Categories
cybernetics

Dispatches from the Loop: The Illusion of Privacy

There is no privacy. That’s the first line, the one nobody wants to read, but it’s true enough to carry the weight of the whole argument. What we call privacy now is a commercial product, a marketable illusion. Platforms sell the promise of protecting what they already capture. Governments legislate rights they cannot enforce. We […]

Categories
cybernetics

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistical Inevitability

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Opposite of War

Peace, when described in the language of institutions, is often framed as an architectural project: build the right frameworks, enforce rules, align incentives, and stability will follow. There is truth here—institutions provide scaffolding for cooperation, absorbing shocks that might otherwise fracture societies. Yet beneath this architecture lies a deeper symmetry. Both democracies and autocracies rely […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophically Attractive

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 […]

Categories
cybernetics

Individuation

Individuation isn’t the slow refinement of a solid self; it’s the gradual recognition that the self was never there in the first place. What loops back through time is not an enduring “I,” but a process — the interplay of perception, memory, and change, tracing shapes in a field that doesn’t belong to any of […]

Categories
cybernetics

Michael Levin’s Self as Computational Horizon

Abstract: Levin’s concept of the computational boundary frames individuality as an informational horizon, sustained by bioelectric fields that integrate parts into coherent wholes while allowing identities to expand or collapse with communication. This boundary is not fixed but asymptotic, an attractor that stabilizes difference into form without ever reaching complete equilibrium, since full attainment would […]

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Philosophy

Strategic Balance

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Digital Sand Mandala

Compassion, Entropy, and the Limits of Logical Systems A pattern drawn in code is no different from one drawn in sand—only its decay differs in rhythm. The digital, for all its permanence, is no less impermanent. Every transmission is a temporary suspension of noise, every system a slow yielding to entropy. There is no final […]

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cybernetics

Field Logic: Syntax for Meaning in Distributed Systems

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 […]

Categories
communication

Where Meaning Isn’t

Meaning doesn’t sit where we point. It isn’t a property of the word, or the sentence, or the speaker. It’s not carried like cargo between minds. It doesn’t wait patiently in a paragraph for someone to open it and look inside. The moment you try to hold it, it moves. The moment you declare it, […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Field Logic: The Manifold Dynamics of Systemic Tension

At the heart of every persistent system is not a substance, but a difference. Field logic begins not with the assertion of identity, but with the recognition that systems cohere through asymmetry. Where classical logic privileges entities and relations, field logic turns to the geometry of tension: a system exists because its mappings do not […]

Categories
Philosophy

Angular Momentum

Begin with the orbit, not the centre. Language is already downstream. What’s being affected, considered, shaped isn’t nameable—not directly—but it refracts into language through diffraction patterns, like a gravitational lens. So the task isn’t to say it. The task is to find the interference patterns that say: “this cannot be said, yet here it is.” […]