. . . scribbled on a restaurant napkin:
1. Things are always already in process.
2. More complex things are more in process, or in more (and different) processes, than simpler things.
3. Growing/developing/evolving things tend to become more complex. Other things tend to become less so.
4. Being in process, things elude capture. Those that don’t become other things, and generally simpler things, than they were.
5. You can never do only one thing.
6. You can never isolate one thing from the rest. When you try, that thing ceases to be what it is, or it drags other things with it.
7. Knowing is doing; doing is knowing. But neither of them is only and fully the other.
8. Every moment presents options. Its passing alters the options presented to future moments.
9. Every action feeds a relation, tweaks a process, builds a network.
10. A world full of things made by the human Thing makes it seem that things are merely things, simple things, dead things. Even those things aren’t that, but other things certainly aren’t that.
Notes:
(1) “Things” is a generic term for bits and pieces of world/universe. Things do; things are done.
(2) Complexity and simplicity are relative; entropy and negentropy are general trends. In reality, most things don’t just move all in one direction.
(4) Everything becomes different from itself anyway. The question is always what to become.
(5) But you can try.
(7) Form is substance; substance is form. But… same story.
(9) Or many at once.
(10) The “human Thing” includes humans, ruminants and cereal grasses, fossil fuels, cities, techno-economic networks, and an ever diversifying range of things made for the Thing and things made to make other things for the Thing. Things made by the human Thing even seem to be getting livelier and more complex (e.g., digital life, nanotechnology, online worlds). We are building a complex (mega)network atop a complex (mega)network, but with relations between the two (Terra 1.0 and Terra 2.0, if you will) growing more tenuous and fragile.
