This article is an exercise in speculative reasoning. It is a response to the feeling that the multiple crises we face cannot be addressed by thinking with any of the existing theories of change or models of systems dynamics that are available to us today. This article is also a critique of complex adaptive systems thinking and all of the complexity science that is based on it. Because we are steeped in the logics of complex adaptive systems thinking, everyone is caught in a closed loop of escalating complexity and accelerating risk. In this article, I propose a new theory of change that has the potential to create new intentional states in people, and as such, new behaviors. Unlike the logics of complex adaptive systems thinking, where each person is a potential opponent, and every environment is a potential threat, this new theory of change—which I call “a theory of complex potential states”—prepares us to open up to new potentials that are offered in every relationship and every environment.

Part One: The Problem Situation

Our current theories of change are invested in the dynamics of crisis.

The deep codes embedded in our theories of development and evolution—such as progress, competition, adaptive pressure, and survival drives—are root causes of the escalating complexity and increasing systemic risk that characterize our time. Even imagining as a response that we are under threat from climate, or that the lifeworld is being threatened by us, is itself entangled in these codes and leads to self-fulfilling prophecies.

Humans create self-fulfilling prophecies because our causal theories of change are themselves causally implicated in the world we create. Because we are reflexive, predictive, and intentional beings, we deliberate, decide, and act based on mental models we share on how the world works. These models change over time. For example, the idea that an external agent created the universe is based on a construction theory of change that was prevalent in premodern monotheistic cultures. In premodern polytheistic or panentheistic cultures, the origin story was based on a developmental theory of change—either from the union of male and female energies, or the developmental unfolding of a primordial egg. More recently, many of our theories of change are based on evolutionary dynamics. These have proliferated into a broad spectrum of models, from the original Darwinian theory to models of complex adaptive, chaotic, chaordic, and emergent systems.

In its original form, Darwinian evolution depended on two basic dynamics: (1) random mutations in individuals resulting in genetic drift across breeding populations, and (2) changes in the environment. The mutations are blind to environmental changes, and environmental changes are unresponsive to the mutations. “Natural selection” is a random coincidence that occurs when the change in the environment just happens to increase or decrease breeding prospects across some populations (and not others) and some individuals (and not others). This change could be slow and incremental, eventually leading to sub-populations that no longer breed together, eliminating the hybrid traits. Eventually, the disadvantaged population becomes extinct, and the new population emerges as a new species. This change could be dramatic and swift, wiping out entire groups of species, and setting the stage for new lineages to found later forms.

The point here is that the original Darwinian model is not a story of survival drives, adaptive pressure, and striving to survive—it is a story about rolling the dice.¹ Here, there is no sense in which, for example, the dinosaurs could have done something different to adapt to the meteoric disturbance. A rock fell from the sky and radically altered the planet. The creatures that survived were already engaged in the forms of living that were possible after the impact. Prior to the impact, these forms of living “laid low,” as it were, not especially successful, not especially prolific, and most certainly not dominating the available resources and affordances. After the impact, they were able to continue on, much as before, as the planet changed again, more slowly this time. Genetic drift, the opening of new niches, new opportunities for making a living, resulted in a radial expansion of forms.

The point here is that evolutionary processes are not at all like developmental processes. With development, later forms build up upon the prior, higher (or more complex) form. This is trivial but important. You have to be two feet tall before you are three feet tall, and you don’t go back to being two feet before you grow to four feet. Similarly, you must develop systemic reasoning before you develop meta-systemic reasoning, and in between you don’t drop back into concrete representational modes of reasoning. With evolutionary theory this is assuredly not the case. Time and time again we see in the evolutionary record that the most recent “highest form”—the species best fitted to the existing environment—is not the foundational species for the future forms. We did not descend from the spectacular fishes of the Cambrian explosion, but from the lowly worms who survived the great Ordovician extinction. We did not descend from the mighty dinosaurs, we descended from the lowly shrews who out-lasted them.

The language of complex adaptive systems has usurped the Darwinian model. 

Complex adaptive systems (CAS) thinking has replaced the original notion of random mutation and natural selection with the notions of adaptive strivance—strategies designed to address increasing evolutionary pressure, creating vicious cycles of escalating complexity and increasing volatility. To understand how this happened, we need to look at how the underlying mental models of evolution changed.

