iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 04/09/2026

Or even: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 04/09/2026

www-journals-uchicago-edu.eux.idm.oclc.org/doi/10.1093/...

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 23/07/2026

When you find out that you've missed your calling in life 😢 www.cbc.ca/news/enterta...

Matt Damon describing the use of small jacked women as stunt doubles for Nolan's The Odyssey

"Then they got stuntmen who were under five feet. And so my double was a woman, a female stunt performer, who had the greatest arms I've ever seen."

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 06/05/2026

Rewilding the Web will take place @schoolofppls.bsky.social on the 28/29th May! With @philosodave.bsky.social, @anil.recoil.org + Jon Crowcroft, Elena Rovenskaya, Orit Halpern, @georgien.bsky.social, @r-emrys.bsky.social, @blaine.bsky.social + others Register: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rewilding-...

Inspired by cybernetic ecology + distributed control mechanisms, the internet’s architects believed interconnection would lead to harmonious self-organization.

50 years later, the internet is a monoculture.

In the meantime, the cybernetic paradigm has been overturned by non-mechanistic views of nature. How might these inform the cultivation of a
healthier internet?

28/29th May
G.32, 7 George Square
The University of Edinburgh

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 10/04/2026

New paper out in Adaptive Behavior! On why cognitive scientists need a better account of purposive of behaviour, why cybernetics and dynamical systems won't do the trick, and how biological autonomy might. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The aim of autopoiesis theory, as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela declared it in 1980, was to understand living systems via a ‘mechanistic’ approach that involved only what can be found ‘anywhere else in the physical world… blind material interactions governed by aimless physical laws’ (p. 74). In service of such a mission, in Maturana's words, ‘any attempt to characterise living systems with notions of purpose or function was doomed to fail’ (p. xiii).
A lot can change in a few decades. By 2002 – to the presumed horror of those who had once rejoiced at this naturalistic ‘destruction of teleology’ (Beer, 1980) – we find Varela declaring that there is in fact ‘a real teleology implied in the notion of autopoiesis’, that it is a source of ‘subjectivity, intentionality and meaning’, and thus that, ‘organisms are subjects having purposes according to values encountered in the making of their living’ (Weber & Varela, 2002).

This search for an alternative ‘science of meaning’ is, alongside the rejection of a ‘representation-first’ view of cognition, one of the central pillars that defines Varela et al.'s (1991) presentation of the enactive approach. Yet the term ‘enactivism’ is also used more loosely to refer to the endorsement of the second, anti-representationalist, pillar alone. Disagreement thus persists about whether autopoiesis supplies an adequate basis for an alternative ‘science of meaning’, and indeed whether any such basis is even needed (Barandiaran, 2017; Ward et al., 2017).
This broad tent of enactive cognitive science has been pitched across a fault line. On one side: cyberneticists, who hew to Maturana’s machinistic view within which mind may be continuous with life, but only to the extent that both are continuous with non-life and all can be subsumed within the mathematics of dynamical systems theory. On the other: ‘organicists’, who take living systems to constitute a genuinely new sort of organisation – one that is necessary for a system to be cognitive and which cannot be straightforwardly approached via the same modelling strategies used in ordinary physics.

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 23/03/2026

Reminder that you can submit an abstract to give a talk at our upcoming 'Rewilding the Web' workshop at the University of Edinburgh up until the 31st March. Details in image and alt text. Supported by @schoolofppls.bsky.social @edfuturesinstitute.bsky.social + Scotsphil

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 17/03/2026

Reminder that the deadline for talk abstract submissions for the upcoming 'Rewilding the Web' workshop at the University of Edinburgh on the 28/29th May has been extended to the 31st March. Supported by @schoolofppls.bsky.social and @edfuturesinstitute.bsky.social Details in image and alt text.

Call for abstracts: Rewilding the Web: diversity and resilience in sociotechnical infrastructure

University of Edinburgh, UK; May 28th-29th
Submission deadline: 31st March

Organizers: Kate Nave, Dave Ward

Invited Speakers:
Orit Halpern — Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures, TU Dresden
Anil Madhavapeddy — Professor of Planetary Computing, University of Cambridge
Robin Berjon — Senior Fellow, Future of Technology Institute
Elena Rovenskaya — Program Director Advancing Systems Analysis Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
Shannon Vallor (Discussant) — Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh

Inspired by visions of nature as an ecosystem of self-regulating feedback loops, the 20th-century architects of the internet proposed that a perfectly interconnected world would allow free individuals to spontaneously self-organise into harmonious networks of exchange, without any need for top-down control (Terranova, 2004; Kelly, 1994).

