Categories
Philosophy

Optimism, qualified: Ouroboros

Being clever is not always about being correct, but being optimistic might in some (or many) instances be the greatest self-deception of all. Systems of largely unsubstantiated belief, as our private and shared worlds tend to be, generate a threshold level of expansive uncertainty and referential or relational (i.e. semantic) undecidability. This then invokes and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Semantic Mysteries

Semantics is a fascinating mystery that is haunted by, yet enigmatically accelerates towards, a vacuum composed of the circularly generative absence of its own semantic closure. (It becomes a complex, hollow and counter-intuitively meaningless tautology.) “Language” is itself simply another word, hollow and haunted by an underlying relational semantics that forever displaces meaning, identity and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Maximum Entropy

We rarely pause for thought to consider that all of this accelerating sociotechnical speciation and generative utility precisely is the drift through combinatorial complexity into states of maximum entropy. It remains as something of a collective (perhaps collaborative) blindspot that organisational order is profoundly dependent upon unrecoverable loss and stochastic uncertainty. The same observation applies […]

Categories
politics

Donald Trump is an Accident of History

Assuring democratic continuity may be problematised by the presence of this particular political personality in ways that (perhaps necessarily) distract us from tackling underlying causal factors. If it wasn’t this problematic character, it would be someone else and regardless of how this situation plays out; what are the large-scale causal dynamics here? Is the demagogic […]

Categories
Philosophy

Finding Consciousness

I wonder if a reflex to identify the where and the how of consciousness might not necessarily, if inadvertently, render the what inaccessibly unintelligible. Distributed (as emergent) system properties inhabit their transmission media in a counter-intuitive way. Yes – where, how and what are all different perspectives on the same abstract conceptual entity but the […]

Categories
environment

Dialectic Climate Change

A significant problem percolates through all this melting ice: the decomposable modularity of our languages, technologies and organisational systems remains functionally unable to comprehensively or sustainably address the complexity or scale of this issue. Subsequently, we find ourselves inhabiting and endlessly replicating media tropes of hollow platitudes and inherited generalisations that are simply not sophisticated […]

Categories
Philosophy

Mnemosyne’s Curse

Mnemosyne’s gift is a curse. Those who do not remember the past may be forever condemned to repeat it but those who cannot forget the past will suffer an even more difficult fate. Not all memories are positive.

Categories
technology

Loneliness

Technologically-mediated communication is creating the global epidemic of loneliness. Alienation and emptiness is a signal amplified by our ubiquitous and omnipresent sense and experience of contemporary connectivity, an inward-turning inflection of systemic extensibility for which we are quite poorly prepared by the majority of our evolutionary history. Kindness fades in these moments as everyone struggles […]

Categories
technology

Control

Access to the high-dimensional complexity resident in machine learning models comes at a cost. It is not being discussed much in public discussions but the ability to interrogate these complex information systems appears to bring an inevitable loss of control over the outputs. Generative systems in particular are prone to this inverse riddle: the more […]

Categories
art

Generative Design

An inexorably rapid turn to generative art indicates a complementary toolkit for creative designers. If it is a technology that doesn’t already exist, I look forward to being able to create, curate and refine design artefacts on the fly with human voice control alone.

Categories
Philosophy

Artificial Intelligence and Geostrategic Uncertainty

Context: How Might AI Affect the Rise and Fall of Nations? We shall find ourselves entangled in (and as) the self-amplifying adversarial difference, distance and geostrategic dissonance of an orientation towards the accelerating reproduction of the technical methods of our own cultural, cognitive and politically self-validating insecurities. This is a self-referential tesseract of hyper-inflating complexity […]

Categories
Philosophy

Generative Uncertainty

What better way to assure cultural, cognitive or communications system continuity than to anchor its rapidly speciating encoding machinery in an endlessly productive combinatorial entropy and kernel core of stochastic uncertainty? This is precisely what generative technologies are doing. Food for thought.