occurring globally today.<\/p>\n See Entries for:<\/span> Jan 2024 Entry:\u00a0 Theories are still very useful, but the subject here is not mainly the theory. It’s the material origins, designs, and behaviors of the natural world we’re part of. The use of theory also helps one ask good questions about natural subjects, but care is taken to focus on how nature works on its own. Then one finds that asking different questions gives you different answers.<\/p>\n Today, we have the fancy new tool of AI, but if we keep asking it the same questions as before, it’s very likely to steer us in the same disastrous direction: interfering with nature for profit. You could now helpfully ask it how to avoid that, or how to understand the limits of our working systems.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n It’s to help with identifying and discussing things in context rather than as abstracted from their contexts, things natural language developed to communicate and store as information on how the world lives, rather than as it theoretically should, a big difference quite often. It greatly helps raise better questions about how the natural systems in our surroundings are organized and behave.\u00a0 For example, one can observe a business as an organization of various specialized work groups, along with the technologies the people are most expert in using. \u00a0Those work groups are served and guided by management to work together as a whole. \u00a0\u00a0So the idea is to say quite a lot just by speaking clearly, using natural language, to then better see the systems behind the data if you can imagine what’s happening.\u00a0<\/p>\n We’ve actually done that for the last half million years at least, as our way of getting along, unable to make up theories but absorbing lots of useful direct knowledge about how things work independently and creating many useful languages for sharing what we learned and passing it along, adding sophistication.\u00a0\u00a0We naturally look at the plants that way, things connected to things, with internal working parts, in a way that equations really cannot explain.<\/p>\n The same goes for ecologies or cultures working together, composed of families and populations within their environments. \u00a0\u00a0They’re all “organizations of specializations” in that every part finds its own role in its local context, environment, and community, so each can work together, “unified by their design to work as a whole.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0If you see things working as a whole, it amounts to recognizing their mutual coordination, the distinct differences between what goes on within their unified relationships and what goes on outside, and asking how the system developed.<\/p>\n One usually finds it developed from some starting pattern, its ‘seed’ or ‘germ’ or ‘model’ by one or another process of growth. \u00a0All those traits and many more seem to generally go along with “systems”, as the complex units of design that populate our world.\u00a0 What’s different about this view from the usual scientific approach is that it’s a study of individual designs as things actively working in our environment. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The scientific method begins with data and ends with finding equations to predict the average behavior of things. \u00a0\u00a0Here, the focus tends to begin and end with finding good questions about how things are designed and how they work individually. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It’s often useful to be able to go back and forth between those two scientific views, and from the perspectives of other disciplines as well, all addressing the natural subjects in common.<\/p>\n Also, look at the designs of plants that way, or think of ecologies or cultures working that way, composed of families and populations in their environments. \u00a0 They’re all “organizations of specializations” that are “unified by a design” for working as a whole. \u00a0 \u00a0If you see things working as a whole, it amounts to recognizing the boundary that encloses it, noticing the distinct differences between what goes on inside and outside, and asking how the system developed. \u00a0 One usually finds it developed from some starting pattern, its ‘seed’ or ‘germ’ or ‘model’ by one or another process of growth. \u00a0All those traits and many more seem to generally go along with “systems”, as the complex units of design that populate our world. \u00a0 What’s different about this view from the usual scientific approach is that it’s a study of individual designs as things working in our environment. \u00a0 The scientific method begins with data and ends with finding equations to predict the average behavior of things. \u00a0 Here, the focus tends to begin and end with finding good questions about how things are designed and how they work individually. \u00a0 \u00a0It’s often useful to be able to go back and forth between those two scientific views, and from the perspectives of other disciplines as well, all addressing the natural subjects in common.<\/p>\n __________<\/p>\n \u00a0 A chance to join my pattern recognition for natural system designs with the “pattern language” for holistic design of Christopher Alexander. \u00a0\u00a0It gives me a wonderful way to record and communicate, creating a whole language of “how to work with nature” by recognizing nature’s working parts, closely coordinated with the language of Christopher Alexander, and how it is being adopted by a number of professions as a common language of holistic design. \u00a0\u00a0Alexander’s ‘pattern language’ originated as his way of documenting the ancient principles of holistic architectural design, using a practice of being explicit about the “context”, the “forces” needing a response, and “simplifying ideals” of the designs to unify them, along with lists of the expert knowledge needed to communicate and accomplish it, a holistic language of design.<\/p>\n The profession that has applied it most widely is software programmers, using it as a formal way to define whole working parts of programs as having holistic designs and purposes, often called “object-oriented programming”. \u00a0\u00a0Describing natural systems as whole units of organization, I sometimes call “object-oriented science” a study of how natural systems work as wholes. