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I've followed this thinking for awhile. I understand it as Complexity Science thinking, as espoused by the Santa Fe Institute. It's always struck me as the styl

by patcon 6y ago

I've followed this thinking for awhile. I understand it as Complexity Science thinking, as espoused by the Santa Fe Institute. It's always struck me as the style of thinking that biomimicry is but a small subset of. It feels like a way of thinking that elevates analogy between domains up to the level of partial knowledge. And I understand it as being more about generalized properties of networks -- seeing networks that "rhyme", even in totally different domains and strata. Operating within these frameworks feels like looking at one of those 3D Magic Eye images. "Oh, if I cross my eyes a bit, I can see that death is simply a repeatedly discovered pattern that emerged in virtually all living networks, and death is just a process of collapsing/compressing a complex network agent into a lower dimensional representation that will be referential to other agents. And so how does this repeatedly successful pattern bear on how I should build a government? Or my organization? etc etc" EDIT: I also find myself curious whether this truth is why we have this predisposition to see beauty in allegory and metaphor and poetics. Maybe our deep history and evolution knows that these things constitute a fuzzy sort of real knowledge. Maybe our biology knows better than us that networks share structure at various levels, and connecting them through linguistic bridges has always served us and made our collective will more powerful.

jgilias 6y ago
I also believe this kind of thinking can have very real practical applications. As a trivial example, say you look at a criminal organization and treat it as a living system. Then you can identify what kind of failure modes there exist in living systems in general and how these can be forced, and then use these insights to incapacitate the organization. Granted, I'd expect that most of these forced failures, say destroying or overloading their communications channels, will already be known to practicioners of the field. However, there may be some methods that are overlooked due to how sciences dealing with other kinds of living systems are seen as completely unrelated fields living in their own silos.
ganzuul 6y ago
What does death as a representation mean?
beaconstudios 6y ago
this all ties into things like systems dynamics and cybernetics, which look at feedback loops as the fundamental structure in a system. I've been looking for the kinds of communities/fields that recognise the properties you've described and study/discuss them more in-depth, as it's something I've noticed a few years ago and am deeply interested in. It seems the peak of investigation into system properties was in the 50s, and despite the idea (or at least the meme) of cybernetics being embedded into everything futuristic/high-tech, I haven't found much actual interest/community around these ideas outside of maybe academia (which I'm not involved in, or sure how I would even access).

by patcon 6y ago

jgilias 6y ago

I also believe this kind of thinking can have very real practical applications. As a trivial example, say you look at a criminal organization and treat it as a living system. Then you can identify what kind of failure modes there exist in living systems in general and how these can be forced, and then use these insights to incapacitate the organization. Granted, I'd expect that most of these forced failures, say destroying or overloading their communications channels, will already be known to practicioners of the field. However, there may be some methods that are overlooked due to how sciences dealing with other kinds of living systems are seen as completely unrelated fields living in their own silos.

ganzuul 6y ago

What does death as a representation mean?

beaconstudios 6y ago

this all ties into things like systems dynamics and cybernetics, which look at feedback loops as the fundamental structure in a system. I've been looking for the kinds of communities/fields that recognise the properties you've described and study/discuss them more in-depth, as it's something I've noticed a few years ago and am deeply interested in. It seems the peak of investigation into system properties was in the 50s, and despite the idea (or at least the meme) of cybernetics being embedded into everything futuristic/high-tech, I haven't found much actual interest/community around these ideas outside of maybe academia (which I'm not involved in, or sure how I would even access).