What if the same patterns shape physics, biology, mind, and culture?
Tyler Volk (NYU Professor Emeritus) explores how reality may be organised through recurring metapatterns — spanning everything from atoms to ecosystems to human societies.
Bringing together work from Meta Patterns, Gaia’s Body, and Quarks to Culture, Volk examines how systems form through relationships, how life scales through planetary interdependence, and how new levels of complexity emerge over time.
Key ideas in this talk:
- recurring metapatterns across nature and culture
- systems thinking as a deep structure of mind (“systemes”)
- Gaia theory and biochemical interdependence
- combogenesis: how new levels of organisation emerge
- propagation, variation, and selection across biological, mental, and cultural evolution.
This is a rich, cross-disciplinary exploration for those interested in: systems thinking, big history, evolution, complexity science, Gaia theory, and metatheory.
Timestamps
00:00:00 Introduction and Tyler Volk’s background
00:02:00 Three themes: systems, evolution, pattern land
00:05:00 Metapatterns across nature and culture
00:08:00 Centred vs distributed systems
00:11:30 “Systemes” and systems thinking
00:15:00 Gaia theory and biochemical cycles
00:19:30 Biosphere vs Darwinian evolution
00:23:00 From quarks to culture
00:25:30 Combogenesis and PVS dynamics
00:29:30 Pattern land and relations
