The Fractal Path

Our Fractal, Algorithmic Nature

Being as we are at the verge or perhaps in the middle of that threshold or bifurcation of our own destiny, it is hard if not impossible to observe with parsimony the course of action. In that liminal state where turbulence becomes organized into myriad eddies and flows and the “singularity” approaches, every theory or hypothesis seems to have some validity since the information or data we analyze is particular to our point of view and seldom encompasses a bigger picture.

Gregory Bateson, reminiscing about the Macy conferences,1 goes further by suggesting that we never know the world as such. He states that “We are our epistemology” since we only perceive and understand the world through what our sensory apparatus allows.

However the birthing environment of the open network where data itself acts as a “controlling agent”2 is beginning to show a pattern that is itself fed back into the system, and once the critical threshold is achieved, some theorists suggest3 it will give raise to the emergence of a machinic consciousness.

Introduction to Roboethics and Performance, Arturo Sinclair, 2008

1 It was at the Macy Conferences that Norbert Wiener coined the term ‘cybernetics’.

2 Manuel Delanda, “War in the age of intelligent machines” Swerve Editions, New York 1991, p163

3 Hofstadter ,"Godel, Escher, Bach" Zenon Pylyshyn, Mind Design Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing