Hierarchical Development

Any thing, as soon as it is distinguished from all the other things, becomes related to the rest of the world. The very distinction of two things is already a relation binding them together. When related to different things, any particular thing manifests its different qualities, refoldings of its hierarchy. Eventually, it will show every possible unfolding, being related to the world as a whole.

The internal hierarchy of any thing is the inverse side of the hierarchy of its environment. In particular, the thing is related to itself through its environment, and hence it plays the role of enviroment for itself. Such reflexive interaction with the environment leads to development, changing the hierarchy of the thing.

In general, the levels of any hierarchy represent the stages of development. However, due to refoldability, the same hierarchy can manifest itself as different hierarchical structures. This means that, since there are many ways for a thing to interact with the world, development may follow different routes, and different unfoldings of the hierarchy indicate the possible ways of its development.

However, any act of an object's interaction with the world implies a cycle of alternating phases (levels) of action and being acted upon. The thing is reproduced in every such cycle, but, in general, not exactly as it was, with some changes introduced. In the simplest case, such reproduction is reduced to the rotation of hierarchy, leaving the object the same and merely changing its "form", or its "position" in the world. This is called simple reproduction, or adaptation. Yet another common possibility is extended reproduction, or expansion, when a larger portion of the world becomes involved in the object's environment, while the character of interactions remains generally unchanged.

True development implies a shift of the boundary between the thing and its surroundings, the change in the very notion of "the internal". This means that the object's hierarchy will change through the synthesis of its own hierarchy with the hierarchy of another thing that formerly was a part of the outer world. This "absorption" of outer things should not be confused with mere consumption; in the latter case, the bodies consumed cease to exist, while in hierarchical development, they only become involved in the activities of another thing, forming a kind of collective body. Thus, in biological development, single cells remain relatively independent organisms despite being included in an organ, and tissues can change their functionality depending on their place in the living body.

Hierarchical development occurs when a number of things form a higher-level integrity, which obviously results in the reflection of this integrity in each component, and hence the growth of their inner hierarchies. The basic mechanism of this development is reflexive interaction with the world, when a thing changes due to the change in its environment produced by that very thing.

In simple reproduction, only the thing itself is reproduced. In development, the thing is reproduced together with its specific environment, contributing not only to its own persistence, but to the preservation (and expansion) of the other things.

A cycle of an object's self-reproduction provides a natural measure of time, associated with that particular instance of development. Time itself is hierarchical, since the same cycle of reproduction takes different forms at different levels of hierarchy, and there is no fixed collection of reproduction cycles to servea as an absolute "clock". Within the same thing (object, phenomenon, process etc.), there are different time scales, associated with the different level of its hierarchy.