Wholeness

The wholeness of a system is its internal coherence. It is related to our senses of beauty, rightness, good fit, life, health, simplicity, and tranquility. When people are involved in a system that is whole, they tend to feel joy, satisfaction, confidence, trust, loving-kindness, and connectedness.

The degree of wholeness in a system inversely correlates with conflict between forces.

Holographic structure → wholeness. You can see evidence of the whole in each part.

Wholeness is recursive. A whole system consists of centers that are themselves whole.

Wholeness predicts predictability. "You know you're reading good code when each routine you look at turns out to be pretty much what you expected" —Ward Cunningham.

If you can't see wholeness, you're doomed to thrash between micro-optimizations as you focus first on one force and then on another.

Latent, Weak, and Strong Centers

Wholeness can often be enhanced by:

• Making implicit (latent) centers explicit, by giving them a definite identity and structure.
• Making weak but important centers stronger, by creating and arranging other centers within and around them to reinforce them
• Making strong but unimportant centers weaker (by indirection / decoupling?)

How Centers Strengthen Each Other

Alternative titles: Fifteen Properties of Living Structure; the Structure of Seredipity

Examples from Music

• a jam session has a wholeness
• musicians can improvise together by respecting the wholeness of the jam and applying structure-preserving transformations to evolve it
• if one person tries to impose their own structure, to be deliberately "creative," the thing goes off the rails.
• c.f. Ainulindalë