We think with concepts.

They are the building blocks from which we construct our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Yet most of us rarely examine those building blocks. We inherit them—from our language, our education, our culture—and begin using them long before we are capable of asking whether they are true, useful, or even appropriate to the world in which we now live.

Some are thousands of years old.

They served reasonably well in worlds very different from ours. Some were quite comfortable in the Dark Ages. Yet they remain embedded in our language and thought, quietly determining what we see and, just as importantly, what we are unable to see.

Consider the simple habit of either/or.

Something is true or false. Right or wrong. Success or failure. Normal or abnormal.

Then encounter Fuzzy Logic, and suddenly there is another possibility: things may possess degrees of membership. The world has not changed.

Your way of seeing it has.

Or consider the seemingly obvious assumption that a central authority must control a complex organization. Then encounter self-regulation and emergence—the discovery that extraordinary order can arise from countless individual interactions without anyone directing the whole.

Again, the world has not changed.

Your map has.

And then we encounter perhaps one of the most important concepts of all:

The map is not the territory.

What you believe about reality is not reality itself. Your worldview is a model—constructed from experience, language, culture, education, and concepts you may never have consciously chosen.

This section is about examining those concepts and acquiring better ones.

Systems.
Fuzzy Logic.
Emergence.
Self-regulation.
Non-Allness.
Consciousness of Abstracting.
The Map and the Territory.

Do not treat these as vocabulary words to memorize. Each is a tool of thought.

Pick it up. Turn it over. Apply it to something you thought you understood. See what happens.

Some will merely be useful.

Others may be dangerous—in the best sense of the word. Once understood, they make it difficult to return to your previous way of seeing things.

Taken together, these concepts will begin to alter your worldview. They will give you distinctions you did not previously possess, questions you did not know to ask, and ways of thinking unavailable within the older conceptual framework.

They become part of your intellectual armamentarium.

And that matters because the objective of this journey is not to tell you what to think.

It is to give you better tools with which to think.