lately, a number of people have asked me, "what exactly is a living system?"
in answer to this question, i can only offer this sprawling stream of consciousness narrative about Information Theory, Living Systems, the Mysteries of Pluto, the State of the World & the Outsider...
initially, i am often inclined to respond to such queries with a list of characteristics like that which can be found in the wikipedia entry for "life."
"Living organisms are capable of growth and reproduction, some can communicate and many can adapt to their environment through changes originating internally. A physical characteristic of life is that it feeds on negative entropy.
An entity with the above properties is considered to be a living organism, hence, a 'life form'. However, not every definition of life considers all of these properties to be essential. For example, the capacity for evolution is sometimes taken as the only essential property of life; this definition notably includes viruses, which do not qualify under narrower definitions as they are acellular and do not metabolize.
A diverse array of living organisms can be found in the biosphere on Earth. Properties common to these organisms - plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea and bacteria - are a carbon-and water-based cellular form with complex organization and heritable genetic information. They undergo metabolism, possess a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and, through natural selection, adapt to their environment in successive generations."
although i will also admit that after considering so many of these paradigm shifts in conceiving of biological systems... such as those suggested by Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology ...i'm honestly not sure what *isn't* a living system anymore!
and since we have observed DNA-like helical structures in plasma, then it seems that even the stars themselves can be said to be alive!
perhaps the whole cosmos is a living system, eh? ;~}
--
but, here is what really got me started writing this screed:
Bruce Sterling has indicated that @ Plutopia, among other things, he will be speaking about his new project, The User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets...
So, I started wondering about what other things he might discuss, and these are the first few things that came to my mind:
...perhaps reference to the recent paradigm shift from the Viridian Design Movement?
...possibly mention of how people are transcending the first world to become tech-nomadic & find themselves developing mutually beneficial relationships with the disenfranchised fourth-worlders without homes
at all?
...even coverage of how people are becoming inspired to participate in creating community economies of barter & shared resources since they don't trust the international political & macro-economic systems?
...maybe some general references to alternative economies?
then, i went back & read the Well's "State of the World, 2009" conference & I came up with this list of possible topics:
co-working facilities, make-and-do labs, hacker spaces, barnraisings, neighborhood charrettes, culture jamming and a New Alchemy Insitute on every block... hardware commons and instructables... farmer's markets, community gardens and food co-ops... whole nutrition & preventative medical care... ecological restoration & rewilding... open source development (not only in programming, but also in arts, medicine, politics, business, education)... sustainability & peer-to-peer networks... the long tail, translocal communities & commons-based peer production... emergent symbiosis, evolving cooperation, and developing mutually beneficial synergies... worldchanging philanthropy, humanitarianism, & volunteerism... green tech development (& a "war vs. oil?") & zero energy, zero waste, low carbon output... no more preaching to the choir (illuminating the opposition?)... a pragmatic synthesis of the "whole-earth" ethos with market realities... post-scarcity, post-consumer... voluntary simplicity, doing more with less, ephemeralization & the design science revolution... boycotting products with high fructose corn syrup & partially hydrogenated oils... and the ease of reformatting industrial civilization ;~}
...also we could benefit from probably some discussion of resilient communities vs. growing rogue paramilitary micronations & impending thermonuclear doom?
...what about the upcoming solar maximum?
...the precession of the equinox?
...& global climate change?
...as well as alignment with the black hole @ our galactic center, or even the distantly possible creation of microscopic black holes by the LHC?
while I was contemplating all of this, I started musing about some references to Jack Parsons's invocations of Pan
and oddly enough, I have been reading about Pan in the context of the Rites of Eleusis & researching possible relationships between other mystery traditions that could date back into prehistoric times...
--
I have to admit that I have been wanting to mention this for a while, and it's been weighing upon my mind lately, rather a lot... that after all, it was *Pluto* who took Kore into the Underworld!
q.v. the Eleusinian Mysteries:
So, I was looking into some revisionist spins on that old story, recently:
Lunar Tunes Astrology: Jeffrey Kishner's cosmic ramblings:
Persephone was not abducted into the Underworld. She entered of her own free will.
Goddess in a Teapot - Celebrating Spirituality and Art in Women's Everyday Lives:
Every Woman Is a Storyteller (another version of the Persephone and Demeter tale)
I begin to wonder if perhaps we are engaging in a process which is somewhat akin to some of the teachings of ancient mystery cults that initiated people into the knowledge of how to recognize & integrate our dreams & shadows into ubiquitous consciousness awareness, so that we may shine our light of star-stuff all the brighter in the darkness of the void, while we compare & contrast our evolving artifice of organization to the beautifully chaotic nature of the cosmos!
