Why Will to Pattern

Start with the homepage. Seven hundred points, placed at random, each following three rules: don't crowd your neighbours, head roughly where they are heading, drift toward their middle. That is all. There is no shape in the rules, and yet within a couple of minutes there is a flock, and within a couple more you will swear it was briefly a spiral, or a face.

It was not. Or rather, it was, in the only place a spiral ever is, which is somewhere between the points and the eye.

This site argues, as slowly as it can manage, that the drive to find pattern is not one feature of living things among many. It may be the feature. A thing that keeps a model of its world and is restless until the world fits it is a reasonable description of a bacterium, a bird, a reader, and perhaps of something else.

Draft. The remainder of this essay is the About page, expanded, and will be written once the About page has been checked against three readers.