Fifty years later, the internet is a monoculture. Google accounts for 84% of all search queries, while 50% of cloud computing is provided by Amazon and Microsoft alone. Accordingly, technologists are increasingly calling for a ‘rewilding’ via the decentralisation of core services, in order to restore the cybernetic vision of a harmonious digital ecology (Farrell & Berjon, 2024). Yet if decentralisation alone were sufficient to ensure a flourishing ecosystem, then how could these tech monopolies have arisen in the first place? For the re-wilding of internet infrastructure to succeed, it must move beyond an outdated view of biological systems, which abstracts from the inherent mutability and precarity of organisms to treat them as no more than complex machines seeking a stable equilibrium. Fortunately, other philosophies of nature are available.

Aims: This workshop will bring together ecologists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and technologists to discuss how contemporary insights from theoretical biology and ecology can provide a richer understanding of what makes for a thriving biosphere, and how this might provide inspiration for cultivating sociotechnical infrastructure that is more resilient against co-option by monopolising tendencies.

There are 3-4 slots available for contributed talks that showcase research from any discipline that furthers the workshop's aims. If you have work you would like to present, please email a detailed abstract of 1000 words (excluding references), to Dave.Ward@ed.ac.uk/Kate.Nave@ed.ac.uk by Friday 31st March, including 'Re-wilding the Web' in the subject line. Prospective talks should be suitable for presentation in 30 minutes, allowing for 15 minutes for questions.

We hope to have some limited funding available to offset travel and accommodation costs for speakers without financial support from their institution.

Accepted speakers will be notified by 10th April

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 12/10/2025

Excited to be in the Himalayan foothills for the 39th @mindandlife.bsky.social / @mindandlifeeu.bsky.social dialogue on Minds, AI and Ethics. The livestream will be available from 9:30am Monday (India Time) - but in the meantime, here's some beautiful mountains 😍 www.mindandlife.org/events/minds...

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 10/09/2025

Certainly plenty of people in 2003 seemed to know exactly what Epstein was up to

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 10/09/2025

A decade ago, a naïver me thought Brockman's online salon 'The Edge' (funded by Epstein) was the coolest thing a scientist or philosopher could be part of. Now that admiration goes to Ivette Fuentes instead: www.science.org/content/arti...

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 10/09/2025

I don't know how well those listed actually knew Epstein (according to Giuffre, it seems Minsky at least knew him far too well) but as a fan of many of their scientific outputs, this is so bleak: Scientists: Men's 'intellectual' contributions vs Girlfriends: photos of women's naked bodies.

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 15/08/2025

Boden's "Is Metabolism Necessary" from 1999 is a brilliant critique of the functionalist abstractions of Alife: perfect for undergrads, punchy, and prescient with respect to current debates around functionalism in PhilMind. www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4...

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 13/08/2025

To celebrate postdoc appreciation week, Edinburgh is ‘piloting’ an e-card scheme, with three stunning templates. A bold scheme but I, for one, am grateful that the university cares enough to take a risk on trialling this sort of frontier technology.

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 06/08/2025

This one genuinely sounds cool enough to sabotage my writing plans for the day....

Blurb for the book Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age by Raphael Cormack

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 06/08/2025

Today's Divinity Library book of the day

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 05/08/2025

Reason 100 for working in the @uoedivinity.bsky.social library - it always has the coolest books...

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 06/07/2025

I like using Bohemian Rhapsody's screwball transitions to illustrate the need for a notion of identity as 'processual continuity', rather than 'preservation of invariants'. So its cool to discover music modellers analysing this as the "Bohemian Rhapsody problem" eceweb.ucsd.edu/~gert/papers...

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 06/03/2025

Enjoying Amazon's implication here that, in addition to being the first scientist, Anaximander was also the first man in space...

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 14/02/2025

Pretty excited by this new addition to the bookshelf... Which you can add to your own bookshelf here: www.amazon.com/Drive-Surviv... Or download for *free* here: direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 11/01/2025

You just don't get this calibre of advertising in academic journals anymore :(

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 29/11/2024

Me, when someone suggests that flexibility and hierarchical structure, are the trick for turning the feedback control of a mere thermostat into a genuinely purposeful artificial agent…

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 27/11/2024

A Drive to Survive now has a cover! Thanks to my friend Toby Logan saving the day with his design skills. Unfortunately the release has been delayed another two months, but the pre-print can be downloaded here osf.io/preprints/ps... or I’m happy to email a PDF to anyone interested!

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 25/11/2024

'A Drive to Survive' has it's first goodreads review (courtesy of Jordi Galiano) and I couldn't really have asked for a better one. www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 12/11/2024

'A Drive to Survive' is available for pre-order! mitpress.mit.edu/978026255132... And while it doesn't yet have a cover it does have some very nice blurbs from @evanthompson.bsky.social and Andy Clark, two of the philosophers who most inspired its content.

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