***Somehow, it seems ironically appropriate to me that Plutopia would represent so many "outsider" artists!***
But perhaps I will first need to share
some of my background notes about Yuggoth (Pluto):
I have to admit that when I read these lines from the Well's "State of the World, 2009" conference...
"When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable."
On that note, I couldn't help but dwell upon some Mythos Lore about "the Magnum Innominandum" and related issues...
For instance...
(I)t was in _The Whisperer in Darkness_ (written in September of 1930), that HPL drops the hint about the real importance of Yuggoth (Pluto):
"But Yuggoth, of course, is only the stepping-stone. The main body of the beings inhabit strangely organized abysses wholly beyond the utmost reach of any human imagination. The space-time globule which we recognize as the totality of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine infinity which is theirs."
Okay, if you weren't already aware of any of this lore, then you must know that:
...The Outer Ones originated in a black cosmos outside time and space, far outside the Einsteinian space-time continuum or greatest known cosmos [HPL Whisperer 228, 254].
...Pseudo-Akeley said that the Outer Ones have an increasing desire to make themselves known to humanity and establish peaceful coexistence, now that mankind's increasing knowledge is making it more and more
difficult for the Outer Ones' outposts to exist secretly on this planet [239]. The Outer Ones apparently inspired humanity to discover Yuggoth (the planet Pluto)...
...According to pseudo-Akeley, there is a secret cult of men who oppose the Outer Ones. Pseudo-Akeley linked them to Hastur and the Yellow Sign, and claimed that the cult works on behalf of monstrous powers from other dimensions [239]...
This is an important point... that the Outer Ones are opposed (for whatever unknown reason... maybe conflict over resources or perhaps even ideology?) by Hastur (who has often been mistaken for the "real" Magnum Innominandum) & the brotherhood of the Yellow Sign (which are often conceived of as entities motivated by the forces of ignorance, entropy, and fear).
The "Outer Ones" were also enemies of the "Old Ones" (aka the "Elder Things" or the "Great Race of Yith"), who supposedly concocted earth life as a joke or mistake:
...It seems that at some point, the collective forces of a rather Socialist-like uprising within the society of the servitor race known as the Shoggoths also contributed to the downfall of the Old Ones. ;~}
I am also reminded of how adversarial cultures can organize slaves to revolt against their masters, as in the Spanish overthrow of the Aztec & Incan Empires; or the the Xtian assimilation of pagani/heathen, that lead to the decline & fall of the Roman Empire!
--
"My theory about why 'The Call of Cthulhu' and Lovecraft's fiction resonate so strongly with people," (Greg) Stafford says, "is that despite being set in an arbitrary, impersonal, cruel universe, they show that small, individual acts of dignity and goodness are possible." - from _Return of the Weird_ by Zack Stentz (q.v. the truth is OUT THERE! ...emphasis à la cosmic proto-existentialism)
--
this sort of discourse always reminds me of the Mission Statement from "Grammatical Man," Jeremy Campbell's excellent book about the development of Information Theory:
"Biologists as well as philosophers have suggested that the universe, and the living forms it contains, are based on chance, but not on accident. To put it another way, forces of chance and of antichance coexist in a complementary relationship. The random element is called entropy, the agent of chaos, which tends to mix up the unmixed, to destroy meaning. The nonrandom element is information, which exploits the uncertainty inherent in the entropy principle to generate new structures, to inform the world in novel ways.
Information theory shows that there are good reasons why the forces of antichance are as universal as the forces of chance, even though entropy has been presented as the overwhelmingly more powerful principle. The proper metaphor for the life process may not be a pair of rolling dice or a spinning roulette wheel, but the sentences of a language, conveying information that is partly predictable and partly unpredictable. These sentences are generated by rules which make much out of little, producing a boundless wealth of meaning from a finite store of words; they enable language to be familiar yet surprising, constrained yet unpredictable within its constraints.
Sense and order, the theory says, can prevail against nonsense and chaos. The world need not regress toward the simple, the uniform, and the banal, but may advance in the direction of richer and more complex structures, physical and mental. Life, like language, remains 'grammatical.' The classical view of entropy implied that structure is the exception and confusion the rule. The theory of information suggests instead that order is entirely natural: grammatical man inhabits a grammatical universe."
