If it is true that there does in fact exist a class (or singular, if enigmatic, presence) of global systems theories that successfully, comprehensively and usefully abstract universal properties, theorems or logical relationships in any one non-trivially complex or sophisticated system and integrated, adaptive and evolutionary context; then those insights, abstractions and global properties solve […]
Political systems, as much as the ideologies which endlessly resonate through them, are very much not as controlled or indicative of individual or collective self-determination as people might choose to believe. There is certainly choice, just as there is responsibility, but the overall complex dynamical system as information and energy-processing field that these artefacts embody […]
What a strange thing to find such an artefact of profound wisdom located on the wall next to a wash basin in the public toilet of a shopping center. Language is structured in precisely this way and it is around precisely such micro-choices of self-inflected emotional bias that our whole lives sometimes turn. There is […]
Context: How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists I am interested in Global Systems Theory as the Grand logical Poobah system of all systems which, notwithstanding and plausibly because of Russell’s Paradox of entity self-containment, generates some interesting concepts, viewed laterally. Consider that “sucking orderliness” from an environment is inversely equivalent to asserting disorder upon […]
Context: How Bill Gates’ company TerraPower is building next-generation nuclear power As a general observation, *anything* which measures safety as “analyzed by deaths per unit of electricity generated” is a worry – it is a normative expectation of inevitable fatality. The technical solution described is interesting and certainly shifts the hazards and juggles the entropy […]
Context: Climate change: 2020 in a dead heat for world’s warmest year Climate change has been off the radar for a while, it seems and while the shit-show and train-wreck of 2020 rolls on into 2021, there are some things which seem painfully obvious to me but which also, for whatever reason, seem to be […]
Our world is complex and yet as a matter of cognition and, beyond the confused and hollow or unthinking tribally-reflexive and adversarial impulse that humanity is prone to express, of intelligence – we are bound to assert or overlay simplicities, mnemonics and shortcuts or cartographies to interpret all of this effervescent noise in useful ways. […]
We are (all) still attempting to brute-force our way towards Artificial General Intelligence. If the complexity sciences have taught us anything it is that there is an autonomous orientation within naturally-occurring information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems towards self-organisation and bootstrapped system optimisation via logical extensibility and recursive exponentiation. We appear to be attempting to […]
Core questions of sustainable civilisation are surely not whether or not growth should occur, but rather – what form or shape that growth should take. Growth characterised purely as material multiplicity and external, organisational or (associated) thermal or energy burden (also) entirely misses the mark of understanding and harnessing the logically self-inflected nature of innovation […]
In a world of information over-saturation, where the constant bombardment of spectacle, news and entertainment has reached a fever-pitch of colour and noise, where images, faces, people and (our) lives rush past (and through) us at an ever-accelerating pace – we find ourselves inhabiting the vacuum of our own dissatisfaction and dissonant disconnection with the […]
Intuitions are the common solutions or theorems of our everyday life. Going with a “gut feeling” is, however, very likely unrelated to the complex of neurons that actually exist in your gut. It is perhaps more of an insight into the patterns and symmetries of information and energy within (and as) which we exist. An […]
Why is it that ideological, political and organisational ineptitude and incompetence are endlessly reoccurring phenomena? If the longer-term evolutionary or biological history of a living system, including it’s diverse manifestations in and as cultural and political systems, is oriented towards efficient self-replication and continuity, why is it that so many poor-fitting (and indeed – positively […]
