A “perfect” system of conceptual categories, like an omniscient mind, would be incapable of learning. Likewise a healthy ecosystem, as Ulanowicz (1997) says, requires not only ascendency but also overhead, which furnishes resilience or ‘reliability’ (ability to adapt to new circumstances). Theobald (1997) makes a similar observation in the cultural domain: the most dangerous circumstances result from our success as a species, so we need to use our overhead as a resource by ‘rethinking success.’
Perhaps an open world is not the only enigma to which our discussion is pointing. We also seem to inhabit a world of opposites. We have seen how the mathematics of information theory allows us to dissect system behavior according to its ordered and disordered attributes: ascendency represents how efficiently a system operates; overhead is the catchall for its inefficiency (but it also encompasses, among other things, its reliability). Whenever a system’s development capacity remains constant, any increase in one attribute implies a decrease in the other. There is a fundamental incompatibility between the ordered and disordered fractions – yet they are complementary aspects of what is essential to sustaining the operation and persistence of the system.
… any living system requires some proportion of both attributes to survive. In the same loose sense that the centripetality engendered by positive feedback provides a precursor for selfishness and ego, the relationship between overhead and ascendency prefigures a human dialectic (Salthe 1993). Conflict at one scale can turn mutualistic at the next-higher level.
— Ulanowicz (1997, 93-95)