"If a spider is taken off its half-finished web and placed elsewhere, it goes on as soon as it can, spinning where it left off. It spins outwardly the rest of the net which thus has a hole in it.1 Like digestion, its web-spinning process cannot just begin again in the middle. The events cannot follow in just any order. [...]
Living cannot well be thought of as unit events related to other events only by position, that is to say single events that one could rearrange in any order. I don't mean that anyone claims that living events can occur in any order. But why this is not possible is thought of only in terms of externally imposed relationships of things in an observer's space.
Let us instead allow the spider to generate time and continuity. The spider's own process has its own order. The rest of the web will remain implied until the environment cooperates in the occurring of the rest of the net. Each occurring is also an implying, and this stays the same unless it is changed by an environmental occurring that has a certain very special relation to the implying."
Source: A Process Model, Eugene Gendlin
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beware! we have received updated commentary on orb weavers that contradicts this account.....