Categories
life

Attractors

In the early evening of fading light last night I visited a local shopping complex to purchase some simple necessities. In the sky just above some apartments I saw some small birds flying, too few to flock but just enough to exist in that liminal zone of groups of 3 or 4. Single birds would […]

Categories
cybernetics

Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the drones of war…

Recently reading of airborne multiple-drone systems that, being once (and unsuccessfully) modelled on insect swarms, are now being modelled on wolf-pack behaviour, it got me thinking. Biomimetic systems are powerful but I do wonder if and when the analogies that compel them might at times become inadvertently inhibitory. Logic and technological (as much as biological) […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Cloud of Unknowing

Studies in the area of swarms (murmurations, schooling fish, etc.) consistently suggest that not only is there a cognitive boost in company, but, beyond even the plausible case in which the embodied intelligence with which we are all so intimately familiar is itself only the most salient and visceral experience of a natural bias towards […]