Knottedness

It's not hard to come upon a knot that created itself. Knots come about not from the end snaking its way around the main extent of the fiber, but when loops twist themselves into existence in the middle part of the string and interlock into self tying clusters. To remove the clusters, you can certainly work from the ends, undoing as you go, but the process of tracing and untangling paradoxically may make them tighter. If you can somehow lay the string out  and  untwist the intertwined loops as if they were the end points, this process of continuous simplification will undo that natural entanglement process.  Patience, and a board with pins to keep them from twisting again, are the tools for undoing and understanding the knot. Understanding this process is also a way to understand philosophical knots: find the twists and  pin them out to see the structures they create and obscure.