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Philosophy

The Reflexive Absence of Artificial General Intelligence

Context: — The Transcripts of an AI That a Google Engineer Claims Is Sentient Are Pretty Wild — A (prospectively Zen) Buddhist psychology in which the core of conscious experience is rendered as a discontinuously generative absence seems to be a much richer vein of sentience to mine than that of endlessly throwing larger and […]

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Philosophy

Blockchain as Void

Context: — Blockchain Guy Struggles to Explain a Single Practical Use for Web3 — Interesting, yet, in that this self-referentiality and non-existence are quite common across linguistic and symbolic or logical systems of reference when viewed from (i.e. inhabited as) gestalt bundles of artefacts, entities and systems such as those we reflexively posit our own […]

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Philosophy

Meaning Machines

Context: — Can computers understand complex words and concepts? Yes, according to research — Is understanding a “simple” matter of inhabiting and adaptively observing or shuffling the relational properties of language? This raises questions of meaning as only being the suspended tension wire of inductive resonance across a logical frame of gestalt linguistic self-reference, without […]

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Philosophy

Bureaucracy Fails because it Must

Deterministic assumptions have a tendency to reproduce the kinds of dissonance for which those assumptions are best suited to further negotiate; bureaucracies thrive in precisely this way. This is a question as of how (and perhaps why) systems tend to abstract models of their components that ever so slightly misrepresent those parts in ways that, […]

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Philosophy

Genetic Predestination

Context: Genetic paparazzi are right around the corner, and courts aren’t ready to confront the legal quagmire of DNA theft — I find that the unacknowledged (yet common enough) assumption that genes deterministically prescribe destiny as more or less isomorphic mappings of downstream biological development is unhelpfully shaping an already complex debate. Yes, genes shape […]

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Philosophy

Preliminary Reflections on a Philosophy of the Cybernetics of Time

I was recently asked to write a short reflection on the Cybernetics of Time. It occurs to me that such a narrative must be in no small measure the Cybernetics of Causality. This itself leads to the curious revelation and plausibly cathartic insight that the aspirational control as shaping, influence or purposive feedback that inflates […]

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Philosophy

AGI: The Hole in the Wheel…

Context: Google Engineer On Leave After He Claims AI Program Has Gone Sentient I do wonder if the preponderance towards inflected self-validation and effectively narcissistic pareidolia indicates, quite paradoxically, that subjectivity and prospective machine sentience are concepts essentially built upon smoke and mirrors. In seeking self as Other in the reflective mirror of technological determinism, […]

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Philosophy

What if ?

What if everything we ever do and think or feel was purely the reflexive experience of a vast and indeterminately complex statistical flow of information and energy? What if the triumphs, successes, errors and abject failures endemic of people and ideas were really only the instances of a much vaster, grander stream of intricately entangled […]

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Philosophy

Emotional Maturity: Acquiescence

The first sign that you are emotionally mature: you acknowledge that no one ever truly is. The generative discontinuity of insecurity is very much the mischievous absence around which we build our subjective selves and each iteration of developmental sedimentation into (and as) memory, experience and learning only ever really amplifies this uncertainty in useful […]

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Philosophy

Closure: does reality make sense?

Context: A theory of reality that makes sense On the topic of the nominally closed systems referenced in the article above, much of the closure asserted (or interpreted) is at a cost of displacing or offsetting the external dependencies of those systems. Yes, there is a certain degree of ontological individuation without which rationality and […]

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Philosophy

Better Words, Better Worlds

Watching the ramshackle parade and rickety cart of human civilisation bumping and bumbling along the deep corrugations of this muddy dirt track (of history) that it has never quite managed to effectively transcend, I am struck much less by the cyclical percolation of idiots and tyrants to positions of power than I am that we […]

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Philosophy

Conflict, Hope, Identity

Key problems appear to be the degree and extent to which brains (as though pattern-recognition savants) are so willingly bewitched by the structure of an argument as a sufficient reason to believe in its validity. The psychologically reflexive experience of an argument or conceptual constellation tends to reproduce epistemological subjectivity in ways biased towards structure […]