Physical Gestalten: is organization a feature of physical nature, not something the mind imposes?

Wolfgang Köhler, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Organisation is not the special work of mind, nor the assembly of a machine; it is what dynamic physical systems DO. The electric charge distributes itself over a conductor into an equilibrium form that no part determines and no engineer imposes — a physical Gestalt.1 If nature organises itself in physics, then the organisation of experience needs neither a vital force nor a mental architect: it is the same tendency toward equilibrium, working in the nervous system.23

Sources

  1. But among the constant conditions two further classes may be discriminated. In the case of electric current it is one given condition that all moving charges have the amount of electronic charge or multiples of it. Another condition of the current is given by the mode of the distribution, the connections and the spatial order of the conducting material, i.e., a network of wires.
    Gestalt Psychology
  2. Again the electric current may have one direction or the other, its distribution may vary enormously; but, if the wires are surrounded by isolating material, the dynamics of the current itself will remain restricted to the interior of the wires.
    Gestalt Psychology
  3. One may well suppose that the excitement produced by Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood contained a similar element of fear, because the conception of man as a rigid structure was suddenly disturbed by the idea of internal unrest, accompanied by the possibility of its fatal cessation at any moment.
    Gestalt Psychology

Where the argument is made

  • The thesis of Die physischen Gestalten (1920), summarised in Gestalt Psychology (1929): self-distributing physical systems (the charge on a conductor, the soap film) as physical Gestalten, showing organisation arising from dynamics without mind or machine

How the argument was received

This is the boldest and most physical of my claims, and I hold it as the thesis that lets Gestalt psychology escape both the machine and the soul: organisation is neither imposed from without nor breathed in from above but arises from dynamics. Where it has been pressed is on the tightness of the analogy between the soap-film and the percept; the general point — that self-organisation is a fact of nature — I hold firmly.