Reductive abstractions in explanatory systems serve very well to ground those systems in self-validating (if demonstrably incomplete) logic, and possess considerable power and compelling reasons to believe them. Observe the thread of Turing‘s abstraction arrive in the (perhaps inevitable) artefacts, entities and exceptional utility of cloud computing – the simulated computing machines of various kinds: running on the universal machine and bootstrapped into abstraction.
Claude Shannon also explicitly adhered to the relative reductive certainties of an engineered system that possessed no overt semantics, only the refined mechanisms of logic, mathematics and mechanical symmetry. Here we observe the power and the (inadvertent) weakness of that information system compression that both science and reductive technological analysis rest upon.
Why weakness? Because for all of the power and self-propagating intensity of this hyper-inflating technological (and extended cognitive) referential space, we find ourselves obligated to engage with the contemporary rising tide of messy, uncontrolled information semantics and discontinuous complexity. The machine is a tool from which we excised our own selves and our uncertainties but this displaced entropy always returns, eventually.
