Categories
Philosophy

Implicit Bias in Artificial Intelligence: the fault is not in our stars…

For all our aspirations to escape the implicit biases and semantic turbulence of cognition, culture and the diverse linguistic or other semi-formal behavioural and conceptual encoding grammars we inhabit, there are very likely intrinsic symmetries in information and communications systems that orient them towards qualititatively dissonant outcomes. Biases are functional amplifications of difference and information […]

Categories
life

Irony of Selfless Compassion

The bitter-sweet cost and irreducible irony of sincere compassion is that in any act of selfless love we will almost always ourselves lose that which we seek to set free.

Categories
Philosophy

Endless Redefinition of Human Dignity

All meanings are by spoken or unspoken convention, by agreement and – being that every word or mind and context is foundationally dynamic – exist as saliences in distributed fields of communication. In the first few pages of “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, Bertrand Russell raises an irreducible spectre (or is it an angel?) of circularity […]

Categories
Science

Other forms of life in the Universe…

Context: A Strange Form of Life Could Flourish Deep Inside of Stars, Physicists Say Fascinating article above, discussing the logical (i.e. hypothetical) presence of life and intelligence inside stars. We are of course blinded by our own intimate familiarity with a form of life that we ourselves take for granted as normative or necessary and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Limitations of Artificial Intelligence Reflect Intrinsic Individual and Shared Failures

Context: Would you trust an AI Operative in the field? This (quote from the above article) is an assessment of limitations in current AI: “…tend to respond well to what they’ve been trained to detect, but responses can become erratic when confronted with unexpected circumstances…” is in fact, and perhaps not coincidentally, an operational and […]

Categories
life

Seduction

SEDUCTION is a game of chess – a patterned strategy of conquest. Men fancy themselves asserting power as Kings but as mere arrogant pawns are all too soon spent upon a battlefield rushed into without thought, ruined by hidden rules rarely understood and – in hasty passions of unthinking desire – that are often ignored. […]

Categories
life

Hollow Theology

Some moments are so simple and unproblematically perfect that it is entirely understandable how Ancient peoples may have perceived a world so deeply infused and alive with mystery, magic and meaning. For all our progress and the hyper-extended cognition of complex technology, we have not really come all that far since then and while to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Is Happiness only the Absence of Unhappiness?

…and by that measure, love is the absence of hateful artefacts or experiences, peace is the absence of belligerent acts and associated technologies of violence. Where, though, is self? Can self be negatively defined in quite the same way and, if not, then what is it that is being happy, loving or peaceful but the […]

Categories
politics

Partisan Political System Self-replication

Partisan Political Systems have a double life as what is visible and what is not. What is not obvious is generally the most interesting (and causally critical) feature. If a complex information and/or energy-processing (i.e. computational) system maintains sustainable intrinsic homeostatic and extrinsic contextual continuity through the reflexive priming of its environment as a pliable […]

Categories
Philosophy

Imagination is Living Logic

Imagination – that recursively self-inflected and indefinitely extensible system of undirected grammatical, cognitive or structural exploration and visualisation; it is very similar to a logic, mathematics or physics that itself autonomously expands (albeit in abstract, interior spaces and through us as symbolic codes) and endlessly seeks optimally concise self-representations, abstractions, higher-dimensional compression, self-gravitation and algorithmic […]

Categories
Philosophy

Empty Vessels

Perhaps it is not words that are our vessels and messengers so much as it is we who are in fact the empty vessels through which words and patterned symmetries of endless entropy-as-information flows, it is not our intentions that are written upon this world so much as it is this world that writes itself […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Healing America: not so simple…

A key problem: information and communication systems autonomously self-replicate by optimally-concise pattern encoding methods as an extended consequence of the orientation towards low-energy states. No surprise there, perhaps, for anyone versed in complexity theory but the problem is not necessarily the intractable antitheses by binary poles in this endless partisan argument so much as the […]