Fig 1.

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If you take something which reacts to sound, say a microphone or a guitar, plug it into a speaker and then place it next to that speaker, something interesting happens. The instrument starts react to its own sound. This also means that the instrument reacts to this reaction (fig 1). It’s pretty easy to see how things escalate from there. Jimi Hendrix famously uses it to build up walls of guitar noise; what starts out at a single note spirals quickly in screeching catherine wheels and soaring planes. Since then people like Lou Reedand Merzbowhave produced whole pieces of music consisting of nothing but feedback.Outside of sound, feedback loops remain an interesting concept. The logician Bertrand Russell, for instance, abandoned his project to provide a logical foundation for mathematics in part due to his inability to make sense of logical feedback loops. Specifically, Russell was concerned with what is sometimes calledwhich attempts to determine the truth of a particular sentence, namely:“This sentence is false”If the sentence is true, then we should accept what it states, namely that it is false. But if it is false, then we should disregard the sentence and therefore assume it’s true. The sentence is setup to respond to itself, just like the microphone by the speaker, so as a result its truth value seems to be in endless flux.Feedback seems unavoidable too when we think about the way we interpret and make sense of the world. The phenomenologist Martin Heidegger wrote heavily about what he termed. He explained that in order to make any sense of something, we have to already have some kind of an idea of what that thing is. If we ask a question like “What’s the nature of being?” (which Heidegger did a lot), we have to have some kind of an idea of what ‘being’ is in the first place for the question to even make sense. “What’s the nature of being?” for instance, can lead to interesting conversations or thoughts, in a way that “What’s the nature of?” doesn’t.So feedback can be important. It can make interesting sounds and textures. It can be difficult to understand but it is also always necessary for understanding. I think, particularly in light of many of the political events of 2016, that it can be dangerous as well. For the UK, in the morning after the vote to leave the European Union, and for the US, in the morning after Donald Trump’s presidential election, half of the country woke up not recognising their own country, and being frightened by what they saw. Meanwhile, the other half could not understanding why so many failed to share their excitement at a new wave of nationalist politics.Events like this can seem a mystery, but when we consider the way are ideas and opinions are formed, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s easy to develop views through talking to a small social circles, and journalism that caters to your views. It’s easier still to forget how our worlds can often resemble tight feedback loops, where opinions can spring from themselves. And again, it’s easy to express horror at the screeching catherine wheels of sound that other people’s opinions can seem to be, without taking notice of our own.It’s not a realistic expectation to try and stop our own opinions from feeding back to us. Our worlds are always, to some extent, feedback loops feeding off themselves. But we can certainly try to broaden our horizons, to reign in our reference points, and to remember that other people inhabit different worlds. May your feedback loops be wide.1. A good example of this is his performance ofat Monterey in 1967 (which ended in him setting fire to his guitar) or his cover ofat Woodstock in 1969.2. Lou Reed,(1975)3. Merzbow,(1996)4. Andrew David Irvine & Harry Deutsch,(2016)5. Heidegger talks about this throughout his career, it appears as a theme throughout his first work(1927).