There is always a choice. No matter what we do, there is always a choice. It is in general a wonderful thing to be able to choose and even when we do not necessarily possess (or need) any control over the spectrum and menu of choices available, it remains a fact that we would rather […]
Tag: Complexity
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Technology Copies Itself Through Us
What I find unrelentingly entertaining about the technologically-mediated collective and aspirationally-individuated self-definitions of our historical moment is not that we (all, and each in our own ways) seek to create and sustain these distributed and functionally differential or dissociative Others of self-representation that we endlessly cultivate. What is more interesting is that we rarely notice, […]
Technology is always and already the cognitive hyper-extension of our minds and the many ways in which we may choose (or be chosen) to see ourselves through the diverse manifestations of this technology constitute the complex forms of introspective life that we (perhaps inadvertently) inhabit. The material extension and concrete presence of technology masks it’s […]
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Einstein’s Time ran out…
Einstein couldn’t quite close the loop on his unified field theory. One reading of a hybrid montage of Algorithmic Information Theory, Kolmogorov Complexity and the (Incompleteness) consequences of logical self-containment in any self-describing system suggests that we may end up with more attractive offices (or desktops) and blackboards but that we, too, will all end […]
Uncertainty is an indirect measure of the sum-over-all combinatorial possibilities of any definable (or intelligible) systems state space. The combinatorial possibilities of any non-trivially sophisticated – i.e. complex – state space are larger than any definition (or empirically-derived knowledge) of that same complex entity. Complete descriptions are impossible for the same essential reason that mathematical […]
In what ways does regulation, interdiction, surveillance and retrospective analysis or definition actually and inadvertently (re)produce the problems it seeks to diminish? Distinctions between legal and illegal are clearly and self-evidently important but in terms of comprehensive analysis and aspirations towards effective problem resolution they may also be a foundational misdirection. It is becoming clear […]
The return of the Wicked Problem. The problem of antibiotic resistance characterises a key symmetry of “wickedness” in any problem-space. That is, the activities, responses, interdictions and behaviours that might solve the problem are also those inadvertently exacerbate it. It is an endemic property of complex systems to seek optimal patterns of self-propagation. What at […]
The article Tackling wicked problems : A public policy perspective provides a comprehensive acknowledgment of the complexity of many of the “wicked” problems that large organisations (not just governments) face in negotiating the facts of reality as they are (i.e. being pragmatic), not as we might prefer them to be (i.e. ideological assertions). “The handling […]
Reductive abstractions in explanatory systems serve very well to ground those systems in self-validating (if demonstrably incomplete) logic, and possess considerable power and compelling reasons to believe them. Observe the thread of Turing‘s abstraction arrive in the (perhaps inevitable) artefacts, entities and exceptional utility of cloud computing – the simulated computing machines of various kinds: […]
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Rethinking (is) Philosophy
Context: Four philosophers who realized they were completely wrong about things The article referenced above is an interesting, if spectacularly shallow, reflection on conceptual about-faces in philosophy. The deeper lesson and message here is not so much that these particular – if diverse – philosophical, political or theological world-views (and their proponents) found themselves in […]
Information increases constantly – as a corollary and parallel (energy-processing) thread to the form and flow of natural, physical phenomena and thermodynamic diffusion. We might even call that part of the world that avails itself of observation and description – and which is for that reason usefully or operationally defined or described and deployed – […]
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Things fall apart…
Perhaps “the centre cannot hold” because there is no centre. Chaos and disorder are far more the native state of material (thermodynamic, dissipative) facts than are the projected order and control around which we reflexively and aspirationally self-validate. Curious, indeed, (and under one perspective) that everything emerging out of the complexity sciences suggests that it […]
Daedelus Kite 