Well, among other things… Entropy is a measure of the “degrees of freedom” available to a system. Generally-speaking, the more components, sub-systems, artefacts, entities that compose a system – the more degrees of freedom that are available to that system. Because there are always more possible disordered system states than ordered ones (in the total […]
There is a deepening feeling of doom (and gloom) as coronavirus begins to take hold across our community. We see the numbers growing daily; accelerating, exponentiating. At some point this will no longer be “someone else’s” illness, it will be upon us; a tidal surge of trillions of sinister nano-scale biological robots, wicked ribonucleic algorithms […]
This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds – never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged – these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance. […]
Fashion wears us more than we could ever be said to wear it; we only have these experiences and ideas in direct and reflexive proportion to the extent that they, in fact, have us. We do not search for meaning – it searches for us and there, finding us as so many yawning vacuums and […]
Zeitgeist.
Sociality and interdependence is our species’ strength but is simultaneously also our weakness. The complex networks and intangible feedback loops of behaviour, communication, material artefacts and technologies upon which we have built a Global civilisation, such as it is, are autonomously self-propagating information systems. Once such psychological, social and cultural systems have gained energy and […]
In our darkest hour, the breadth and depth of institutional insolvency unveils itself – as though we were not all already aware of the compound ethical, economic and intellectual bankruptcy of our era – and stands naked and useless like a balance sheet providing shelter from a storm.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship […]
An interesting article: A Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind Mind is certainly built around nested hierarchies, but the general structures built here (in this article) are too dependent upon loosely unverified correlation and analogy; “X implies Y, so then Z”, where X is unsubstantiated. The structural constraints of communication and narrative cognition derive from, are […]
Beyond the self-evident inadequacies of our integrated bureaucratic hierarchies, the labyrinth of systemic biases which have funneled wealth into corporate welfare and monopolistic hegemonies are now revealing their utter ineptitude at providing adequate socioeconomic resilience. You could ask why no one saw this coming. Many people did, they just did not know what shape or […]
The endless unravelling of assurance at one end of this cryptographic tapestry is simultaneously the enduring incentive, obligation and functional necessity of creating more sophisticated and impermeable logical entanglements at the other end. A question which springs to mind is as to the plausible inevitability of an acceleration of applied human or machine intelligence overtaking […]
Such a principle (of Fallibilism) should indeed be taken as implicit to science and all ordered systems of knowledge or organisational practice. The indefinitely extensible essence (and raison d’etre) of all material, biological, cognitive, cultural and technological systems is irreducible; it is simultaneously strength and vulnerability in (and as) everything we build, cultivate and share. […]
Daedelus Kite 