Innards

innards2, originally uploaded by Negentropic Object 23.

Constructal Theory

Much of this science is over my head, particularly because it is an obscure branch (no pun intended) of engineering, even though at first sight it seems to be fundamentally intuitive. In common with much of the work in systems theory, it elucidates principles that are dramatically complex in analysis but yet are displayed universally in nature with an apparent simplicity. Just recognising the similarities between blood vessel networks, tree branches and river deltas is almost enough to stimulate a kind of epiphany.





http://www.constructal.org/

Complexity and Coherence

In complexity theory, it is observed that when a simplified and idealised population reaches a certain threshold of component complexity, a system of negentropic novelty emerges spontaneously and sustains itself at a higher frequency of order, auto-catalysing and self-organising. These newly emerged systems then go on to manifest further non-linear emergences at progressively higher levels of complexity, held away from equilibrium and dissolution by autopoesis. Many of these elucidations are congruent with observable chemical and biological processes and offer a tantalising glimpse into how Life has been making similar, interminable emergent steps of accumulating complexity; an unbroken developmental chain running from diffuse energies and cosmological bodies to cognitive molecular interactions and the vast sophistication of conscious multi-cellular organisms. Certainly some important new ideas, not least those of complexity theory and emergence and their ilk, substantiate these observations and seem just on the cusp of societal bloom, at least in the minds of them that are keen to motion.

If we consider that what has been called mind, or consciousness, is an emergent property of the 'material' brain (not that I necessarily consider it to be), we can also then consider language as an emergent property of mind, and that the dense aggregations of information that construe ideas i.e. words and symbols to ideologies, paradigms etc. (however valid), will share the same emergent properties, emerging albeit in a kind of imaginal space, a noospace. This space was first articulated so by Teilhard de Chardin and to me seems notionally equivalent to what Alan Moore has termed ‘ideaspace’ and what Karl Popper called ‘World 3’; the world of objective contents of thought. It then becomes interesting to speculate what can and will manifest in this noospace, on the 'substance' it is made from, and the way in which it feedbacks onto the 'material' world proper.

Some have suggested that when informational complexity, like Terence McKenna’s novelty, is graphed against time, albeit with a tentative x-axis, the graph’s general curve is exponential, meaning that its steepness increases logarithmically over time, and essentially throughout history. Others have also noticed that at our current point of history we are tending very close to the vertical of this curve, at which point informational complexity increases so rapidly as to confound. Theories of singularities and transitional apocalyptic cusps therefore abound, or as Alan Moore articulates information doubling; water sublimates into steam. Regardless of the veracity or meaning of these propositions, ones which I am inclined to intuitively sympathise with, we, as self-reflective language generators, are witnessing what it is like to be on the accelerating wave-front of this emergence, the effervescing limen of novelty; of evolution. Pay attention to it.

6 ways mushrooms can save the world

I have always appreciated our fungal, Terran brethren, but Paul's insight, effort and passion, not least this lecture, are incredible.

liquid air

reitteration4, originally uploaded by Negentropic Object 23.

The Juicy Looters (Sternest Meanings Remix)

Warm half-mad, hindering saneness.
Deathly, bat-eared thug stutters.
Master's nihilist dreadness.
Obscuration nauseated joviality.
Fruitier or topnotch nightshade.
Ramble well crackpot recanter.

Hmmm! Abhorrent handbook pointers.
A scratchy grace smooches apeman.
I am the grotty, lush geek.
Hotheads distract to damnation.
Deathful, threatless hesitation.
Over-the-top, idiotical injury.

Fans of DADA, Surrealist automatic writing and Gysin/Burroughsian cut-up will appreciate this tool:

STERNEST MEANINGS

Planet Fecund

IMGP7561matte, originally uploaded by Negentropic Object 23.

The Incomplete History of Everything: Enuncipated. Chapter 17

"..With the arrival of sentience and self-awareness, came consciousness, and speculation. In the wake of the first primordial imaginings, mental architectures manifested, memetic information cohered crystalline. The advent of political, religious and philosophical thought, brought greater complexity, the meta-object now a tortuous, labyrinthine psycho-geography, resplendent in its diversity yet somehow unsettling in arrangement.

There were those who wandered far off into this baroque, symbolic sprawl, seeking to explore the expanding noos-spacial territory, climbing to perch vertiginous on remote romantic pinnacles, dreaming of dark dissolutions. Some travellers even became trapped, sealed in crumbling semantic cul-de-sacs or mummified in the crypts of extinct ideas; forgotten, as others leapt liberated from private, exegetic edifices, tumbling into the churning chaos of deconstructive voids.

Of them that remained, a portion found satisfaction in a vistal perspective, a relatively compelling truth, truths which they were always keen to share (reinforced as they are by familiarity and collective investment), whilst traversing safe, well-trodden corridors. Those who could not appreciate such views, clustered in basement catacombs, unaware or unconvinced that there was anything much worth seeing anyway, uniformly swaying to the thrum of the great ideological machines that rose around them. There were however, unaccountables...”

Wade Davis: The worldwide web of belief and ritual

An unbiased insight into the wealth, wonder and need, for human cultural diversity. An antidote to modern self-satisfaction.