Network Thinking - Overview

Network Thinking as a Lingua Franca for achieving evolving one's metacognition

Titles of popular business books like  Social Physics illustrate that the Consilient century truly has arrived. Heralded by the late great biologist EO Wilson in his prescient 1998 book Consilience suggested that the way forward that was becoming available to us in the 21st century was unlike any that had ever been open to us before.

Network Thinking is the lingua Franca.  Anything in the universe can be viewed as nested networks and nodes*.

*Networks are the common currency of resilience studies: the theory and vocabulary of networks provide a universal framework “for describing how information, resources, and behaviors flow through many complex systems,” including “biological, economic, and ecological systems.” – Anne Marie Slaughter – the Chessboard and the Web.

Pattern recognition

Great Athletes don’t’ have faster reflexes. They have better forward pattern recognition.

Because everything can be viewed as nested nodes and networks it offers us a way to think about and reframe anything. Patterns exist at all levels. And because it is so fundamental, network structures appear similar throughout the natural world. For example:

• The Trunk of a tree and the Aorta of the human heart have the same ratio to the rest of the circulatory as the to roots and branches of the tree. 
• Cities all over the world have the same number of gas stations. This is why Elon Musk, Raymond Smullyan and Chuang tze suggest that we are living in a simulation