Does the Cognitive Fusion Reactor (ITER-8) really exist?
Conventional responses to this question would focus on whether it has been duly constituted as a de facto or de jure organization, with appropriate statutes. However the clarifying documents specifically challenge the unfruitful constraint of such understandings of “existence” — especially in the increasingly virtualized world of cyberspace (cf Consciously Self-reflexive Global Initiatives: Renaissance zones, complex adaptive systems, and third order organizations). Given its intended parallel development to the ITER mega-research project on nuclear fusion, it is clearly the case that it is premature to consider that it exists as an operational reactor, whatever the research undertaken to that end. Clearly, as with any project, it exists as an idea, but the question is how to understand the nature of the form to which the idea has given expression. That such a framing is non-trivial may be seen in the recognition that al-Qa’ida needs to be understood as essentially an idea which inspi
