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Philosophy

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 […]

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Philosophy

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 […]

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Philosophy

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 […]

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Philosophy

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 […]

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Philosophy

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 […]

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Philosophy

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 […]

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Philosophy

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, […]

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Philosophy

Neologisms are the Exception that Proves the Rule

Cicero: “exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis”.(The exception that proves the rule). Context: The chaos theory of word creation Interesting etymologies coursing as arcs from quarks through stochastic serendipity into literature and beyond but then most etymology is found fascinating to reflective minds. Neologisms are the recursive concatenation and hybrid juxtaposition of pre-existing symbol […]

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Philosophy

Peace

A rare moment of clarity: I realise that I’m not going to be here forever, that my own transient, anxious and caffeine-fuelled path through life is, has been and will forever be completely meaningless if I do not in some small way make this world a better place and room for improvement quite clearly exists […]

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Philosophy

Synthetic Biases

Context: What Is Synthetic Data? …and yet, with this – the bootstrap into virtualised abstraction becomes all but complete. Fascinating and clearly intersects with some of Jean Baudrillard’s observations on simulation, semiotics and reality. Training machine intelligence on data generated in virtual worlds solves some tricky problems but at what cost; where does the “real-world” […]

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Philosophy

DNA: Structure is not Meaning

Context: The Human Genome Is—Finally!—Complete This is interesting, of course, but access to the catalogue of the Library of Congress is not the same thing as understanding its contents. (Enter: John Searle’s Chinese Room, stage left.) Of note here is that a record of information is as a function of observable difference in or as […]

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Philosophy

AI: Big Data, Narrow Intelligence

Context: The False Philosophy Plaguing AI The (or at least a) problem here is that the ascendant technologies, frameworks, cultures and commercial incentives have inadvertently stumbled upon the constructive and recursively self-inflected sweet-spot through which those core assumptions themselves optimally self-propagate. If the incentives and rewards for developers, researchers and corporate or institutional entities find […]