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Philosophy

Does Language Generate Conflict?

Language is particularly useful and effective as a system of communication but it tends to generate ambiguity and confusion in equal measures to those of the invocation of clarity and understanding. It is not always or immediately apparent but the integrated systems of communication we inhabit are naturally and adaptively biased towards their own reproduction. […]

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Philosophy

Mirror, Mirror: Enigmas in Language

Context: — Three ideas from linguistics that everyone in AI should know — I do wonder if we might fundamentally misrepresent our relationship to these systems of symbolic communication as something of an irreducible function of language itself. Noting here that the persistent problems of these LLMs with bias, truth values and drift into effectively […]

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Philosophy

Can we prove sentience?

From within the linguistic frame of aspirationally certain definitions, can we lay claim to truths over what may be inaccessible as analogue, continuous and indeterminate if not otherwise and essentially mysterious or metaphysical assertions of knowing, understanding, possessing or proving sentience? Asking for a friend…

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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 […]