The great “I believe…” has quite inadvertently come to imply that any inarticulate caricature and catastrophically irrational utterance might quite easily take the cognitive or public and theatrical (or often enough geopolitical) center of gravity and there draw the gullible like moths to its naked flame. Belief, thus and there abstracted from fact, reminds us […]
Some fascinating video lectures from Jeff Lichtman of Harvard University on the topic of connectomics are linked below. The reflections on technological aspirations to machine intelligence are implicit. Connectomics: seeking neural circuit motifs • Brains are initially maximally interconnected as wired networks and it is the imprinting of experience that prunes this connectivity to more […]
Not so much listening to as hearing a neighbour’s car stereo droning out a persistent rhythmic baseline this afternoon provides room for reflection. It occurs to me how such assertions of public identity, of enthusiastically announcing a place in whichever cultural coordinate space we might choose or otherwise find ourselves inhabiting, there is a certain […]
To what extent might we ever comprehensively or justifiably speak of an external or “objective” reality? Internal experience is intimately interdependent with an “external” world, assertions of certainty regarding subjective ownership of an experience of colour remain somewhat unreliable. Experience exists, but as an inductive inevitability the doubt regarding objective reality is mirrored in that […]
The most consequential questions are not those that (only) provide answers but that in so doing invoke many more questions, the most interesting and influential information or artefacts as entities and systems of communication are those that generate more of themselves, and the most successful technologies are those that generate more technologies.
Context: Facebook Changes Name, Announces AR Layer Over Physical Reality Utopian fantasy tends to follow a predictable arc as much in ideology as in technology. The cognitive consequences will be constitutively dissociative and alienating but then, all technology simultaneously empowers and inhibits. A recent study regarding the shrinking of brains some 3,000 years ago aligns […]
In an era of complex systems, negotiating organisational complexity is front and center. Large, stratified hierarchies have traditionally relied upon the necessary – or at least (and arguably) inevitable – Manichaean historical certainties that both define and constrain growth, innovation and resilience in this context. In some ways, traditional bureaucracy represents a logico-symbolic aspiration for […]
The most consequential questions are not those that provide answers but that in so doing invoke many more questions, the most interesting and influential information or artefacts of communication are those that generate more information and artefacts, and the most successful technologies are those that generate more technologies as conceptual or logical ancestry.
Indeed. I do wonder if a little constructive self-deception is the necessary cognitive consequence and corollary of a symbolic language that is anything other than perfectly fit for the purpose of unambiguous communication. In this sense, are discoveries really accidental dialects? Feynman diagrams being an (abstract, representational) case in point.
Context: 94% of the universe’s galaxies are permanently beyond our reach The scale of the cosmos is astonishing. Some estimates infer 2 trillion galaxies and some variations of cosmological hyper-inflation (i.e. early expansion) require an infinite Universe. What is most astonishing of all, though and to anyone who stares into this abyss for longer than […]
Context: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge Epistemological uncertainty is the center of gravity and compelling force (as vacuum) that drives discovery. AI constitutes something of an instance of a much broader principle (or sociotechnical pattern). Inductive utility is a function of the degrees of reduction in uncertainty but this same uncertainty as occluded knowledge faces, […]
Beyond the most broad brushstrokes of inductive intuition, we should never assume anything about others’ thoughts or intentions and yet find ourselves quite naturally predisposed by endemically limited information to do precisely this. A corollary assumption being that not only are the assumptions we make as essentially and irreducibly metaphysical assertions regarding others most likely […]
Daedelus Kite 