We can contemplate the absence of experience only through experience itself. The deepest sadness is not that we die, but how readily we diminish the extraordinary possibility of being alive.
The trouble with building a world that no longer needs people is discovering that you’re one of them.
The world is changing, and institutions are working frantically to ensure that nothing fundamental changes. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle in which the machinery of (i.e. self-)preservation becomes an engine of destruction.
Europe’s unrest is sustained by a self-reproducing system of conflict in which opposing positions become mutually sustaining and unresolved grievances become politically and commercially valuable.
Climate change is not a problem inside a stable planetary system. This text indicates how it is reorganising the relations through which planetary stability itself is reproduced.
Ideology is what happens when a way of seeing the world becomes part of the world itself, shaping not only what we believe, but what becomes easier to believe next.
What persists is neither order nor entropy, but the organised difference through which each continually transforms the conditions of the other.
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.
The only (or at least most) comprehensive way to account for emergent behaviour is to grant some ontic reality to the abstract relational patterns, symmetries, and phase dynamics that bind and sustain it. A collection of things is, in other words, also a thing. That is not especially surprising at one intuitive level, but it […]
The unconscious is not a hidden chamber beneath awareness, nor a secondary mind running in parallel. It is the emergent interior of dynamical, adaptive, relational complexity itself. It is what complex systems feel like from the inside. Any system capable of learning, anticipation, coordination, and self-regulation must generate internal structure that cannot be fully present […]
Modern power does not stabilise disorder. It metabolises it. At planetary scale, technological and financial systems do not merely respond to uncertainty. They generate specific instabilities that make their own interventions appear necessary, then present themselves as the most probable remedy. This is not a claim about intent. It is a structural tendency of adaptive […]
The notion (articulated in the video) that the homeostatic process by which quasicriticality is maintained in the brain may have an essentially cybernetic explanation. In Jeff Hawkins’ “A Thousand Brains” he references neurophysiologist Vernon Mountcastle’s belief in the existence of an underlying (as unifying) organisational principle in the brain. I wouldn’t be at all surprised […]
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