Diving in… Culture is a slow-moving entropic wave, propagating through time as an emergent pattern of communication. Unlike speech or writing, which operate on high-frequency scales, culture moves through a distributed process of accumulation, decay, recombination, and redistribution. It is neither stable nor chaotic but oscillates within a state of perpetual disequilibrium, shaped by noise, […]
The phenomenon of societal ‘dumbing down’ is undeniable. While terms like “uninformed” or “disengaged” may seem too blunt, there is a notable drift – both culturally and intellectually – towards a collective state that is increasingly indifferent, uninspired, and detached from genuine engagement with one another. And yet, this shift is layered beneath a polished […]
Ottmar Mergenthaler’s 1884 Linotype machine revolutionised printing by the automation of typesetting. With keyboard inputs, it assembled and cast lines of type, replacing slower manual methods and vastly increasing publishing efficiency. Generative technologies invoke a similarly self-amplifying communications signal regarding an indefinitely extensible logic of engineering the reproductive methods and transmission media of symbolic language.
Buddhist psychology can be uniquely insightful. The animist turn in Shinto casts nature (and all who sail in her) as something of and with an agency, an experience. If everything has experience, then in some sense nothing does but this is a rhetorical trick because negation, uncertainty, nothing, absence and potentiality are endemic to bio-logic. […]
An excellent piece of communication on the topic of communication: A spectrum and integrated matrix of regenerative uncertainty is simultaneously: that which compels that we must communicate, and, that which inevitably arises from communication. That we find ourselves somewhat lashed to the mast of this self-propagating vortex of competitive differences and ideological distances should really […]
There is little doubt that our cultural systems are communications networks, albeit of considerably higher dimensionality than (even) the digital telecommunications systems with which we are all now so necessarily well-acquainted. In a spirit of relatively non-specific philosophical reflection, questions quite naturally arise as to the carrying capacity of these cultural networks and of what […]
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” […]
Cultural processing of information is one of the main tasks we carry out. It is costly and can be very difficult. Our brains are on one hand dedicated to the maintenance and sustainable continuity of the bodily vessels that support them but also must process the symbolic complexity required to sustain the systems of culture […]
Context: World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global Life I have been deep down a rabbit hole of seeking to apply these complexity thinking insights more broadly for the last few years. One key, kernel and core takeaway is that (we) human beings seem on the whole quite poorly equipped […]
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 […]
What is known (or is believed to be known) varies, adapts and undergoes the relentless metamorphosis of entangled streams of intersubjective abstraction we experience as cultural (and now, explicitly, technological) reality, but amongst all this effervescing percolation and uncertain intentions of identity and difference there remains a constant. The song, that is, remains the same […]
In regards to some study and incidental (as unplanned) research I was engaged in recently, it seems to be most eminently true that the very information and communications technologies upon which we now so critically depend are profoundly, deeply and irredeemably unreliable. This may be no big news to you but I think it justifies […]
Daedelus Kite 