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Being Human in the Anthropocene

Being Human in the Anthropocene

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Peter Haff
December 21, 2018December 21, 2018 Peter HaffFaculty

4.1 What is a part?

An inquiry into the nature of parts, begun here, will lead to several new regulative rules that are useful in technosphere analysis. The discussion is abstract, as is usually the case when working at theContinue reading

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Peter Haff
October 31, 2018 Peter HaffFaculty

Technosphere workshop

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

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Peter Haff
October 12, 2018October 12, 2018 Peter HaffFaculty

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

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Peter Haff
October 5, 2018 Peter HaffFaculty

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

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Peter Haff
September 18, 2018September 18, 2018 Peter HaffFaculty

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

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Peter Haff
June 20, 2018June 20, 2018 Peter HaffFaculty

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

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Peter Haff
June 11, 2018June 11, 2018 Peter HaffFaculty

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

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Peter Haff
May 29, 2018May 29, 2018 Peter HaffFaculty

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

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Peter Haff
May 15, 2018May 25, 2018 Peter HaffFaculty

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

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Peter Haff
May 7, 2018May 25, 2018 Peter HaffFaculty

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

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About Peter

Peter Haff is a geologist, civil engineer, and physicist trying to expand our view of humans in the Anthropocene. The big picture is that humans are contingent components tied to the dynamics of a newly emerged Earth sphere—the technosphere. Read More >

Being Human in the Anthropocene

“Being Human in the Anthropocene” focuses on constructing a physical framework for analyzing the challenges humans face as obligate components of the technosphere system.

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