Everybody knows about the familiar large-scale cycles of nature: day follows night follows day; summer-fall-winter-spring-summer-fall-winter-spring; the water cycle of evaporation and precipitation that refills our lakes, scours our rivers, and restores the water supply of every living thing on the planet. But not everybody appreciates how cycles—at every spatial and temporal scale from the atomic to the astronomic—are quite literally the hidden spinning motors that power all the wonderful phenomena of nature.
A good rule of thumb, then, when confronting the apparent magic of the world of life and mind is to look for the cycles that are doing all the hard work.
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
