Thinking about thinking about feedback

Thinking about thinking about feedback

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...

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Cybernetics of Cybernetics Button

Cybernetics of Cybernetics Button

I made this button for all those people out there who want to keep complexity complex, who understand that feedback is the name of the game, and that the main rule of the game is that the rules must continually be modified.  If you know about Calvinball, you know what I'm talking about: a...

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Recursive Frame Analysis 2

Recursive Frame Analysis 2

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Recursive Frame Analysis 1

Recursive Frame Analysis 1

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Francisco Varela and Ethical Know-How

Francisco Varela and Ethical Know-How

This post is about bringing forth a different way of speaking about ethics, which is usually bogged down with a load of ridiculously unquestioned Western philosophical THOUGHT baggage, which keeps ethics locked nicely away in principles which themselves are never acted, only known. For this reason, Varela's idea that perception is based in ACTION is...

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Conversation, Conversion, and Transdisciplinarity

Every conversation can lead to conversion; to a new context, a different way of perceiving, a step out of habitual patterns of thinking that we unknowingly carry with us or alternately identify as self.  As one who attempts to live with Morin's "new way of thinking", one is never converted; one can only be...

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Goethean Phenomenology, Soul Breathing, and Transformation

Goethean phenomenology acts as a transformative bridge between the researcher and a topic of inquiry.  The method is unique not in that it attempts to work through the subject/object split, but rather in the WAY it attempts to do this. Doing Goethean phenomenological research requires that one be completely open to what presents itself, while...

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Water through transdisciplinarity and alchemy

Edgar Morin, who calls for a transdisciplinary way of thinking, wrote an amazing short essay entitled "A New Way of Thinking". (A New Way of Thinking.pdf)  One of the principles of this new way of thinking involves recognizing that wholes and parts are mutually interactive:  "properties emerge from the organization of a whole and may...

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Gasp! Newton LIED to you about his three laws of motion!

I've been thinking about the co-existence of multiple descriptions of reality lately.  In particular, as someone who has taught high-school physics, I run up against a philosophical quandary when I'm presenting, say Newton's laws of motion.  Am I presenting a lie to the students, because quantum mechanics and general relativity replaced the Newtonian physics? On...

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Organs of Perception

Basarab Nicolescu is a physicist and proponent of transdisciplinarity.  In the book of the same name (which he edited), he speaks of multiple "levels of Reality", which are accompanied by multiple "levels of perception". These two complementary duals form, on the one hand, what he calls the "transdisciplinary object" and on the other the...

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is reliance upon dualism hardwired?

I wonder about the extent to which dichotomous thinking is either hard-wired or at least dependent on completely non-social forces.  It seems almost to be a thermodynamic question, that is, a question of trying to optimize the amount of energy spent in thinking for a given situation.  Thinking is a very expensive activity, physiologically...

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