Darwin’s original model operates much like the invisible hand of the market.² In both cases, individuals have agency only at local, micro scales. The macro-events, such as population effects and macro-economic events, are inaccessible to the individual agents, from whose actions and behaviors the macro-effects emerge. The wolf has agency with respect to hunting the elk. The elk have agency with respect to fleeing and to fighting back, to participating in herding behaviors, and to migrating to food and breeding places. That these local actions scale up to population and ecological-level outcomes is completely decoupled to the agency of the wolf and elk. In this model, the environment is a macro-level outcome, not an agent or actor in the evolutionary arena.

At some point the notion of the environment as actor slipped into the evolutionary model. We came to speak about ecological destruction and climate change as exerting evolutionary pressure on populations to adapt. Eventually, evolutionary processes became simultaneously the protagonist and the antagonist of a new collective story. This story functions as a powerful theory-constitutive metaphor for complex adaptive thinking.³ It had led us to “modernist assumptions of securing the human against the world” ⁴ (Chandler, 2018) and to thinking of ourselves, individually and collectively, as people under siege⁵ from the very planetary and ecological forces that life depends upon (Roy, 2021).⁶

More recently, complex adaptive systems thinking has been applied at every scale, and we have come to construe the struggle between individual (or group) and environment as existing at every scale—from the macro down to the micro. Here, in this imaginary world, everyone and everything is adapting to everyone else and everything else.

The notion of complex adaptive systems thinking is epistemically suspect.

While it includes all the individuals as players, it robs them any real agency, since they are caught in a perpetual action-reaction cycle. As a result, we become sufferers of our own actions. The notion of complex adaptive systems thinking is also epistemically futile, because it necessarily implies systemic closure,

[because] every adaptation to pressure simultaneously injects more adaptive pressure into the system. It is a continuously escalating, perpetual motion machine of antibiotics and bacteria, insects and pesticides, markets and trade, nuclear arms and weapons defense, viruses and vaccines.⁷ Inside complex adaptive systems thinking, closure [is] predicated on the very properties of the model itself.⁸

Part Two: A Side View Proposition—Alexander, Whitehead, Simondon

I have taken from Christopher Alexander, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilbert Simondon first and foremost a certain view that permeates their writings. I have tried to integrate the main principles of this view and applied these principles to “the problem situation”—that complex adaptive systems thinking is both epistemically suspect and yet almost exclusively adopted as a theory of change in complex situations—laid out in part one. This includes Alexander’s view of “the living processes which can, successfully, generate living structure.” Alexander surmises that this view is not substantiated by the world view of biology, complex systems theory, and quantum physics as we know them. The living phenomena are commonly observable features of the world that we can see, sense, and feel. “But they do not fit within any previous explanatory context. They need their own model.”⁹ It also entails a Whiteheadian view where potentials are also living phenomenon that are causally implicit in generating the actual structures of the world. Both Alexander and Whitehead construed these generative potentials and processes, as having both physical properties and subjective qualities that are entangled at every point and in every event. Alexander writes:

What I call “the I” is that interior element in a work of art, or in a work of nature, which makes one feel related to it. It may occur in a leaf, or in a picture, in a house, in a wave, even in a grain of sand or in an ornament. It is not ego. It is not me. It is not individual at all, having to do with me, or you. It is humble, and enormous: that thing in common which each one of us has in us. It is the spirit which animates each living center.¹⁰

Whitehead laid out a view which has come to be known alternatively as panexperiantialism, which also assigns subjective qualities to what we ordinarily consider as physical events; and, like Alexander, he does so without absenting the crucial role of the physical form. This dipolar view is not ordinary dualism—it is a double entanglement, which poses a challenge to our dualistic language. Alexander’s 4-volume work on The Nature of Order took decades to write. He paid close attention to advances in quantum physics and the new sciences of complexity where the individual and the collective, the local and the global, and the subsystems and whole system came to be seen as mutually implicated, where “unexpected and complex behaviors arise in richly interconnected systems” and whose theorems “show how compelling order arises, almost spontaneously, in these systems.”¹¹ He followed the work of Stuart Kaufmann, who had said that order arises naturally and spontaneously through self-organizing processes.¹² Yet he found these developments fell short of an adequate view of reality because they leave out the place of the human experience. In other words, they were still based on a metaphysics of substance, rather than, as Whitehead proposed, a metaphysics of experience. For Alexander, this is the central dilemma, what he referred to as “Whitehead’s bifurcation”—the rift that remains:

The personal, the existence of felt “self” in the universe, the presence of consciousness and the vital relation between self and matter—none of these have entered the picture yet, in a practical or scientifically workable way.¹³

Christopher Alexander’s new vision was of a living world permeated with centers and wholes. Unlike parts, which are members of wholes, centers function like crystals dropped into a super-salient solution, around which the whole cascades into symmetry. This symmetry is complex, itself composed of “whole subsystems,” which in turn are composed of other “whole subsystems.” If you zoomed into any of the subsystems, you would see a fractal ordering, of more centers that had seeded them. It is here, in the supersystem of wholes, that the new sciences have made their remarkable discoveries. But it is in the living center that Alexander identifies how the “I” recognizes its self, the presence of consciousness and its own vitality as a center among other centers. Here there are three key features: (1) the “whole” that pre-exists as an organizing principle, and the center around which structure grows; (2) the centers which are in relation to each other, such that the structure that they express is both effected by and affects all the others; and (3) a strong asymmetrical vector (associated with the arrow of time) which, Alexander concludes, is necessary for ongoing structural transformations which bring about change and novelty, that are requisites for a living system. This he calls the “principle of unfolding wholeness” which says that every structure continues to change its own nature. This suggests that every transformation implies some ambiguity, that every structure is replete but not complete.

Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Cosmological Individuation

A quick google search tells me that Simondon and Whitehead were unaware of each other. Yet it is impossible not to see a common intuition running through their work. Even more uncanny is the way that Simondon’s notion of cosmic individuation resonates with Alexander’s view, only they are mirror images of each other. Where Alexander sees living centers as seeding the crystalline-like lattice structure of the whole, Simondon begins with the cosmological principle—a fundamental metaphysical force—he calls “Individuation.” This force produces “singularities” from the “background field” which is originally a unitary whole, with a signature organizational structure. The singularities are like Alexander’s centers’ imbued with subject-like qualities. Simondon calls them “transdividuals,” to reflect their ambiguous nature (neither objective, nor subjective). This process Simondon calls “transduction” which is an inexhaustible impetus where

an activity of thought or being is born from the propagation of the pre-individual reality little by little, from one problematic region to another, each subsequent region amplifying the one prior to it, producing a transformation, a new phase of reality.¹⁴

The processes of transduction lead to singularities that are replete, but not complete. As I envision it, there is an excess of “transductive force” that is enfolded into the singularity itself, accounting for its continual individuation process. This resonates with the Daoist notion of yan qi (original energy) that is said to be set upon conception but descends fully into the organism only at birth, performing the arrival of the “individual” human being. Prior to birth, yan qi remains part of the energetic plenum and can be revoked due to conditions and circumstances. It would be consistent with this model to think of infant death syndrome as the impartial or incomplete descending of yan qi into the newborn.¹⁵

The theory of complex potential states begins by imagining a field of potential.

In a substance view of reality, only the actual things are counted, whereas the potential state of the ground processes is ignored. A theory of complex potential states begins by considering the potential state as an infinite array of dimensionless dots of infinitesimally small but non-zero capacity to connect with another dot. The array is infinite, so the potential is infinite. What actually exists is a small fragment of what potentially exists. The latent potential is not merely “surplus.” It performs the background activity that constitutes the potential state or organizing principle for the dots to connect in some ways and not others. This activity can be construed as vibratory waves that participate energetically but fail to meet some threshold conditions of actualizing. In this field, relationships are always “threatening to appear,” composing a “stream brimming with pluripotentiality flow[ing] toward action.”¹⁶

It is easy to see how Alexander’s centers and Simondon’s singularities are implicit in this array. Behind the actualized events (what Whitehead would call “occasions”) lies a vast vibratory field which threatens transformation from one occasion to another—the process Simondon would call “transduction.” Whitehead would construe this threatening as “prehension”—a feeling towards relationship that is both provocative and loving. Alexander would think of this impetus as the principle of unfolding order at the heart of living center, the subjective “I” striving for wholeness.

