Categories
cybernetics

System Dynamics and Surface Rules: Sharkskin, Political Economy

Shark skin is a sheet of teeth: millimetre-scale placoid denticles, each with an enamel crown, dentine core and pulp cavity, rooted in the dermis and oriented from nose to tail so that one way feels smooth and the other rasps like sandpaper. In fast swimmers such as the shortfin mako Isurus oxyrinchus and other pelagic […]

Categories
Philosophy

Human Systems

Human behaviour gathers around centres that never quite appear. We move toward meanings that seem solid, yet their solidity comes from the very motion that tries to reach them. The closer we look, the more the “centre” dissolves into the relations that formed it, leaving us oriented by something that exists only as a pattern […]

Categories
cybernetics

General Intelligence

Imagine F and G as two interdependent operations—each defining the other through difference. F acts as a generator: it constructs hypotheses, projections, or internal states. G acts as a comparator: it evaluates, reflects, and reintroduces the outcomes of F back into the system. The diagram’s symmetry, where F = − G, indicates an inversion rather […]

Categories
cybernetics

Threads

In every century, a new medium discovers how easily it can puppet the collective mind. The printing press made possible both Luther’s Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War; the telegraph and newspaper incubated nationalism; radio begot the theater of fascism; television normalized consumption as faith—and vice versa. Each era mistakes its medium for enlightenment until […]

Categories
cybernetics

Organisational Transformation: It’s Complicated

Most organizations eventually require radical transformation. They drift into and through forms of neurosis, clinging to outdated responses while the environment around them changes. A gap opens between what was, what is, and what is becoming, and it is within this gap that organizational structures harden into habits that no longer serve their purpose. In […]

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

Recursive Tension: Orbit Frame, Logical Orbit, and the Viability of Communication, Culture, and Ecological Systems

Abstract This paper advances a cybernetic account of complex adaptive systems in which coherence is sustained by unresolved tension rather than equilibrium. The orbit frame is introduced as a relational model that represents systems as networks of elastic constraints across gaps that never fully close. Logical orbit is defined as the recursive dynamical process that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Dependent Definition

The more precisely we define and describe any system, the more deeply it becomes embedded in the field of relations (and/or language) that makes it possible. This is not an accidental by-product of analysis but a structural inevitability: to single something out is to weave it more tightly into what surrounds it. Every definition is […]

Categories
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
cybernetics

The Entropic Conductor: Emergence of Logic from Pre-Symbolic Dynamics

Introduction The Entropic Conductor is a conceptual model for how human cognition self-organizes into meaning and logic from pre-symbolic beginnings. It refers to the infrastructure of mind that lets recursive loops (sometimes called “logical orbits”) form via entropy-driven, time-saturated, and coherence-aligned informational processes. Instead of seeing logical thought and symbols as pre-given foundations, this view […]

Categories
cybernetics

Introvision

Cultural systems are fundamentally recursive.

Categories
cybernetics

Generative Introspection

Having widely now gained access to this effectively unbounded as relationally networked complexity in generative computational representation, what are the odds that many if not most of the images and texts produced are used to directly or indirectly embellish, validate and incentivise the development of yet more generative and/or (other, as) downstream communications technology?