*Wow. This stuff is hard to beat for High Bonkers. It reads like Rudy Rucker with a parametrics and a hard-hat.
http://metamorf.no/?p=2036&lang=en
(...)
"We are currently witnessing a change in the way we imagine the ordering of the world away from the Enlightenment ideals. Boundaries that were once consolidated by duality –machine/human, man/woman, and organic/inorganic – are now incontrovertibly blurred. We live in a world of definable probability that is entangled in networks of continuous exchange in which life and matter evolve continually. This is more than an intellectual fashion but has been precipitated by infrastructural changes in the way we live. We find ourselves at the event horizon of a generation of globally connected, digital natives whose day-to-day understanding of reality is complex, strange, disobedient and full of paradoxes. The Internet has provided us all access to a reality enframed by complexity, in which abstracted representations have created the language of possibility of a new way of imagining the world. Online, contradictions seamlessly coexist and are an extension of our natural selves. We can be in two places simultaneously, or inhabit different characters without confusion and although it does not matter if you are a dog, a tin man, or a chat bot – it does matter just how well we’re connected. The scientific understanding of these networks has been termed ‘complex systems’ and has developed over the course of the twentieth century in the disciplines of theoretical physics, mathematics, cybernetics and ecology. Yet its significance has only burst through the fabric of our mechanistic reality with the rise of modern computing. The information highways of cyberspace have provided the infrastructure that made complexity ‘real’ by enabling us to describe, diagram, image and imagine how this new world is constructed. With advances in processing power and speed we’ve documented network topologies and have started to observe recognisable structures such as, veined mushroom clouds of connections that explode upwards to the megascale and downwards to the nanoscale. Complexity can be seen in the mapping of many kinds of everyday systems, which may be as diverse as – the metabolism of cells, air traffic flight patterns or the movement of people around cities. Its unique qualities are more than simply speculative connections between things – they are embodied in these relationships. Theoretical physicist Albert-László Barabási has characterised the behaviour of complex systems as being surprisingly stable, conservative, robust and resilient. Yet they also have the capacity to be ceaselessly creative and unpredictable. Complexity is a conservative force with revolutionary potential.
"While the tools of cyberspace allow us to glimpse at the information structures of this world, quantum physics has facilitated an understanding of how complexity functions in material terms...." (((etc etc what th' etc)))
