Context: Early humans were sheltered from worst effects of volcanic supereruption Human culture is in effect a shared memory and transient security blanket that rarely sees (or reflexively, defensively – chooses to see) very far past the half-mirrored, labyrinthine self-reflection that a dream-like consensus reality and the hyper-extended cognition of technology must always and ultimately […]
It is kind of hard to believe that there’s someone out there for all of us, somewhere. It’s a nice idea and I even think I know who my “someone” is, regardless that I will for many diverse and complicated reasons never meet her. Perhaps the necessary condition for there to even be the possibility […]
Context: The Criminal Potential of Artificial Intelligence Beyond autonomous cybernetic system as tool or aperture of adversarial vulnerability lies the distinct possibility of AI as malevolent criminal mastermind. Notwithstanding the current paucity of anything even vaguely resembling Artificial General Intelligence, and regardless of our best (and worst) aspirations to benchmark and bootstrap this technology into […]
It need hardly be said that good ideas sell themselves, that bad ideas only catch fire where (and when) ignorance is in ascendancy, and that only truly terrible and utterly ugly ideas require propaganda or violence to acquire or maintain a hold upon this long-suffering human world. It is and remains a fact worth acknowledging […]
We never think that we know what love is anywhere near so much as when it feels like it has abandoned us and that, that is the mystery: we must lose what we love to realise just how truly and deeply we loved it.
Much of the analytical (academic) discourse regarding social system self-propagation gets swept up and away by the effective subset of communication and information propagation that it, itself, represents. The point: human social systems not only exhibit but constitutively are the distributed mnemonics and information artefacts they produce. Academic and institutional contexts derive value (and relevance) […]
Ontology is the baseline. [All definitions are made in terms of other definitions in what only ever arrives at circularly tautological uncertainty. An arbitrary starting point must be chosen from inside the hyper-inflating self-referential systems of language and logic.] What does a “whole” or “complete” (if feeling adventurous, add “consistent” or “decidable”) system look like? […]
Context: The Great American Novel will not be written by a Computer It’s a great point and notwithstanding that hard-core reductionist types often enough give the piñata of John Searle’s Chinese Room a comprehensively passive aggressive thrashing with pitchforks and torches, it is an irreducible fact under the current ascendant paradigm. Semantic complexity in either […]
My love is a marionette. Dancing on threads that she never controls or owns and like blindfolds in darkness, that I never know. Life’s theatre of pleasure is a labyrinth of pain and were it not that we all refine in game and grammar such intricate strategies of haunted self-deception as pure aspirations to continuing […]
Context: Liquid sheep – drone footage. The patterns of sheep transit are as of slime mould moving, or of liquid flow – perhaps quicksilver. Note that the resemblance is not merely superficial or in any sense trivial. Complex systems dynamics quite naturally gravitate towards functional eloquence over a diminished or abbreviated dynamical vocabulary; more or […]
Context: Is reality a game of quantum mirrors? A new theory suggests it might be It is as though we exist on the interior of a spherical object embedded in higher dimensional space, the half-mirrored hyper-surface projecting all manner of rippling labyrinthine reflections that inflate in and as our phenomenological experience of a manifest world […]
Despite being quite well suited by geography and economy to weather the pandemic, it seems the inevitable has happened and – part epidemiological entropy, part selfish human stupidity, part bad luck – COVID-19 has gained a foothold again here in Australia. Every morning and several times a day I check the news media online to […]
Daedelus Kite 