Fractal Ontology: Minds, Brains and Catalysis

29.5.07

Minds, Brains and Catalysis

Christopher Davia has published an absolutely wild e-book which expands on the systems-cybernetic model of Maturana and Varela. The paper covers autopoesis, fractal catalysis and the ontology of consciousness, and has been made available through Carnegie-Mellon's psychology department.

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Welcome to Fractal Ontology!

Have your dreams ever frightened you awake?

Welcome! You've found Fractal Ontology, a collective weblog representing the work of a group of graduate and undergraduate students in science and philosophy.

Our idea is this: it is possible to plot a course, through critical theory, towards a unified understanding of cybernetics, language and society.

Our task: tracing connections between and across diverse fields and disciplines, but most importantly: psychoanalysis, theoretical biology, philosophy and artificial intelligence.

[ why all this? ]

Why "fractal" ontology?

Simply put, I believe that our way of understanding Being is fractured. This means that we need to ask the question of being in a new way. But first we have to understand the consequences of this break. Let's start with the following thesis: traditional ontology is an atheistic process of conquest. There is, within those churning wheels or re-education and co-optation, a reduction of the Other to the Same, where we reinscribe the transcendent as a coincident. Only through such ruthless and arcane methods and 'measurements' are we able to trick speculative metaphysics into "comprehending" the non-thinkable. It's not that we have too much metaphysics, and have strayed from reality... rather, we don't have enough metaphysics, and with an inadequate conception of process and subject, reality and ourselves, we falsely seek to attain an imaginary security through a power-hungry colonization of reality...

OK, so what can we do?

Well, against such a nightmarish, apocalyptic world-view, I say we need spaces for political subjectivity without totalization, an infinite fragmentation if you will, and now I think the allusion to fractals becomes clear: in a fractal system, details unfold and unpack, and the closer you examine, the more reality unfolds, the more you realize all that was countably already-there was only a portion of the infinite still-more. Thus a "fractal ontology" would be a non-totalizing ontological orientation which critiques rather than upholds the prevailing political economy.

(While this page was named before I discovered the connection, this phrase also appears in a not entirely dissimilar sense in 'Chaosmosis' by Felix Guattari. You can read more about him as well as find detailed notes of other works under discussion at Fractal Schema.)

Fractal Ontology

29.5.07

Minds, Brains and Catalysis

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Welcome to Fractal Ontology!

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