Even Things Happen

I think we are at a moment like the discovery of irrational numbers, which were rejected by the Greeks as incomprehensible. It seemed crazy to believe in negative or irrational numbers, but once mathematics was past this reluctance, these kinds of numbers were accepted into the concept of number.

It is important to note the Greeks had an idea of number, which did not admit such things as negative or irrational numbers. Yet, in time, these concepts of number would come to be accepted by mathematicians and taught in modern elementary schools.

We are at the moment in science, where it is difficult to see the forest for the trees. We are so close to science as a reductionist process we fail to recognize there are other processes that can lead to scientific understanding. To most people, reductionism is science.

But we are beginning to discover another approach to understanding complex systems in the natural world, which goes beyond reductionism. Science is starting to recognize the reductionist approach fails to explain all aspects of reality. This new science of the "irrational" and complex, recognizes that things are much more occurrences than they are things. An occurrence is something that happens over time.

Even a stone plucked form a stream, held in the palm of the hand, science tells us is less solid than it appears. At the smallest levels a stone is nothing more than infinitesimally small particles, flitting in and out of existence from the "vacuum state." Even a stone is a kind of occurrence.

Science has been like the glass half full. With the discovery of the physics of chaotic systems and complexity theory, it can be a full glass. Equipped with the new science of the complex we can see nature is not a clockwork, that things are ephemeral an connected, but not just interconnected like the parts of a machine, but intertwined paradoxically, in feedback loops, or parts that are wholes and wholes that are parts.

We like to think of as things as things we can take apart, but they are actually occurrences. It will take a while for people to get used to this idea, just as it took a very long time for new concepts of number to become the stuff of elementary school mathematics.

If you find it difficult to see things as occurrences, think of how a food can be more than the sum of its parts, because the sum of its parts consists of its interactions with other parts and wholes in its environment, which means that a food is more an occurrence than a thing.

We must recognize the physical thing we study is inseparable from an occurrence, that even things happen.