The Bottom Line:

1. Network science reveals hidden dynamics in self and world: Technical analysis and modeling take us inside the obscure realm of complexity and network operations in new ways. It enables us to plot networks as constellations of surprising connections, feedback loops, and interdependencies in any given system.  It reveals how Nature acts through emergent order creation and autonomous network agency to animate the world in ways invisible to our ordinary perspectives. This knowledge is essential to a realistic world view.

2. Network science re-reads mythic symbolism as dynamical modeling of complexity: The factual perspective of network science shows how mythic symbolism models complexity, transforming myth from delusional fantasy into imaginal reality. Myth's magical events and spiritual entities correlate with complexity's emergent creativity and network autonomy. Myth and science now corroborate each other. 

3. The combination of network science and mythic imagination changes our sense of reality: Correlating simple analytical methods derived from the science with symbolic modeling prompts intuitive understanding of emergent phenomena. This constitutes an experience of complexity's hidden dynamics, allowing us think like Nature acts and reconfigure our relationships with real world contexts.

     We are all familiar with the dynamical activity of mechanistic causation and order formation. That is what makes our industries and technologies possible. It gives us control over many things. But science now confronts us with a very different dynamical mode of order creation. Astonishingly, this one turns out to way Nature acts to create most of the form and activity around us. We are compelled to rethink the way we think about how things actually happen.


     This basic method for investigating network dynamics aids in understanding which parts of a system are influencing other parts in reciprocal ways, showing how flows of feedback between parts can generate the concurrently interdependent dynamics associated with emergent order creation and its network autonomy. In this way we can track how individual trees, and other elements, generate the self-regulating network of a forest ecology.


      A forest is a complex ecosystem whose dynamical network relationships cannot be represented by a hierarchy. Only a network constellation can provide a sense of how the parts of the system interact interdependently to generate the self-regulating, adaptive autonomy of its operational network.
      
     Such relational plots provide a much more realistic representation of how things are happening in both human an non-human complex systems. However, no matter how detailed we try to make an abstract constellated plot of a particular operational network, it will never reveal to us all what exactly is happening in its simultaneously interdependent, continually variable, self-sustaining operations. Nonetheless, even this network analysis draw fro sscine alone provides revalations about common subjects and aspects of our ordinary world. Yet, to fully appreciate these, a metaphoric method of representing what network constellations reveal becomes useful.


   Science locates the emergent creativity of complexity's self-organizing criticality in the dynamical turbulence "at the edge of chaos." This condition of disorderly, unpredictably self-organizing activity is the real world domain of myth's metamorphic "other world" of magical transformations, animating spirits, and divine powers.


    The complex interactions between system parts, like trees and people, create additional autonomous meta-networks than manifest their own character and influence. The characteristics of a forest are different from those of individual trees, as social networks are different from those of the individual people from which the social meta-network emerges. Science provides evidence for these autonomous networks. Mythic imagination gives us vivid, compelling ways of perceiving them that science cannot provide. The complexity of a simple two-person relationship generates an emergent network that has impulses different from the two individuals. Myth makes these ethereal networks "visible" as the extra-ordinary representations of its magical events and personified spirits.

  Science and myth now have common ground--as ways to model emergent order creation. Used together, they provide a vision of the hidden ways that things actually happen.


     Through careful observation of the order and behavior complex systems manifest, mythic imagination generates symbolic images and stories that characterize the archetypal traits of particular systems. These give us a sense of how they are and behave that science can not provide--due to the ultimately undefinable aspects of complexity. In this way, mythic metaphors reveal the archetypal character or soul of networks. They constitute the archetypal psychology of how network autonomy animates the world, of the ways it becomes the "minding of matter"--in human and non-human systems.

     This correspondence between recent science and ancient imagination shows that pre-modern people had a way of perceiving and appreciating the self-animating agency of complex adaptive systems. Just as the science now shows we are woefully ignorant of how the world really works, so does mythic imagination. The scientific logic of networks can now be made more tangible by uniting these seemingly opposed human ways of knowing. Together they show that myth is not concerned with literal belief in "the gods" but with awakening human awareness to the hidden operations of autonomous networks throughout Nature.

To Know More Dive Down

      Understanding the methodology of scientific mythology as factual symbolism requires an exploration of the correlations between the two areas of knowledge. It is important to remember that the basics of the science are used here to re-incorporate the wisdom of mythic symbolism into our modern secular worldview. What you find below is not a thorough technical explanation of therelative science.

