20.3 Mirrored functions as correspondences

Consider the multiple generative levels implied within creation according to the principles outlined in Chapter 5. There will be detailed constituent events in both of a pair of prior and produced degrees. Because of these microscopic events, there will be successive generative influxes from the prior degree reciprocating with sequential selections by the produced degree. This alternation will repeat itself longest if the patterns of the constituent events are most similar in the two degrees and they do not get out of step. By a sort of survival of the fittest, this gives rise to correspondences of function between adjacent degrees. We may conversely say that the functions in distinct degrees sustain each other in a kind of ‘mirror’ or ‘resonance’ when they are most similar in the patterns of their constituent events. We could speculate, for example, that our minds and brains sustain each other by influx and selection when psychological and neural processes are most nearly isomorphic to each other in their functional description. There is much detail here to be learned by derivation and observation, not just in mind-brain functioning but throughout living organisms. The different discrete degrees are never of one continuous substance that makes both. They have functional relations that make them ‘contiguously intertwined’ at all stages and at all levels of detail at each stage. These will be discussed further in Section 25.3.