Fakes fly further and faster than facts because truth is not and never was the ground state of communication. Truth is IN language but it is not OF language: indeterminacy regarding semantics and truth is a primary method of linguistic system self-propagation. We should, perhaps, focus less on rubrics of culturally and psychologically self-validating (as […]
For a system to persistently self-sustain, it has to negotiate and/or “exhale” its own waste products as entropy. Generating waste that is reusable by something or someone else is all but ubiquitous in biology. Human systems (and consequences, in a scaled, industrial and technological sense) might be uniquely distinguished by the volume, diversity and cadence […]
Institutional continuity (and all that follows) is reciprocally self-defined through assertions of regulatory control, surveillance, power and – yes – strategy; an interface and communications bridge or feedback loop of some sort forms and self-sustains in this way. This mirrors many a parochial epistemology, but – is the control system and model as adaptive as […]
Context: What is incoherence? I am reminded of Kahlil Gibran‘s “a pearl is a temple built by pain around a grain of sand.” Emergent systems of frictive cognitive and partisan communications (or belief) system dissonance are inevitable in ways that serially failing to understand them is not. There is a tricky paradox here. Difficult to […]
This “race” may indeed be a descending, dissipative system and entropy dividend as a function of the overall approximation towards the median values that percolate to ascendance through the generally recursive computational processing and validation of billions of pre-existing and manufactured datapoints. Consider, please, and if you will, that what this integrated Rube Goldberg machine […]
It is of course possible to make similar observations about (many) other contemporary and earlier systems of belief. Nietzsche wasn’t restrained in such a critical context. I’m not so interested in what these systems represent, as such median hyperbole percolates to ascendance everywhere and in almost every instance dissimulates the possession of a truth that […]
The Cobra Effect of unintended consequences is the tip of an enormous iceberg of complex systems feedback loops and interdependency. It is not just the measurable, observed or recorded properties, processes and downstream consequences that concern us. Where we seek to control, shape or otherwise, and more realistically, to (minimally, if constructively) influence the arc […]
Differentiation in ontology often asserts unnecessary-as-eminently-redundant-distinctions, however: Systemic hierarchies seem to come in two main flavours from which later differentiation and confusions emerge. There are designed hierarchies and there are un-designed hierarchies. The first is an assertion of order, planning and control on a spectrum from brute-forced top-down through to the most sophisticated and nuanced […]
Objectivity is a strange beast. The language and corollary cognition with which we engage complexity is itself the constitutive invocation of a necessarily partial model of the systems we seek to define, articulate and/or usefully shape. The definition of a “system” being quite clearly the manifest as epistemological reality of that artefact, entity or logical […]
The thing we most commonly fail to understand about genetic code is that it is not an isolated abstraction, divorced from context and phenotypical hyper-extension. The genetic code is the component microcosm of the context in which it exists and as the nodal, atomic form of that living world, it bears its experience and history […]
Information is a quantification of the difference between the current state of a system and its most probable state.
Ashby had powerful insights. The Good Regulator theorem of Conant and Ashby that every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system is instructive. Further down the Ashby path – the variety (a.k.a. complexity) of a model needs to be at least as sophisticated as that of the system it models. […]
Daedelus Kite 