The very fact that definitions are diverse and scattered across such a rugged ontological landscape of entities, artefacts and information (or institutional and behavioural or cognitive) processing systems and endlessly-extensible logical refinement suggests that, beyond general qualities or properties any one of us might render in any number of complementary ways, there is and can be no singular definition. It is very often the conspicuous absence of unified or singular properties in any system under analysis that indicates a blind-spot in our collective vision. In the case of rational, iterative and procedurally additive thought or knowledge turned back upon (and through) itself as an object of its own introspection, we find not only that this recursive logical self-containment is a property OF science and empirical analysis, but that such globally self-inflected information-processing IS what science – as collective intelligence or any other terminology for autonomously self-propagating emergent complexity – consists of.
Daedelus Kite 