Why Combine Science and Myth? The Archetypal Constellation of Networks

     Prior to the more recent research into complex dynamics over the last 50 years or so, there was no factual basis to connect scientific knowledge with the metaphoric symbolism of the mythic imagination. But the discovery of emergent order creation and its autonomously self-organizing network operations in complex systems now facilitates their association. A profoundly important relationship between these seemingly incommensurable modes of understanding is now possible.  By combining these different methods of representing complexity and its emergent properties, the technically analytical aspects of our mental networks become connected to our intuitive ones--our imagination can serve our logic in ways that make the invisible realm of emergent order creation more tangible and comprehensible.
     The purpose then is to develop a factual imagination of our existence in and as the interplay of a bi-dynamical reality composed of predictable and unpredictable but intentional order creation. Science remains science, and myth myth, but the two at last have a logical basis for teaching us about reality through factual symbolism. The factual evidence of science serves to guide or imagination of what those facts indicated but which scientific method cannot fully describe and explain. In this manner, mythic imagination extends our insight into aspect of reality science finds inaccessible.

The Related Histories of Science and Mythic Imagination as Dynamical Modeling

    Scientific method has a long history. It is in some degree an inherent human approach to understanding. The pragmatic aspect of human intelligence observes, forms hypotheses about how things take shape, and tests these thoughts to see if a person can improve upon his or her capacity to manipulate or control aspects of the environment. The development of a basic technology of tools among early humans is an example. The more formalized rules for doing scientific analysis are often seen as arising among the ancient Greeks, particularly with the thought of Aristotle. From that time on in Western Civilization, such efforts were known as natural philosophy. But natural philosophers continued to attempt to understand Nature in a metaphysical manner up to the modern era of Galileo Galilei, Issac Newton, Rene' Descartes, and others. Newton himself worked in the mode of Alchemy, seeking a spiritual aspect in the transformations of physical matter.
     Alchemy constituted a practice that advanced the science of chemistry while also involving a mythical imagination about spiritual forces at work in natural phenomena. So it  can be said that science was not always considered antithetical to myth, as it became in the 19th Century, when the idea that all of Nature was composed and governed by the deterministic but unintentional Laws of Physics. Consequently it became a matter of cultural belief that all natural phenomena could be reduced to the properties of atoms and molecules, resulting in an assumption that all causation, all order creation, occurs "from the bottom up," as a result of the quantifiable properties of matter and energy. Thus it seemed quite obvious that the spiritual forces of the mythical imagination could have no role in Nature.
    This trajectory in how scientific method has been used to define reality actually has a corrolary in the history of myth. With the advent of complexity science it became possible to analyze the expressions of the mythical imagination as metaphoric modeling of complex dynamics. From that perspective, one can discern that there is also an historical trajectory of change in how myth was used to model complex dynamics.  The earliest known cultural expressions of mythic symbolism are associated with the concept of animism. In that worldview, most things and events are influenced by ethereal spiritual forces that act intentionally, with particularized character, to influence the physical world. This intuition of the role of network autonomy in Nature posits no inherent hierarchy to the interacting spirits that collectively influence order creation by animating the world in diverse and conflicted ways. Thus it appears to reflect the insights of complexity science about the role of network autonomy expressed in the quantitative terms of scientific logic.
     However, with the emergence of agriculture and hierarchically structured, urbanized mass societies, such as in the Middle East some five thousand or so years ago, the ways mythic imagination represented network autonomy began to change.  People still perceived Nature to be imbued with spiritual order creation, but a realm of "higher" gods and goddesses appeared. That gave the imagination of spiritual animation a hierarchical aspect in which a few divinities held dominion over all. This mythological worldview is identified as polytheism, in which multiple gods and goddesses interact variably to influence order creation in the world. In effect, the powers of spiritual animation were being concentrated into fewer, more powerful figures.
     In some cultures, these higher divinities began to be portrayed as divided into two categories. One was credited with acting on the side of civilization's orderly structure and the other on the side of a wild, chaotic Nature. An early example is the conflict described between in Babylonian culture between Tiamat, the chaotic feminine spiritual force of the sea, and Marduk, a more human-like god who kills Tiamt and cuts her into pieces to form the world order in which civilization can flourish.

