Extralogical Complexity Part 1: The Nonlinearity of Nature
For an environment to evolve into something like Nature, Nature can’t be what people think. As discussed in other posts, vertebrate cognition’s need to make comprehensible and motivating models of reality leads to a host of fallacies and illusions about Nature, the World, and human beings ( see summary intro ). Linear change—constant, predictable change characterized by bell curves and straight lines--is too weak to account for the self-organizing, adaptive powers of Nature. Nor can change occur to accommodate neat, satisfying explanations, where initiating events always lead to proportional outcomes (at least outside of people’s cognitively biased minds). This treatise shows the true dynamics of change, which gives rise to the characteristic phenomena of Complex systems theory presented in the upcoming part two. You’ve heard “the balance of Nature,” “balance in the Force,” and the like. This is almost exactly what Nature isn’t...