Facilitation

The property of certain types of process whereby they promote their own repetition. This property is a common factor in some systems, underlying both the process of identical multiplication and of adaptive modification. A process is said to facilitate its reproduction when it leads to a stable result which tends to bring about a repetition of the process. A wide class of processes possess this self-facilitating property which underlies all development and extension of form. All processes are self-facilitating which lead to a structure possessing a symmetry character which can be extended by spatial repetition.