Human intelligence is really some kind of game that language plays against itself through us.
Category: Philosophy
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 […]
Technological Uncertainty
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) […]
I’ve never been entirely certain that educating a person who as a probable consequence then goes on to conquer the known world (of their time) is necessarily a good thing. Of course, we can never be certain what someone will do with the technical knowledge or practical wisdom we might be fortunate enough in all […]
The Rapid Rise of Language Models
Large Language Models are gaining such popularity because the technology at the center of this paradigm is that which has a natural orientation towards the reproduction of itself and its own sociotechnical genealogies. Our commercial, political, strategic and colloquial as cultural communications systems are similarly aligned to the generative technologies because as complex adaptive systems […]
Cosmological Evanescence
Context: How will the Universe end? Cosmological evanescence as measured against the eternal darkness and endlessly meaningless expanses of infinite duration without life, experience or purpose. I expect the podcast might both begin and end with the generative complexity and radiating dissipative properties of thermodynamic entropy but I wonder how such vast existential facts can […]
The waffling, meandering text more closely associated with stream of consciousness and creative thinking has been slowly bludgeoned into a relatively colourless glue-like soup for corporate, scientific and institutional communication. I mention this because these text-weaving AI tools are now quite rapidly taking the center of generative gravity in regards to the production of such […]
The Simplest Conspiracies
Systems of belief are commonly engaged as performative role-plays in which the actual meaning or reality of whichever loosely cobbled bundle of assertions one inhabits need not in any way be anchored upon logical facts or verifiable truth. In fact, the more remote from plausibility or sensible, rational forethought and analysis that any particular position […]
Our shared future is built from our collective past every bit as much as is this present moving moment. Even as the technological juggernaut of contemporary civilisation endlessly accelerates around us, we rarely find time to gaze long and deep into this collective past through the many artefacts, entities and cultural systems that came before […]
Meaningless Reflection
There’s an argument to be made for the notion that the contents of our minds are really nothing more than the reflective internalisation of all that froth and bubble we experience from other people. In such a world in which the contents of each mind are little more that the reverberating reflection of all the […]
Philosophy is Forever Unresolvable
Philosophy is fascinating because, as much as any other sustainably persistent dialect of communication, it endlessly invokes novel parsings of existing ontological constellations in ways that assure the generative uncertainty as doubt by and through which methodological parsings are themselves guaranteed to persist. Philosophy, that is, represents an optimal transmission medium for the languages (and […]
I always find it so disheartening that the constructive differences by and through which psychological self (and cultural or national) identity emerge from the form and flow of human experience are so easily warped, twisted and co-opted for vacuous political purposes. The totalitarian turn, perhaps more of an oscillating historical cycle, is a haunting atavism […]