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Joined June 2012
- Tweets 6,116
- Following 739
- Followers 3,668
- Likes 22,053
794 Photos and videos
Jun 15
.@_awbery_ and I will be at Edge Esmeralda next week to hang and chat about our work (adaptive learning for opening awareness). Feel free to reach out or tell us who we should meet.
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Jun 15
I must elaborate. Christopher Alexander is a brilliant student of things as they appear, carefully noticing the field of care for properties and structure.
Don't read for the metaphysics / philosophy, fwiw. It's substance-monism, people have wrestled with subjective vs objective for a long time, etc. It's messy and I don't think accomplishes much for you.
Read for the phenomenology. In the author's note:
"In the same way, I have attempted to put together a workable explanation of the physical and emotional phenomena which I have observed in buildings and in the living world... Not only do we want to understand this set of phenomena, but we must also be able to reproduce them: we want to be able to create living structure in the world. Quantum mechanics would not have been of more than academic interest to a few university professors if it were not for its immense field of practical applications, such as in electronics. Here, too, in the sphere of building, we have a practical aim. We wish to create living structure in the built world; we wish to apply this model of the universe in order to reproduce the phenomena that we are interested in."
This isn't quite Popper's falsifiable-predictions claim. A theory is justified because it's workable. You can reproduce observable phenomena and build/do things!
It's useful to assume he's directionally right about the phenomenology of centers, the "I", beauty, wholeness, etc. He cared more about this than anyone I've encountered.
So there's a lot to learn from him. His workable explanation, imho, is best read as "this is how things appear" *and* "if taken as a model, you can uncover this quality that is meaningful".
The Luminous Ground is when he gently steps away from trying to work within a system of architecture to understand the generative function. And it's beautiful!
Jun 15
The Nature of Order, book 4, The Luminous Ground is as good as they say
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Jun 15
A constructive account of Alexander:
There is a natural tension between coherence (separation and wholeness), operating at every scale. His fifteen properties are its grammar.
Levels of scale, strong centers, boundaries, alternating repetition, positive space, good shape, local symmetries, deep interlock, contrast, gradients, roughness, echoes, the void, inner calm, not-separateness.
Take any seriously, and you can notice more about how coherence is showing up.
Integrated-differentiation and criticality are substrate-independent, and common across nature, because all are products of adaptive growth under constraint. As such, we're keenly tuned towards it.
And our field of care isn't limited to bounded systems. Everything we touch is dependently-originated, intimately tied together. This doesn't need any sort of extra cosmic substrate or independent field.
The book is a love letter to Alexander's (and, our) field of care.
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Jun 15
The Nature of Order, book 4, The Luminous Ground is as good as they say
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Jun 8
You can change the color temperature of your cheap but useful LEDs!
Get yourself gel filter sheets. Depending on the source color and your goals, you may want to experiment, but I like the Lee Filters Zircon Warm Amber sheets...
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Jun 8
And thus, I won't be blinding our night guests with 5000K blue light.
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Jun 9
Here's another light I've done, a bedside lamp that was putting out 3500K! Have they no eyes!?
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May 28
It's expensive, but for making indoors as bright as outside, I highly recommend the @brighterlamp.
Tunable color temp, excellent CRI, no flicker, and in the shape to produce good ambient light across the room.
I've replaced my @meaningness-inspired stadium lights.
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Andrew Conner retweeted
May 12
What does “architectural taste” actually consist of, in software development? The answer here partially generalizes to meta-rational judgments in other, dissimilar fields. meaningness.substack.com/p/c…
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Andrew Conner retweeted
May 19
Adding "Attitude and Method" after many systems contributes a lot.
e.g.: the Getting Things Done Attitude and Method; Schwarzenegger Body Building Attitude and Method.
Reminds us (a) that the method works better when it is the expression of the attitude, and (b) the method can be used to help discover the attitude, and (c) if you solidly comprehend the attitude, you can improvise and diverge from the method successfully.
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May 11
Simulated event camera, then playing with webgl shaders on the output.
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May 12
Here's one with more vibrant particles, hopefully better for Twitter.
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May 13
Starting to get somewhere interesting. Dancing is lovely because the field cycles in and out of intensity.
Next up is playing with audio.
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Apr 28
And @Meaningness and my conversation about this:
x.com/Meaningness/status/204…
Apr 28
🆕📺 New video! @connerdelights and I discuss @DrJohnVervaeke's _Meaning Crisis_ series and how it relates to my _Meaningness_ book. Very similar frames, somewhat different conclusions and recommendations!
🔗Link in reply tweet! ⤵️
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Andrew Conner retweeted
Apr 28
🆕📺 New video! @connerdelights and I discuss @DrJohnVervaeke's _Meaning Crisis_ series and how it relates to my _Meaningness_ book. Very similar frames, somewhat different conclusions and recommendations!
🔗Link in reply tweet! ⤵️
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