Categories
systems technology

Cybersecurity’s Unacknowledged Truth

The whole cybersecurity enterprise seems to be built upon a suite of psychological and culturally-reflexive assumptions that assert that there exists even a possibility of logical or systemic closure. No such closure or completion is possible and this is rarely acknowledged.

Categories
systems

Turing, Undecidability, Adaptation and Cancer

Alan Turing’s proof of the undecidability of non-trivially sophisticated algorithms is sufficient reason for:• the autonomously adaptive, complex information strategies of life; and,• the intractably problematic and recursively non-terminating information transcription of cancer.

Categories
technology

Active Measures: information, physics, influence and censorship in cyberspace

It is interesting that active intervention, interdiction and an assertion of ideological self-interest through campaigns of enthusiastic (technologically-facilitated) censorship are probably the most expensive and least efficient ways of achieving information-centric goals. It is like attempting to cool a building by adding cold air – far more expensive in terms of energy, resources and information-processing […]

Categories
Philosophy Science

How free would we all be if there was no ultimate truth?

I just read an interesting (partial) article/concept/book on life, the universe and everything from biologist Robert Lanza: “Biocentrism: A New Theory of the Universe“. I am not entirely convinced that the author is not just substituting one mystery and suite of questions with another. For instance – the role of the conscious observer in “creating” […]

Categories
Philosophy

Is Consciousness Everywhere?

It is as likely that the autonomously self-propagating patterns of information and energy processing (of which consciousness is an instance or manifestation) are ubiquitously distributed; such that (what we experience as) intelligence, consciousness and the self-inflective logic of embodied complexity in life are indeed “everywhere”. It is not that what we are is anything radically […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unanswerable Questions: Science, God, Infinity

Michelangelo’s Divinity reaches back from an artfully-obfuscated human cranium and brain to create Adam. It is indeed at the level of (such) Universals – in which questioners become objects of their own self-introspection that we observe an endless referential circularity and recursion without end. Foundational work in logic and mathematics suggests that all aspiration to […]

Categories
money

Financial Physics: Entropy, Gravitation, Complexity

The proliferating, bubbling, effervescent diffusion of information abstractions in (and as) cultural and economic – ergo financial – systems nowhere reveals itself as so much smoke and mirrors than, ironically, where it assumes such literal gravity and influence over our lives and experience. I am fascinated by the autonomous methods and optimal functions of system […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy

UFOs: physics, logic, possibility

The “Laws of Physics” as we know them may be just one (relatively) self-consistent cross-section, constellation or “slice” through the state-space of all possible optimally-concise descriptions and mathematical (or logical) entities. We should not be so surprised to discover that there is more than one way to cut this cake, nor that other entities (or […]

Categories
politics

Political Problems: the ubiquitous, intractable and shared enigmas of outsourcing our rationality to those least able to effectively use it

A central problem of all political systems is that the idealised abstractions of those systems are of a fundamentally different kind or class of entity than are the lived experiences and material extension or implementation of those systems into, upon, through and as the world. There is a fundamental (and foundational) discontinuity between the material […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Disentangling Bureauracy

It is fascinating to consider that an anachronistic hierarchy produces precisely the organisational inertia and systemic entropy that it itself is best oriented to negotiate (and through this to endlessly reproduce its own self-validating necessity). It is quite likely that the path of least effort and autonomously self-organising (i.e. low energy-state, minimal algorithmic complexity) systems […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

One Planet: a Smoke Signal in this Warming World

Every day, in the afternoon or early evening, for around 4 weeks a blanket of smoke has drifted across my city. I reflected on this here recently but tonight I found myself inadvertently caught up in the smoke as I was walking. My eyes are stinging, I have a sickening burnt wood taste in the […]

Categories
technology

Future of Work: Will AI create a Vocational Apocalypse?

What is perhaps most disturbing about the artival of autonomous systems and AI is not the plausible inevitability of monumental vocational disruption; it is that there are so few ongoing or persistent, well-informed and broadly-accessible public and (non-partisan) political discussions regarding the extent to which these upheavals will reshape entire economic, social and cultural value […]