A papal document. 1329. In agro dominico, In the Field of the Lord. Twenty-eight propositions condemned. A man’s life’s work declared heretical by the highest authority in the Western world. The man himself was already dead. They condemned him anyway. That is the first thing…
There is a pattern in the history of ideas that is rarely talked about directly. A thinker produces something genuinely new. Something at a different structural level entirely, a framework that the existing structure cannot hold without cracking. The institution encounters it. The institution is…
Link to YouTube Video Plato and Aristotle opposed each other for 2,400 years. They built two of the most complete philosophical systems in Western history. They disagreed on almost everything fundamental: the nature of reality, the direction of truth, where knowledge lives, what the world…
Most people are very clear about what they want. Or at least believe they are. Ask someone what they want from a difficult conversation and they’ll tell you immediately, I want them to understand my position. Ask what they want from a career change and…
Perturbation versus instruction: the difference between triggering change and specifying change. Living systems cannot receive instructions, only perturbations that their organization determines how to process. Perturbation: an interaction that triggers structural change in an autopoietic system. The environment perturbs. The system’s organization determines what structural…
The Void, Zero Before we count, we must acknowledge what comes before one. The Greeks called it ‘apeiron’, the unlimited, the indefinite. The void is not nothing. It is the field of all possibilities. Every number emerges from this infinite potential. Zero is the womb…