Communication becomes less ambiguous and more streamlined or efficient when content aligns with dominant (as ascendant) probability distributions. This invokes communicative simplicity as a reciprocal deficit of comprehension. In this way, assurance of significance is plagued by the plausible inevitability of a proliferation of largely meaningless content.
Context: China’s spy threat is growing, but the West has struggled to keep up …oh yes, and we might also ask: to what extent is the burbling, percolating insecurity of incessant intrusion, theft and deceptive misdirection actually a necessary and sustaining precondition for the continuity of a constitutively repressive political system? Is the invocation, cultivation and […]
Is “does the AI understand meaning?” an inadvertently deceptive question? We are intent on chasing and catching butterflies with a jar made out of butterflies! Yes, that may just have to be the nature of any expansive philosophy of language but the least we might do is to acknowledge the core intractability of seeking explanatory […]
Indeterminacy is the generative core of cognition. It is an elementary absence in knowledge that counter-intuitively inflates language (and communication) with meaning.
Luddites, yes, and just as blindness might take many forms, there are so many ways to inhibit the progress of civilisation or work against those creatively seeking collaborative solutions to humanity’s shared existential problems. For some, it becomes a professional if not also political vocation of ignorant bluster and destructive blundering. Analysis is interesting but […]
General reflection – binary opposition: Most constellations of word pairs, bundled vocabularies and variously symmetrical semantic dichotomies in our linguistic experience represent gradients of difference. This presence of idiomatic antitheses generates ambiguity, uncertainty, confusion, miscommunication. However, we should never just observe the words and the variously transient sociotechnical vocabularies that orbit them. I have been […]
Fakes fly further and faster than facts because truth is not and never was the ground state of communication. Truth is IN language but it is not OF language: indeterminacy regarding semantics and truth is a primary method of linguistic system self-propagation. We should, perhaps, focus less on rubrics of culturally and psychologically self-validating (as […]
It’s an interesting thought that the countless electrochemical systems that sustain life and experience are in some mischievously self-orchestrating sense far smarter than we are. Our own minds do not encompass biological complexity, they are a subset of it. As for artificial intelligence, we should not let its utility and imminent ubiquity deceive us into […]
Art is not an externality. Abstractive visualisation is significant for gaining intuitions regarding many relational and topological spaces, networked systems, causal flows and (even, for elaborating) assertions of causality, intent and purpose in mind and/or nature. It is not a matter of art OR science, which as a logical relationship approximates and resolves to some […]
Meaning is contested but not because we explicitly or necessarily choose this particular path. If meaning and cultural or political and psychological significance was not subject to ambiguity and confusion, deception and misdirection in the ways it generally is, the adaptive system of bartered value and utility we build around and as language would be […]
Given the potentially infinite continuum of expressive freedom available within language, it is something of a mystery as to why we generally only occupy such a small range of creative possibility within it.
What if deterrence fails? Here’s a quadruple-shot of caffeine for your Tuesday morning: Every silver lining has a cloud, an occasional series: nuclear science, geostrategic insecurity and civilisation extinction edition. Somewhat, IMHO, more significant than most of the babbling business of communicative noise that sustains social media systems, blogging or vlogging platforms, podcasts, news websites and broadcasters, and yet […]
Daedelus Kite 