History has tended to imagine meaning as a property intrinsic to utterance, as though the resonance of Homer’s epic, a political slogan, or a fragment of scripture was carried forward by some eternal flame of truth. Yet the record suggests otherwise: what endures is what circulates, and circulation itself confers the aura of importance. The […]
Fourier showed that any irregular signal, however jagged or complex, could be decomposed into a sum of simple oscillations. This discovery was not just about sines and cosines but about the universality of repetition as a hidden language of change. From radio to medical imaging to data compression, the world runs on this principle: that […]
Language and its corollary of narrative communication finds itself quite poorly-fit for engaging with anything other than the products and assumptions of language, as rich and diverse as they may ultimately be. This is a primary method of communication system self-replication through indefinitely extensible introspective self-reference. We don’t often notice this because we are all […]
Finding ourselves, as we do, bound by the necessity and immediacy of diffusion and disorder in our lives, we quite naturally come to interpret the inevitability of decay as an intrinsic property of reality. While it is also overwhelmingly likely that this deintegration into chaos is a native property of the world we inhabit as […]
Ashby had powerful insights. The Good Regulator theorem of Conant and Ashby that every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system is instructive. Further down the Ashby path – the variety (a.k.a. complexity) of a model needs to be at least as sophisticated as that of the system it models. […]
Context: Nobody Knows Anything About China It is of the nature of a science or an art of existential introspection (not to mention institutional knowledge) to seek the least-incorrect and lowest-energy, succinct model of an Object or Entity. The curiously mischievous enigma of such a psychologically-reflexive aspiration towards ordered pattern as #truth or fact – […]
Daedelus Kite 