The cast changes. The relations keep coming back. Popular culture makes visible how complex adaptive systems persist through transformation.
Tag: recurrence
Music, poetry, language and artistic performance share an underlying harmonic structure. Rhythm, repetition and constructive difference give rise to meaning (and value), while every new expression changes what can follow. Every performance carries its past into a future it helps create, but can never fully predict.
Desire and fear appear to pull us in opposite directions, but both persist through the distance they seek to overcome.
An account can be accurate in every detail it gives and deceptive in what it leads people to believe.
Categories
The Essence of Language
Language, like all communication systems, holds together not despite displacement, delay and uncertainty, but because of them.
A rigged game constrains probabilities; it does not determine every outcome.
Peace is not merely difficult. We have built institutions, identities, economies and languages whose coherence depends upon the persistence of conflict.
Counter-disinformation has a structural problem: engaging a message often helps keep it alive. While this is generally unsurprising dynamical behaviour, it remains widely misunderstood.
Categories
Belief as Harmonic Structure
Belief is harmonic structure: the recurrent pattern of timing, relation and probability through which language, meaning and experience take form.
Categories
Persistence of Reality
Reality persists because nothing (and only nothing!) ever fully coincides with itself.
Categories
WTF
We keep telling the same stories in different ways. The faces, crises and characters change. The same tribal pattern keeps finding new forms.
Meaning repeats because recurrence builds structure, and structure influences what follows. History rhymes for much the same reason.
