Category: Complexity

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Complexity

Collective Intelligence

Context: Editorial to the Inaugural Issue of Collective Intelligence, 24-Aug-22…https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26339137221114179 That intelligence and/or intelligence-like dynamical properties can be distributed, as it were, across the entire information and energy-processing “surface” of a complex system should give us all pause for thought. This seems to implicate thermodynamic system properties and self-organising computational dynamics that consistently bridge the […]

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Complexity

Power Laws in Cybersecurity

Great graphic (from the people at Information is Beautiful) but it immediately raises a question of just how we measure severity, extent and consequence in this context. Is there an offset and identifiable boundary between naive analysis that concentrates on common as relatively unproblematic or pragmatic metrics and more detailed (yet broader spectrum) analysis that […]

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Complexity mathematics systems

Rat on a Wheel: The Doughnut in your Mind

Recent research suggests that the underlying symmetry in neural patterns of geometric world mapping in the mammalian brain are toroidal. “(…) the Mosers discovered the activity structure of single grid cells. What they found was a hexagonal grid pattern that functions as the brain’s metric and coordinate system for space. Today they have uncovered the […]

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Complexity information mathematics

Turbulent Flow: the Algorithmic Compression of Liquid Sheep

Context: Liquid sheep – drone footage. The patterns of sheep transit are as of slime mould moving, or of liquid flow – perhaps quicksilver. Note that the resemblance is not merely superficial or in any sense trivial. Complex systems dynamics quite naturally gravitate towards functional eloquence over a diminished or abbreviated dynamical vocabulary; more or […]

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communication Complexity culture

On Influencing Others

Context: Influencing the mind of an adversary It really makes me wonder what the future (or present) utility of statistical approaches combining neurobiological feedback orchestrated or forecasted through and as machine learning might be. The commercial extraction of utility through social media via algorithmic abbreviation and influence is clearly just such a practice. These brains […]

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Complexity

Complexity: Embracing Emptiness

Context: Embracing Complexity On thinking in terms of complex systems. The concept of emergence is introduced (at the article referenced above) by an example of self-organisation in ant colonies. Emergence is the point where complex systems acquire a unique dimensional property. This property is succinctly captured by the common trope of “the whole being more […]

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Complexity

Epidemiological Entropy: Modeling Coronavirus

Uncertainty (and it’s irreducible twin shadows of proliferating information and entropy) represents an implicit logical discontinuity in, and of, information systems.  This is the central abstract artefact around which complex systems self-gravitate, accelerate, self-replicate and autonomously self-propagate in, through, and as internal system structure and environmental information and energy flows. This recursive entanglement and adaptive […]

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communication Complexity culture

Language is an Operating System

Language is something of an operating system. Language also represents a self-propagating, abstract information system – much like culture or socioeconomic reality – that inhabits us just as much as we inhabit it. Human beings, technologies, artefacts and communication systems are the medium through which this linguistic entity manifests and self-replicates. The resilience of this […]

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communication Complexity culture

Disassembling Control: Talent, Technology and Entropy

In any context where an employment and technology ecosystem is so rapidly evolving – recognising talents, skills and aptitude becomes about as difficult and as (ultimately and) unmanageably complex as acquiring or maintaining them. What interests me here is a second-order semantic analysis: there is such an efflorescence of salient wisdom and clever advice available, […]

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communication Complexity culture technology

Technology: Utopian Aspirations?

Utopian aspirations are inevitably three parts marketing and one part plausibility. While communication (as much as communications platforms or technologies) is necessarily a matter of endlessly effervescent linguistic or logical self-inflection, the implicit openness of our contemporary context and the cognitive hyper-extension of technological complexity represents cost and burden as much as it does utility. […]

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Complexity

Cancer, Senescence, Computation and Complexity

I had an intuition that rather than genetic or cellular breakage and strict malfunction that cancer represents something of an uncanny alignment with the Halting Problem of computational theory. What is on one level a function of an atavistic throwback to deep biological history where replication and continuity at all costs provides a cellular (genetic) […]

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communication Complexity culture

These Logical Games also Play Themselves, Through Us

There exists an endemic and intransigent adherence to the self-evident necessity of linear or causal teleology and reductive explicability in human experience that misleads us as to the underlying organisational or logical principles of our shared reality.  The many and diverse games we play are, for instance, evidence of core principles of systemic (and systematic) […]