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We are like figures which some great demonstrator draws upon the blackboard of Time. A problem is to be solved, without doubt; what the problem is, we, the figures, cannot know and do not need to know; all we know is that sooner or later we shall be sponged off the board and other figures take our places, and the demonstration go on.
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Most humans, it seems, still put up fences around their acts and thoughts – even when these are piles of shit – for they have no other way of delimiting them. Contrast Paleolithic cave paintings, in which animals and magical markings are overlayed with no differentiation or sense of framing. But when some of us have worked in natural settings, say in a meadow, woods, or mountain range, our cultural training has been so deeply ingrained that we have simply carried a mental rectangle with us to drop around whatever we were doing. This made us feel at home. (Even aerial navigation is plotted geometrically, thus giving the air a 'shape').
The scientist has to have a way of thinking about the environment of a system that is richer and more subtle than a mere looking at for boundaries. He does this by noting that, when we say that something lies ‘outside’ the system, we mean that system can do relatively little about its characteristics or its behavior. Environment, in effect, makes up the things and people that are ‘fixed’ or ‘given’, from the system’s point of view.
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