Political systems, as much as the ideologies which endlessly resonate through them, are very much not as controlled or indicative of individual or collective self-determination as people might choose to believe. There is certainly choice, just as there is responsibility, but the overall complex dynamical system as information and energy-processing field that these artefacts embody […]
The Kessler Syndrome is a clear and stark reminder of just how intransigently daft the militarisation of space might eventually prove itself to be. One idiot with a missile and LEO indefinitely inaccessible for everyone. No less painful than the consequences of even a limited exchange of nuclear weapons (anywhere) but, if you noticed, the […]
“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 […]
Singularly final unifying theories are a – or indeed, the – holy grail. The most significant barrier to unifying theories is that we expect them to be domain-specific, narrow and effectively limited – i.e. epistemologically “controlled” or even “controllable”. That’s the core problem – unified and/or unifying theories are constitutively not limited. Further, I expect […]
Context: Take a look at this bizarrely beautiful library inspired by the human brain. Fascinating idea – a library inspired by the brain. Of course, all libraries are always and already inspired and purposefully inflated by the needs and activities of brains and their products of hyper-extended cognition in – and as – language, culture, […]
True, perhaps, and yet all technology, all cognitive hyper-extension through art, language, culture – it is all really just one vast and monumentally intricate selfie, a world that replicates and represents itself through us, in us, as us. Curiously, and more than a little bit Zen, is that if everything is self, then nothing is.
Innovation as a concept is (still) quite poorly understood. While instances of innovation are critically significant, the general abstraction of which those instances are manifestations remains somewhat opaque. There is a class of logical systems constructs that mine a rich seam of conceptual innovation. These derive from the recursive (logical) properties of system self-containment. This […]
Have you ever noticed the ways in which love has a tendency to empty and hollow out our world every bit as much as it inflates it with meaning and purpose? I find myself dreaming, desiring, longing and imagining the effective fictive fantasy of Other, of closure and reflexive psychological completion, of unity and hope […]
As I get older and, reluctantly, more mature – my social life has become dominated by sitting in cafes by myself, wistfully scribbling obscure observations on the nature of mind and systems theory into personal notebooks. It is very lonely and in very many ways. Something which occurred to me, mid-scribble, today was more generally […]
Under analysis, we might be pleasantly (or otherwise) surprised to discover that imagination and its abstracted introspection represent the kernel and tonal center around which all intelligence as ordered experience and perception modulate. More than this, though, all belief – being the interior reflection of a half-mirrored labyrinth asserted and projected upon assumptive metaphysical facts […]
Whether as a function of age, ignorance or blind good fortune to never have suffered any of life’s indignities or inevitable hardships – it always strikes me that the happiest people I know have pretty much no idea how the world really works and just how dark it can be, how unfair and complex or […]
There is something foundational missing and it can not be brute-forced – all emulations are bound to be hollow and haunted. The ontological, holistic bootstrap of autocatalytic system self-containment that provides even a possibility of life, sentience, and eventually – intelligence and technology, is an absence conspicuous by its presence. There is a hidden logical […]
Daedelus Kite 