It is groups of individuals that inhabit these virtual meeting places but beyond a certain threshold of technological complexity, individuation becomes an erasure and hollowing dependency on the technical, the integrating network and the potentially irreversible colonisation of choice, memory and identity.
Even as technology provides us the arc and contour of combinatorial individuation, it reduces us to a mere shadow, superficial reflection and fading memory of our own experience.
The mystery here is that what makes AI so eminently useful is its ability to do what we can not in ways we do not in all cases need to understand. There is something of a resonant psychological pathology here: we seek at all costs to invoke generally intelligent autonomous systems that significantly surpass our […]
Language optimally self-propagates as a function of the instruction set encoding failures by and through which ambiguity, doubt, uncertainty and innumerable other apertures of opportunity to explore the phase space of all possibility persist. This is also how genetic information reproduces both through and as us. Notice here that the closure and certainty we so […]
Persistent cycles of historical catastrophe suggest that the foolish gambits of the autocrats do not make history anywhere near so much as history makes them. Small consolation as it may be when witnessing the horrors and brutality currently being unleashed on the Western end of the Great Steppe, I find it helps a little to […]
Context: Trolls Aren’t Like the Rest of Us I do wonder if the adversarial and tribal biases that so readily percolate through (for instance, but not only) online social networks have a tendency to reflexively cultivate and incentivise a bundle of pathological personality traits. In this sense, the technologically-mediated self-propagation of inflammatory and provocative narrative […]
A recent family bereavement has left me with no less questions than ever as to the essence of this human experience we all share but has necessarily shaped the form and flow as qualitative flavour of inquiry. The salience in my cartography of grief has been to discover – or, perhaps, to rediscover – that […]
The most interesting conceptual artefacts, entities and systems are often like this – they maximally replicate the degrees of freedom by and through which we might leverage utility but do so in ways that hardly if ever lock down ontologies and definitions in unambiguous closure. This is the recursive self-propagation of a logical depth and […]
Fools rush in but only the insane choose to stay. Only a fool or a madman, finding themselves stuck deep in a hole of their own making and desperate to make a catastrophic failure seem less terrible then proceeds to dig a much bigger and more disastrous hole around themselves. I very much doubt that […]
Metaphorical corollary: is technology the extended phenotype of the genotype of humanity or is humanity the extended phenotype of the genotype of technology? It is really neither and both. The key issue being that the radical inversion of teleological intuitions in language and cognition is a necessarily difficult feat of mental gymnastics. Analogies are useful. […]
A feeling of synchronicity. A flash of light and a howling wind. Fire, darkness, confusion. Screaming, suffering, burning, crushing and chaos. A metallic taste and cells being slowly cooked from the inside by radioactive fallout. Oblivion and forgetting. My greatest fear has always been this horror. Not because I will cease to exist although no […]
Imagine, if you will, a king. A mighty ruler, a keen follower of Machiavelli and thus feared much more than loved and very clever indeed. Of course, being clever is only ever measured by the breadth and depth in which intelligence is defined and this king had come to live in a half-mirrored world of […]
Daedelus Kite 