Emergence, Story, and the Challenge of Positive Scenarios

Abstract

This article is divided into three parts. The first part describes the paradox of positive scenarios: they are much harder to write than negative scenarios. The second part describes the logic of emergent systems whose properties are neither reducible to nor predictable from the properties of their component parts. The third part shows how the concept of emergence can be used to lend plausibility to those optimistic scenarios that might otherwise be rejected as mere wishful thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Complexity
• emergence
• holism
• morphodynamics
• optimism
• paradigm shifts
• pessimism
• scenario planning
• story
• teleodynamics