Adventures in Thought Space

  For an environment to evolve into something like Nature,  Nature  can’t be what people think.    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 . 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 reliably accommodate neat, satisfying explanations, where initiating events always lead to proportional outcomes. This treatise illustrates the prevalence of nonlinear change in Nature, 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. Some say it’s chaos or disorder. While common, disorder and mathematical chaos ...