Wonderful read! One immediate application of this on the more human level is networking. Meeting people today unlocks doors tomorrow that you could never have predicted.
Does this connet to TRE, Temporal Reciprocal Emergence? Doesn't the phase space represent lawful possibilities which could be reached "now" in some standard temporal unit, however reapplied? But what if some of those possibilities bring with them longer term possibilities, possibles whose evolution would be on a different scale? Like the time interval that Herbert Simon's watchmaker has to have to complete a survivable module, or piece, of what will later become a complete watch? Seems to have something to do with time scales.
nice catch! This article came from an entirely different part of my work on social change, and I didn;t even have the emergent stuff in mind at all. But now that you say it I can see that it might well be part of the work of unifying the tree of causality and the tree of emergence. I'll ponder that more. thx!
nice catch! This article came from an entirely different part of my work on social change, and I didn;t even have the emergent stuff in mind at all. But now that you say it I can see that it might well be part of the work of unifying the tree of causality and the tree of emergence. I'll ponder that more. thx!
While the Hundredth Monkey phenomenon has often been explained through supernatural concepts like collective consciousness or mystical knowledge transfer, the adjacent possible framework offers a structural explanation: similar ingredients + similar problems = similar solutions, discovered independently but not mysteriously.
The adjacent possible framework doesn’t dismiss the mystery of seemingly impossible simultaneous discoveries—it solves it. What appears miraculous can emerge from pure structure: when isolated populations face similar challenges with similar capabilities, they’re all positioned at the same frontier, making convergent innovation not just possible but likely.
The real mystery wasn’t “how did knowledge jump between islands?” but rather “why didn’t we recognize these populations were all standing at the same door, ready to open it?” The phenomenon may be real; we were simply asking the wrong question about what caused it.
Dear Jim - I literally laughed aloud when I read this, surrounded as I am with about 500 art books (30 alone on Picasso), and I have more in boxes in storage. Here's the problem. The Art History books are BIG review books. They take you through the lengthy history in an ok manner, but are super shallow. Art books that have depth deal with specific topics and usually run to 500 pages, mostly bios. Vasari's "Lives" - the most famous historical books, are a set of three 500 pagers with what is today deemed some accuracy and some laughable accounts. A lot of the most acute readings aside from bios have been highly skilled journalists. So I will recommend 4 books for you.
1. Big (shallow) historical Review:"The History of Art" Anthony F. Janson (often called "Janson's) many editions, get the latest and always buy used. A good over-all book.
2. "Working Space" by Frank Stella - Stella is dead now, but he was a noted Modern Artist who also knew art history and could write (this is unusual). So this book combines his actual experience as a painter with history.
3. "Hot,Cold,Heavy,Light", 100 Art Writings by Peter Schjeldahl. PS was an art writer for 30 years, his last 20 for the New Yorker. Very acute perceptions and terrific writing.
This books covers art of the time plus old art visited on travels. Other books by PS avail.
4. "Landscapes", John Berger on Art - The Spectator called Berger "perhaps the greatest living writer on art" - possibly, though he passed about 8 years ago. There are many available books. This is a good compendium with essays on old and new artists.
I think that even though you are not an "art person" you will enjoy all of these. MG
Dear Jim - I literally laughed aloud when I read this, surrounded as I am with about 500 art books (30 alone on Picasso), and I have more in boxes in storage. Here's the problem. The Art History books are BIG review books. They take you through the lengthy history in an ok manner, but are super shallow. Art books that have depth deal with specific topics and usually run to 500 pages, mostly bios. Vasari's "Lives" - the most famous historical books, are a set of three 500 pagers with what is today deemed some accuracy and some laughable accounts. A lot of the most acute readings aside from bios have been highly skilled journalists. So I will recommend 4 books for you.
1. Big (shallow) historical Review:"The History of Art" Anthony F. Janson (often called "Janson's) many editions, get the latest and always buy used. A good over-all book.
2. "Working Space" by Frank Stella - Stella is dead now, but he was a noted Modern Artist who also knew art history and could write (this is unusual). So this book combines his actual experience as a painter with history.
3. "Hot,Cold,Heavy,Light", 100 Art Writings by Peter Schjeldahl. PS was an art writer for 30 years, his last 20 for the New Yorker. Very acute perceptions and terrific writing.
This books covers art of the time plus old art visited on travels. Other books by PS avail.
4. "Landscapes", John Berger on Art - The Spectator called Berger "perhaps the greatest living writer on art" - possibly, though he passed about 8 years ago. There are many available books. This is a good compendium with essays on old and new artists.
