“System differentiation is nothing more than the repetition within systems of the difference between system and environment.”
Niklas Luhmann, ‘Social Systems’, Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 7.
The abstractions are effectively the difference between a(ny) system and its environment, replicated and recursively reproduced as the self-inflation and fact that is that system.
The abstraction that is intelligence, value or organisational and technological utility precisely is algorithmic compression. The boundary and border by and through which abstraction is identified, projected or asserted upon the world is actually the constitutive and substantively recursive presence of the system; not located in any one place but is distributed across (and as) the whole system. We witness instances as artefacts or entities and events but the underlying symmetry and ontological skeleton key is the abstraction. Zen is emptiness and all systems are self-abstracted ontological vacuums.
Daedelus Kite 