Systems Theory
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”
Dissipative structures are these special situations which arise in nature where order is actually preserved far from equilibrium. That’s the technical way of saying it. In other words, equilibrium is where you get to when you let go, and then you drift toward death, disintegration, decay, equilibrium. And sooner or later, in the old paradigm, all... See more
Build Your Own Damn Wagon
This is blowing my mind. This stuff in combination with Levin’s work is very, very interesting.
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.
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
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
Build Your Own Damn Wagon
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 )
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
Build Your Own Damn Wagon
Terence is referencing Ilya Prigogine
Concomitant to the development of all this technology—chaos theory, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the work of Erich Jantsch, and Ilya Prigogine, and Ralph Abraham, and Stuart Kauffman (all these people who worked in complexity theory and perturbation of large-scale dissipative structures)—these people have secured that complex systems... See more
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By Terence McKenna