We can also map the array onto contemporary hypotheses about dark matter and dark energy, where the dots (implicit but not actualized centers) correspond to dark matter and the vibrations correspond to dark energy. Perhaps the space-time continuum is composed by the asymmetrical array that is always in flux, and vibrations become closer to connecting by increasing resonance, which rises above a threshold—the Plank scale. The Plank scale would thus correspond to the Whiteheadian-Bergsonian notion of “duration” which is a unit of space-time. The Plank scale understood as the event horizon the smallest possible duration that has the intensity to actualize. This would be consistent with contemporary interpretations of the Plank constant, defined as the elementary quantum of action.¹⁷ Of course, this is hugely speculative! Yet Whitehead himself spoke of “many durations” and the notion of complexity as a compounding resonance of durations at different scales.¹⁸

The theory of complex potential states (TCPS) replaces Whitehead’s notion of prehension with the notion of protension. By doing so, TCPS relieves Whitehead’s panpsychism of some of its anthropomorphic liability, by adding an energetic component to it instead. To say that the field is a vibrating potential state is the same as saying that relations “build up a kind of pressure or is seeded with energy vectors.” Which means that the pressure to change increases during the very processes of forming connections. TCPS replaces Whitehead’s dipolar (subjective-objective) process with the notion of complex feedloops in systems thinking.¹⁹ Complex feedloops have both interference (inhibitory) and superposition (excitatory) relationships. These feedloops are deeply entangled through connectivity, but also through complex temporal asymmetries such as asynchronous activity, delays, lag time and resting phases. We can imagine all of these as characteristics of the potential field, resulting in an ongoing, fluxing state.

Incorporating the language of Whitehead and Alexander it would be also correct to say that the field itself—the complex potential state—is composed by living centers, which are dynamic, animated, feeling monads searching for relationships and stretching forward toward novelty. The exchange of DNA between bacteria, the sexual union between animals, the exchange of particles that mediates the four fundamental forces of nature,²⁰ meteorological dynamics that self-organize climate events—all can be construed as living centers composing and recomposing relationships. These events are alive, Alexander would say, because aliveness is a quality that exists, to one extent or another, in all structures:

There is a sense in which the distinction between something alive and something lifeless is much more general, and far more profound, than the distinction between living things and nonliving things, or between life and death.²¹

A theory of complex potential states begins with the field of potential, the potential to come alive, through creating relationships.

Here a theory of change means potential states become complex relational states as they advance. Occasions meander in and out of history as they cohere and decohere. Occasions have a rhythm, an oscillation, a “pulse.”

Duration is a key concept for TCPS. Since occasions cohere and decohere, one might suspect, as some Buddhists argue, that the universe dips in and out of existence. For Whitehead, a duration is an atemporal yet discrete “passage” from potential state to actual occasion, between prehension and concrescence. It is the temporary state of relational coherence. But since agents exercise agency across multiple scales and durations, there is not only one single moment in time when everything passes through all at once. In living systems, relational-states cohere far from equilibrium, which means that the topology between states is steep, and the space where coherence happens is narrow. It is this feature of “steep and narrow” that accounts for the precarity of being.

In TCPS duration is also related to scale. The potential field—the array of vibratory centers—is infinite, therefore it has an infinite duration, which is to say, that it never actualizes. This is of course the very definition of the field—it is potential, not actual. This scale-dependence means that all living centers have a kind of oscillation—a rhythmic time-stamp that identifies this entity as an entity of a specific type. This then can account for the particle nature of reality, from the fundamental sub-atomic particles, to the periodic elements on up. This is consistent with contemporary understanding of the fundamental nature of reality—that everything oscillates.²²

Coherent states are actual occasions. They are fixed, temporal and real. In TCPS are also included potential states which are a-temporal durations of “prehension.” In these potential states relations are fluid and can be recombined in various ways. While most of the relations are reiterated (which is why reality holds together), some of the relations are lost and new relations may be created. This is a way to think of systems as complexes of potential states, rather than adaptive systems.

