Categories
cybernetics

The Physics of Nothing: How Missing Information Holds Systems Together

When people speak of nothing, they usually mean absence. No matter. No signal. No data. But in complex systems, absence is rarely empty. What is missing often functions as constraint, and that constraint is frequently what makes coherence possible. Across logic, computation, physics, cognition, and social organisation, systems do not persist because they contain everything […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Edge of Chaos in Conflict and Communication

Language and (other) communications technologies are built around and positively amplify the signals of difference by and through which human beings define, understand and share or record their experience of the world. The abbreviated macrostates of variously competitive self-definitions emerge and converge in ways that recursively drive the adaptive self-propagation of the communication systems and technologies that embody their primary transmission […]