Curiosity and Networks of Possibility

Scientific progress, then, is not unidirectional but multidirectional and its characteristic discoveries both add new information and reformulate old information. Scientific curiosity, in this context, drives individual scientists and scientific communities to fill internal and external network cavities with informational nodes and conceptual edges

Curiosity and possibility are sibling concepts, born of the same horizon and generated along the same edge. They work together to break open what has yet to be thought and done, lived and loved. We are poised at a moment in human history where these sibling concepts—long valued but understudied—are pressing to the fore of our consciousness and conc

Disabled people are consistently written out of the future, philosopher Kafer (2013) notes, and perceived as having no future. To craft futures in which both realist and nonrealist disabilities are integral to liberatory worlds, then, is to reach for adjacent possibilities otherwise ignored and dismissed. It is to relocate possibility within the va

While scientific progress, then, proceeds by curiously exploring adjacent possibilities, preference is given to work closely tied to existing science and conducted by a privileged subset of scientists.

Art, as Bloch said, is a laboratory of possibilities. Indeed, other worlds become possible as and insofar as we curiously reformulate the networks in our heads—and in our hearts.

Without curiosity, possibility cannot appear on the scene, and without possibility, curiosity has no scene to work with in the first place. The two make one another possible.

Collectivities of humans, moreover, take a myriad of shapes, from small groups to organizations and transnational corporations. This is not even to mention the curious possibilities pursued in and among the more-than-human world. The dynamics we are describing, then, are scalar in nature and have wide conceptual purchase accordingly.

the connectional account of curiosity also challenges the common-sense view of possibility as solely related to growth. While nodes can be added, they can also be removed or changed, and while edges can be added, they can also be broken and rewired

Without curiosity, the space of the adjacent possible would exist but remain unplumbed and inactive. Curiosity then opens up adjacent possibilities, whether that means new nodes and edges or the reformulation of existing nodes and edges (and ultimately of the network itself).