Categories
cybernetics

Entropy Locking

Entropy locking describes the scenario where a system and its control mechanism become intricately intertwined with the entropy they produce, relying on an offset diffusion and complexity displacement for adaptive self-sustainment. The environment is simply another system in the most elementary symmetry or definition; a system/environment coupling or communications bridge resembles two systems, entangled with […]

Categories
Philosophy

Epistemological Bootstrap

Our greatest risk may be that we each and all entertain and inhabit a reflexive abhorrence of the essential uncertainty that science is, if inadvertently, bound to generate. This, I think, represents a key misunderstanding in how we cultivate and describe theories (and technologies). The aspirational orientation towards epistemological closure, communication and control is a […]

Categories
Philosophy

Certain Uncertainty in Science

In the quest to comprehend the vast tapestry of reality, we find ourselves at a crossroads of opposites and contradictions. It is as if the very fabric of existence hinges on a delicate balance, a critical dependence upon its opposite. This interplay of contrasts isn’t merely a linguistic construct or a byproduct of our cognitive […]

Categories
Philosophy

Sociotechnical Recursion

Sociotechnical recursion is a concept that captures the deeply interdependent nature of technological and social systems. It describes how these systems are not only connected but are continuously shaping and being shaped by each other in a complex, ongoing cycle. In this view, technology is not merely a tool or a passive artifact; it is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Theory

A theory describes itself and its own history as much as it ever comprehensively communicates or unproblematically renders its object, it sets out to prove that an absence of its opposite is the presence (and truth) of itself. A cunning gambit as the basis for confirmatory self-validation but grounded in this way in an abject […]

Categories
Philosophy

Belief

Belief systems are intricate webs of shared understanding. They anchor even the most fiercely independent or introspective identities of adversarially partisan tribalism within a vast, self-entangled tapestry of cultural and linguistic relationships. This network, this communal dance of meaning and experience, shapes our sense of self. We strive to forge an identity that feels wholly […]

Categories
communication

Reflection on Media

This is, among other things, a relatively succinct description of the (current, Global) communications system drift through combinatorial entropy into the more probable states of relatively meaningless yet optimally reconfigurable (as modular) noise. High frequency, low fidelity narrative artifacts (and all who sail in them) don’t become completely meaningless signals, but they come to share […]

Categories
Philosophy

Doctor Who

Doctor Who is such a perennially fascinating character. Beyond the indefinitely extensible and Menger sponge-like topological vacuum of the TARDIS (“…but – its bigger on the inside!”) as transmission medium of unbounded self-inflection, the Doctor seems to only just have self-consciously begun to acknowledge an irreducible epistemological blindspot in his own narrative. This resembles, I […]

Categories
Philosophy

Describing Consciousness with Language and Generative Technology

Even as we seek to comprehensively describe this apparently intractable enigma of experience, the descriptions by and through which we aspire to do so have begun to become active. There is much to say on the roles of generative technology in shaping our methods and paradigms of introspective discovery, but that is still waiting for […]

Categories
Philosophy

Infinite Emptiness: Language and Via Negativa

Language is a class of epistemological (as self-validating) tesseract. From within its horizon of intelligibility, we can only ever see or engage the descriptions (and the descriptions of descriptions) with more language. This is why Zen kōans frame impossible questions and concepts: it is a way to escape the language trap, using language. Non-linearity is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Inexplicable Me

Understanding agency is deeply problematised by the languages with which we aspire to do so. We find ourselves haggling over meanings and inferential teleologies within a system of semantic encoding (in language) that, as complex adaptive system, maintains and sustains its tenured continuity in its environment as a function of the impossibility of isolating meaning, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Freedom

To claim, to reclaim, to assert ownership or self-determination, in almost any conceivable constellation of semantics and implicature, is simultaneously an act of submission, concession and referential, relational displacement in, through and as language. Technology functions quite similarly in that every aspirational act and assertion of communication and control is only ever rendered intelligible and […]