Omnipresence of Tectonic Processes
1.Earth’s surface is thought of as consisting “tectonic” plates moving slowly on the molten underground, hitting or driving apart and thereby forming mountains or deep rifts. It is a combination of a downwards force of gravity, an energy source from the hot core of earth creating upwards circulation, turbulence including effests of the global rotation of earth, solidification and melting, etc.
2. Look at evolution or rather multiplication as an energy transforming propulsing Life and creating growth (up), dependence and, even more, adaption to the environment as a resticting conservative force (down), death and birth creating a global circulation and change of forming species. The collisons, competition of species, replaces the movement of the tectonic plates on earth, some rise to dominating other go extinct! So like Earth we can see a tectonic structure in Life.
3. People are advancing through curiosity driven knowledge (up) and there is a restriction (down) by a prudent, conservative fear of new structures, solidification of knowledge stops research while doubt (of so-called facts) gives birth to new knowledge. Communication, first local and then global, creates a mixing circulation of ideas, abstract concepts but also beliefs and ideologies, stemming from the restriction function. The tectonic plates are replaced by the different cultures growing, hitting each other, leading to renewal by new cooperation as well as breakdowns by wars and conflicts. There is a tectonic structure in Society.
4. The development of the human mind is propulsed the will to understand (up) and restricted by a feeling of fear for the unknown, rigidification of knowledge follows from trying to fix an identity, new understanding stems from viewing the person as fluid and a process of change. Social actions like education or self-study and mass media, interfer with the formation of an Identity and the process of change — the fluidity in the personality — in the persion’s mind. Social interactions also influence the linking of so-called facts and emotions what will lead to the creation of domains of expertise ( hobby and/or specialisation) which may even lead to contradictions within one person (an emotional input may reduce, or extend, the value associated to logic!). The tectonic structure of the mind may result in breakdowns and outbreaks (e.g. burnouts and creative dsiscoveries, either by destructive collisions of different specialisation domains or by enriching joins and new links between them.
The structure we see in the four domains creates the flexibility as well as the uncertainty in the processes. The speed of change is different in each of the examples, the slower the process ( for example Earth and Life are slower than Society and someone’s Mind) the more stable the evolution; so we can predict the movement of the tectonic plates in a rather satisfactory way by knowing the past, about Life we have still good predictions but with less trustworthyness, about society we are just above a good guess , perhaps an educated guess for some, and someone’s mind is the most free process considered here and therefore also the most complex!
It seems the tectonic structure is abundantly present in reality, so let us define tectonic processes as follows.
Tectonic Process = Process in two opposing “forcefields” (actions), with some global degrees of freedom and creating opposing interactions localy, leading to coagulation and mobile flexible substructures with different level of coherence.