I think that even though you are not an "art person" you will enjoy all of these. MG
Jim, I do a lot of consulting to artists all over the world. And their primary concern is "how to succeed" - of course. One of the primary things I tell them is that they must explore the development of an identifiable style, and that style must come from their genuine, undefended selves plus their trained technical knowledge - but that the new and original style cannot be more than about 10% of about what is currently accepted in the larger art world. If it is further ahead than that, it will fail. The artists who are immensely original and create vast change in art often have resources that allow them to ignore the pressures of the marketplace. Or their vision is realized after they die. But for regular, working artists? 10% maximum is about right - it's "adjacent", to use your language. Recognizable, but new.
makes sense. Also fits the distinction between relatively common innovation and relatively rare invention. Like, who invented realistic 3d perspective in painting? I wonder if something like that distinction exists in the art5 history discipline?
Giotto single-handedly invented perspective drawing. We know this because he didn't teach anyone else to do it, so for a century people wrote about how impressed they were and how they couldn't figure out how to do it.
Also, the Hellenistic Greeks probably used perspective drawing, but it is all lost. All we know about Greek art is from inferior Roman copies.
3D perspective is old. 15th CT old. Brunelleschi discovered it and actually published a book on it. But art arises from culture. So around the time of the Greek alphabet, a 2000 year arc of favoring structure over emotion began in art, reflecting the focus on rational thought. Anything emotional took 2nd place. This was good, because this thrust developed science. But healers were called witches and burned, alas. Nonetheless, the rational progressed steadily thru printing presses and all the Enlightenment discoveries on through to the end-time of the arc, marked by quantum mechanics, which announced wave/particle duality and hence "permitted" rational and non-rational equality, or at least its beginnings in a new arc. Which is good, since humans require both in equal measure to deal with a complex culture. Computer science and womens "official" equality all matured at about the same time in the 20th century. Art arises from culture - always. This is what produced all of the abstract and after that, non-objective and non-representational art of the last ct. Today, since we are venturing into a new period - a time of chaos as we change paradigms - new art is returning to a type of realism that is narrative and often contains riddles - just like life. Truly, everything we know about history can be seen and learned from art. MG
Wonderful read! One immediate application of this on the more human level is networking. Meeting people today unlocks doors tomorrow that you could never have predicted.
Seems to be somewhat related to Christopher Alexander's Nature of Order with Structure Preserving Transformations.
Does this connet to TRE, Temporal Reciprocal Emergence? Doesn't the phase space represent lawful possibilities which could be reached "now" in some standard temporal unit, however reapplied? But what if some of those possibilities bring with them longer term possibilities, possibles whose evolution would be on a different scale? Like the time interval that Herbert Simon's watchmaker has to have to complete a survivable module, or piece, of what will later become a complete watch? Seems to have something to do with time scales.
nice catch! This article came from an entirely different part of my work on social change, and I didn;t even have the emergent stuff in mind at all. But now that you say it I can see that it might well be part of the work of unifying the tree of causality and the tree of emergence. I'll ponder that more. thx!
nice catch! This article came from an entirely different part of my work on social change, and I didn;t even have the emergent stuff in mind at all. But now that you say it I can see that it might well be part of the work of unifying the tree of causality and the tree of emergence. I'll ponder that more. thx!
While the Hundredth Monkey phenomenon has often been explained through supernatural concepts like collective consciousness or mystical knowledge transfer, the adjacent possible framework offers a structural explanation: similar ingredients + similar problems = similar solutions, discovered independently but not mysteriously.
The adjacent possible framework doesn’t dismiss the mystery of seemingly impossible simultaneous discoveries—it solves it. What appears miraculous can emerge from pure structure: when isolated populations face similar challenges with similar capabilities, they’re all positioned at the same frontier, making convergent innovation not just possible but likely.
The real mystery wasn’t “how did knowledge jump between islands?” but rather “why didn’t we recognize these populations were all standing at the same door, ready to open it?” The phenomenon may be real; we were simply asking the wrong question about what caused it.
Dear Jim - I literally laughed aloud when I read this, surrounded as I am with about 500 art books (30 alone on Picasso), and I have more in boxes in storage. Here's the problem. The Art History books are BIG review books. They take you through the lengthy history in an ok manner, but are super shallow. Art books that have depth deal with specific topics and usually run to 500 pages, mostly bios. Vasari's "Lives" - the most famous historical books, are a set of three 500 pagers with what is today deemed some accuracy and some laughable accounts. A lot of the most acute readings aside from bios have been highly skilled journalists. So I will recommend 4 books for you.
