So far reality has been depicted as a disorderly mist, fractured with a scatter of low-entropy pockets – “systems” – that feed on each other in a swirling, co-adaptive dance towards ever-increasing complexity.
Ontology rests on the idea that reality is not perfectly uniform – that it has discontinuities. To develop a sense of these “contours”, hierarchy theory provides a crude and attractive account that makes for a good beginning.
This collection is about the scientific endeavor to find concise descriptions for how patterns in Nature are generated, and this is an endeavor that has taken twisted and unexpected turns
We concluded last section by linking Simon’s watchmaker parable to Holland’s multiplier effect to show that reproduction’s inevitable incorporation of error creates an innate bias to increase complexity.
