Singularly final unifying theories are a – or indeed, the – holy grail. The most significant barrier to unifying theories is that we expect them to be domain-specific, narrow and effectively limited – i.e. epistemologically “controlled” or even “controllable”. That’s the core problem – unified and/or unifying theories are constitutively not limited. Further, I expect […]
Category: Philosophy
Library as Brain
Context: Take a look at this bizarrely beautiful library inspired by the human brain. Fascinating idea – a library inspired by the brain. Of course, all libraries are always and already inspired and purposefully inflated by the needs and activities of brains and their products of hyper-extended cognition in – and as – language, culture, […]
Universal Selfie
True, perhaps, and yet all technology, all cognitive hyper-extension through art, language, culture – it is all really just one vast and monumentally intricate selfie, a world that replicates and represents itself through us, in us, as us. Curiously, and more than a little bit Zen, is that if everything is self, then nothing is.
Innovation
Innovation as a concept is (still) quite poorly understood. While instances of innovation are critically significant, the general abstraction of which those instances are manifestations remains somewhat opaque. There is a class of logical systems constructs that mine a rich seam of conceptual innovation. These derive from the recursive (logical) properties of system self-containment. This […]
Loneliness in Love
Have you ever noticed the ways in which love has a tendency to empty and hollow out our world every bit as much as it inflates it with meaning and purpose? I find myself dreaming, desiring, longing and imagining the effective fictive fantasy of Other, of closure and reflexive psychological completion, of unity and hope […]
A Lonely Philosopher
As I get older and, reluctantly, more mature – my social life has become dominated by sitting in cafes by myself, wistfully scribbling obscure observations on the nature of mind and systems theory into personal notebooks. It is very lonely and in very many ways. Something which occurred to me, mid-scribble, today was more generally […]
Imagination
Under analysis, we might be pleasantly (or otherwise) surprised to discover that imagination and its abstracted introspection represent the kernel and tonal center around which all intelligence as ordered experience and perception modulate. More than this, though, all belief – being the interior reflection of a half-mirrored labyrinth asserted and projected upon assumptive metaphysical facts […]
Naive Happiness
Whether as a function of age, ignorance or blind good fortune to never have suffered any of life’s indignities or inevitable hardships – it always strikes me that the happiest people I know have pretty much no idea how the world really works and just how dark it can be, how unfair and complex or […]
AGI: The Missing Link
There is something foundational missing and it can not be brute-forced – all emulations are bound to be hollow and haunted. The ontological, holistic bootstrap of autocatalytic system self-containment that provides even a possibility of life, sentience, and eventually – intelligence and technology, is an absence conspicuous by its presence. There is a hidden logical […]
COVID’s Metamorphosis, Revisited
A salient question to ask at this time is whether or not it is possible for rates of viral mutation to be self-modified. The rationale: if the information-replication and associated encoding mechanism that this viral family of entities represent is autonomously oriented towards maximal self-reproduction, and if accelerated mutation becomes a sustainable form of maximising […]
The Selfish Problem of Duality
The core issue is an ontological symmetry that in some sense “breaks” or aggregates around, through and as human subjectivity. All of our organisational systems, definitions, structural and technological innovations and vulnerabilities reflect this self-same underlying and enigmatically self-contained dynamic. The proliferation of models, frameworks, maps and “best practices’ is misses a key point. A […]
Why do Philosophers Argue?
Because entropy. There are always and as a consequence of combinatorial necessity more disordered states available than ordered ones and as a consequence debate eventually travels through them into dissonance and disagreement but this, curiously, is also the source for more philosophy. It is a common (recursive) idiom and is endemic of and to logic, […]