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 […]
There are, in general, two main ways to understand a complex system-of-systems. First, as an adaptive constellation of modularly decomposable artefacts, entities and sub-systems as subject to and expressions of orchestration and directed purpose – that is, in terms of its differentiated parts and their relationships. Later, as a bonded, binding proxy organism in which […]
Doctor Who is such a perennially fascinating character. Beyond the indefinitely extensible and Menger sponge-like topological vacuum of the TARDIS (“…but – its bigger on the inside!”) as transmission medium of unbounded self-inflection, the Doctor seems to only just have self-consciously begun to acknowledge an irreducible epistemological blindspot in his own narrative. This resembles, I […]
One system. Two sub-systems that each contain the other as a function of the communication and interdependent modelling they generate. Each sub-system contains the other and is bound in and as one unifying abstraction that only persists in the way it contains itself. It contains itself through the modularly decomposable differentiation of sub-systems that inflate […]
Relativistic spatio-temporal curvature and variable time dilation may be a key component in system formation, dependency and self-sustainment. The variable is a property of system clocks, themselves defined by the measure (or bandwidth) of complexity and entropy within which they find themselves entangled. Reciprocal functions map one system internal states to its environment and to […]
The first nation to engage in a treaty to leverage a learning relationship with an extraterrestrial civilisation shall likely find themselves so vastly overwhelmed by intelligence, technology and (all associated, downstream) complexity that they might later wish they had simply stayed in a cave sharpening the pointy sticks with which humans are so prone to […]
The uncanny frequency with which narcissists percolate into positions of power is a function of the ways that the Rube Goldberg tesseract of ascendant organisational ecologies acquire an emergent orientation towards the self-selection of complementary, resonant character types. This is to say: there exists something of a distributed pathological bias for self-selecting personality traits that […]
The critical role of local clocks in the emergence of complex systems is often misunderstood. It is at the level of harmonic resonance and entangled epistemological (as much as material) interdependence that system valence begins to refine cadence, prosody and the overall synchronisation of interacting (i.e. communicating) system clocks. It may not be immediately apparent […]
Context: New Biosensors Allow Earbuds To Record Brain Activity and Exercise Levels This is all moving inexorably towards and through a world in which omnipresent interfaces to human bodies (and brains) so seamlessly merge surveillance and digital entertainment as information encoding, decoding and transmission, that not only does the functional dichotomy of “for me” and […]
The greatest physical pain a person can ever feel is quite probably bounded by suffering any one of a dozen or so uniquely unpleasant ailments but the greatest emotional pain is almost singularly attributable to the suffering of others. Emotional experience is the essence of compassion and peace of mind but it is a subjective […]
Entity and context, system and environment, part and whole. Behaviour and purpose is not bounded or purely or completely encoded in an entity, regardless that our linguistic (as much as cognitive or technologocal) teleologies and intuitions reinforce and validate such a belief. Symbiosis also occurs at the level of whole systems. Entity and environment both […]
There is little doubt that our cultural systems are communications networks, albeit of considerably higher dimensionality than (even) the digital telecommunications systems with which we are all now so necessarily well-acquainted. In a spirit of relatively non-specific philosophical reflection, questions quite naturally arise as to the carrying capacity of these cultural networks and of what […]
Daedelus Kite 