Intro to AWM: How Stuff Happens - Part 2, The Model Itself
The Model Itself
This model describes a functional structure with a set of simple principles (axioms) and relationships between those principles. Some of the axioms represent things (the existential axioms: state, moment, entities); some of them represent movement (the operational axioms: becoming, action, choice). To make the basic axioms easier to apply to real life, we have developed derivative axioms from the synthesis of the existential and operational axioms, which helps us understand the ordinary world.
Things that Are: Actualities and Potentials
At the deepest level, the model shows us that there are two main elements of the creative universe.
- There is the stuff of the world that is—that which we normally perceive. We call it the Actuality or Actualities. It includes what most of us would perceive as the actual stuff of the world. (Ambiguities about what is real stuff and what is potential stuff are interesting, but not really pertinent to the application of the model. Thank goodness, for the line is hard to draw.)
- There is the Potential, the information about the future world into which the Actuality will transform. This information includes patterns of persistence, arrays of possibilities, likelihoods—all of the pending possibilities that have been previously generated. We understand a lot of the information that resides in the Potential, but not all of it. (We can predict the movement of a golf ball, but not the shifting of an earthquake, or the thought process of an Einstein.) Some of it is too vast or complex for us to be able to predict what is actually going to happen, though our capacity to understand is expanding all the time.
We call the combination of the Actuality and the Potential the State of the universe. State is an infinite informational state space—that is, everything in the world has, in each moment, some state or condition which is changing to some degree all the time. Its momentary actual state, its potential states, and the process of change itself determine how it changes—what it will become—what happens next.
In each moment, the potential becomes the actual—the world arising into being.
How the World Operates - Becoming
Becoming is the core of the universe’s existence. Everything is changing in every moment. The universe is a process of change and evolution even more than it is a set of things.
The rules for the process of becoming are in large part what we try to learn in life. These rules determine the creation of the actual world from the potential of what could be. We understand a lot of the rules of becoming. We can explain why a plane flies, or why balls fall, or how the surfboard catches the wave. We know why the baby is hungry. But there are many other underlying patterns and rules that we do not yet understand, though our evolution, exploration, and investigations are driven in large part by our desire to uncover them and to understand more accurately how the world works. Each individual has a different level of understanding and, in large part, that is what individual growth and development is—the expansion of our ability to understand all the ways of the world and to work creatively with them.
