Complex potential states

Good new post by Bonnitta Roy. She uses process philosophy to challenge the limiting paradigm of complexity science, partly because it tries to explain everything in its own terms. Her suggestion is "a shift from thinking in terms of adaptive pressure and escalating complexity, toward a more process philosophical view where systems are not bounded entities with agency that struggle to adapt, but are construed as relational states composed by all agents that strive to advance." 

The latter are potential states that have different possibilities that can cohere into actual occasions under the right conditions. Yet these potentials subsist the existence of actual occasions and continue to affect the latter. This is highly reminiscent of the discussion of convergent and divergent thought above, and indicative of what I'm calling hier(an)archical synplexity.

This last quote highlights what I see as how the collaborative commons works through this process, in distinction from the enlightened heroes figuring it all out from their complex ivory towers which supposedly and hopefully 'trickles down' to the rest of us.

"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."