Inevitable Complexity

Time passes and the universe expands... but not so much locally. Here, something else happens altogether. Time passes, the amount of space stays the same, but the amount of information contained within grows increasingly dense. We may be products of this, or we may produce it. As we are driven to explore the world around us, we carve it up with boundaries and divisions, categorizing any information we can get our hands on. Our categories get smaller and smaller, each more specific and detailed than the last. In a sense, our drive to divide and label at increasingly smaller scales seems fitting for our fractal-laden world.... we could keep separating on into infinity. There’s a few drawbacks to this method, however. As we increase the density of our space with boundaries, we decrease our freedom of movement. As more lines are drawn around us, we find less room to reach--the impacts of our actions have a more immediate effect. Yet, not all of our designated boundaries are wholly accurate. They are convenient, so we stick with them, even when they don’t exactly fit the complexity of the world around us. Those convenient, yet marginally inaccurate boundaries don’t exist independent of reality. It isn’t as if these two worlds--the perceived and labeled world versus the real world--are mutually exclusive. Rather, they have direct impacts on one another. We adjust our boundaries as we gain understanding of the real world, hoping to increase their accuracy. Meanwhile, those choices and drawn boundaries affect the actual world around us. Ultimately, our world is constantly increasing in complexity, our adapting selves along with it, as both causes and effects. To understand what we are becoming, we must first understand where what we have been.