2007 January - The Emergent Fool

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Emergence, Government, Voting on 01 26th, 2007 | 1 Comment

This is a repost from my MySpace blog, but it really belongs here. Why Political Parties Exist, Why they are Bad, and How to Eliminate Them Voting blocs are an emergent property of representative democracies wherein each new voting issue carries with it an automatic right for each representative to vote. In...

Networks...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Levels, Networks on 01 24th, 2007 | No Comments

One useful model of how information flows between elements of a level is the mathematical abstraction of a graph, more plainly known as a network. The internet is our current exemplar, but most levels of organization are amenable to network modelling of information flow: social networks, biochemical...

Levels of Organization...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Emergence, Levels on 01 24th, 2007 | 10 Comments

One of the paradigms in complex adaptive systems thinking that has great explanatory power is the idea that there are distinct systems organized hierarchically in various levels of complexity. So, for instance, you can look at atoms as being a system at one level of organization, on top of which sits the...

This Sentence is False...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Limits of Knowledge, Models on 01 16th, 2007 | 3 Comments

Combining the notions from the last two posts — we understand only through models, and our models are mainly metaphorical — we can shed light on some of the most profound and durable philosophical and scientific debates. One such debate, that of free will versus determinism, brings with it a...

Thought as Metaphor...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Limits of Knowledge on 01 16th, 2007 | 1 Comment

Lakoff and Johnson make an incredibly convincing argument that the majority of human “understanding”, including most of conscious analytical thought, is achieved by a highly innate and irrevocably ingrained mechanism of metaphor. We understand one thing by treating it as if it were another thing...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Limits of Knowledge on 01 16th, 2007 | 4 Comments

As much as I strive to get at the “truth” in whatever I do, I hate the word. I prefer to acknowledge that everything we know about the universe is based on the models (aka theories) which are imperfect. As we study more about a system, we refine our models, we take models from other systems and...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Limits of Knowledge on 01 16th, 2007 | 2 Comments

If you truly believe in God or if you are a staunch Atheist, you will not get anything out of reading further than this sentence....

Can we cure cancer?...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Cancer on 01 14th, 2007 | 2 Comments

In my previous post I paraphrased my understanding of why the cancer workshop was called as the premise: “cancer is an evolutionary process; the cure for cancer is within reach, and is mostly an engineering problem now that we have the right model; and what can we do collectively to work towards and...

Prelude...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Cancer, Point of Order on 01 12th, 2007 | 6 Comments

The last two days I attended a conference that I was attracted to because the organizers and I have been conversing lately on a subject of interest, namely the idea that “cancer is an evolutionary process; the cure for cancer is within reach, and is mostly an engineering problem now that we have the...