There is little doubt that our cultural systems are communications networks, albeit of considerably higher dimensionality than (even) the digital telecommunications systems with which we are all now so necessarily well-acquainted. In a spirit of relatively non-specific philosophical reflection, questions quite naturally arise as to the carrying capacity of these cultural networks and of what […]
If virtue was innate or actually worth something beyond an advertising slogan of social merit, would it have to be as performative and theatrical as it so commonly is? It is worth reflecting that anyone who feels compelled to endlessly demonstrate their moral virtue very likely possesses none whatsoever.
When words finally fail us, we might have actually found something worthwhile to say.
When encountering the serially haunted futility of so much of our species’ belligerently selfish behavioural vocabulary, I often resort to an attempted witty quip to the effect that this is, yet again and quite simply, “human beings being human”. It is not after all as though most who conduct themselves in variously disgraceful ways have […]
Is artificial intelligence going to destroy social media? Would it even matter if it might not also destroy us in the process? These are fractal tesseracts of linguistic narcissism as wheels within wheels of technologically mediated autopoiesis. Will we be able to see anything outside the half-mirrored sphere of reflective, reflexively dopamine-boosting narrative self-engagement? There […]
Nope. If nothing else and far beyond the actual sophisticated engineering (*not* rhetorical) problem this represents, to render life endless is simultaneously to render it meaningless. It may not always be obvious but value is not anywhere near so much a function of abundance as it is of scarcity. It is the transience of our […]
We prefer ingesting prose that reflexively confirms back to us the identities and systems of belief we perceive ourselves as inhabiting. As a general observation of the mischievously discontinuous arc and trajectory of this plausibly ineradicable narcissism that compels our choices, actions and words – the texts we prefer tend to be slightly off-center and […]
Separation perhaps, but we would be committing a major disservice to knowledge if we were not to acknowledge that both language and thought must derive in some way from deeper principles of self-organisational complexity in (and as) information, energy and logical or material communications systems in nature and physics. Language may be separable from thought […]
When viewed as the sum total combinatorial complexity of so very many information and energy-processing artefacts, entities and systems, it becomes apparent that the unity and individuated singularity of Self that we carry around in our brains as culturally reflexive semiotic cocoons of personal identity might be something quite significantly other than what we tend […]
Human intelligence is really some kind of game that language plays against itself through us.
I find that Buddhist psychology in some of its regional dialects (historically, through Tibet into China and Japan) approximates to a profound observation on the ultimate insubstantiality of this contingent, transient concept of Self that inhabits and invariably haunts us all. In regards to AGI, I think a significant barrier is that the subjective experience […]
Has anyone noticed that the smaller these computational and communications artefacts become, the more rapidly this whole planetary technological juggernaut accelerates? There’s something of an uncertainty principle here – the more precisely we can measure, define and inhabit the various technological transmission media, the less certain we become about the velocity (and direction or destination) […]
Daedelus Kite 