Unlike the logic of complex adaptive systems which asks “what do we do now?,” the logic of complex potential states asks “what is possible from here?” What is possible is infinite, but not exhaustive. There is a history, an arrow of time. For example, there was a time when there were not elephants, and there may be a time when there are no longer any elephants. But there will never be a time when there was never any elephants. That particular possibility is taken out of existence. This is another characteristic of TCPS: coherent states leave traces that “subsist” in the field of potentials, even after they cease to exist in actuality. In addition, not all of the potentials are actualized. The coherent state that emerges as action taken enfolds only some of the potentials. Those not selected are in a sense “left behind,” but they are not eliminated. Connolly writes, “The open plurality that preceded the selection now simmers in the background of being, available to enter into future vibrations when a new situation arises.” He goes on the state:

So loose instinctual residues from a past that never was periodically exert pressure on life. The scar left behind, however, bristles with uncertain potential. It may be activated under new circumstance, foraging an uncanny relation with the new situation from which a new bout of creative energy arises. . . . A new idea, feeling, tactic, perception, desire, plan of inspiration may bubble into being as if from nowhere.²³

The theory of complex potential states opens up new meaning and offers hope in the era of the Anthropocene.

In our highly complex and volatile world, most of our efforts to create new potential worlds hardly materializes on the global stage. Is it possible, though, to reframe the big questions of climate change, existential risk, institutional crisis, and the breakdown of meaning from one of adaptive pressure on a global scale to a theory of complex potential states on a human scale? In a world as diverse in people and rich in meanings as ours big change might come from small acts by everyone operating everywhere in the contexts that already present themselves in their ordinary lives—even though these contexts seem disconnected. These acts might be instances of what Connolly calls “the uncanny processes of creativity.” “The process is uncanny,” Connolly writes, “because creativity is neither the simple result of a profound intention, nor the realization of a preordained principle waiting to be elaborated.”²⁴

In the theory of complex potential states, social transformation is reimagined as the result of oscillations which otherwise constitute the “noise” we filter out, rather than the “signal” we tune into and try to “adapt to.”²⁵

On the explicit, exploitive surface of things, there are the vicious action-reaction cycles among all the competing signals. But below the radar of social media the noise may not be entropic—it may be a powerful oscillator threatening to “irrupt.”²⁶ These processes of irruption can be likened to the phenomenon of a lake turning over, where the deeper, colder layers rise up as the surface layers begin to cool. Although the processes of solar radiation and thermal oscillations are happening all the time, turn-over happens “all at once.”²⁷ The future, likewise, will not be televised because it cannot be tracked—it will be a threshold event.

Think of all the most significant biological and cultural innovations in the evolutionary-anthropology of the human: standing erect, speaking, writing, mutations in consciousness described by Gebser and Donald²⁸—these all look like threshold events. No one knew beforehand how to learn how to do these things, and we don’t know even now how humans learn to do these things—yet they are things we learn to do. There is no adaptive pressure to stand erect, speak, write, or alter the fundamental operating system of human consciousness. Rather, from the view of TCPS, these are singularities that result from protension—the strivance for things to advance.²⁹

From the perspective of complex adaptive systems thinking, the noise is seen to be random (meaningless), and is therefore classified as disordered.³⁰ From the perspective of TCPS, the noise is meaningful because it has an implicit order—the interference patterns of the background “vibrations.”³¹ Furthermore, from the view of TCPS, we can explain why emergent, singularity events, associated with catastrophic bifurcations in CAS, cannot be traced to causes, because the causes only subsist in the potential field.³² Once the event horizon is breached, and the new occasion arises de novo, we can trace the effects back to instantiations in the new occasion that seem to cause them. Hence the effects and the causes emerge simultaneously. In TCPS, this is called “numinous causality” which, in my opinion, is the most accurate definition of wholeness.³³

In this arena of numinous causality there is no reduction into subjects and object, between agents who act and agents that are acted upon. Rather, each entity is an agent-unto-itself, a vital, radiating living center that emanates (vibrates, ripples) fields of protension—overlapping and interfering and resonating waves in multiple dimensions and scales. The waves are mycelium-like, or analogous to the way a slime mold advances and retreats on its way to “solving a problem.” These are also analogous to how the body-brain works, through multiple conversations between afferent and efferent oscillations.³⁴

Consider an ordinary morning. There is an oscillation between me and the coffee, me and the cat, me and the computer, me and the rain. I am literally suspended by vibrating threads of value and desire on the one side, seduction and value on the other. I am in a constant state of disequilibrium, as are all the other entities. We need each other to satisfy our desires. I reach out in innumerable waves, like casting a thousand fishing lines into a vast and deep sea. In this sea are innumerable fishes in a frenzy to feed. Inside my body the same processes are happening—oscillations moving toward and away, rising above and falling below threshold levels of experience, rising above and falling below threshold levels of consciousness. The fractal iteration of it all, seen in this way, enables me to view the universe as my own experience. As above, so below.

