Sufficiency is a word that until recently has had a minor role as a noun that "indicates an adequate quantity or amount of something without the need to determine a precise measure" or that "indicates a reason for the amount or quantity in question."

Recently, as Data A art eliminated the boundary between human nature (as a human-made interpretation of the world) and Nature at large, art and life can now be expressed without any separation.

It follows, that life in those terms can now be approached in search of an aesthetic (or underlying principle) that informs us about Nature's way of coming up with consistent and suitable amounts of materials, qualities, characteristics and life styles for millions of different creatures.

Sufficiency presides over the continuous improvements of the survival aesthetic of all life on earth across all of the different levels in the web of life which  functions as one integrated planetary biosphere.

Sufficiency is a natural agent of "sustainable continuity," human culture is a short term culture and that explains in part why Sufficiency is not a part of human culture. In nature, however, short term strategies are evolutionary dead ends. In Nature, Sufficiency is a long term aesthetic instrument.

Those are some of the considerations of sufficiency as it occurs in Nature and are considerations being incorporated to the word (sufficiency) as we know it.

Clearly Sufficiency as a field for observation and study is in its infancy, however, preliminary observation have already given us clues that Nature appeals to Sufficiency for most everything. Therefore, our exploration of this new connection with life is of great interest because we as a species have arrived to a crossroad where we must learn not so much "about" Nature but we must learn more "from" Nature to steady our survival opportunities.

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For a few decades I have wrestled with the thoughts that surround a number of observations, studies and experiments which are the foundations of an idea whose data I have incorporated into the word “Sufficiency”.

I thought about creating a new word for it, but, I found that the word sufficiency was already going in the right direction so I don’t see why not, unless the academy of language has a problem.

Anyway let me state that what I suggest for Sufficiency is a desire to adapt for human usage a pattern that seems to occur in nature which enables information to organize in exponentially more complex arrangements while maintaining a continuous, unbroken, integrative relationship in order to operate as one whole.

Sufficiency is nothing unless one ventures into its landscape, which is the known universe except that, similarly to using 3D glasses to see the movie in 3D, Sufficiency is best viewed, to follow the analogy, with 4D glasses.

Nothing is really changed by viewing the world or the universe through those glasses, except that our interpretation of nature or of life is more correspondent with the true nature of things and less dependent on human prejudice.

To nature's credit, each time I’ve ventured into its landscape, I emerge knowing more than before but increasingly boggled about how far reaching its unexplored domain seems to be. In fact, I feel prescient to think that Sufficiency may someday give us the first glimpse into why there is a universe in the first place.

At any event I stand in awe before sufficiency as Galileo must have stood in awe at the sight of planets and stars filtering into his mind through his telescope.

In the same manner, as with the emergence of the telescope as an astronomical tool, Sufficiency may in time attract the attention of true scholars and entertain their minds for the rest of the century and beyond.

Following, I will try to share with you a brief outline about Sufficiency that hopefully can make your time reading it worth while.

In the beginning; I was looking for a kind of stepping stone to stand on in order to look at humanity from the outside, similarly to stepping away from the trees to look at the whole forest.

The reason was that history was replete with accounts of efforts to improve the human condition from the inside and a history of results where the improvements came at an increasingly higher social and environmental cost while netting an exponential loss, in the overall long term livability of civilization and of the planet.  

I wanted to think about what was missing from our cultural strategy, which was preventing us from making use of the incredible amount of information that comprises our interpretation of life, to construct a knowledge base that could transcend the boundaries and limitations of our human nature to embrace nature from a new conception of reality common to both.

I had a feeling that nature had already figured out that problem and that the answer was already tested and waiting just outside of human nature.

We are a species who have just begun to discern the extent of our ignorance and the boundaries of our prejudice; this is exemplified in the recent cultural achievement of having finally learned to agree to disagree. An achievement hailed by Steven Hawking as a defining event of the 20^th century.

Let me say that I have never really thought of humanity as doing good or bad, rather, I have always seen humanity as an adolescent species trying its best to do what it thinks is right. That is perhaps the advantage to the view from the outside of the forest, as for the most part even our greatest minds, can’t see the forest for the trees.

However, in these critical times there are basis to suggest that the adolescence is over and that we must find a way to embrace a kind of adulthood, a true coming of age for the species as a planetary creature. The time to leave behind the adolescent who wants to keep all of the marbles at all cost has come.

My work is more of an act of responsibility to the development of the adolescent than it is a criticism on what has already occurred through innocence.  

