Categories
systems

Supply Chain Stealth

An industrial-scale project is information and energy intensive. That information and energy-processing has a footprint as multidimensional (i.e. complex) signal in the background noise of an economy and all associated sociotechnical artefacts, entities, systems. The relative autonomy and partial logical closure of any manufactured system is a function of referential dependency. The continuity of a […]

Categories
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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Philosophy systems

Strategic Innovation and Unknowing Truth

There was a mystical thread of thought in medieval philosophy called “apophasis”. This is an “un-saying” and reductive process of abstraction and recursively self-inflected introspection that may arrive at a goal of finding whatever is left after everything else is removed – God, enlightenment, essence, reality, certainty, truth; take your pick. Of course, we find […]

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systems

Climate: Ocean Flows are Dramatically Changing

Context: The Speed of Ocean Currents Is Changing in a Major Way, Scientists Warn Increasing the median internal energy gradients in any such vastly distributed information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system is bound to have consequences. Complexity and self-referential combinatorial structure of sufficient sophistication is likely to acquire new and perhaps relatively stable phases. If […]

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systems

Information, Influence and Dissonance: the Utility of Fakes and Errors in System Self-Propagation

Information systems, viewed from a gestalt/holistic perspective, possess many properties we might otherwise recognise as self-propagation, “emergence” or self-organisation. The presence of values attributed semantic (or logical) properties of truth or falsity at a level of cognition or language may be purely incidental. From a Global Systems perspective, information systems autonomously pursue the optimal means […]

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systems

Higher-Dimensionality, Negation, Logical Freedom

Organisational and technological systems are generally structured by linear, procedural and additive modular methods. The new degrees of freedom available at a logical level are rarely acknowledged. Unexplored, abstract logical spaces of literal higher-dimensionality also exist. Higher dimensions are not magical, metaphysical mystery tours in some “other” spatial place or additional bolt-on to reality; they […]

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systems

Octopus Farming: What is the (actual) product here?

Work into refining the viability of octopus farming continues apace. I doubt that there is any other animal on Earth the farming of which would so closely resemble the cultivation of extraterrestrial life. Reflections on a big(ger) picture: In what ways does accelerated aquaculture only continue to generate the problems which have led to the […]

Categories
Organisation systems technology

Enigma: When Strength is also Weakness

It is so often the case that the strength and the weakness of a technological or organisational system exist in (and as) that same structural and logical artefacts. The indefinite (recursive) extensibility of all material and logical systems is the foundation of, and cause for, this enigmatic duality.

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systems technology

Cybersecurity’s Unacknowledged Truth

The whole cybersecurity enterprise seems to be built upon a suite of psychological and culturally-reflexive assumptions that assert that there exists even a possibility of logical or systemic closure. No such closure or completion is possible and this is rarely acknowledged.

Categories
systems

Turing, Undecidability, Adaptation and Cancer

Alan Turing’s proof of the undecidability of non-trivially sophisticated algorithms is sufficient reason for:• the autonomously adaptive, complex information strategies of life; and,• the intractably problematic and recursively non-terminating information transcription of cancer.

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systems

The Shadows of Entropy

It is a truth almost universally known but rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the strengths and the values of our world are simultaneously its weakness and qualitative (as much as quantitative) poverty. Contemporary communications systems have, for instance, been truly wonderous – they have brought us all closer together through near-instaneous text, voice and video […]

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Philosophy politics systems

Levelling-Up in the Civilisation Game

It is a little hard not to feel somewhat dispossessed and saddened by the arc of catastrophe that human history traces in time. There is some essential adversarial turn in psychology and nature that provides and requires the entropy from which new forms of thought and life are able to emerge. We come to depend […]