Categories
Complexity

Brain Function as Communications System

Context: Neuroscientists listened in on people’s brains for a week. They found order and chaos. Brain as decentralised communications network that exists with optimal efficiency on a globally-distributed fractal boundary between order and disorder? “Specific brain networks seemed to communicate with each other in what looked like a “dance,” with one region appearing to “listen” […]

Categories
Philosophy

On Living and Dying in Languages and Ecosystems

Context: The surprising role death plays in the stability of ecosystems There’s a sense in which viable biological systems persist as a function of their ability to offset entropy as dissipative disorder to their environments. When these viable systems are themselves the combinatorial gestalt that an ecosystem represents, there is no externality or reservoir into […]

Categories
Philosophy

Why do Philosophers Argue?

Because entropy. There are always and as a consequence of combinatorial necessity more disordered states available than ordered ones and as a consequence debate eventually travels through them into dissonance and disagreement but this, curiously, is also the source for more philosophy. It is a common (recursive) idiom and is endemic of and to logic, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Reweaving the World

Science and technology cartwheel and careen past us in ways that few can convincingly argue are fully comprehended, defined or ever anything more than superficially controlled. This accelerating turbulence of complex sociotechnical recursion and self-validating necessity is a self-propagating compression wave of information, energy, technology and concepts. It ripples and oscillates like waves on a […]

Categories
Philosophy

Why do we suffer?

I’m going for yet another deep (if relatively brief) dive on the question of suffering. The natural orientation of the Universe towards dissolution and decay or disorder is precisely the reason why we have life, sentience, experience and intelligence – the entropy of material dissolution is a precondition for the structural aggregation and compression of […]

Categories
Philosophy

War and Peace

There is an irreducible enigma in the aspiration to peace through structured, ordered methods. Every structure, system, taxonomy, ontology and patterned application of rationality or logic to complex problems always (ALWAYS) becomes another component in the hyper-inflating, combinatorial reference space of the problem that is being addressed – in language, law or perception. Each new […]

Categories
Philosophy

History: In the widening gyre…

This (image above) is how I feel watching history unfold around me. Our Global systems of governance, organisation and power are in essence defined (but hardly well-designed) to compel and incentivise the ascendancy of those ideas and individuals who do not – counter-intuitively – actually represent the best-interests of that world as a whole or […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Authoritarian Vacuum and the Chaos that Follows

Which begs the question: if individuals tend on average towards a path of least resistance and select (or become selected by) a singular – or authoritarian – narrative interpretation and filter of their world, why is it that these systems in which there is no (or at least a sudden vacuum of) overarching meta-narrative find […]

Categories
culture

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 […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Crown of Thorns: this gathering storm

This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds – never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged – these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance. […]

Categories
systems

The Shadows of Entropy

It is a truth almost universally known but rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the strengths and the values of our world are simultaneously its weakness and qualitative (as much as quantitative) poverty. Contemporary communications systems have, for instance, been truly wonderous – they have brought us all closer together through near-instaneous text, voice and video […]

Categories
culture

Europe in Disarray

Negotiating the accelerating metamorphosis of systemic change is a problem of global salience which appears rather poorly catered for by the leviathan of legacy organisational and heuristic solutions.