It may be an inevitable consequence of the ways in which our social, political and technological progress is (perhaps intractably) built upon and around difference and conflict but I am still left flabbergasted by the endless stream of selfish morons into positions of power. Why is it that such brutally unrepentant misanthropes perennially percolate to […]
On the topic of autocratic ideology, it is no long stretch of the imagination to understand that good ideas sell themselves, bad ideas require a little more persuasion but it is only the truly ugly ideas that kick in your door and point a gun at you.
There is indeed a boundary and border between what might be said or defined and what might eventually be understood or known as reality, information, the physical facts that (or as they) exist beyond our descriptions of them. I am sympathetic with any philosophical position that seeks to build and inhabit the difference and distance […]
Having played the game of imperialist anachronism for so very long, I wonder if they might be blind to the extent to which each and every pathological assertion of expansionist control only ever guarantees the eventual and inevitable, plausibly accelerated downstream dissolution of their own state power apparatus. I acknowledge that their political and strategic […]
Context: Jeff Bezos Startup Hires Top Scientist to Defeat Death As a matter of philosophical (as much as thermodynamic or logical) necessity, the only plausible way to defeat death is to prove that you were never alive in the first place. If the detached soliton-like umbilical of life is not a rare phenomenon and rather […]
The technologies of Artificial Intelligence have had stunning success with a hyper-inflating speciation of statistical in logical and inferential complexity as the savant-like Narrow AI that Gary Marcus references. The recognition of an ontological bootstrap and conspicuous absence of “common sense” being an optimistic step in a direction towards General as (at least minimally) sentient […]
All actions, all choices, all approximation to unambiguously individuated (as subjective) self-determination tends to fade away in such an exquisitely, eloquently, interdependently entangled Cosmos. More subtly rendered: the kinds of self and other or system and environment that such a complex world as this invokes is distributed, integrated and functionally, existentially multidimensional. The reflexive boundaries […]
The philosophical question remains: is the hyper-extended cognition of abstraction into virtual worlds a running towards or away from reality, from ourselves? Utopia, dystopia or simultaneously both? We should not be surprised that, just as with any journey or symbolic displacement of subjective identity and experience that, regardless of the embellishment or sophistication of the […]
Knowledge as a function of intuitively “grokking it” in perception is a curious beast. Is demonstrable knowledge the only valid form of knowledge? Are there forms of knowledge that are only ever indirectly accessible as a corollary of true but unprovable logical facts. Consider the mental visualisation of a 3D sphere. There is some implicit, […]
Out of the uncountably many possibilities that might actually happen, those events that do become in some sense encoded in (and as) spacetime and personal or shared historical memory are often as difficult to unambiguously define as the futures they came from. Just as forecasting future events is deeply infused with uncertainty and complexity, the […]
In a Universe of potentially 2 trillion galaxies, by some models of cosmological inflation necessarily infinite in extent, we should be much less surprised that we have not found our own very specific and plausibly transient technologies staring back at us from this abyss. For perhaps no other reason than relative developmental and logical self-consistency, […]
All systems exist in contexts, environments and distributed, often integrated, other systems from which they gather or variously acquire (as effect, consequence, experience or memory and encoding) information as internal structure. This internal structure or variety is only possible and sustainably continuous by offsetting the inevitability of growing internal (as thermodynamic or logical/information) entropy to […]
