There is an interesting, related theory hailing from philosophers Andy Park and David Chalmers. The Theory of Extended Mind asserts that, while your consciousness (whatever that may be) does seem squarely anchored between your ears, your cognition is a distributed entity that – yes – is characteristically if not uniquely “of human brains” but need […]
An analytical framework, as much as its denizens, loves nothing so much as a murder mystery to solve and short of the wars and (other) international intrigues that often lead to all manner of unjust killings, the forensic science of unexplained death plays a special role in cultural and media reflexivity. I do not suggest […]
Self-identity is almost always if not exclusively at some level performative and theatrical. We most assert ourselves in the world as some kind of reflexive emulation of what we would like others to see us as. In this way, we come to know self as always and already being some kind of stranger and internally-worn […]
It is worth reflecting that, as though some elementary yet monumentally high-dimensional linear reflex, it is at precisely the moment when our collective intelligence and expressive creativity is set free by #technology that we are also quite utterly and unwittingly imprisoned by it. As above, so below… indeed.
I’d be much more worried about an unconscious AI. The impending corporate dissimulation of an omniscient technocratic overlord will attract and acquire all the trappings and recursively self-propagating (human) interfaces of a complex system that maximally self-propagates and self-sustains as a function of the uncertainties it invokes in regards to ambiguities regarding the proof of […]
The mystery of the void is that the absence beyond knowledge is indistinguishable (and arguably identical) to that within. Our embodied experience of life and knowing then become less the container of a mystery and more that other mystery that is itself simply an island of transience amongst all this unknowing. There is a tradition […]
Entity and context, system and environment, part and whole. Behaviour and purpose is not bounded or purely or completely encoded in an entity, regardless that our linguistic (as much as cognitive or technologocal) teleologies and intuitions reinforce and validate such a belief. Symbiosis also occurs at the level of whole systems. Entity and environment both […]
The breadth and depth of the systemic (i.e. Global) changes we need to seed to sustain biodiversity and ecological resilience are far beyond the aptitude of contemporary political and economic practices. How to transform the many heroic yet isolated efforts of conservationists into the broad and consequential systemic changes we need without frightening the political […]
Defining “improve” or “better” in the context of our lives is always an interesting proposition. Following a generally Buddhist ontology and cathartic acceptance of suffering as irreducible, I wonder if the role of suffering and imperfection is so profoundly and intricately entangled with happiness and (an) aspirational ascent towards perfection that – if our lives […]
It seems to me that most technologically-inflected discussions of what it means to be human begin from the assumption that our experience represents some kind of necessary closure as terminal (and teleological) endpoint. The notion that intelligence or sentience (and intelligence- or sentience-like) artefacts, entities and systems could ever represent any kind of pinnacle (or […]
Will sentient machines require psychological care? It is a serious question and while it must be acknowledged that these likely are (or will be) very different kinds of minds than our own, in as much as they could understand and engage their presence in the world through (human) language they might find themselves facing their […]
As almost all of our self-representations are now so profoundly inflected by digital curation, I wonder if we should even try to pretend that not only does social media lie, it is fundamentally incapable of telling the truth. Image: Bing’s version of DALL-E 2.
Daedelus Kite 