About - Adjacent Possible

The adjacent possible is as much about limits as it is about openings. At every moment in the timeline of an expanding biosphere, there are doors that cannot be unlocked yet. In human culture, we like to think of breakthrough ideas as sudden accelerations on the timeline, where a genius jumps ahead fifty years and invents something that normal mind

If knowledge is a network and curiosity is its growth principle, and if the adjacent possible is indeed hovering over the edges of knowledge systems as they currently exist, then curiosity is at least one of, if not the primary, epistemic access point to that field of adjacent epistemic possibilities. Crucially, that field of adjacent epistemic pos

Chance favors the connected mind. —STEVEN BERLIN JOHNSON

This is what Stuart Kauffman recognized when he first formulated the idea of the adjacent possible: that there is something like an essential drive in the biosphere to diversify into new ways of making a living.

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.

In the dense networks of the first cities, good ideas have a natural propensity to get into circulation. They spill over, and through that spilling they are preserved for future generations.

release. The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you. This can be as simple as changing the physical environment you work in, or cultivating a specific kind of social network, or maintaining certain habits in the way you seek out and store information.