Categories
Psychology

Vanishing Point: Self-ish

The self is commonly understood as something one has: a centre of experience, a point of view, a continuous “me” that persists through time. Psychological models tend to formalise this intuition by treating the self as a representational structure—narrative continuity, minimal experiential core, or predictive model—through which coherence can be maintained. This move is not […]

Categories
Philosophy

Uncool, Cybernetics School…

What begins as an act of response—a mutation, a thought, a tool—is not designed to last. It emerges, briefly optimal in a changing landscape, then fades or fragments. But sometimes, the solution doesn’t end when the problem is gone. Sometimes the solution learns to survive. It begins to reinforce itself, not because it’s still needed, […]

Categories
Complexity

Self-Organising Criticality in Brains, Battles and Universes

The notion (articulated in the video) that the homeostatic process by which quasicriticality is maintained in the brain may have an essentially cybernetic explanation. In Jeff Hawkins’ “A Thousand Brains” he references neurophysiologist Vernon Mountcastle’s belief in the existence of an underlying (as unifying) organisational principle in the brain. I wouldn’t be at all surprised […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy

Playing the Long-Game of Human Civilisation

The catastrophic entropy of a currently most-probable future is not the only available solution in the possibility-space of all emergent and adaptive human planetary civilisations.

Categories
Philosophy

Cultivating Innovation

Sociological, psychological and economic systems are poorly optimised to cultivate or acknowledge the forms of innovation and creative thinking that their existence in the world depends upon.