1. Big (shallow) historical Review:"The History of Art" Anthony F. Janson (often called "Janson's) many editions, get the latest and always buy used. A good over-all book.
2. "Working Space" by Frank Stella - Stella is dead now, but he was a noted Modern Artist who also knew art history and could write (this is unusual). So this book combines his actual experience as a painter with history.
3. "Hot,Cold,Heavy,Light", 100 Art Writings by Peter Schjeldahl. PS was an art writer for 30 years, his last 20 for the New Yorker. Very acute perceptions and terrific writing.
This books covers art of the time plus old art visited on travels. Other books by PS avail.
4. "Landscapes", John Berger on Art - The Spectator called Berger "perhaps the greatest living writer on art" - possibly, though he passed about 8 years ago. There are many available books. This is a good compendium with essays on old and new artists.
I think that even though you are not an "art person" you will enjoy all of these. MG
Dear Jim - I literally laughed aloud when I read this, surrounded as I am with about 500 art books (30 alone on Picasso), and I have more in boxes in storage. Here's the problem. The Art History books are BIG review books. They take you through the lengthy history in an ok manner, but are super shallow. Art books that have depth deal with specific topics and usually run to 500 pages, mostly bios. Vasari's "Lives" - the most famous historical books, are a set of three 500 pagers with what is today deemed some accuracy and some laughable accounts. A lot of the most acute readings aside from bios have been highly skilled journalists. So I will recommend 4 books for you.
1. Big (shallow) historical Review:"The History of Art" Anthony F. Janson (often called "Janson's) many editions, get the latest and always buy used. A good over-all book.
2. "Working Space" by Frank Stella - Stella is dead now, but he was a noted Modern Artist who also knew art history and could write (this is unusual). So this book combines his actual experience as a painter with history.
3. "Hot,Cold,Heavy,Light", 100 Art Writings by Peter Schjeldahl. PS was an art writer for 30 years, his last 20 for the New Yorker. Very acute perceptions and terrific writing.
This books covers art of the time plus old art visited on travels. Other books by PS avail.
4. "Landscapes", John Berger on Art - The Spectator called Berger "perhaps the greatest living writer on art" - possibly, though he passed about 8 years ago. There are many available books. This is a good compendium with essays on old and new artists.
I think that even though you are not an "art person" you will enjoy all of these. MG
Jim, I do a lot of consulting to artists all over the world. And their primary concern is "how to succeed" - of course. One of the primary things I tell them is that they must explore the development of an identifiable style, and that style must come from their genuine, undefended selves plus their trained technical knowledge - but that the new and original style cannot be more than about 10% of about what is currently accepted in the larger art world. If it is further ahead than that, it will fail. The artists who are immensely original and create vast change in art often have resources that allow them to ignore the pressures of the marketplace. Or their vision is realized after they die. But for regular, working artists? 10% maximum is about right - it's "adjacent", to use your language. Recognizable, but new.
makes sense. Also fits the distinction between relatively common innovation and relatively rare invention. Like, who invented realistic 3d perspective in painting? I wonder if something like that distinction exists in the art5 history discipline?
Giotto single-handedly invented perspective drawing. We know this because he didn't teach anyone else to do it, so for a century people wrote about how impressed they were and how they couldn't figure out how to do it.
Also, the Hellenistic Greeks probably used perspective drawing, but it is all lost. All we know about Greek art is from inferior Roman copies.
3D perspective is old. 15th CT old. Brunelleschi discovered it and actually published a book on it. But art arises from culture. So around the time of the Greek alphabet, a 2000 year arc of favoring structure over emotion began in art, reflecting the focus on rational thought. Anything emotional took 2nd place. This was good, because this thrust developed science. But healers were called witches and burned, alas. Nonetheless, the rational progressed steadily thru printing presses and all the Enlightenment discoveries on through to the end-time of the arc, marked by quantum mechanics, which announced wave/particle duality and hence "permitted" rational and non-rational equality, or at least its beginnings in a new arc. Which is good, since humans require both in equal measure to deal with a complex culture. Computer science and womens "official" equality all matured at about the same time in the 20th century. Art arises from culture - always. This is what produced all of the abstract and after that, non-objective and non-representational art of the last ct. Today, since we are venturing into a new period - a time of chaos as we change paradigms - new art is returning to a type of realism that is narrative and often contains riddles - just like life. Truly, everything we know about history can be seen and learned from art. MG
Interesting. Art History is, unfortunately, a near void in my knowledge base. Could you recommend a single volume on the topic?