musings

Anna Matheson (2026), in her short paper entitled Agency, place and the real-world dynamics of health inequality, provides a great example, in my view, of engaging with the world as richly and deeply complex. Matheson builds on the work of…

Engagement and exploration Since the publication of The Dao of Complexity I continue to have interesting engagements and connections with people from all over the world. I love it! And it allows for the furtherment of ideas –  and angles…

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to give a talk on complexity and Daoism and the light they shed on how to engage with what feels like our ever-more precarious future. I sat on the train and sorted…

Co-evolution of nature, science and economics The history of antibiotics gives some great examples of how the ‘path taken’ is shaped by the coming together of disparate and sometimes quirky conditions and events and requirements,  which then create the conditions…

Song-Chun Zhu, in the field of Artificial Intelligence, is taking a strikingly different stance from the prevailing paradigm in the US, reports Chang Che in The Guardian Weekly (26 September 2025). He argues that a sign of true intelligence is…

Last weekend I took part in ‘Regathering’  – an event held deep in a wood just north of Bath. Think yurts, compost loos with a view, outdoor cooking, roundhouse for meetings, yoga – as well as connection, sharing of ideas,…

“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves… but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.” Gilles Deleuze This quote was shared recently by Shahzad Tabassum in a Facebook post, and…

If the science of complexity, the science of open systems, gives a picture of the functioning of complex webs of inter-relating ‘things’, then we can expect this science to offer a perspective from the smallest to the largest scale. Individual…

I am part of a meditation group and this morning I was asked to start us off with a few words about Daoism – its central tenets from my perspective. This five minute recording , rather tentative, summarises two linked…

I went to a talk last Saturday in Oxford, given by Ben Ansell, author of Why Politics Fails’. It worried me. One central issue – and I challenged him on this – is his assumption that Man always acts in…

The world is still in the grip of worldviews driven by two classical – and outdated – physics theories. One, the mechanical worldview, is based on the work of Isaac Newton. Newton essentially was focused on two questions: how the…

How can we explore the complex world? If the world is complex, then ‘knowing’ that world is best approached with methods that reflect that complexity and capture its contextual, path-dependent, patterned nature.…