One Nice Bug Per Day
oozey mess
Show & Tell
taylor price
#extradirty
Color Me Curious
Not today Justin
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Phantogram Three
almost home
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ojovivo
The Bright Sessions
occasionally subtle
tannertan36
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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Unemployment being labelled as a mental disorder in Britain... ...and yet "Filthy Rich Selfish Bastard Syndrome" endures, massively under-represented in psychiatric diagnosis... http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27853-stop-labelling-unemployment-as-a-psychological-disorder.html
Saatchi curated online art gallery.
Young Africans using social media to counter stereotypes.
Skynet Surveillance Network
Skunkworks New Fusion Reactor
Momento Mori
Undead Culture
Future Shock
Semiotic Cocoon
Blogging into the Void.
Work-Life Balance ?
Mirror, mirror: observations of Gym culture.
Google AI Dreams of Electric Sheep
Juxtaposition.
AI IQ: OT or OMG ?
I was inspired to comment on an interesting article at Nautilus concerning "The Life and Times of Ideas" by David Krakauer of the Santa Fe Institute.
Interesting overview. I enjoyed the metaphor of hardware (brain) and software (culture). While we can talk of culture as software in the sense intended, culture is nothing beyond it's participants. The tree which falls in the forest still needs an observer to be said to have fallen at all and it is the observer, the active participant who engenders meaning and simultaneously drives change through choice and social, cultural or even technological activity. Each person represents a "node" in a complex "field", a local intensification or "twisting" of the field. The field is, globally speaking (i.e. systems), recursive and self-organising. Patterns rippling across the field are mediated through communication, technology and much like patterns of excitation across any complex system you might name. The patterns can only be said to exist in as much as they do in the minds of the observers, the living, breathing, imagining and imperfect human beings but collectively they take on a life of their own, an ontological "being" as culture. I think the holographic metaphor of "whole pattern/image encoded in each part" captures this well. The progressive sedimentation and acceleration of aggregating complexity over time is fascinating. As a whole, the cultural, technological system is rotating through itself in some ongoing, open-ended and unplanned incomplete logical extension in which we individuals are simultaneously the witnesses, the bearers and the instigators.
The article itself covered a lot of ground in a few words, with conceptual vectors and colourful ideas heading in multiple directions simultaneously, but I always find it inspiring to see thinkers from the complexity field juggle interesting ideas.
Complexity, Chaos, Creativity and Open Systems
The natural world around us is creative, complex, chaotic, dynamic and fundamentally self-organising. Any response to the world which hopes to successfully manage human beings and our many little worlds into anything resembling a sane organisational structure requires us to whole-heartedly embrace this complexity and chaos. Repetition and rote-learned, blindly regurgitative behaviours lead largely to stagnancy and demise. Systems which are notionally closed, regardless of the logical and ontological impossibility of such systemic "closure", tend to rot internally from the inevitable self-destruction borne of decay and proliferating entropy. Systems which are intrinsically open and dynamic can creatively harness the physical properties of entropy and much like life itself, successfully surf the wave-front chaotically defined through the inevitability of change and time. An open system thrives on the change, complexity and creativity that chaos and entropy can bring. A closed system, eventually, dies.
Everything in space and time is subject to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: Entropy in a closed system tends to increase. Dust accumulates, wrinkles develop, engines rust, mountains erode, galaxies fall apart; all systems are subject to this. A truly closed system does not exist in nature in this a creative secret dwells. Entropy is inevitable but death and decay is not. A quote from one of the several books I am currently reading:
"'The overripe hierarchies of the world, from corporations to nation states, are in trouble and are calling, however reluctantly, on their people for more creativity, commitment, and innovation." But this all comes at the same time that the closed, hierarchical, competitively organized and linearly planned structure of organizations are hell-bent on preventing those creative qualities from ever self-organizing within corporate walls."
"Seven Life Lessons of Chaos", John Briggs and F. David Peat, HarperPerennial, 1999, p. 70