The Adjacent Possible

“And human culture, in general, is ceaselessly creative as the biosphere and culture expand into what I call the Adjacent Possible. The point is that at levels of complexity above the atom, the universe has not had time to make all possible complex objects, such as all proteins length 200. The universe, at these levels of complexity, is on a unique trajectory. When my friend Gertrude [here Kauffman is using the  storybook name he gave the first ever flying squirrel in Earth’s evolution] flew, she changed the material and behavioral features of the evolving universe. So did Picasso.” - Kauffman, S.A., 2007. Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred. Zygon, 42(4), pp.903–914.

Fact or Value?

“…reductionism…has…left us in a world of fact — cold fact with no scientific place for value.” - Kauffman, S.A., 2007. Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred. Zygon, 42(4), pp.903–914.

Clash of symbiosis

“It is one thing for a craftsman to improve his craft. It is one thing to establish a business on the basis of an invention made by an independent inventor. It is quite another thing for an organization to undertake regular and systematic investigations which will obsolete its current products and methods of production and cause it to change in ways it is bound to find uncomfortable if not downright disastrous. It is one thing for businessmen to exploit for business the results of scientific research. It is quite another thing for business to establish a permanent living arrangement with science, and for scientists, technologists and businessmen, with their very different value systems, to enter into a kind of symbiosis quite unknown before the twentieth century.” - Schön, D.A., 1967. Technology and change: the new Heraclitus, New York, NY: Dell Publishing Company., p. xiv

If you can read this, you are posthuman

“The important intervention comes not when you try to determine which is the man, the woman, or the machine. Rather, the important intervention comes much earlier, when the test puts you into a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces. As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman.” - Hayles, N.K., 1999. How we Became Posthuman, University Of Chicago Press., p. xiv.

A misunderstanding of art and science

“This whole tired question of the correspondence between words and the world stems from a simple confusion between epistemology and the history of art. We have taken science for realist painting, imagining that It made an exact copy of the world. The sciences do something else entirely — paintings too, for that matter. Through successive stages they link us to an aligned, transformed, constructed world.” - Latour, B., 1999. Pandora's Hope, Harvard Univ Press, p. 78

Distributed Cognition

“Once thought breaks the frame of the human mind and the human subject, as it does with tool use, identity begins to unravel. Thinking does not take place within the interiority of the subject; rather, it occurs in the contact among the surfaces of user, tool, and environment. As a consequence of taking distributed cognition seriously, humans are no longer the beings who think but rather the things who think alongside and in accord with computational prosthetics.” - Broglio, R., 2008. Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750-1830, Bucknell University Press., p. 22.

From things to objects

“Technology and art make things sensible by transforming the world out there into inscriptions or intelligible signs on flat surfaces. Inscriptions such as writings, drawings, paintings, maps, and figures change the ‘stuff’ found in nature into simple, distinct objects with characteristics that humans can comprehend. The move from things (with their opaque materiality) to objects (as intelligible and abstract sums) brings nature into culture and imbues elements of nature with a halo of social meaning.” - Broglio, R., 2008. Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750-1830, Bucknell University Press., p. 15.