Sublime

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

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.

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.

By altering the ingredients of the idea menu they are exposed to, we might, in turn, minimize the dangerous inputs to the processes of belief and network updating.

non-equilibrium physics).

Perhaps the greatest “phase transition” in our thinking that such an approach could engender is the maturation in our willingness to live with relatively high levels of uncertainty in the domains of complex phenomena—and thus give up on ideas like complete “cures,” the elimination of “risk,” the design of perfect “stability,” and achieving total

not vary.

James Coleman,