Superficiality is a function of acceleration. The mainstream flow of technological complexity is such that not only is it quite possible to exist, survive and (indeed) thrive while doing little more than juggling labels, names, references and (other) abbreviations – this is the constitutive default mode of contemporary psychological and cultural experience. Complexity and comprehension […]
The key reason that we are unable to completely and comprehensively understand the world we live in is because the core systems symmetry of analytical leverage necessitates that we, ourselves, are removed from the equation. Any whole systems analysis requires us to consider that there is no outside if the system under analysis. The consequences […]
We do not pilot this vehicle of civilisation anywhere near so much as it pilots us and it is as a relatively unremarkable consequence of human vanity that we remain on the whole almost entirely unable to perceive this.
Sufficiently sophisticated insights into the function and structure of this world are effectively indistinguishable from insanity. In this regard, a profoundly delusional mind is as often aligned with genius as it is with utter absurdity. Questions we might ask here are as to the profound and natural orientation of extreme creativity towards alienation and isolation. […]
What we assume as the central tenet of language and (other) symbolic systems of information-encoding is not in fact its goal, it is a supporting consequence and effective symptom of a system that, like all non-trivially sophisticated or complex entities, first and foremost seeks continuity and replication. The primary purpose of human language is not […]
Context: Logical Fallacies Curiously, though, logical fallacies have a largely unacknowledged and arguably pivotal role to play in the successfully sustainable continuity of cultural (as much as cognitive) communications systems. What is inaccurate or even outright absurd often carries more information entropy and influence than that which is, strictly speaking, factual or true. It is […]
Something I have noticed over the last few years of my journey through complexity theory and cognitive, cultural and communications systems is that knowing how (or even why) a something happens is not always of any particular use beyond pure intellectual fascination. Another way of saying this is that the world we inhabit optimally self-propagates […]
Bias represents an interesting and potentially intractable problem. Regardless of how (or where) we seek to address or interdict it, there exists an intrinsic, endemic property of complex information and energy-processing (i.e. logical, material) systems that natively orients those entities towards abstraction, abbreviation and mnemonic compression. Bias is the persistence of logical errors that naturally […]
Science and technology cartwheel and careen past us in ways that few can convincingly argue are fully comprehended, defined or ever anything more than superficially controlled. This accelerating turbulence of complex sociotechnical recursion and self-validating necessity is a self-propagating compression wave of information, energy, technology and concepts. It ripples and oscillates like waves on a […]
Almost exclusively, this human life and shared cultural experience represents some kind of an existential kindergarten. Our world is essentially a half-mirrored labyrinth of recursively self-validating communication and endlessly self-propagating patterns of information; encoded (in general) as the difference and notional distance through which we are each and all reflexively defined. Our behaviour, thought and […]
Context: Prometheus’ Toolbox Even if the only way we might ever find technology viscerally intelligible is as just such a Golem of projected corporeal self-inflection, we almost always seem to miss an important point. That which is created or copied and which then endlessly regenerates itself with all the logical necessity of a Von Neumann […]
Context: How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists I am interested in Global Systems Theory as the Grand logical Poobah system of all systems which, notwithstanding and plausibly because of Russell’s Paradox of entity self-containment, generates some interesting concepts, viewed laterally. Consider that “sucking orderliness” from an environment is inversely equivalent to asserting disorder upon […]
Daedelus Kite 