Currents 066: Matthew Pirkowski on Emergence in Possibility Space
Jim continues his discussion with Matthew Pirkowski on ideas of emergence and how they can be applied to today's meta-crisis. They discuss the meaning of emergence, treating potential as ontologically real, exaptation & meta-adaptation, path dependency in the history of science, the naivety of closed systems, the apparent tension between energy efficiency & energy production, how GameA status signaling limits solution space, slack in metabolism & civilization, how greater energy inputs could synchronize with regenerative agriculture, carbon tax as a signal, the infosphere substrate of human self-organization, inertia vs conertia, artifactual membranes old & new, humanity's giant exaptic leap into a new possibility space, destabilization & continuity of creative expression, the tradeoff between exploration & exploitation, unifying mathematics, thermodynamics, & free energy mathematics, systems as model-generating agents, the representation of values & the lack of telos in online interaction spaces, an invitation to collaborate, and much more.