Excellent read. I can’t help but fixate on the verbiage your mother used: “a weave of complex relations that unfolds in and through the [urban] fabric”. It seems to me that this captures your own thesis that the essence of complexity is the dynamic flux of its relations. The fabric that is reality is precisely constructed by the relations between entities, that although fixed, can be shifted and changed to create a different, novel world.
This was a real ‘mind trip’. New to me but easy to understand. And, I’ll have to admit I have envy at your early exposure to a complex world. We just ‘got by’ at my house although my mother did have a bit of the ‘think bigger’ about her.
Great post. The sheer complexity of our civilization is hard to fathom. It's places in the old world where it is truly on display, the balance of modernity and culture developed in antiquity creating the silent hum of ordered chaos.
And they're so hard to decipher! That's why central planning leaves so much to be desired. When interpreting complex systems, its increasingly difficult to delineate between spandrel, emergence, and substrate.
I loved the imagery you used to illustrate your point. cheers!
I liked this a lot. Section 3 gave me distinct vibes of a strange but wonderful movie we were shown in grade school: Disney’s “Donald in Mathmagicland”.
Excellent read. I can’t help but fixate on the verbiage your mother used: “a weave of complex relations that unfolds in and through the [urban] fabric”. It seems to me that this captures your own thesis that the essence of complexity is the dynamic flux of its relations. The fabric that is reality is precisely constructed by the relations between entities, that although fixed, can be shifted and changed to create a different, novel world.
This was a real ‘mind trip’. New to me but easy to understand. And, I’ll have to admit I have envy at your early exposure to a complex world. We just ‘got by’ at my house although my mother did have a bit of the ‘think bigger’ about her.
Great post. The sheer complexity of our civilization is hard to fathom. It's places in the old world where it is truly on display, the balance of modernity and culture developed in antiquity creating the silent hum of ordered chaos.
And they're so hard to decipher! That's why central planning leaves so much to be desired. When interpreting complex systems, its increasingly difficult to delineate between spandrel, emergence, and substrate.
I loved the imagery you used to illustrate your point. cheers!
I liked this a lot. Section 3 gave me distinct vibes of a strange but wonderful movie we were shown in grade school: Disney’s “Donald in Mathmagicland”.