Not apart from it
Let's start with terms...
What's an adaptive system?
You. Me. A child. A family. A neighbourhood. A company. A city. A nation. An education system. A justice system. A government. A culture. A climate. A forest.
Anything that perceives the world it inhabits and responds.
What isn't an adaptive system?
A rock. A steel rod. A chair. A cup of water.
Anything that doesn't respond, change, grow, or become something else without something else acting on it. I may have to work on that definition a bit... Ah, yes: things that cannot change themselves, however they change.
What is reality?
Reality includes everything:
Other people. Social norms. Rules. Laws. Gravity. Objects. Planets. Climates. Families...
Uh-oh, this is already turning into a recursive framework, and we're not even past 'what defines reality?'
Reality is everything within which adaptive systems exist and must respond and adapt to.
A World Within Worlds...
One of my favourite words, these days, is recursion, because once I started seeing it, I couldn't unsee it.
Consider a child in a family in a neighbourhood in a society in the world.
A child lives within a family. A family lives within a neighbourhood. A neighbourhood lives within a society, a society lives within the world...
Each of these is providing some of reality for the others, as well as adapting to reality both because of, and outside of, the others.
The child is responding to, and adapting to, everything. Recording everything, whether or not they can consciously recall it, or tell stories about it later. Compiling everything, using the complex interaction between senses and neural networks, into what becomes their sense of their world. Their family, obviously, is a very close-up and powerful influence on a child ... but so is their neighbourhood and the broader society, whether that's encountered through travel, meeting people, or brought to their own homes through media like tv and the internet, or only conversations about the day at the dinner table.
The child is affecting the family at the same time they're being affected by it. Same with the neighbourhood, and even the broader society ... although in smaller and less visible or direct ways.
A child walking one foot on the curb and one foot on the road is noticed by passers by, who respond in a variety of ways, visible and invisible to the child: one smiles remembering that simple fun, one frowns remembering the criticism it drew in their own life, one says, 'kids never change, hey?' while another yells, 'get that kid off the road, don't you care at all?'
These tiny interactions build up, compile, into the tone and quality of the neighbourhood. Is it a safe neighbourhood? A friendly one? Cold and distant or warm and pleasant? Both in the sense of an adaptive system and a reality people live within.
Just the same way each interaction with reality builds upon each other, compiling into 'what I think I am' for the child... 'what I'm worth' and 'how I'm respected' which, over time, creates what the child becomes.
We notice the objects of reality, and changes in it --a parent notices the curmudgeon's disrespect, the child feels the warm smile as well as the quirky sensation of the uneven walk and the height of the curb and its smooth or missing paint. We see the child at a new height, or with a new interest or objection, while it's hard to see or notice how we are affecting their system or being affected by their system...
The Medium (not the psychic kind)
Because what we don't tend to notice is the medium --where all this behaviour, perception and adaptation is occurring. The social, biological, physical and cultural medium in which we are changing, ever day, into the person we aspire to be (or not)... into the older person than we were yesterday, stronger if we stressed our muscled, ever so slightly weaker if we didn't... That compiled world we live in, respond to and alter, we tend not to see.
Lots of people refer to the fish: not noticing the water, while all the time noticing the signs of nearby food, or predators, temperature or salinity changes, but not the water itself... not the medium in which its existence is possible.
The other thing the fish doesn't have awareness of (and this parallels with other adaptive systems) is how the fish itself changes the water --breathing causing vibrations and changing chemistry, movement creating ripples, et cetera. For many people 'the fish doesn't recognize the existence of water' stops at how the fish itself is perceiving reality, and stops before including how the fish itself is changing reality, both for itself and for other life in the water to adapt and respond to.
Now here's the brain gymnastics: we are perceiving and responding to reality, changing and adapting, and affecting change in reality, all around in a circle --recursion.
Every adaptive system changes the reality that changes it.
Nothing that adapts ever simply is; it is forever becoming.
Maybe your home is cluttered. That is often seen as 'a reality.' It's hard to argue with that assessment, but it's too thin to see most of what's really going on.
A label (cluttered) doesn't speak about becoming, a label freeze a moment of time, like a photo.
On a cluttered table, pushing something aside to put something else onto it makes it more cluttered (even if only by one more piece of paper) while taking one thing off it makes it less cluttered (again... even if only by fewer pieces of paper.)
If we think of homemaking as an adaptive system (not alive, but adapting to changes) within the medium of 'home' then we can see results (more cluttered / less cluttered, easier to move around in, harder to find things in) in our interactions within that medium. We can even think of ourselves as 'becoming homemakers' as we tidy (or clutter) our spaces, changing the medium of our homes, to more or less easy to find things in... to more or less easy to do things in.
We can see that we are affected by the level of clutter or tidiness within the medium 'home' and we can see that we affect the level of clutter or tidiness, as well.
Imagine if you could see that everywhere...
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