Overview

This editorial considers the actual world as a complex and dynamic system and asks what kinds of data can represent it. It discusses scientific attempts to interpret changing patterns through concepts including randomness, chaos, nonlinearity, irreversible processes, and noise. The paper emphasizes that evidence depends on what was present in an actual-world state, how it was observed, and how the state changed over time.

Topics covered

• The limits of detecting and interpreting patterns in a continually changing actual world.

• How objects, phenomena, and processes can influence behavior, events, and trajectories to different degrees.

• The methodological balance between accounting for full context and narrowing that context enough to obtain usable evidence.

Original publication

The complete publication is available through the original PDF download on this page. This web body is a concise overview prepared from that source.