Historically, the divergence between Eastern and Western approaches to war reflects not merely strategic preference but foundational differences in epistemology and system logic. Western traditions, from Thucydides to Clausewitz and Mahan, have typically conceptualised war as a discrete extension of political will—goal-directed, adversarial, and mechanistically bounded. Mahan’s emphasis on sea power, for example, exemplified a […]
In an age defined by information overload and communicative saturation, the core structure of meaning is straining under its own weight. Traditional accounts of meaning—rooted in symbols, representation, and local causality—struggle to explain how coherence persists across fragmented, dynamic, and scale-invariant systems. A growing body of work points toward something more subtle and robust: not […]
The multiverse, conceived as an unbounded configuration space of all possible system states, is not problematic for science because of its scale, entropy, or recursive self-generation—it’s problematic because science, as currently structured, lacks the tools to capture or model such structures. The hyperinflation of interior spaces—spaces within spaces, possibility within possibility—highlights the same ancient wound […]
James Lovelock (1919–2022) was as pioneering as he was resisted. Uniquely famous for proposing the Gaia hypothesis—the idea that Earth behaves as a self-regulating system—he faced deep scepticism, dismissed by many as mystical or unscientific. Yet it was Daisyworld, his elegant simulation of a planet populated by simple black and white daisies, that provided a […]
The emergent state is neither fixed nor singular—it resolves dynamically, continuously redefining itself through interaction. Dimensionality here is more than spatial; it is the interplay of options, the degrees of freedom available in any system. Transformation is not just movement within these dimensions but the act of leveraging them—instrumentalizing novelty, bending constraints into possibilities. This […]
The critical role of local clocks in the emergence of complex systems is often misunderstood. It is at the level of harmonic resonance and entangled epistemological (as much as material) interdependence that system valence begins to refine cadence, prosody and the overall synchronisation of interacting (i.e. communicating) system clocks. It may not be immediately apparent […]
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 […]
Context: Editorial to the Inaugural Issue of Collective Intelligence, 24-Aug-22…https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26339137221114179 That intelligence and/or intelligence-like dynamical properties can be distributed, as it were, across the entire information and energy-processing “surface” of a complex system should give us all pause for thought. This seems to implicate thermodynamic system properties and self-organising computational dynamics that consistently bridge the […]
More reflections on cosmological conundrums, today. It occurs to me that whatever the Universe (or really – our descriptions of it) is, it is actually trying to vanish. The natural bias and orientation towards entropic disassembly and diffusion is that through this system in gestalt aspires to reach the lowest energy state. The mischievous irony […]
Context: Ant colonies behave like neural networks when making decisions …and, indeed, vice versa but we would do as well to acknowledge that such adaptive autotelic information and energy-processing symmetries quite plausibly constitute something of a primary reality of which all complex instances, resonant analogies and artefacts of salient or perceived intelligence represent mere component […]
I find the range and spectrum of generative ambiguity around the concept (and definition) of complexity to itself be quite interesting. We find in language (as much as in technology but both as hyper-extended corollaries of cognition) these mischievously self-propagating confusions and constructive indeterminacies around concepts like complexity, entropy and emergence. Otherwise rendered: the most […]
Metaphorical corollary: is technology the extended phenotype of the genotype of humanity or is humanity the extended phenotype of the genotype of technology? It is really neither and both. The key issue being that the radical inversion of teleological intuitions in language and cognition is a necessarily difficult feat of mental gymnastics. Analogies are useful. […]
Daedelus Kite 