If you are interested in the technosphere and are in the UK or environs, consider the workshop described below. The questions it will address include many of relevance to the topic of this blog. Technosphere:Continue reading
3.5 The Rule of Provision
If a system is defined by the collective actions of its parts, one may still ask why the parts should cooperate to create collective effects? And, especially if there are very many parts in the system,Continue reading
Interlude on Semiotics: an exchange with Professor Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
On the connection between the technosphere and culture, between science and humanism–the boundary that must be addressed in any full attempt to deal with environmental challenges of the Anthropocene. Professor Herrmann-Pillath (an economist and philosopherContinue reading
3.4 The Rule of Performance
My discussion of a regulative framework for systems begins with a rule that applies to system parts. Recall that a system is a set of parts that dissipates energy through participation of those parts inContinue reading
3.3 Regulative and constitutive rules
Dynamical systems are composed of parts that participate in organized behavior that persists through many internal time cycles. The coherence of action of a set of parts that otherwise might have no relation to oneContinue reading
3.2 Technosphere Now
In this essay I sketch out a physical framework for the technosphere, Earth’s newest sphere. My goal is to articulate some of the implications of being human in the Anthropocene, given our inescapable role as partsContinue reading
3.1 What I mean by a system
I take a system to be a recognizable set of parts that dissipates energy through participation of those parts in mutual collective (organized) behavior. Parts can be systems (subsystems). The technosphere is a system ofContinue reading
2.5 Three revolutions
The “two revolutions” projected at the end of my last post are expanded here to “three revolutions”. These are major transformations that bear emphasizing among a large number of significant changes over time in howContinue reading
2.4 Breaking the Anthropocene Illusion
The Anthropocene Illusion–that human agency is the driving force of the modern world–helps us navigate that world at human scale. It makes clear the connection between our desires and the actions we take to achieveContinue reading
2.3 The Anthropocene Illusion
The Anthropocene Epoch has been proposed as a name for the current phase of Earth history. Used in this sense it is a geological term. Taking the Anthropocene seriously as a geological concept offers theContinue reading