In spare moments, I’m reading Coming from Your Inner Self: Interview with W. Brian Arthur by Joseph Jaworski, Gary Jusela, and C. Otto Scharmer (a link I believe I got from Rajesh Babu). Brian Arthur is with the Santa Fe Institute. I will just post quotes from the interview, as I read them and find them interesting.

If you ask Taoists how they see the world [says Brian Arthur], the first thing they’ll tell you is that the world is changing. Everything is always changing, everything is always unfolding, and it is our job as human beings to allow things to unfold. You can give a little nudge here and a nudge there, influencing things at the proper time in your own way, but the world is not seen as a machine. The world is seen organically as a collection of unfolding patterns. […]

[In the late 1000s, Taoists and Neo-Confucianists] taught that all was in flux but that everything structured itself according to inner principles that governed it. Now we’d call those laws. They said principle is one, but its manifestations are many. In other words, things in this world emerge from elements that structure themselves. The mind, they said, is not a vessel to be filled with facts or ideas. It too emerges. The mind is an emergent phenomenon. […]

Another one:

The movement that started complexity [theory] looks in the other direction [than the standard sciences, which puts things under a finer and finer microscope]. It’s asking, how do things assemble themselves? How do patterns emerge from these interacting elements? Complexity [theory] is looking at interacting elements and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold. It’s important to point out that the patterns may never be finished. They’re open-ended. In standard science this hit some things that most scientists have a negative reaction to. Science doesn’t like perpetual novelty.