From Aristotle to Heraclitus

“Why do we, in the Euro-American (Western) world, often investigate the dynamics of change and assume that stability is the ‘natural’ state of systems?” And “If everything always changes, why don’t we investigate why, and how, we create stable models summarizing change?” Rather than the dominant Aristotelian approach, this paper follows Heraclitus, affirming that everything always changes and stability is a construct in our thinking. We conceive of change as a dynamic of flows of energy, matter, and information. Whereas the first two are subject to the second law of thermodynamics, information is not and can be shared. The paper thus looks at how human information processing impacts socio-environmental dynamics by shaping stable basins of attraction structuring our vision of all that surrounds us. These basins are separated by “tipping points.” Any society’s basin of attraction is different from any other, anchored in differences in cognitive structures established throughout the society’s history. These structures determine a society’s cognitive links between different aspects of its perception of its environment, its ecology and its society, as well as the structure of the community’s analytical (scientific) tools.