Categories
Philosophy

Point in fact

The world does not need to collapse this hard or this fast. There are people who benefit from disorder and others who profit by it, but none of them are outside the structure they exploit. Everyone is anchored to the same reef of dependencies, because at this scale disagreement does not create separation. Dense intercommunication […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Geometry of the Unconscious

The unconscious is not a hidden chamber beneath awareness, nor a secondary mind running in parallel. It is the emergent interior of dynamical, adaptive, relational complexity itself. It is what complex systems feel like from the inside. Any system capable of learning, anticipation, coordination, and self-regulation must generate internal structure that cannot be fully present […]

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 […]

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 […]