A hybrid philosophical and methodological stance that treats complex, evolving systems as if they were machines, but acknowledges that these machines are constantly changing their own structure, rules, and components. It's the intellectual offspring of classical mechanics and systems theory: you still look for gears, levers, and feedback loops, but you accept that the gearbox redesigns itself mid-operation. Dynamic Mechanicism refuses to abandon the analytical power of mechanistic thinking while grudgingly admitting that the "machine" has a mind of its own. It's the engineering equivalent of trying to fix a car that's also a chameleon.
Dynamic Mechanicism Example: A Dynamic Mechanicist studying a financial market doesn't just model it as static supply-demand curves. They model it as an adaptive network of interacting algorithms, each one learning and changing its behavior based on market outcomes. The "mechanism" isn't fixed; it's a population of evolving strategies. Yet they still speak in terms of feedback, equilibrium, and control—mechanistic vocabulary for a post-mechanistic world.
by Dumu The Void February 11, 2026
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