Virtual Engine

The virtual engine is the usage of Mithra-Varuna within the context of the Virtual Generator (Varuna) and Virtual Governor (Mithra) being used in company of each other "Now notice... what I'm trying to get you to see is - first all this is important! I mean I wish I was Charles Darwin! This is one of the great great theories! He gets to sail around the world and... What a life! He gets to sail around the world, go to some amazing places and then he comes back and makes a world changing theory! It's just, it's amazing! But notice how much this Darwinian theory that is at the foundation of biology, how much it is beholden to Aristotle. How much it depends on Aristotelian ideas. Now, Juarrero talks about this as a "Virtual Governor".

A governor is any device that limits what you can do on a system, like if you have a governor on a steam engine it sets the range, it limits the range at which you can cycle. She calls it a virtual Governor because it's not an actual machine. It's the shaping of possibility. She stops there and work that I've done with Leo Ferraro and Anderson Todd and Richard Wu, we think she should continue to finish the metaphor. This is a virtual generator ("enabling constraings" part of the cycle; written on the board there) because it's a set of conditions that are generating options for a self-organizing system. And here's the idea: when you put a virtual governor systematically together with a virtual generator, such that you are systematically regulating a feedback cycle, this whole thing is a virtual engine because when you attach a governor to a generator you get a "virtual engine" (diagram with terms drawn on board)."

- John Vervaeke