musings

I’ve now returned from a very enjoyable trip to Amsterdam, Berlin and Leipzig. I gave a talk at the Pakhuis de Zwijger, sponsored by Karen den Hertog of Public Health Amsterdam, and Wilma Waterlander of the University Medical Centre. It…

“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves… but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.” Gilles Deleuze This quote was shared recently by Shahzad Tabassum in a Facebook post, and…

If the science of complexity, the science of open systems, gives a picture of the functioning of complex webs of inter-relating ‘things’, then we can expect this science to offer a perspective from the smallest to the largest scale. Individual…

I am part of a meditation group and this morning I was asked to start us off with a few words about Daoism – its central tenets from my perspective. This five minute recording , rather tentative, summarises two linked…

I went to a talk last Saturday in Oxford, given by Ben Ansell, author of Why Politics Fails’. It worried me. One central issue – and I challenged him on this – is his assumption that Man always acts in…

The world is still in the grip of worldviews driven by two classical – and outdated – physics theories. One, the mechanical worldview, is based on the work of Isaac Newton. Newton essentially was focused on two questions: how the…

How can we explore the complex world? If the world is complex, then ‘knowing’ that world is best approached with methods that reflect that complexity and capture its contextual, path-dependent, patterned nature.…

Peter Allen used to unsettle people back in the day by asserting that there is more than one future. I am not quite sure why people found this so upsetting other than it is another recognition of the limits to…