- Jan 2024
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Local file Local file
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The physicistsStephen Wolfram and Brosl Hasslacher introduced me, in the early1980s, to chaos theory and nonlinear systems. In the 1990s, I learnedabout complex systems from conversations with Danny Hillis, the bi-ologist Stuart Kauffman, the Nobel-laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and others. Most recently, Hasslacher and the electrical engineerand device physicist Mark Reed have been giving me insight into the in-credible possibilities of molecular electronics.
some of Bill Joy's intellectual history here mirrors much of my own...
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- Jan 2022
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Autopoiesis is just one of several current theories of life, including the chemoton[20] of Tibor Gánti, the hypercycle of Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster,[21] [22] [23] the (M,R) systems[24][25] of Robert Rosen, and the autocatalytic sets[26] of Stuart Kauffman, similar to an earlier proposal by Freeman Dyson.[27] All of these (including autopoiesis) found their original inspiration in Erwin Schrödinger's book What is Life?[28] but at first they appear to have little in common with one another, largely because the authors did not communicate with one another, and none of them made any reference in their principal publications to any of the other theories.
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- Dec 2021
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luhmann.surge.sh luhmann.surge.sh
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Possibility of linking (Verweisungsmöglichkeiten). Since all papers have fixed numbers, you can add as many references to them as you may want. Central concepts can have many links which show on which other contexts we can find materials relevant for them.
Continuing on the analogy between addresses for zettels/index cards and for people, the differing contexts for cards and ideas is similar to the multiple different publics in which people operate (home, work, school, church, etc.)
Having these multiple publics creates a variety of cross links within various networks for people which makes their internal knowledge and relationships more valuable.
As societies grow the number of potential interconnections grows as well. Compounding things the society doesn't grow as a homogeneous whole but smaller sub-groups appear creating new and different publics for each member of the society. This is sure to create a much larger and much more complex system. Perhaps it's part of the beneficial piece of the human limit of memory of inter-personal connections (the Dunbar number) means that instead of spending time linearly with those physically closest to us, we travel further out into other spheres and by doing so, we dramatically increase the complexity of our societies.
Does this level of complexity change for oral societies in pre-agrarian contexts?
What would this look like mathematically and combinatorially? How does this effect the size and complexity of the system?
How can we connect this to Stuart Kauffman's ideas on complexity? (Picking up a single thread creates a network by itself...)
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