--
Attempting to summarize this ramshackle exegesis... I can only say that I think that increasing the recognition & celebration of "outsider" art & artists (such as through the Plutopia event) represents perhaps the most viable strategy we have as an option for encouraging diversity in our culture, which is so crucial for the survival & evolution of our living systems!
initially, i am often inclined to respond to such queries with a list of characteristics like that which can be found in the wikipedia entry for "life."
"Living organisms are capable of growth and reproduction, some can communicate and many can adapt to their environment through changes originating internally. A physical characteristic of life is that it feeds on negative entropy.
An entity with the above properties is considered to be a living organism, hence, a 'life form'. However, not every definition of life considers all of these properties to be essential. For example, the capacity for evolution is sometimes taken as the only essential property of life; this definition notably includes viruses, which do not qualify under narrower definitions as they are acellular and do not metabolize.
A diverse array of living organisms can be found in the biosphere on Earth. Properties common to these organisms - plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea and bacteria - are a carbon-and water-based cellular form with complex organization and heritable genetic information. They undergo metabolism, possess a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and, through natural selection, adapt to their environment in successive generations."
although i will also admit that after considering so many of these paradigm shifts in conceiving of biological systems... such as those suggested by Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology ...i'm honestly not sure what *isn't* a living system anymore!
and since we have observed DNA-like helical structures in plasma, then it seems that even the stars themselves can be said to be alive!
perhaps the whole cosmos is a living system, eh? ;~}
--
but, here is what really got me started writing this screed:
Bruce Sterling has indicated that @ Plutopia, among other things, he will be speaking about his new project, The User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets...
So, I started wondering about what other things he might discuss, and these are the first few things that came to my mind:
...perhaps reference to the recent paradigm shift from the Viridian Design Movement?
...possibly mention of how people are transcending the first world to become tech-nomadic & find themselves developing mutually beneficial relationships with the disenfranchised fourth-worlders without homes
at all?
...even coverage of how people are becoming inspired to participate in creating community economies of barter & shared resources since they don't trust the international political & macro-economic systems?
...maybe some general references to alternative economies?
then, i went back & read the Well's "State of the World, 2009" conference & I came up with this list of possible topics:
co-working facilities, make-and-do labs, hacker spaces, barnraisings, neighborhood charrettes, culture jamming and a New Alchemy Insitute on every block... hardware commons and instructables... farmer's markets, community gardens and food co-ops... whole nutrition & preventative medical care... ecological restoration & rewilding... open source development (not only in programming, but also in arts, medicine, politics, business, education)... sustainability & peer-to-peer networks... the long tail, translocal communities & commons-based peer production... emergent symbiosis, evolving cooperation, and developing mutually beneficial synergies... worldchanging philanthropy, humanitarianism, & volunteerism... green tech development (& a "war vs. oil?") & zero energy, zero waste, low carbon output... no more preaching to the choir (illuminating the opposition?)... a pragmatic synthesis of the "whole-earth" ethos with market realities... post-scarcity, post-consumer... voluntary simplicity, doing more with less, ephemeralization & the design science revolution... boycotting products with high fructose corn syrup & partially hydrogenated oils... and the ease of reformatting industrial civilization ;~}
...also we could benefit from probably some discussion of resilient communities vs. growing rogue paramilitary micronations & impending thermonuclear doom?
...what about the upcoming solar maximum?
...the precession of the equinox?
...& global climate change?
...as well as alignment with the black hole @ our galactic center, or even the distantly possible creation of microscopic black holes by the LHC?
while I was contemplating all of this, I started musing about some references to Jack Parsons's invocations of Pan
and oddly enough, I have been reading about Pan in the context of the Rites of Eleusis & researching possible relationships between other mystery traditions that could date back into prehistoric times...
--
I have to admit that I have been wanting to mention this for a while, and it's been weighing upon my mind lately, rather a lot... that after all, it was *Pluto* who took Kore into the Underworld!
q.v. the Eleusinian Mysteries:
So, I was looking into some revisionist spins on that old story, recently:
Lunar Tunes Astrology: Jeffrey Kishner's cosmic ramblings:
Persephone was not abducted into the Underworld. She entered of her own free will.
Goddess in a Teapot - Celebrating Spirituality and Art in Women's Everyday Lives:
Every Woman Is a Storyteller (another version of the Persephone and Demeter tale)
I begin to wonder if perhaps we are engaging in a process which is somewhat akin to some of the teachings of ancient mystery cults that initiated people into the knowledge of how to recognize & integrate our dreams & shadows into ubiquitous consciousness awareness, so that we may shine our light of star-stuff all the brighter in the darkness of the void, while we compare & contrast our evolving artifice of organization to the beautifully chaotic nature of the cosmos!
