NEO Magazine Issue 2 | Page 18

In order to be fully holistic, the regenerative framework aims at seeing beyond systems and outside of the understanding how processes can promote optimum conditions. In other words, designing integrated systems is not enough; it is also necessary to envision the processes which link systems and promote their co-evolution over time. We call these systems emergent structures. The process of emergence by which the local interactions between the parts of the system give rise to a certain new improved complex global structure; • the process of temporary steady state during which the system maintains its structure by exchanging matter and information with its environment • • the process of bifurcation and phase transition during which the old steady state collapses a new process of emergence starts and generates a new steady state. Systems with emergent properties or emergent structures may appear to defy entropic principles and the second law of thermodynamics, because they form and increase order despite the lack of command and central control. This is possible because open systems can extract information and order out of the environment. The emergent property itself may be either very predictable or unpredictable and unprecedented, and represent a new level of the system’s evolution. The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities: they are irreducible. Clearly biological eco-systems do not new earth designs by juan schlosser cal, co-evolutionary integrated world view understanding not a clockwork-Newtonian perception of reality.