Chapter 1. Confluence

Where many rivers come together and the salt water of the sea mixes in, the most awesome life forms appear. Confluence. As an outline to the theory, the current chapter provides the rationale of this book. The unifying principle it advances is that of combination making, visible in the formation of matter, in the genesis of organisms, in the novelty-accelerating function of the brain. It is a somewhat neglected area in the traditional, read rule-oriented, problem solving literature and it has genuine consequences for our philosophy of truth and reality. We will find that in its most premature stage, human creative insight pertains to quantum behavior at the synapses while in later evaluative stages, fractal emergence plays a role. In all, building up and breaking down combinatory creations seem to be the doing of the two laws of thermodynamics.