organizational directedness

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Organizational directedness is the asymmetry by which some continuations maintain a living system’s organization while others degrade or destroy it. RB2 uses it to articulate viability-oriented activity without requiring represented ends, conscious intention or final causes. The proposal preserves this biological criterion while distinguishing it from subjective feeling, ethical goodness and an unrestricted claim that every physical process has goals.

Explanation

The direct account locates directedness in the conditions of continued organization. An organism’s activity matters differently according to whether it sustains or undermines that organization. The criterion is therefore not supplied merely by an external observer preferring one trajectory, and it does not require an organism to formulate a plan in language.

RB2 distinguishes literal viability normativity in living systems from analogical description of nonliving processes. This prevents a shared vocabulary of constraint from distributing agency or experience indiscriminately. A process can be organized and causally consequential without thereby owning a concern, sensing a purpose or feeling its outcome.

AB similarly separates having stakes from feeling them and from responding to another’s stakes. Its account of minimal self-maintenance does not establish moral virtue. The entry therefore retains biological asymmetry without deriving ethical approval from survival, treating harm as justified maintenance or equating every self-preserving process with conscious intention.

Scope and attribution

Keep the living organizational criterion and explicit limits on analogy.

AB — The Actual Book

Own stakes, feeling and ethical response remain separate.

Occurrence locators: 116.

PB — The Possible Book

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: 95.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

Viability asymmetry is literal in the stated living scope without represented ends or final causes.

Occurrence locators: 129, 130, 131.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Living organizational directedness is distinguished from hypothetical artificial stakes.