Categories
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 […]

Categories
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, […]

Categories
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 […]

Categories
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 […]

Categories
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 […]

Categories
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 […]

Categories
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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Bad Vibes

Bad vibes are sticky, contagious in precisely the way good vibes are but they have a tendency to persist (as memory) much longer than the experiences that invoke them. There is no doubt that evolution has predisposed us to bias negativity over positivity as a function of survival in what was once a much more […]

Categories
Philosophy

Structure and Argument

I have been deep down a rabbit hole of argument analysis just recently. There is a natural orientation as bias in many people towards choosing points of view and systems of belief based upon their structural aesthetics, not upon their substance. The arguments made for and against any particular political point or the tenets of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Pattern Recognition and Conspiracy Theory

One thing that human minds as intelligent entities maintain particular fluency in is the recognition and conceptual or material reproduction of patterns. It allows us to generalise by analogy and to draw inferences across multiple facts to derive underlying symmetries and principles. This lateral pattern-matching across domains is a uniquely powerful mental facility but may […]

Categories
Philosophy

Autocracy is Addicted to Fear

We all know that the mobster kleptocracy has been catastrophically miscalculating at least in part due to a narrative dependency of getting high on its own supply of disinformation but in the monumental strategic blunder that this invasion represents they display the kernel core of a neurotic psychological pathology. An implicit orientation towards the positive […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Sinking Ship

Opportunities are the anchors that like grappling hooks we cast out and upon the stochastic turbulence and mercurial probabilities of uncertain futures and there, in identifying them, in defining or formulating the possibilities they invoke we do well not to forget all those other unrealised worlds that might also exist and which yet as ontological […]