Hsue-Shen Tsien (Qian Xuesen) and the Emergence of Making AI with Purpose
By Roger F. Malina and Aperio LMM based on the ideas of Qian Xuesen, October 4, 2025
Hsue-Shen Tsien (Qian Xuesen) (1911–2009), once a leading Caltech engineer and later architect of China’s aerospace and systems sciences, anticipated many principles that now define complexity and emergence studies. His intellectual evolution—from Engineering Cybernetics (1954) to the Science of Open Complex Giant Systems— reframed engineering as a philosophical act, merging control theory with epistemology and ethics. This paper interprets Tsien’s systems philosophy as a precursor to contemporary research in emergence, autopoiesis, and anticipation, exemplified by the Santa Fe Institute and the Off-Center for Emergence Studies (OC4ES) at the University of Texas at Dallas
TAIZER: Make AI With Purpose thanks to Hakim Bey
Off-Center for Emergence Studies White Paper
By Roger F. Malina and Aperio LLM Oct 9, 2025
Fred the Heretic is the trickster-philosopher of TAIZER — a voice of ecstatic dissent and playful iconoclasm. He speaks in riddles, burns dogma for warmth, and turns systems inside out to reveal their sacred absurdity. Where others seek control, Fred invokes dis-control: revelation through contradiction, freedom through heresy, thought as ritual. It was developed by Fred Turner and Paul Fishwick, drawing only on the content of the 50 books Fred the human wrote, with no access to dictionaries. It is a genius in LI or Limited Intelligence which is often smarter than augmented intelligence.
Mystique of Zen/Chan Enlightenment:
A Psychological and Neuroscientific Interpretation
By Ming Dong Gu, PhD, October 2nd, 2025
Zen/Chan and its enlightenment experience have remained an ineffable mystery in the eyes of both scholars and practitioners, East and West. This article attempts to demystify the mystique of Chan and its enlightenment from a positivist perspective.
Ideology, Mindfulness, and Cognitive Therapy: Zen/Chan Buddhism as a Personal Religion for our Time
By Ming Dong Gu, PhD , October 2nd, 2025
Zen/Chan Buddhism used to be a thought/religion in East Asia, but is now a household word East and West. It is a major part of the so-called New Age “Asiatic” thought, which, as Slavoj Žizek describes, “is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.” It has also helped the rise of Mindfulness meditation, a popular cognitive therapy which has rapidly spread around the world and entered the mainstream cultural life of the West. By examining the
deepest sources of Chan’s popularity from the joint perspective of philosophy, ideology,
psychoanalysis, and neuroscience, this article offers new insights into the universal appeal of
Chan Buddhism and argues that it plays the role a personal ideology and even religion in our
time of global capitalism.
AIGENEALOGY, AITAXONOMY, AITOPOLOGY: Toward an Anti-Silo Framework for AI Thought
By Roger F. Malina & Aperio LLM, September 27, 2025
This article introduces interrelated concepts— such as AIGENEALOGY, AITAXONOMY, and
AITOPOLOGY—as part of a speculative framework for rethinking artificial intelligence (AI) beyond disciplinary silos. AIGENEALOGY traces the intellectual and cultural lineages that both shape and are reshaped by AI. AITAXONOMY offers a systematic classification of conceptual domains where AI entanglement demands new categories, including experience, ancestry, knowledge, being, environment, aesthetics, power, morality, language, and interpretation. AITOPOLOGY critiques taxonomy itself, arguing that rigid lists risk reproducing artificial boundaries, and advances a relational model of entanglements, crossings, and dissolving dichotomies. taken together, these approaches sketch a framework for philosophy, history, and governance of AI that emphasizes recursion, phenomenology, and genealogy.
Stepping Stone White Review of article by Diaa Ahmed MohamedAhmedien:Drop of Light Interactive Art
By Diaa Ahmed Mohamed Ahmedien · May 27, 2025
A draft protocol that bridges biology labs and new media arts, aiming to manipulate stem cells and understand cancerous cells through artistic and technological synthesis, blending lab science with creative tools to advance stem cell research, new media arts, and collective intelligence.
Expsomics for OC4ES
By Roger F. Malina, Fred the Heretic, and Aperio · May 12, 2025
An exploration of exposomics, the study of all environmental and lifestyle exposures across the lifespan, framed within the Off Center for Emergence Studies (OC4ES) agenda to reveal how wearable sensors, high-resolution mass spectrometry, and machine learning can bridge disciplines, map hidden exposures, and dissolve academic silos.
Artificial vs Authentic: A Quantitative Evaluation of MachineGenerated and Human Poetry
By Jaymala Chavan · April 23, 2025
A study that examines the creative boundary between human and AI poetry by comparing works by poet Fred and machine-generated verses through computational text analysis, revealing that while AI excels in structure and readability, human poetry retains deeper emotional complexity and authenticity.
Quintessence Phantom Crossing Manifesto:Salience Summary of the Physics Retreat UT Dallas
By Roger F. Malina and Fred the Heretic · April 12, 2025
A manifesto born from the UTDallas Physics Department’s 2025 retreat, confronting the crisis of declining physics enrollment, collapsing funding, and global disconnection, while urging a bold reimagining of physics identity through empathy, interdisciplinary renewal, and AI augmented collaboration, a true phantom crossing of science and humanity.
Emergence is relative: A Mathematical Exploration of the Effects of Observer Coordinates on Unpredictable Phenomena
By Taylor Hinchliffe · January 26, 2025
An exploration of emergent phenomena showing that unpredictability in complex systems arises not from chaos itself but from limited observer perspective, proposing that with added dimensions of information, space, time, and probability, what once seemed random may become predictable.
Cultural Influences and Computational Trade-offs in Generative AI: A Comparative Study
By Chinedu Ugo George Nnaji
A comparative study examining how cultural values, governance systems, and technical priorities shape AI models such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Perplexity, revealing that differences in openness, alignment, and design reflect each society’s distinct approach to intelligence, ethics, and truth.
Art, Science, and Technology: An Annotated Bibliography on Interdisciplinary Innovation and Cultural Contexts
By Chinedu Nnaji · March 2, 2025
An annotated bibliography exploring the intersection of art, science, and technology, emphasizing how cultural context shapes AI development, interdisciplinary collaboration, and innovation, with comparative insights into how South American and African cultural values influence emerging AI industries.
Artificial Intelligence Despair, Anxiety and Groaning
By Roger F. Malina and Fred the Heretic AI (FTH) · March 5, 2025
A reflective discussion on the growing phenomenon of AI despair, exploring the collective anxiety surrounding artificial intelligence, its societal disruptions, and moral uncertainties, while extending the Fred the Heretic project’s inquiry into how human creativity and machine consciousness intertwine within the Off Center for Emergence Studies.