The Radical New Reality of Network Science
Our Next
World View
How Self-Organizing System Networks Make The World--
And That Changes Everything!
A New Science of 'How Things Happen'
A New Cultural World View
A New Reality for Art and Myth
Recent science tells a surprising new story of 'how things actually happen.' Much of the order of the world is created by feedback-driven networks in self-organizing systems. From ecosystems to economies, cells to corporations, these networks are self-determining agents which we cannot control. They arise from a type of simultaneous interactivity similar to that in human brains. This basis of human intelligence is now found to be present in the feedback networks
of both natural and human social systems. That is a radically new reality.
We must now re-conceive both society and Nature as complexes of self-ordering, self-directing system networks--not predictable 'machinery.' This shift has profound implications for all aspects of culture.
Our ignorance about self-organizing networks leads to actions that disable their self-sustaining operations. It promotes social inequality, economic instability, political dysfunction, violent conflicts, ecological devastation, and climate disruption. A network-based world view reveals that neither society nor Nature function in the ways we assume. To understand what we now know requires fundamental cultural change
The new science shows how the symbolism of Art and Mythology represent hidden aspects of our real lives through metaphors. Symbolism now has a scientific basis as an essential way of knowing 'how the world actually works.'
A New, Secular Spirituality
Humans are not the only 'intentional actors' shaping society, history, or the biosphere. Evidence for self-organizing networks reveals a self-animating principle in Nature--a secular concept of spiritual agency 'at work in the world.' This world view arises from science. It does not require religious belief or doctrine.
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Neuroscience now reveals how our two brain hemispheres 'see' the world in dramatically different ways -- as integrated wholes through the right, and as separated, sequenced parts through the left. These 'two minds' in our one brain allow us to perceive the 'two ways things happen' now detailed by complex systems science: as predictably causal events and as the unpredictably emergent interdependencies that result in self-organizing systems. .