The theory of complex potential states can account for beauty and life.

In his book, A World of Becoming, William E. Connolly cautions against both individualism and holism, and echoes TCPS notion of “ambiguity” because the connections are “loose, incomplete, . . . and susceptible to potential change. They don’t add up to a complete whole . . . and they never will.”³⁵ In this view, the words “ambiguity,” “incompleteness,” and “potential” are essentially synonymous. Unlike the language of CAS, the language of TCPS resists closure, reduction and reification. It is a lens that can reveal key choice points in situations which otherwise have grown so recursive that we cannot even imagine poking just one toe out of the loop.³⁶

The first step, then, in adopting TCPS is in noticing and rejecting closure, reduction, and reification, and learning how to avoid slipping into complex adaptive logics. You begin to see the origins of CAS thinking, and the root of the infinite loop. For example, let’s say you are in a conversation that is quickly turning into a heated argument. You are going to say the next “higher” thing to trump your opponent, but you realize the next “higher” is never the last. So you interrupt this discursive loop by not saying it. You provide no adaptive response. You allow your “opponent” to adapt to the space of not-saying, while you pay attention to de-escalating your body into a new potential state. It has the disposition of welcoming, inviting, curiosity, and empathy. Now you will feel the system that is you and the other also shifts gear into a new potential. You no longer anticipate the next move. You anticipate being surprised!

Take another, more pressing example—climate change and environmental destruction. All the discourse is in the language of adaptation, strategy and survival. Even the discourse around resilience thinking has taken on a subtle flavor of CAS rather than surfing the possibilities of state change.³⁷ I might frame the problem situation as needing to “preserve life on earth.”³⁸ This framing implies a CAS mentality, since there is an implication of threat and therefore opponent. With this framing, there is the possibility of contributing to the very destruction you are trying to avoid. It often leads to justifying the tools of destruction in order to end the destruction, a version of the US army’s strategy of destroying the village in order to save it. These are all means-ends problems that result from taking CAS to extremes.

As an alternative, I might frame the problem the way Christopher Alexander would— by simply asking: How can I create more life?³⁹ What if I incorporated this question into every decision—small and large—in my everyday ordinary encounters? How might continual commitment to just this one principle create openings that reveal new choice points for action?

Finally, on the organizational level, where CAS language is running rampant, I could reframe a situation from that of competition and threat to a concentrated focus on creating more life in my relationships with clients, customers, partners and employees, creating more life in the customer experience, creating more beauty in the product, and focusing on adding more delight and life into the ecosystem.

Concluding Remarks

In this article I introduce a new theory of change, called a theory of complex potential states, as an integration of the views of Alexander, Whitehead, and Simondon. I have tried to point the reader to authors and works which support this direction of thought that has captured the imagination of writers addressing the problem of epistemic closure in the face of existential and environmental crisis. I believe that a key advantage of TCPS is that, whereas CAS thinking leads to recursive loops where action only exacerbates and escalates the problem situation, TCPS thinking can reveal key choice points that lead to preferred futures, by decoupling action from “epi-systemic bondage.” This is its utilitarian feature, itself a quasi-response to the situation we find ourselves in today. But ultimately, I believe that a theory of complex potential states is an epistemic midwife that can help us create more life, and actualize more of the potential beauty of the universe that lies latent, beckoning us to feel and realize what in our hearts we know is possible.

Notes:

