Systems Theory
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
Build Your Own Damn Wagon
Conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. I mean, isn’t it so simple to believe that things are run by the Greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and we can solve our technological problems. Or, isn’t it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party,... See more
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
Terence McKenna
I think law allows freedom because freedom means you go outside of law. But law doesn’t allow novelty, exactly. That’s a slightly different concept. So if you take seriously this idea that the concept of law can be replaced by the idea of habit, then suddenly you’re not in a Newtonian machine, a soulless cuckoo clock of natural laws. What you’re... See more
Build Your Own Damn Wagon
Schismogenesis, you’ll recall, describes how societies in contact with each other end up joined within a common system of differences, even as they attempt to distinguish themselves from one another.
David Graeber • The Dawn of Everything
Reminds me of the “narcissism of small differences”
Memes are the smallest units of a concept. And they’re like genes. The word is deliberately constructed to rhyme with gene. And so when I say, “Every woman should consider having only one child,” that’s a meme. And that meme goes out into society, where it competes with the family values meme, the gay lifestyle meme, the celibacy meme—they all... See more
Build Your Own Damn Wagon
Information theory, memes, genes
Habit and novelty are the new—or what I would propose as the two concepts that are rising out of a synthesis of twentieth-century experience as the new defining terms of a universal paradigm
Build Your Own Damn Wagon
This is the “double diamond”, and that’s interesting for “design thinking” because it shows the “problem space” and the “solution space”. But the big picture is that there is alternation between divergence and convergence. And it goes on forever.
That’s one purpose of my research: to be an additive medium through which I can contribute to the graph of human knowledge my humble little node which draws from many others before me, and from which maybe someone in the future can draw upon as they create theirs.
alexanderobenauer.com • How I approach my core work
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