Currents 053: Matthew Pirkowski on Grammars of Emergence

Jim talks with Matthew Pirkowski about new frameworks in the study of emergence. They discuss the concept's roots in the work of J.S. Mill, 19th-century tensions between reductionism & vitalism, Terrence Deacon's ententional properties, ententionality as a result of constraints, giving reality status to relations, pruning rules as key to emergence, possibility space as unconstrained, chirality, spin glasses, viewing the Ukraine-Russia conflict in terms of preference regimes, communication speeds & emergence in the French Revolution, viscosity in political systems, Ilya Prigogine's dissipative structures, using waste as energy, emergence without emergencies, complexity catastrophe & viscosity, social media platforms as memetic reactors, race-to-the-bottom dynamics in social media, the possibility of non-trivial positivity within volatile online spaces, knowing communities by their fruits, grammars of differentiation vs grammars of integration, the project of synthesizing hyper-specialized languages, and much more.