1. Consider, for example that the way we talk about COVID and immune systems, vaccines and contagion, variants and “breakthrough viruses” is the same way we talk about climate, markets, world financial systems, geopolitics, and organizational change, and has none of the flavors of the original Darwinian model.
2. And not surprisingly so, therefore, when CAS thinking changed evolutionary theory, it also changed the way we think about markets.
3. In Metaphor and Theory Change, Richard Boyd (1979) coined the term “theory-constitutive metaphor,” defining them as interaction metaphors that scientists need to accommodate language to the causal structure of the world.”
4. David Chandler (2018) Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene
5. Roy, Bonnitta (2021) Time, Change and Causality: Notes Toward a Metamorphosis of Mind in Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and emergence in metamodernity, ed. Jonathan Rowson & Layman Pascal (London: Perspective Press, 2021), 53-70.
6. See, for example, https://www.google.com/search?q=cbsn+adapt+or+die&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS840US844&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjq_-ThpMLyAhUtGVkFHWFXARgQ_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=1368&bih=769&dpr=2.
7. As well as the political landscape between the left and right.
8. Bonnitta Roy, “Time, Change & Causality: Note toward a metamorphosis of mind,” in Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and Emergence in Metamodernity, ed. Jonathan Rowson & Layman Pascal, 53-70. (London: Perspective Press, 2021), 65-66.
9. Christopher Alexander, The Luminous Ground (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), xv.
10. Alexander, The Luminous Ground, 2.
11. Alexander, The Luminous Ground, 16.
12. Stuart Kauffmann, Reinventing the Sacred (New York: Perseus Books, 2008).
13. Alexander, The Luminous Ground, 17.
14. David Scott, Gilber Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 6.
15. I have witnessed this event in newborn foals—a process that goes so slowly that you can actually see the organism change from a two-dimensional body to a three-dimensional being.
16. William Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham, UK: Duke University Press, 2017), 76.
17. https://www.britannica.com/science/Plancks-constant.
18. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge, U K: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
19. All complex systems entail complex feedloops, the best example of which is the brain, with its complex excitatory-inhibitory processes.
20. See Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N79rTxce6bI.
21. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (New York; Oxford University Press, 1979), 29.
22. See Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/4Abq2h5LttU.
23. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 77.
24. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 77.
25. That the signals—on social media for example—seem to be increasingly noisefull might be a meaningful clue.
26. Jean Gebser introduced the notion of irruption in his book The Ever-Present Origin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985). He wrote about the “irruption of time” as a 4^th-dimensional component of diaphaneity (reality-awareness), but also defines time as “intensity” or the “presentiation of origin”—what he called the “achronon.” I believe this corresponds to the oscillation-potential-protensional field-state of TCPS.
27. See https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/lake-turnover/.
28. See Gebser, The Ever Present Origin, and Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Both map out four mutations in consciousness and memory systems: Magic (Episodic), Mythic (Aural), Mental (Theoretic), and Integral (Digital) Donald in particular talks about asymmetrical evolution between the species, culture and technology.
29. Note: “advance” is not the same as “progress.” Advance is the transduction of what is into an instance of new becoming.
30. “The dark disorder domain in the centre represents situations where there is no clarity about which of the other domains apply. By definition it is hard to see when this domain applies. ‘Here, multiple perspectives jostle for prominence, factional leaders argue with one another, and cacophony rules,’ write David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone (“A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making,” Harvard Business Review, 2007). ‘The way out of this realm is to break down the situation into constituent parts and assign each to one of the other four realms. Leaders can then make decisions and intervene in contextually appropriate ways.’” From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework.
31. Dave Snowden, the designer of the Cynefin framework, has characterized disorder as a “Useful but hazardous phase shift mechanism” (https://www.cognitive-edge.com/the-domain-of-disorder-ii/).
32. In CAS, the interpretation given is that after bifurcation, the interpretive lens itself has drastically changed, and only a retrospective reconstructive narrative can connect the dots into a new meaningful narrative. See Alicia Juarrero, Dynamics in Action (Cambridge, UK: Policy Press, 2002).
33. Numinous causality is very closely related to randomness, and contemporary theoretical physics is examining the role of randomness (noise) in self-organized complexity. See Markus J. Aschwanden, et al., “Order out of Randomness: Self-Organization Processes in Astrophysics.” Space Science Review 214, no. 55. (2018): 1-75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-018-0489-2.
34. See Gyorgi Buzsaki, The Brain from Inside-Out (London: Oxford University Press, 2021), and Rhythms of the Brain (London: Oxford University Press, 2015).
35. Connolly, A World of Becoming, 35.
36. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is an example of this kind of closure of the imagination.
37. For many examples, see Stephanie Wakefield, Anthropocene Back Loop (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2020) Viki McCabe, Coming to Our Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Bonnitta Roy, “Time, Change & Causality: Note toward a metamorphosis of mind,” in Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and emergence in metamodernity, ed. Jonathan Rowson & Layman Pascal (London: Perspective Press, 2021), 53-70.
38. This is the mission statement of the Monastic Academy MAPLE.
39. Noting also that the definition of “life” for Alexander is much broader and at the same time more specific than the ordinary meaning.