Observing the President of COP26 stifling emotion as he apologised for the shortfalls of the limited agreement obtained at this critically important conference, I find myself reflecting on the words being variously wielded and warped on such a Global stage. There are two primary games of symbolic communication (i.e. language) at work in these large […]
Not so much listening to as hearing a neighbour’s car stereo droning out a persistent rhythmic baseline this afternoon provides room for reflection. It occurs to me how such assertions of public identity, of enthusiastically announcing a place in whichever cultural coordinate space we might choose or otherwise find ourselves inhabiting, there is a certain […]
Context: When and why did human brains decrease in size 3,000 years ago? Ants may hold clues If information processing and storage is offset to an environmental context, brain size becomes less important. I would probably ask the (corollary) question in this context as to the extent that cultural (as information processing and knowledge transmission) […]
Context: AI Winter I do wonder if we should not (all) be quite so surprised to experience oscillating periods of growth and ossification in any technological endeavour. Notwithstanding expectations of endless growth that align to ascendant paradigms of socioeconomic reality, the tendency of complex systems to periodically decelerate is more than just a measure of […]
Why won’t people leave communities of poorly informed dissatisfaction? It is a curious and potentially intractable aspect of human psychology that the more untenable an ideological position, belief system or existential context, the harder it becomes to leave. Doubling down on a bad bet takes less energy than the potential effort required to extract one’s […]
To what extent might we ever comprehensively or justifiably speak of an external or “objective” reality? Internal experience is intimately interdependent with an “external” world, assertions of certainty regarding subjective ownership of an experience of colour remain somewhat unreliable. Experience exists, but as an inductive inevitability the doubt regarding objective reality is mirrored in that […]
The most consequential questions are not those that (only) provide answers but that in so doing invoke many more questions, the most interesting and influential information or artefacts as entities and systems of communication are those that generate more of themselves, and the most successful technologies are those that generate more technologies.
Context: COP26: Bezos pledges $2bn for restoring nature Yes, thanks Jeff, but it is likely going to cost several orders of magnitude more than that to even begin to effect substantive systemic change. It is something of an unresolvable existential irony that it is precisely the system(s) of value and wealth that we so viscerally […]
This, from the book above: (…)art functions, in essence, to “creat[e] the void and thereby introduce[e] the possibility of filling it.” Staging Nothing: The Figure of Das Ding in Poe’s “The Raven”, Sean J. Kelly, in Psychology in Edgar Allan Poe, Logos Verlag Berlin, 2019, p. 69 Replace “void” with “subjectivity” and you have a […]
Context: Facebook Changes Name, Announces AR Layer Over Physical Reality Utopian fantasy tends to follow a predictable arc as much in ideology as in technology. The cognitive consequences will be constitutively dissociative and alienating but then, all technology simultaneously empowers and inhibits. A recent study regarding the shrinking of brains some 3,000 years ago aligns […]
Detective Del Spooner : Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? Sonny : Can you? Movie: I, Robot, 2004. (After Asimov). A robot can write a symphony, it just can […]
In an era of complex systems, negotiating organisational complexity is front and center. Large, stratified hierarchies have traditionally relied upon the necessary – or at least (and arguably) inevitable – Manichaean historical certainties that both define and constrain growth, innovation and resilience in this context. In some ways, traditional bureaucracy represents a logico-symbolic aspiration for […]
Daedelus Kite 