Governance can be understood as the management of phase relations within an ensemble, not the enforcement of uniform behaviour. In any governed system—social, institutional, technical, or ecological—coherence does not arise from fixing positions or eliminating difference. It arises from partial synchronisation: agents align enough to act collectively while remaining out of phase enough to retain […]
The self is commonly understood as something one has: a centre of experience, a point of view, a continuous “me” that persists through time. Psychological models tend to formalise this intuition by treating the self as a representational structure—narrative continuity, minimal experiential core, or predictive model—through which coherence can be maintained. This move is not […]
Human behaviour gathers around centres that never quite appear. We move toward meanings that seem solid, yet their solidity comes from the very motion that tries to reach them. The closer we look, the more the “centre” dissolves into the relations that formed it, leaving us oriented by something that exists only as a pattern […]
It is a mistake to imagine that cruelty or deception arise from the rare brilliance of tyrants or the careful engineering of conspirators. The truth is flatter, colder: given time, scale, and opportunity, suffering emerges almost as a default outcome, an entropic drift in human systems. Power does not require genius to become exploitative; it […]
In dynamical systems, trajectories do not simply collapse into rest. They can (and tend to) drift endlessly, circling within strange attractors where motion never repeats yet never escapes. Turbulent fluids, weather patterns, ecological populations, and even networks of neurons exhibit this restless confinement. What seems chaotic is in fact structured wandering, an orbit that sustains […]
Many theories of consciousness attempt to resolve its opacity. Some frame it as an emergent computation arising from neural substrates; others treat it as an epiphenomenon, reducible to material process. Phenomenologists insist it must be described in its own terms, while eliminativists argue it is a cognitive illusion, a misapprehension of distributed processes. Each stance, […]
Complex systems persist by inhabiting, invoking, sustaining nonlinear properties, where strict predictability collapses into fragility but feedback loops and fluctuating adaptations sustain continuity. Non-linearity here is less a mathematical technicality than an ontological geometry: the system thrives on unpredictability, dispersing shocks across distributed pathways and drawing from entropy itself as both constraint and medium. This […]
Zak Stein frames the personhood conferral problem as a distinct risk in education and society. Alignment asks how humans control machines, this asks how humans mistake machines for persons. As systems simulate dialogue, affect, and presence, children and adults may confer moral standing to tools. Placing AI in roles of educator, caregiver, or companion risks […]
When we speak, think, or write, it feels like we’re exchanging units of meaning—words, symbols, concepts—as if they were coins passed from hand to hand. But look closer, and something else is happening. Meaning isn’t a thing we hold. It’s a pattern of difference that holds us in structure. Consider two basic ways to move […]
Daedelus Kite 