1.2. Entities and processes

Does reality consist of entities or processes?

The question is puzzling, and no wonder, as it relates to an intricate broader philosophical debate about the nature of reality. Most of us probably think that reality consists of both: entities - by which we mainly refer to concrete objects such as a cat, a table or the Earth - and processes - series of events that have a certain course of development. However, whether we see the world primarily as objects or processes affects how we observe the world.

Take a traffic jam, for example. A traffic jam can be observed as a set of objects (cars), in which case questions are asked about these objects, for example, the number, make and model of cars. Traffic jam can also be observed as a process, and then relevant questions are about the events that create the congestion: when and why the people are driving cars, in which direction they are moving, and how the number of cars affects the flow of traffic?

Western science has tended to focus primarily on properties of objects. The trend has also been to study smaller and smaller objects. In biology, for example, advances have been made in describing the three-dimensional structure of proteins (large biomolecules), down to the level of individual atoms.

When trying to understand systems, it is usually more important to study the interactions between the entities that make up the system, and the processes that result from these interactions, than to describe properties of the entities. However, studying interactions and processes is much more difficult than studying entities. One example is the process by which proteins take on their three-dimensional structure (this process is called protein folding). Although the process is in principle based on simple interactions between atoms, the folding of proteins into a three-dimensional form could only be modelled in 2021, using computers and artificial intelligence.

When it takes the world's most advanced software and computers to model a process that predicts the shape of a single molecule, it is easy to imagine how well we understand the complex processes that are essential for sustainability.

Very poorly.

We don't understand, or at least control, even the functioning of the social systems we have created ourselves, because various economic and political crises surprise us again and again

Add to this the wide-ranging human impact on the Earth's ecosystems, atmosphere, oceans and so on, and the interconnectedness of all these systems, and it becomes clear that we live in a world whose workings we have little knowledge of and whose future we can barely predict.

Yet building a more sustainable future will certainly be easier if we think of the world in terms of interconnected processes and systems, rather than as a mere collection of different entities.

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