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There’s no real change in my former scientific methods for recognizing natural patterns of design in the behavior of energy systems as wholes. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0How I use my “Patterns of Naturally Occurring Design” is mainly a rich, new way to discuss the holistic designs of nature in natural language. Natural language refers to our social values, but we also need to understand and work with it as part of our natural world. \u00a0They’re a bit advanced in that sense, but I also think I’ve laid out a natural way to expand on our common knowledge to work with Alexander’s approach to holistic design, not just for new ways to work on nature, but also the new ways that will eventually transform our ways of working with nature. \u00a0\u00a0At this point, the introduction is to browse my two papers, one for PURPLSOC and the other for PLop 2015, on “Elements<\/a>” and “Mining Living Quality<\/a>“.<\/p>\n What seems like a wonderful new opening to join my pattern recognition for natural system designs with Christopher Alexander’s “pattern language” for holistic design. \u00a0\u00a0It gives me a wonderful way to record and communicate, creating a whole language of “how to work with nature” by recognizing nature’s working parts, closely coordinated with the language of Christopher Alexander, and how it is being adopted by a number of professions as a common language of holistic design. \u00a0 Alexander’s ‘pattern language’ originated as his way of documenting the ancient principles of holistic architectural design, using a practice of being explicit about the “context”, the “forces” needing response and “simplifying ideals” of the designs to unify them, along with lists of the expert knowledge needed to communicate and accomplish it, a holistic language of design.<\/p>\n The profession that has applied it most widely is software programmers, using it as a formal way to define whole working parts of programs as having holistic designs and purposes, and is often called “object-oriented programming”.\u00a0 Describing natural systems as whole units of organization, I sometimes call “object-oriented science” the study of how natural systems work as wholes. There’s no real change in my former scientific methods for recognizing natural patterns of design in the behavior of energy systems as wholes. How I use my “Patterns of Naturally Occurring Design” is mainly a rich, new way to discuss the holistic designs of nature in natural language. Natural language refers to our social values, but we also need to understand and work with it as part of our natural world.<\/p>\n It was exciting but also totally frustrating to find and describe the various great conceptual misunderstandings of how natural systems work, and describe some as technical problems with possible solutions. \u00a0\u00a0See my RNS journal entries for that period for the details.<\/p>\n The discussion focuses on the “natural systems paradigm” of science. \u00a0It expands on the scientific method to correct a major omission. \u00a0The scientific method was never designed to study the self-organizing systems of nature in their natural form.<\/p>\n Natural systems could only be studied as abstract models invented by scientists, based on equations derived from recorded observations. \u00a0\u00a0The lack of observations on how natural systems work internally is the problem. \u00a0\u00a0As for another person’s life or mind, you simply can’t tell how things that work by themselves are organized and operated from their own insides. \u00a0\u00a0Nature abounds with such systems, but the lack of data on how they work has forced science to ignore them as subjects of study.<\/p>\n My approach rests on using observation to first locate natural systems by how they function as a whole, and then to investigate their stages of evolution from beginning to end.<\/p>\n \u00a0 They’re a bit advanced in that sense, but I also think I’ve laid out a natural way to expand on our common knowledge to work with Alexander’s approach to holistic design, not just for new ways to work on nature, but also the new ways that will eventually transform our ways of working with nature. \u00a0 At this point, the introduction is to browse my two papers, one for PURPLSOC and the other for PLop 2015, on “Elements<\/a>” <\/em>and “Mining Living Quality<\/em><\/a>“.<\/p>\n ___________<\/p>\n It was quite exciting but also terribly difficult to discover and describe the various great conceptual misunderstandings of how the natural systems work that the work was to change, citing key technical problems with possible solutions. \u00a0 See my RNS journal entries for that period for the details.<\/p>\n The discussion focuses on the “natural systems paradigm<\/em><\/strong>” of science. \u00a0It expands on the scientific method to correct a major omission. \u00a0The scientific method was never designed to study the self-organizing systems of nature in their natural form.<\/p>\n Natural systems could only be studied as abstract models invented by scientists, based on equations derived from recorded observations. \u00a0 The lack of observations on how natural systems work internally is the problem. \u00a0 As for another person’s life or mind, you simply can’t tell how things that work by themselves are organized and operated from their own insides. \u00a0 Nature abounds with such systems, but the lack of data on how they work has forced science to ignore them as subjects of study.<\/p>\n My approach rests on using observation to first locate natural systems by how they function as a whole, and then to investigate their stages of evolution from beginning to end.<\/p>\n It’s both serious physics and richly informed “storytelling” that uses natural language and the universal themes of beginnings and endings of change. \u00a0\u00a0It uses the principle of energy conservation, as the universal natural limit for all energy-using processes, to explore natural systems and events. \u00a0The “epidemiological” device used is that of a “dual reality”, treating words like “apple” to refer to both the thing and the idea of an apple. \u00a0\u00a0That allows discussion to refer to *both* subjects defined by nature and those of abstract definition in our minds (the world of nature and the world of intellect) as “hand and glove” to consider how one’s mental and physical worlds fit.