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Philosophy technology

Metaverse: The Digital Egg

Context: Metaverse: Augmented reality pioneer warns it could be far worse than social media It has been said that a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg. The extent to which the idioms of technologically-mediated subjectivity we inhabit are the primary methods of information system self-propagation remain as generally opaque to us as […]

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Philosophy

Can our ideas love us back?

If other people must always and to some extent only ever be ideas to any of us, how can those ideas ever love us back without the whole thing devolving into intricate games of haunted, hollow and narcissistic self-deception? What, in essence, is the meta-ethical solution here? Is there one? I suspect there is, but […]

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art Philosophy

Aesthetic Relativity: Lascaux and Other Minds

Representational relativity is an epiphenomenon strongly supported by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (itself perhaps also, and ironically, subject to the representational vicissitudes and aesthetics of oscillating academic taste and cultures). While we might never decompress exactly what the Lascaux cave art meant to its creators, the reflexivity of creative expression as a function of whichever cultural […]

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Philosophy

Biological Complexity: Bootstrapping Explanations

The endemic, near-ubiquitous orientation of dynamical systems towards the emergence of purposive information and energy-encoding and processing (as essentially computational) mechanisms is astonishing. When and where these artefacts, entities and relatively closed (as bounded or measurable and defined) self-propagating patterns arise, it is worth reflecting that while the coding logic is in general our main […]

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culture Philosophy

Suspended Animation

Feeling trapped? It’s just what we humans do and by goodness do we do it well. Endlessly orienting ourselves towards the games of self and other that culture, language and our psychological worlds bring upon us, we find ourselves hooked and strung across so many reciprocal obligations and complex social or economic responsibilities that there […]

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Philosophy

Solving Complexity

Complex systems require complex solutions and global problems require global thinking. The application of holistic analyses to complex adaptive systems obligates us to come up with solutions that are themselves complex adaptive systems. An evolutionary feedback loop is the only plausible way to align adaptive technical solutions with “real-world” volatility and uncertainty. Obtaining contextual tenure […]

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Philosophy

What is Time?

Doctor Who is a classic character of science fiction. He travels through space and time in a sentient machine called the TARDIS. The first thing that most people remark when stepping into the machine is “It’s bigger on the inside!” This, I think, is the situation we find ourselves in with time. As a hybrid […]

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Philosophy

The Black Box of Human Intelligence

The cognitive potential of any system is not so much a product of its informational architecture as it is a function of the dissipative dynamics that sustain it. This is where the black box of intelligence comes in – it is not so much a lack in our understanding of how the brain works, but […]

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Philosophy

Complexity as Logical Vacuum

In general, people’s thinking is teleological and focused on specific details, rather than the big picture. This is due to the fact that people are distracted by individual instances and fail to see the overarching patterns that tie them together. As the hyper-extended cognition of (a) technology and communications system, language recursively shapes the way […]

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Philosophy

Many Worlds

A question worth pondering is that of whether or not the genealogy that percolates as ascendant method(s) of questioning is the one and only possible radiating path through a complex space of all possible (incomplete) logical trajectories. Of all possible worlds and laws of physics (or technical extrapolations of these), something constrains the sum total […]

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Philosophy

A conversation with AI on the Philosophy of Language

Open AI have released the language model of GPT-3 for general use, with appropriate caveats. I have previously been skeptical of the ultimate utility of GPT-3 as a creative authorial or (useful) philosophically reflexive tool but discovered just now that if you feed it a sufficiently sophisticated prompt it actually throws back some interesting linguistic […]

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Philosophy

Mind the Gap: Science and the Unknowable

It remains as something of an intractable and enigmatic fact that all systems of description, all linguistic artefacts and logical entities must conform in some way to the basic structure of a tautology. This in itself is an interesting enough conceptual waypoint but even while we find ourselves forever gazing into the half-mirrored labyrinths of […]