#originoflife #informationtheory #ComplexSystems #CollectiveBehavior #evolutionarydynamics #biogels #informationtheory #philosophy #philosophyofscience #philosophyofmaths
#qotojournal
Starting the book: The Social Logic of Space by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson. Written in 1984, it has a few comments that are dated and some that have been proven wrong but a couple important statements.
“… The structured information on which the system runs is not carried in the description mechanism but in reality itself in the spatio-temporal world. The programme does not generate reality. Reality generates the programme, one whose description is retrievable, leading to the self-reproduction of the system under generally stable conditions. Thus in effect reality is it’s own programme. The abstract description is built into the material organization of reality, which as a result has some degree of intelligibility.”
“… Every society invests a certain proportion of its material resources not in the biological perpetuation of individuals, but in the reproduction of the global society by means of special biologically irrelevant behaviors which are aimed purely at the enactment of descriptions of the society as a whole...”
Hillier, Bill, and Julienne Hanson. The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge University Press, 1984. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511597237.
I don't agree that these behaviors are "biologically irrelevant" and the notion of how humans perceive space has been turned on its head since he wrote this but I would call this book an early classic in using complex systems to understand human culture.
