Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a biologist and a pioneer of the General Systems Theory, discussed the concept of entropy in relation to system dynamics, particularly in large-scale systems. His views can be summarized as follows: Bertalanffy’s ideas were foundational in the development of systems theory, and his insights into the role of entropy in system dynamics […]
Relativistic spatio-temporal curvature and variable time dilation may be a key component in system formation, dependency and self-sustainment. The variable is a property of system clocks, themselves defined by the measure (or bandwidth) of complexity and entropy within which they find themselves entangled. Reciprocal functions map one system internal states to its environment and to […]
We are the mockingbirds, compulsively copying the copies and idiomatic machinery of our shared times and places, of our competitive or collaborative systems of belief. We don’t copy things, we reflexively copy their encoding mechanisms. Each and every coding error breeds further evolutionary metamorphosis. This indicates our critical dependency upon, and endless invocation of, productive […]
An inexorably rapid turn to generative art indicates a complementary toolkit for creative designers. If it is a technology that doesn’t already exist, I look forward to being able to create, curate and refine design artefacts on the fly with human voice control alone.
Wittgenstein once opined that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” I am starting to wonder if cybernetics might not be a battle against the seduction of our minds by technology. The transmission medium and feedback mechanisms of language and technology become the primary methods of influence as […]
An electronics project I built in 2022. It reacted to audio input (i.e. noise, voices) and changed the patterned system of light in a continuous feedback loop with its environment. Each face is an identical irregular triangle but the resulting dodecahedral geometry is such that all edges are the fulcrums as bilateral axes of a […]
It seems to me that most technologically-inflected discussions of what it means to be human begin from the assumption that our experience represents some kind of necessary closure as terminal (and teleological) endpoint. The notion that intelligence or sentience (and intelligence- or sentience-like) artefacts, entities and systems could ever represent any kind of pinnacle (or […]
Will sentient machines require psychological care? It is a serious question and while it must be acknowledged that these likely are (or will be) very different kinds of minds than our own, in as much as they could understand and engage their presence in the world through (human) language they might find themselves facing their […]
Generative AI is changing the world but it doesn’t really take much imagination to understand the transformative cultural shift invoked by this new technology is really only the revisitation of what has come before. Creativity in the visual arts has almost exclusively been a process defined by the endless revisitation and recursively self-propagating evolution of […]
It is interesting to observe how all of our problems and transient solutions take the form of word games. Beyond the autocatalytic pathologies of self-regulatory perseveration, I think it is worth noting that the game itself is the sole beneficiary of this psychological and organisational recursion. Language itself is quite poorly suited to the complex […]
Context: Any Single Galaxy Reveals the Composition of an Entire Universe Such induction to general principles from instances is itself, also, a broader lesson regarding complexity. If recognisable (i.e. “real world”) properties of cosmological matter and energy distribution can be inferred from a single galaxy, in what other systems does such a depth of logical […]
I was recently asked to write a short reflection on the Cybernetics of Time. It occurs to me that such a narrative must be in no small measure the Cybernetics of Causality. This itself leads to the curious revelation and plausibly cathartic insight that the aspirational control as shaping, influence or purposive feedback that inflates […]
Daedelus Kite 