Categories
money

Financial Physics: Entropy, Gravitation, Complexity

The proliferating, bubbling, effervescent diffusion of information abstractions in (and as) cultural and economic – ergo financial – systems nowhere reveals itself as so much smoke and mirrors than, ironically, where it assumes such literal gravity and influence over our lives and experience. I am fascinated by the autonomous methods and optimal functions of system […]

Categories
culture

Encoding Culture, Encrypting Identity

Conjecture: We are encoding culture but we are encrypting identity. It is not well-understood – partially because those procedural mechanisms and autonomously self-propagating waveforms (or functions) of patterned information that manifest as, in and through ourselves must also protect themselves and their own aspirational continuity. If it were immediately apparent how mental worlds and cultural […]

Categories
culture

Social Computation, Complexity and the Constructive Necessity of Dissonance

Some reflections occurred to me while listening to this Santa Fe Institute podcast today: Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice, What of questions concerning the nature of social, psychological and cultural value systems when considered as a unified whole? While it is clear that the aggregate macrostate of any particular system […]

Categories
culture

Innovation War: Competition, Crime, AI and Security

This is a fascinating domain of analysis: artificial intelligence, cyber security and cyber crime are locked in a spiralling arc of mutual interdependence and reflexive self-definition, an evolving symmetry of mutual causation. The accelerating hyper-inflation of this logical space is complex, dynamic and non-linear.  Asserting core self-organisational principles or symmetries of the self-evident Complex Adaptive […]

Categories
communication Philosophy technology

The Necessity of Proliferating Vulnerabilities: a General Philosophy of Cyber Security

Compressed: It is something of an inevitability of both logic and of physics that the more components a material system has – including the diverse and recombinatory abstractions and logic of algorithmic, information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems – the more disordered states of entropy that are also possible, indeed – probable within and as […]

Categories
communication Complexity culture

These Logical Games also Play Themselves, Through Us

There exists an endemic and intransigent adherence to the self-evident necessity of linear or causal teleology and reductive explicability in human experience that misleads us as to the underlying organisational or logical principles of our shared reality.  The many and diverse games we play are, for instance, evidence of core principles of systemic (and systematic) […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Continuity of Civilisation

What we more often fail to observe or acknowledge about the generally messy and entropic state of international relations and an apparent inevitability of internecine conflict is that, as a whole, human civilisation is autonomously calculating and computing the optimal means and methods for self-propagation and systemic continuity.  Homeostasis is not engendered through aspiration towards […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Tattoos and the Masks Within

Tattoos are a clear indication that all symbols, all representation and all meaning is not merely (or literally) inscribed upon our bodies and in our symbolic narratives.  All meaning and symbolic representation warps our cultural space back onto itself; it is recursively twisted and bound back upon and through itself.  All representation seeks the continuing […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Plausible Necessity of Political Incompetence

Why is it that ideological, political and organisational ineptitude and incompetence are endlessly reoccurring phenomena? If the longer-term evolutionary or biological history of a living system, including it’s diverse manifestations in and as cultural and political systems, is oriented towards efficient self-replication and continuity, why is it that so many poor-fitting (and indeed – positively […]

Categories
creativity

Aspirational Creativity and Self-Improvement

There is no best, there is only better and it is a consequence of core psychological fallacies that we even assert or adhere to concepts and narratives of artistic, literary, ideological, political or existential completion and closure. It is always possible to creatively extend any system (or creative act of self-definition) by intuition and recursive […]

Categories
environment life

The Freedom of Words

In every sentence, every voiced utterance and subtle nuance or aspiration towards meaning and purpose, we are that through which the world comes to know itself.  These patterns and vibrant tapestry of mixed, living concept and blind, unknowing information are doing little more than that which the world is bound by necessity to do.  It […]

Categories
Philosophy

Redundancy and Replication

Cultural entities, artefacts and places are simple moments, nodes in time and space.  It is true that any particular node in some way encodes the whole culture in its form and the patterned flow of information and energy from, around, through and as that thing.  Cultural systems protect themselves from catastrophic failure by distributing their […]