<\/p>\n So it’s not about “data and equations” so much as about observed “whole units of organization” found in nature (individual systems).\u00a0 Studying how self-organized systems behave as a whole is the only way to tell how the behaviors of their parts are adding up. Abstract theories simply have no data to inform their internal workings.<\/p>\n Posts on current issues are mostly from a view of general principles,<\/p>\n …so old posts are often out of date for learning more about what is going on behind the scenes when observing environmental events in action.<\/p>\n Nature’s working parts are not “facts” but self-defining physical systems, objects of nature that exist independent of our facts.\u00a0 They work by themselves, where they are, in ways that are far too complex and too holistic for us to define with abstract rules.<\/p>\n You don’t need to know exactly how systems work; how they work as a whole is simple enough to understand on its own.<\/p>\n Natural systems one can clearly identify as individual “things” are generally found to have developed by an energy-using growth process from some “seed” or other “germ of organization. Each then develops by growing in its own environment, usually in a unique local way. \u00a0\u00a0Biological organisms are energy-using systems that mostly develop by growth from a seed. \u00a0\u00a0Thinking of all natural systems as wholes, as if they were “organisms” that work by themselves, living out a natural life, is one convenient way.<\/p>\n So, I studied “storms” as locally developing systems for moving heat, for example, rather than following the rules of deterministic processes.\u00a0 \u00a0 My study of the physics of change over time directed me to prove that this was a necessary perspective. The illusion that systems are organizational, not deterministic, to have flowing reorganization smooth enough to satisfy the conservation of energy from beginning to end. \u00a0[drtheory.pdf<\/a>]<\/p>\n The familiar paradigm of modern science, so far, does not recognize the existence of self-managing systems in nature. \u00a0\u00a0Its only subject of science is “our systems” of mathematical relations, ones we invent to explain the data we collect. So, my work also had to become an exploration of the role of science in shaping our thinking, as the earth and other physical systems of everyone’s great direct concern turn out not to be directly studied by science.<\/p>\n So what I actually study are systems exhibiting the behaviors of individual growing and evolving organisms, storms, events, cultures, transformations, emergence, dances, bursts of change, and collapses of self-organization, etc. They develop by their own processes. \u00a0\u00a0Their “cellular design” (having different sets of internal and external relationships) comes from how they develop, extending the patterns of an animated central \u2018kernel\u201d of design that builds onto itself as it finds resources and forms internal and external relationships.<\/p>\n It’s observed as a burst of self-organization, with a new pattern of energy use expanding in its environment. \u00a0\u00a0It’s been a struggle to get “deterministic thinkers” to consider “opportunistic processes”, though. \u00a0So, the chance to organize and present my rather well-founded theoretical\/empirical approach has actually been put off for decades. \u00a0I keep trying to use “English,” but am also clearly not yet finding a language to convey it.<\/p>\n It’s not that “physics is wrong,” but rather that it takes a different approach, focusing on the parts of nature that can be successfully described by universal rules. \u00a0I study the parts of nature that can be successfully described as following locally developing rules. The two sets of explanatory principles can and do work together and expand our awareness of what’s happening within and around us.<\/p>\n Most of the posts from my old blog<\/a> have been moved here, with a quick edit or two for some in the process. \u00a0\u00a0There’s lots of good stuff going all the way back to 2006. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My research archive is Synapse9.com<\/a>, the work of P.F. Henshaw (my old pen name).<\/p>\n ed: Jan 2024<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jessie Lydia Henshaw’s World A Basic Introduction to HDS natural system design science: research, ideas, methods, and experimentation on a new science of natural system design.\u00a0See synapse9.com\/signals for recent Posts, YouTube talks, Papers, and Comment\u00a0 _______________________ Apr 2026 Note: This site records my many years of experimental research and investigation following from an impromptu 1964 … Continue reading Advances in Natural Systems Design Science<\/span>
<\/strong>This site records my many years of experimental research and investigation following from an impromptu 1964 observation as a freshman physics major. Physics represents natural systems in terms of change over time using abstract rules and equations. For natural systems, this practice overlooks the messier data from periods of system formation and decay.<\/p>\n
Apr 2026 (abv.),<\/strong> Jan 2024,<\/strong> 2014-15<\/strong>,\u00a02012 to 2014,\u00a0<\/strong>1978 to 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n
<\/strong>For those new to my work, the general approach is to use fairly simple scientific explanatory principles, like ‘scale,’ ‘acceleration’, ‘energy,’ and ‘boundaries,’ and ‘organization’ just as used for referring to and describing specific observable things, not as abstract ideas or theories, but as references to what is naturally material about what we observe.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"seeingthings2\"](\"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/seeingthings2-300x297.jpg\")
<\/p>\nIn 2014-15, I pursued what seemed like a wonderful new opening.<\/h5>\n
My 2012 to 2014 work was mostly on Sustainable Development and the UN’s SD goals…<\/h5>\n
Intro to work on natural systems, 1978 to 2011:<\/h4>\n
![](\"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/_PLref\/Org&SystEarth2bSM.jpg\")
<\/a>My 2012 to 2014 work was mostly on \u00a0Sustainable Development and the UN’s SD goals…<\/h4>\n
Intro to work on natural systems, 1978 to 2011:<\/h4>\n
![\"the](\"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/issues\/images\/JAtalk02_resize.jpg\" "\\"the")
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