***Somehow, it seems ironically appropriate to me that Plutopia would represent so many "outsider" artists!***
But perhaps I will first need to share
some of my background notes about Yuggoth (Pluto):
I have to admit that when I read these lines from the Well's "State of the World, 2009" conference...
"When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable."
On that note, I couldn't help but dwell upon some Mythos Lore about "the Magnum Innominandum" and related issues...
For instance...
(I)t was in _The Whisperer in Darkness_ (written in September of 1930), that HPL drops the hint about the real importance of Yuggoth (Pluto):
"But Yuggoth, of course, is only the stepping-stone. The main body of the beings inhabit strangely organized abysses wholly beyond the utmost reach of any human imagination. The space-time globule which we recognize as the totality of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine infinity which is theirs."
Okay, if you weren't already aware of any of this lore, then you must know that:
...The Outer Ones originated in a black cosmos outside time and space, far outside the Einsteinian space-time continuum or greatest known cosmos [HPL Whisperer 228, 254].
...Pseudo-Akeley said that the Outer Ones have an increasing desire to make themselves known to humanity and establish peaceful coexistence, now that mankind's increasing knowledge is making it more and more
difficult for the Outer Ones' outposts to exist secretly on this planet [239]. The Outer Ones apparently inspired humanity to discover Yuggoth (the planet Pluto)...
...According to pseudo-Akeley, there is a secret cult of men who oppose the Outer Ones. Pseudo-Akeley linked them to Hastur and the Yellow Sign, and claimed that the cult works on behalf of monstrous powers from other dimensions [239]...
This is an important point... that the Outer Ones are opposed (for whatever unknown reason... maybe conflict over resources or perhaps even ideology?) by Hastur (who has often been mistaken for the "real" Magnum Innominandum) & the brotherhood of the Yellow Sign (which are often conceived of as entities motivated by the forces of ignorance, entropy, and fear).
The "Outer Ones" were also enemies of the "Old Ones" (aka the "Elder Things" or the "Great Race of Yith"), who supposedly concocted earth life as a joke or mistake:
...It seems that at some point, the collective forces of a rather Socialist-like uprising within the society of the servitor race known as the Shoggoths also contributed to the downfall of the Old Ones. ;~}
I am also reminded of how adversarial cultures can organize slaves to revolt against their masters, as in the Spanish overthrow of the Aztec & Incan Empires; or the the Xtian assimilation of pagani/heathen, that lead to the decline & fall of the Roman Empire!
--
"My theory about why 'The Call of Cthulhu' and Lovecraft's fiction resonate so strongly with people," (Greg) Stafford says, "is that despite being set in an arbitrary, impersonal, cruel universe, they show that small, individual acts of dignity and goodness are possible." - from _Return of the Weird_ by Zack Stentz (q.v. the truth is OUT THERE! ...emphasis à la cosmic proto-existentialism)
--
this sort of discourse always reminds me of the Mission Statement from "Grammatical Man," Jeremy Campbell's excellent book about the development of Information Theory:
"Biologists as well as philosophers have suggested that the universe, and the living forms it contains, are based on chance, but not on accident. To put it another way, forces of chance and of antichance coexist in a complementary relationship. The random element is called entropy, the agent of chaos, which tends to mix up the unmixed, to destroy meaning. The nonrandom element is information, which exploits the uncertainty inherent in the entropy principle to generate new structures, to inform the world in novel ways.
Information theory shows that there are good reasons why the forces of antichance are as universal as the forces of chance, even though entropy has been presented as the overwhelmingly more powerful principle. The proper metaphor for the life process may not be a pair of rolling dice or a spinning roulette wheel, but the sentences of a language, conveying information that is partly predictable and partly unpredictable. These sentences are generated by rules which make much out of little, producing a boundless wealth of meaning from a finite store of words; they enable language to be familiar yet surprising, constrained yet unpredictable within its constraints.
Sense and order, the theory says, can prevail against nonsense and chaos. The world need not regress toward the simple, the uniform, and the banal, but may advance in the direction of richer and more complex structures, physical and mental. Life, like language, remains 'grammatical.' The classical view of entropy implied that structure is the exception and confusion the rule. The theory of information suggests instead that order is entirely natural: grammatical man inhabits a grammatical universe."
--
Attempting to summarize this ramshackle exegesis... I can only say that I think that increasing the recognition & celebration of "outsider" art & artists (such as through the Plutopia event) represents perhaps the most viable strategy we have as an option for encouraging diversity in our culture, which is so crucial for the survival & evolution of our living systems!