Curiosity and Networks of Possibility

In the process of construction and deconstruction, knowledge develops in immediately contiguous spaces—that is, along the adjacent possible edges, both inside and outside of a knowledge network structure. To think curiously, then, is to inaugurate that organic process of actualizing adjacent epistemic possibilities.

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.

Potentialities for growth, then, are available in all directions—toward what has never been thought and back to what must be rethought.

The possibilities of what we might now think, and know, and become are not necessarily novel in the sense of never having been witnessed before. Many artists work in and with historical tropes and beckon, through them, beyond the present horizon. It is that bidirectionality that allows them to crack open the network of thought.

Most germane for our purposes, knowledge, too, can be analyzed as a network. In this case, nodes can be pieces of information, or experiences, or words, or knowers themselves, while the edges can be the relationships between those pieces of information, those experiences, words, or knowers.

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.

Collectively, these four forms of the possible (i.e. new node, new edge, changed node, changed edge) in network science are studied under the notion of the adjacent possible (Björneborn, 2020). The term “adjacent possible” refers to the fact that what is possible is what is adjacent to what exists. What is impossible is what is not adjacent to what

As a condition of innovation, Johnson (2010) argues, “the adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself” (p. 31)

Although science may proceed through the experimental pluck of one scientist or another, it is ultimately a collaborative endeavor. Similarly, speculative fiction is read by the singular reader but experienced by a fanbase and sometimes a whole culture (or cultures).