Categories
Complexity

Brain Function as Communications System

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” […]

Categories
politics

Why Authoritarian Systems Fail

In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. The natural bias of any ordered system system will always be to move towards equilibrium, where entropy is at a minimum. This is because a system will dissipate energy in order to become more ordered. In a complex system, entropy is necessary to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Fate

Fate is a word we use to cast the past (and future) as though it ever could have been anything other than sheer randomness and confusion; we assert an order upon memory or history such that we might reflexively self-define ourselves through it. Fate is another word for a hope of order, meaning or purpose […]

Categories
Philosophy

Snakes and Ladders

Thrown into a world for which none of us are or could ever be fully prepared, we are compelled to engage the interface levers, buttons and switches of culture and interpersonal complexity which always, always represent some potentially duplicitious and risky game of snakes and ladders. There are of course more snakes than ladders, though, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Semantic Ambiguity

The dynamism and flexibility of language is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. This is a corollary of the abstract/logical and concrete/material extensibility that haunts technology as cyber (in)security but is by no means limited there. It is an irreducibly discontinuous symmetry of uncertainty that plagues all organisations and institutional contexts. The incessant invention of […]

Categories
systems

The Purpose of Stupid Ideas

Does human stupidity actually serve a sociological purpose ?

Categories
culture

Europe in Disarray

Negotiating the accelerating metamorphosis of systemic change is a problem of global salience which appears rather poorly catered for by the leviathan of legacy organisational and heuristic solutions.

Categories
heuristics Organisation

Heuristics: Organisational Entropy 003

Bureaucracies and administrative hierarchies possess peculiarly mischievous methods of seeking sustainment and self-justification through the endless production of usefully wasteful products and services…

Categories
life

Aperture, Pattern and Emptiness

Consider this unravelling vessel, this body…

Categories
culture Organisation

Continuity of Civilisation

There may be an irresolvable existential bottleneck between self-seeking commercial incentives and the long-term continuity of human civilisation.

Categories
culture

Open Minds and Closed Organisations

Human beings may never be clever enough to harness and benefit from the symmetries of information and energy flows as already exist in the natural world…

Categories
culture

Order and Decay

Entropy and disorder are inevitable, mismanagement of their consequences is not.