     Eventually, a further reduction on mythic representation of network autonomy emerged in which there was but but one high god, who was personified as masculine. This mythic worldview is referred to as monotheism. Thus the overall influence of emergent network autonomy came to be represented as singular, male, and almost, if not entirely, omnipotent--that is, deliberately in control of every aspect of Nature. Yet even in these mythologies, there is typically an additional, though inferior spiritual force that acts to subvert the orderly influence of the high god. This appears most overtly iirst in the Zoroastrain tradition, as a contest between Ahura Masda and Ahriman. Further, the contest between them becomes a titanic struggle which will end with the end of the world. Monotheism and a similar conflict then appeared in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious thought. Here the struggle between spiritual forces identified with socially ethical order verses unethical or corrupt social disorder is that between "God and the Devil." In this mythic imagination, religious thought became more  binary, dividing the spiritual realm into good and evil, and imposing dogmatic standards for belief and human behavior.
     In these changes we can see further reductions and simplifications of how the mythic imagination represents network autonomy as spiritual animation in Nature. There has been a trajectory from generalized animism to a vertically arrayed "chain of being," with one, true god above all, who has an inferior adversary in the disruptive, disorderly agency of the devil. This is the era when the historical trajectories of myth and science become related. Natural philosophers among the ancient Greeks are regarded as the first thinkers, at least in Western civilization, to begin the scientific method of seeking understanding of Nature without reference to the spiritual influence of gods and goddesses. That is the secular basis of science as a methodology and knowledge base. Nonetheless, most natural philsophers after the Greeks had a metaphysical perspective, meaning they still thought there were forces of ordering that were in addition to merely physical ones. Indeed, many Muslim and Christian thinkers contributed profoundly to the emergence of scientific thought.
    But with the elaboration of methods for applying the secular scientific method, such as advanced mathematics, knowledge of chemistry, and Newton's physics, the descriptive and explanatory power of physical science began gain more cultural credulity than that of the mythical imagination. The latter became trapped in religious literalism and an assertion of absolute truth in the West, causing it to be regarded as historical fact, rather than a more symbolic means of attaining intuitive knowledge about an ultimately unknowable domain of spiritual animation. Ironically, this cultural absolutist background of religious thinking seems to have influenced the attitudes associated with scientific knowledge. Physical science eventually became entangled in a contest with religion for the claim to be the one and only, absolutely true source of knowledge.
    Consequently, societies became more secularly scientific and the West's all-powerful god shrank to the conception of a clockmaker-like engine who initiated the world in accordance with the Laws of Physics. Thereafter, it was thought to have continued to exist without the influence of any spiritual animation, meaning there were not more miracles that science could not explain. Thereby, the metaphorical mythical representation of network autonomy, as personified spiritual forces, lost its meaning. This is not to say that religion has dissapeared as a social force. Rather, the point is that religion, through its emphasis upon historical literalism and dogmatic definition of the spiritual realm, no longer generated an effectively mythical imagination of network autonomy at work in Nature.
     The contemporary cultural conflict between science and religion is, in this view, not about either myth or the potential knowledge to be derived from scientific method. It is more of a struggle between two cultural systems vying to claim the power to define ultimate reality. The behavior of scientists in this conflict betrays their ignorance, or willing avoidance of the implications complexity and network science have regarding the nature of reality.  If we engage with the new science in an intellectually honest way, taking into account with the more familiar science of physics, we will be able to bypass this unproductive battle for cultural hegemony.
     Taking this approach, it becomes evident that the role of mythic imagination, as a method for perceiving the order creation of complexity, did in effect disappear in the modern era. Similarly, we will find that the ways secular society has used science to support its purely mechanistic definition of reality discouraged scientists from the study of complexity in favor of strictly physics-based research. Certainly there is still pervasive resistance to the implications of complexity science. But those researchers who have had the courage to follow the evidence where it leads have accumulated a compelling amount of it.
  Thus this simplistic summary takes us to the contemporary moment in which physical science claims to be the one and only true source of knowledge, yet on a general cultural level, has dogmatically denied any factual basis for spiritual animation, thus the existence of something like network autonomy. The astonishing event now is that scientific method, which in itself supports no belief about what it can or cannot factually describe, has continued on beyond our cultural belief in the ultimate truth of physics as the sole source of causation and order creation in Nature. We are confronted with scientific evidence for complexity's emergent creativity and network autonomy that defy our supposedly scientific modern worldview. The question now is whether and how the implications of this evidence will be incorporated into a new cultural worldview.

