At least it's an ethos?

Co-Creation: Systems Thinking Beyond the Machine

Complexity thinking is all the rage — in the arts and sciences. Yet, there are two different strands of thinking about complexity, which are often confounded. The first comes from cybernetics, focussing on control in complex situations. The second is ecological, aiming at sustainable participation in a reality beyond control. Their difference rests on a fundamental distinction: is complexity rooted in feedback regulation or collective co-creation? While feedback remains mechanistic, co-creation generates new spaces of possibilities. We need it to understand life and its evolution. And it empowers us to rewrite our future, to escape our mechanistic cage without abandoning scientific rigor. In this paper, we illustrate how we implement these powerful yet abstract principles through our artistic and philosophical practice.

Self-Control and the Theory of Consumption

To study the behavior of agents who are susceptible to temptation in infinite horizon consumption problems under uncertainty, we define and characterize dynamic self-control (DSC) preferences. DSC pr...

The AI We Deserve

Critiques of artificial intelligence abound. Where’s the utopian vision for what it could be?

Against optimization

One of the most inescapable edicts when leading a team is the order to optimize the system towards the organization’s goals.

Alexander Lerchner, The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness - PhilArchive

Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view ...

Modeling non-dual awareness via constraint closure: a reinterpretation of groundlessness

Non-dual awareness (NDA) refers to a shift in consciousness in which the usual distinction between subject and object dissolves, and experience is no longer structured by conceptual mediation or goal-directed regulation. Meling enactivist model describes NDA as a meditative disclosure of groundlessness-the recognition of emptiness (śūnyatā), that all phenomena lack intrinsic nature. While enactivism explains autonomy through process closure, this article argues that constraint closure, as developed by Nave, extends that framework by making explicit how autonomy is sustained through the continual regeneration of its own relational conditions. This refinement prevents process-closure models from being read in substantialist terms when applied to complex cognitive systems, where stability arises through ongoing transformation rather than fixed organization. Nave's account builds on Juarrero theory of constraint causality, which replaces intrinsic forces with relational conditions-a view that parallels Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka analysis of dependent origination. Integrating these perspectives, I propose that NDA corresponds to a shift from decoupled to precarious constraints, revealing that cognition and awareness persist not through intrinsic foundations but through the dynamic regeneration of interdependent relations.

Viability theory

Viability theory is an area of mathematics that studies the evolution of dynamical systems under constraints on the system state.[1][2] It was developed to formalize problems arising in the study of various natural and social phenomena, and has close ties to the theories of optimal control and set-valued analysis.

The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile - The Great Simplification

In this episode, Nate is joined by biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant to explore why living systems prioritize robustness over performance, and what that means for a civilization built almost entirely in the opposite direction.

Can AI Be Governed? Only If We Build Normatively Competent AI

Hadfield's discussion brings the idea of AI governance back to the core idea of steering the behavior of an AI system. As she notes, this not only involves technical questions about how AI systems ar...

Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, …

James Scott taught us what's wrong with seeing like a s…

Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds

"Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory by arguing for the creation of what he calls 'autonomous design'--a design practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth"--Publisher description

Alexander Lerchner, The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness - PhilPapers

Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view ...

ver.ooo

Curious about systems — how they behave, how they fail, and what they get up to when nobody is steering.

Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective

What if the most game-optimal play in the new system is actually to become relentlessly, unapologetically you?

ORGANISING PRINCIPLES — THE ALTERNATIVE

This makes the difference between a localism that cannot sustain itself because it is simply too small with limited resources of skills and expertise. And one that is able to build its own regenerative economy, entirely through access to the global commons.

The hidden ‘rules of the game’ that dictate how we navigate the world | Psyche Videos

How free are we really, if human behaviour embodies the complex, intertwined webs of society and history?