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 […]
I’m about half way through reading Jeff Hawkins’ book “A Thousand Brains” which has been taking me quite some time, not because it is overly complicated or inaccessible, but because I tend to have so little spare time these days. It’s an interesting read with the key takeaway (so far) being that our mental world […]
Singularly final unifying theories are a – or indeed, the – holy grail. The most significant barrier to unifying theories is that we expect them to be domain-specific, narrow and effectively limited – i.e. epistemologically “controlled” or even “controllable”. That’s the core problem – unified and/or unifying theories are constitutively not limited. Further, I expect […]
Attempting to comprehensively explain the many and diverse ways in which information autonomously self-propagates as and through cognition, communication and culture is a subtle process. More often than not, such aspirations towards linguistic, mathematical (or other) conceptual closure devolve into meaningless noise that is only saved from complete irrelevance by that pattern-obsessed brains and sociotechnical […]
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship […]
“Bonini’s paradox is the name given to the problem that emerges when a model of a phenomenon is just as hard to understand as the phenomenon that it is supposed to explain.” University of Alberta’s Dictionary of Cognitive Science A critical point of reason here, and one for which we may all be fairly poorly furnished, […]
An ability to think in terms of systems holistically as participating in mutually reflexive causal interdependence can initially be a difficult abstraction and conceptual bridge to cross but it also reveals itself as a powerful way to understand real world systems and processes.
There is no way of proving that you have obtained the most concise, accurate or irreducibly essential pattern or theory from which any sufficiently (i.e. non-trivially) complex pattern or sequence can be reproduced…
I imagine that part of the beauty of an equation in physics lies in the sense in which it serves as an algorithmic information compression of the phenomena, system or relationship it describes…
Self-organising cultural, political and communications-system architectures tend to rapidly capitalise upon and exploit technical tool-sets, vectors or opportunities when they appear…
Grand Theories are impressive, but there seems to me to always be something more…
Any science of dynamic complex systems might find unexpected utility in recursive application to it’s own theoretical foundations and through this – a self-conscious insight into the process of complex systems theory development itself…
Daedelus Kite 