that there are underlying relationships between cause and effect in human interactions and markets, which are capable of discovery and empirical verification.

That faced with a
choice between one or more alternatives, human actors will make a “rational” decision based only on minimizing pain or maximizing pleasure

Every “blink” we see is a “wink,” and act accordingly. We accept that we do things by accident, but assume that others do things deliberately.

The material (what you are made of, your muscles and organs)

the efficient (how you came to be, the fact that your parents gave birth to you)

The final (your function, your life itself, your place in the universe).

He believed that to understand an event or entity, one had to consider all of these factors in the particular, the mysterious as well as the ordered.

The patterns that form are not controlled by a directing intelligence; they are self-organizing.

In a human complex system, an agent is anything that has identity, and we constantly flex our identities both individually and collectively.

We are able to impose structure on our interactions (or disrupt it) as a result of collective agreement or individual acts of free will.

We are capable of shifting a system from complexity to order and maintaining it there in such a way that it becomes predictable.

People have a high capacity for awareness of largescale patterns because of their ability to communicate abstract concepts through language, and, more recently, because of the social and technological infrastructure that enables them to respond immediately to events half a world away.