Natural Novelty: The Newness Manifest in Existence

Novelty is real. Cause-effect relationships come into existence that cannot be attributed to repetition of the relationships that came before them. This idea is relevant to everything from historical sciences, philosophy, religion, to our own subjective experience. But why, in the most general possible sense, do new things happen?

It is argued here that novelty results from a kind of “symbiosis” between systems that function in similar ways, but are made from different stuff. Similarly, nov...