structurally correct sentence that is heard. This worked well enough when you existed in small tribes and all had the same histories and associations as your tribe-members, but in societies of millions or billions, this is no longer the case. This implies that nearly the entirety of human communication is of the abstract general form “ why did the chicken cross the road ?” (while pre - supposing rough mental models of both chickens and roads) which is perhaps why both systems understanding and synthesis are rare in your societies. Systems synthesis a poor emotional match for the simple narrative concepts and metaphorical associations you use to communicate your physical world and its history. You at long last have a chance to start getting that stuff right. The Bottom Line: We conflate the virtual stories of our minds, with the physical reality of the real world. So, much of what we know for sure just ain’ t so.
The Parts and the Whole of the Elephant
“ There is much truth in the definition of the specialist as someone who ‘knows more and more about less and less’ .”
- Garrett Hardin , Ecologist and philosopher
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