Systems Theory
You know, the theory of evolution is essentially a theory which is an effort to account for the large numbers of diverse plants and animals on the planet. Darwin, in his diaries, referred to what he was doing as searching for a solution to the species problem. It was not thought to have anything to do with sociology or geology, but now I think we... See more
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Terence is referencing Ilya Prigogine
And the conclusion that’s coming out of his work is that nature is not governed by eternal laws. Which is a very big piece of news in science, because it has been the assumption (really, since the Greeks) that there is a higher world of mathematical perfection and that, somehow, the world of physical appearance and substance is a shadow in Plato’s... See more
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On habit and novelty
If you take any neuroscience paper and you do a find and replace, and every time it says neuron, you just say cell, and every time it says millisecond, you say minutes or hours, you got yourself a developmental biology paper. And it works amazingly well, because there is this deep underlying symmetry between the two.
"Nothing in biology makes sense without teleology" by Michael Levin
So the universe is a thing where habit constrains but novelty overcomes that constraint. And once overcome, new levels of novelty become incorporated into the old set of constraints. I mean, like, for instance, take Manhattan. Manhattan is an incredibly novel addition to the geography of southern New York. And yet, once in place, it has its rules.... See more
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Mentioned: David Deutsch, “Constructor Theory”; John Cramer, ‘The Quantum Handshake’; Bootstrap paradox; Sean Carroll
“Our understanding of cause and effect may be biased, and may not be a fundamental law of nature”
in a sense, you could almost say that Darwin was the first chaos theorist. Because they discovered—the people; Darwin and his school—that you could take two processes which are both random, and that by running these two random processes together you could attain striking examples of order and symmetry and beauty. And to them this proved that God is... See more
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Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
—John Stuart Mill
—John Stuart Mill
Henrik Karlsson • Everything That Turned Out Well in My Life Followed the Same Design Process
I believe—and again, these are bold generalizations, but generally substantiated—that nature is fractal in its structure. What that means is that a pattern occurring on a given scale can be expected to occur on other scales; very different. Simple example: an atom is a nucleus with electrons spinning around it. A solar system is a star with atoms... See more
Culture and Ideology are not Your Friends
Would it be wrong to call this some kind of multi-layer competency architecture?
every technology carries utterly unpredictable consequences. Nobody dreamed that the automobile would create a sexual revolution because it’s a rolling bedroom. Nobody dreamed that the automobile would destroy the extended family, that people would move hundreds and hundreds of miles from [each other]. The automobile created the suburb. McLuhan, on... See more
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McKenna being a “McLuhanite”
(I’m still not over the fact that he calls it “McLuhanite” when “McLuhanist” is obviously more correct. A rare lapse in aesthetic judgement by Terence :P )