Let me stretch that a little, Humanity seen from the outside, looks as a stand alone creature, full of itself as the superior being but unable to control or direct its human nature towards a sustainable balance within its own social organization or without, in the world with the organization of life in the planet.

Outside of human nature there is only one rule of conduct which may be worded thus: your freedom ends where someone else’s begins. Inside there are literally millions of laws that are continually broken not only by those enforcing them but by people who do not know they even exist.

It is unfortunate that we can’t even get along with each other as a species and yet claim superiority and possession over a system where millions of different species coexist in an integrated web of life, to which we are doing everything in our power to destroy.

To put it plainly, we are not much liked outside of our false fortress, have you noticed that almost every other creature wants nothing to do with us.

So the question was, what is it that nature uses to accommodate information is such a way that a seamless web of interaction emerges, to allows each creature to have its place while securing a place for all creatures, in a continuously evolving and changing environment.

Whatever that is, it is the ingredient that is missing from our human nature, which is to say, from our applied interpretation of life and of the world.

It is probably unnecessary to mention that it was us who departed from nature to create a nature of our own, and that it is us, who have come to a point in that journey where we are realizing that our kind of nature is unsustainable and that the nature that sustains us, is vanishing at an alarming rate.

Making a long story short, Sufficiency in a narrow sense at least for now, is an observation of a phenomenon that is associated with nature or that appears to be in the mix with nature, acting as a fiduciary of variable quantities or measures regarding the functional information needed by living organisms, to establish and maintain a position within their local ecology and by extension with the adjacent ecologies that ultimately constitute a super ecology at a planetary level.

I said in a narrow sense, because over the years it has become plausible to infer, that if that turns out to be the case then the internal ecology of each living organism would have to operate on the same basis.

Having said that, the material constituents of the organism or life form, say, iron for instance, would also have a connection to the same phenomena for its own constituent parts and its relation to the others.

Therefore one can suggest that sufficiency in that sense or the phenomena that I’m suggesting, affects the functional quantities of operable information from the smallest scale of information to its largest expression or the universe as a whole.

Furthermore I’m now inclined to confidently predict that if there are extant universes, even if they operate under a different set of physical laws, Sufficiency will be a feature that ours will share in common or conversely sufficiency may become the first thing that we know about the content of another universe.

Sufficiency as I have implied may be as old as or older than the universe; however,  this are the first incursions of its existence into human inquiry and discovery, even if every cell and organ in our bodies is already happily operating under one or many Sufficiency schemes.

Why, you may ask have we not learned about this phenomenon before?

The answer is that we have been preparing ourselves for it over the last 100 years since Einstein added the theory of relativity to our interpretation of the structure of spacetime. Is not that Sufficiency was hard to find, rather, it was because Sufficiency is easily missed.

You must remember that the first thing we did with E = mc² was to build a bomb and begin an arms race that still threatens life on Earth today.

Sufficiency is intrinsically connected to our new interpretation of spacetime because life operates in a four dimensional theater which means that life is dynamic and consequently variable from moment to moment.

Our interpretation of life has not yet caught up with what that means save in mathematical terms and applied physics. The interpretation has not reached our cultural models with the news that reality is an outcome of that dynamic flow of information and that therefore we need a mechanism to keep track of the ever changing face of reality as it moves through time. That is in fact, one of the things that Sufficiency is good for.

 Otherwise we will continue to model our truths on realities whose Sufficiency was ideal hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

There is fundamentally nothing wrong with old ideas, as they are the tell tale history of our passage though time, but they are not the reality of the moment nor will the reality of the moment be the same, a moment later.

One can believe in the flat earth interpretation of old, while at the same time be relatively confident about the location of the “round earth” with respect to thousands of galactic points in the milky way, protracted over the next hundred years.

As you may already suspect, Sufficiency is a new proposition for a tool that may assist our coming of age, the idea has been around for over three decades but I wanted to be sure that it was a useful tool for our current condition and it is.

There is a lot more to be said but, I will close for now, with a tool analogy that I think illustrates what is happening here.

There was a time when our ancestors made the same hand axe for over a million years without a need to improve it, no one knows why. But at one point, however, some one saw in the pile of refuse left from knapping the same axe, a thin blade that was sharper than the edge of the axe and with a shape that could be used in more ways than the old axe could.

Not long after that, a new variation of homo, was hunting with it and imagining what else to do with the new tool.  

Tiité 2009