Categories
Philosophy

before continuity

Nothing (and only nothing!) persists by remaining complete. Continuity emerges because every organised system must keep rebuilding the conditions of its own existence.

Categories
cybernetics

a theory of differential communication

Communication does not move through organised systems; organised systems emerge from the interference patterns of communication.

Categories
cybernetics

conflict, coherence, and the logic of recurrence

What unifies all processes is, quite simply, that they are processes: dynamical, temporal, contingent, and transient.

Categories
cybernetics

à plus tard

Enduring systems do not survive by resisting change, but by metabolising its consequences into temporary coherence.

Categories
Philosophy

reality

Reality is not made of things. Things are what appear when deeper patterns of relation become temporarily stable.

Categories
cybernetics

aristotle’s egg

Coherence emerges from the continual negotiation of irreducible difference. Discrete boundaries and differences are contingent.

Categories
cybernetics

phase control: communication, power, and the politics of timing

Change the timing and you change the structure. Communication is not merely the transfer of information through a network but the propagation of signals through media of different densities, delays, and constraints. Small temporal modulations accumulate. Phase shifts become interference patterns. Interference becomes organisation.

Categories
life

miracle of persistence

Life is not astonishing simply because it exists. It is astonishing because, against every available opportunity to fall apart, it keeps holding together and this resilience is the kernel core of its persistence.

Categories
cybernetics

OODA Budo

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, writing in the 19th century, observed that no plan of operations could be expected to survive first contact with the enemy. His insight was not that planning was useless, but that the continuity of command intent required adaptation under conditions of uncertainty. Strategy, as Moltke framed it, could not be […]

Categories
technology

LLMs and Institutional Change

Current institutional angst (as sociocultural microcosm) and advice regarding the provenance of machine generated words, sentences and documents feels a little misdirective. That is, it still takes considerable intelligence and patience to extract and usefully curate prose or otherwise insightful text from these new tools. If an LLM has been used is itself neither good […]

Categories
Philosophy

Regulatory Entropy

Institutional continuity (and all that follows) is reciprocally self-defined through assertions of regulatory control, surveillance, power and – yes – strategy; an interface and communications bridge or feedback loop of some sort forms and self-sustains in this way. This mirrors many a parochial epistemology, but – is the control system and model as adaptive as […]

Categories
Philosophy

Recursive Word Games

It is interesting to observe how all of our problems and transient solutions take the form of word games. Beyond the autocatalytic pathologies of self-regulatory perseveration, I think it is worth noting that the game itself is the sole beneficiary of this psychological and organisational recursion. Language itself is quite poorly suited to the complex […]