Correlating Complexity and Network Science with the Dynamical Modeling of Myth

     If we are willing to consider that science and  the mythological method are not inherently opposed, it becomes evident that mythical symbolism is indeed a way of modeling the existence and operations of network autonomy. It was, once upon a time, and still among some surviving tribal cultures, the corollary of complexity science--a useful method for perceiving the invisible realm of emergence and network autonomy. Both share a similarly logical worldview on order creation as deriving from two modalities: the bi-dynamcal one of physic's predictably deterministic but un-intentional ordering and the unpredictably deterministic, partly intentional ordering of emergence and network autonomy. Thus there is sound scientific reason to re-unite science and the mythic imagination in a sense similar to the pre-modern natural philosophers. Only this time scientific methods of quantification and calculation actually frame a factual basis for imagining what that method cannot fully describe and explain. We can generate the doubled vision of a factual imagination to produce a new, non-religious, post-modern metaphysical philosophy.
    The characterization of myth thus far might lead one to assume it is only concerned with modling emergence and network autonomy. But just as science now must struggle with evidence of a world made by two modes of order creation, so too mythic symbolism serves to establish understanding of the relationships between the ordinary physical world and the "other world" of magical transformations and spiritually animating forces. One cannot be represented, much less comprehended without the other.

 
 Networks as Archetypal Dynamics

     Though science has only recently began to engage the unexpected implications of bi-dynamical order creation, myth is myth because it does so.  The difference between science and myth is methodological. Science uses reductive quantification and calculation to analytically differentiate evidence for the two modes of order creation, mythic imagination uses metaphor. The most overt examples of the tension and coexistence of both modes in mythic symbolism are evident in images that suggest the interplay of two or three factors.


     These images function to confound our habitual notions of linear progression in the events of causation and order creation. The Yin-Yang can refer to the interplay of masculine and feminine, but indicates these are not exclusive opposites, as each has a dot of the other inside it. Their interdependency is further indicated by the impression of reciprocally moving into each other, in an endless round. Triskelions suggest that there is always a third aspect to phenomena, rather than being configured by simple oppositions or sequences. Where there are two interacting systems there is a third emerging from their interaction as an additional network. The cadeceus is associated with the Greek god Hermes, who is a messenger between the gods and humans. It is also associated with healing, indicating there is more to this phenomenon than a single domain of physical events. Such images prompt an intuition of complexity, interconnectedness, and interdependency--of a non-hierarchical, simultaneous relationship between multiple factors. We can think of these iconic images as archetypal metaphors of the bi-dynamical character of order creation. They remind us to be alert to the pervasive but invisible role of emergence and network autonomy in ourselves and the world.


Emergent Network Agency Envisioned as the Archetypal Animators of Spirits and Deities
 
     To bring the science and mythic imagination into correspondence we can condsnse the associations between self-organizing complex networks and myth's spiritual animators shown above in the abbreviations shown below.

 
    As animating networks interact, larger scale tendencies of collectively generated network autonomy emerge that then feed back into the lower levels of interdependency from which these arise. Thus we can think of the collective network character of a specific context or event. Such collectively generated network impetus for how things take shape and happen generates a more abstract archetypal character that helps identify types of network autonomy as personified gods and goddesses. This mythic metaphor represents an ethereal tendency that acts to influence networks "from the outside" as a form-creating force in Nature.


     This notion of abstract animators as archetypal forces at work in the world serves to make us more aware of what sort of network psychology is associated with a specific context or area of activity in both human and non-human systems. Traditional mythic cultures often imagine such a god-metaphor for the context of warfare.  In our contemporary modern society we could do the same for the realm of technology as a way of perceiving how technological societies are influenced by the network autonomy of what has been termed the "technium."



     The effects of this shift are made evident by elaborating familiar topics. As the process reveals  unexpected factors and paradoxical relationships between these, one's sense of what they are and how they can manifest can alter radically. The general notion of love is an example. It can seem to be composed of a few basic component parts. But a network analysis and symbolic elaboration leads to experiencing its vast potential for manifesting very different characteristics of network autonomy.

       The Tarot:                       Ares and Aphrodite:                                   Acteaon and Artemis:


Scinetific Mythology as Mythic Journey

       An effective encounter with complex dynamics and network autonomy can be understood as an imaginal but factually derived mythic journey, through symbolic imagination, into an altered state of constellated consciousness--meaning one in which order is experienced as a non-linear, synergistic emergence.


The Protean Encounter of Scientific Mythology



     Only if one can do this might  knowledge of the intentions of other spiritual animators be gained. Proteus personifies the soul of complex and chaotic dynamics in autonomous networks. Thus the mythic imagination of a struggle with this figure symbolizes that of interrogating complex networks, in the quest for understanding how they animate our selves and the world around us. One must be prepared to  encounter all manner of surprising factors and transformations in the analysis and elaboration of network character, before one can reorient ones behavior toward them in a more realistic manner.