One can describe their boundaries and watch the phases of their independent localized development. The inner workings of these strictly local happenings tend to follow a 'nucleation' sequence, the appearance of a small 'cell' of relationships around which others develop, and are generally to be found at the beginning and end of change of all kinds and scales. What's remarkable is how astoundingly common these uncontrolled locally original creative events are, particularly considering how common it is that people believe that everything in nature is predetermined and controlled. Each level of organization just develops on what it finds useful, quite like the way it works in economics where taking things off the shelves puts even more things on the shelves. T he most important, but perhaps the easiest, radical part of learning how to look inside these complex inner workings is to distinguish between natural and numeric time.
Natural time is the physical process of strictly accumulative change.
Numeric time is a sequence of numbers we use as accounting tokens to label observations and as a basis for equations. The one is real and the other, however useful sometimes, is imaginary, and they really should have different names. A little more on other aspects is available at The peculiar shapes and I nner W orkings of T ime. Time Line Traces of whole events To depict the cellular automata of local organizational mechanisms. Others Links .