From the category archives:

Philosophy

Coincidence, Randomness, and Meaning

by Seth on November 30, 2009

Maybe you’ve had this experience:  You are thinking about an acquaintance that you haven’t thought about in a long time and at that moment the phone rings.  ”What are the odds that it’s Jerry?” you think to yourself.  And when it IS Jerry on the other line it seems somehow magical, amazing, beyond mere chance. [...]

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Feedback and levels of description, or: What MPEG2 compression can teach you about cybernetics and epistemology

by Seth on October 30, 2009

A fellow student pointed out recently to me that compression algorithms are an excellent way to see feedback at work, and used the example of mpeg2 video compression.  Here we have a system that utilizes multiple levels of abstraction and feedback in order to efficiently compress video data.
I will give you a picture or two [...]

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Thinking about thinking about feedback

by Seth on October 23, 2009

Ok I’ve been thinking about feedback.
One thing that struck me as interesting was that feedback, as a concept, seems to assume two things (and probably more): 1) step-wise time (and thus some kind of “state” in which a system can be identified, and thus 2) some kind of ‘levels’ within and between systems, in part [...]

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Chaos theory and fractals – 5/4 (!?!)

by Seth on September 28, 2009

A response to the question: “How is chaos theory non-determinant?”
This is an interesting question, because I think it might normally be asked in the opposite way: “How is chaos theory DETERMINANT?”, because chaos theory is, well, chaotic, so it seems more logical to connect chaos with non-determinancy than with determinancy.
So to explore the question that wasn’t really [...]

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Rudolf Steiner and Sri Aurobindo: A Beginning Comparison

by Seth on August 16, 2009

I’ve added a new paper to the Spirit Alchemy site.  A cursory Google search didn’t turn up anything promising in regards to comparing Rudolf Steiner and Sri Aurobindo.  Hopefully this will help:
Rudolf Steiner and Sri Aurobindo: A Beginning Comparison
Summary:
This longer essay summarizes the basic elements of the spiritual-cosmological worldviews of two of [...]

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