Context: Cumulative Cultural Evolution II
Cultures are self-propagating solitons that adapt to and reshape the internal systemic and external environmental conditions that select for their own most probable continuity. Information transfer is “sticky” and contagious, just as is entropy and (it’s qualitative corollary of) ignorance, so it becomes a delicate matter of filtering-out and allowing-in (both external and internal) novelty or surprise as new information.
Academic events are subject to this, in microcosm: a focus on cultivating the conditions which encourage novelty (as information) within a context of maximal conceptual, logical and social self-propagation while minimising entropy; all subject to grammars and conventions of self-validation and organisational coherence.
Observe: recombinatory inflection, distributed computation and recursive self-gravitation. What in one view is the autonomously emergent exploration of optimal paths of concise algorithmic complexity (as methods of cultural, conceptual self-propagation) is, simultaneously, the aggregation and (abstract) self-gravitation of material artefacts, organisational pattern (or symmetry) and cognitive practices in a hyper-inflating, accelerating logical or referential possibility-space.
Daedelus Kite 