Life ≙ Feedback Loops

A spark in the noise. From the first self‑replicating strand to a hi‑frequency trading bot, every living system survives by closing information loops: sense → compare → act → sense again. When the inward torrent of signals outruns the outward shocks, order endures; when the loop breaks, entropy collects its debt. Life, throughout this book, is nothing more (and nothing less) than feedback strong enough to pay its own thermodynamic bills.

If a pattern can correct its own errors faster than the universe can erase it, the pattern lives.

This view lets microbes, forests, nervous systems, and—yes—markets sit on the same continuum: each refines internal models to stay one step ahead of surprise. Chapters 1 – 4 trace how those loops scale from cell to civilisation.

Markets ≙ Information Processors

Prices are packets. Long before silicon, the price system computed the uncomputable: who should grow wheat, where, and at what time‑discount? A single number at the farm gate already encodes soil chemistry, rail tariffs, futures sentiment, and next month’s weather rumours. The market, in our lexicon, is an unconscious super‑computer that routes scarcity messages faster than any ministry could draft memos.

Once we accept markets as processors, booms and busts appear as latency spikes or bandwidth throttles—the same pathologies that plague digital networks. Chapters 5 – 10 ride this metaphor through Rome, railroads, television, and the iPhone.

Culture ≙ Externalised Imagination

Shared hallucination, scalable. Every story, law, or user‑interface is a projection of mental imagery onto a public screen—cave wall, parchment, widescreen, or VR headset. These projections let individual brains pool models and coordinate at planetary scale. Culture, then, is humanity’s distributed imagination rendered in image, symbol, and code.

When new media lower the cost of projection, the collective dreamscape thickens: posters breed cinema; television breeds social feeds; today’s generative AI breeds self‑spawning memes. The final chapters watch that thickening reach its current horizon—and ask what happens when machines start dreaming back.

If life is feedback and markets are routers, culture is the packet payload: the story we swap to justify the trade.

CORE OPERATORS

A Margin Glossary for Rapid Recall

Icon	Term	Field Origin	One‑Sentence Use‑Case
🔄	Renormalisation	Physics → complex systems	When internal chatter outnumbers external shocks, a subsystem seals into its own scale (cell → organ → firm → nation).
📈	Volatility	Finance ↔ info‑theory	The measurable jitter when a system digests new data; high volatility = rapid learning or panic.
🌀	Simulacrum	Baudrillard	A symbol that no longer points to an original, only to other symbols—e.g., Disneyland’s Main Street vs. any real 1900s town.
⚡	Bandwidth	Telecomm	Channel capacity; who gets how much attention, how fast.
🕳️	Computational Irreducibility	Wolfram	A process whose outcome can’t be shortcut; the only way out is through.
🧩	Feedback Loop	Cybernetics	Sense → compare → act → sense; the atomic motor of life, markets, & AI.
🪙	Price Packet	Austrian econ	A scalar summarising distributed knowledge about supply & demand.
🧠	Externalised Imagination	Media theory	Any artefact (myth, code, video) that lets one brain borrow another’s model of the world.