Context: Can the Universe Learn? It seems to be something of an inevitability, in some sense, that the mothership from whence all complex emergence arises is itself an instance and template case of autonomously self-propagating distributed learning systems ontology. The inadmissibility, in general, of such concepts is very much more a consequence of rank psychological […]
Context: Aliens are a mirror to humanity Aeschylus, Shakespeare or Mary Shelley would all and also very likely recognise these narrative tropes of alien Other as being endemic behavioural and psychological reflections of humanity itself. More interesting, perhaps, than that we find ourselves serially encountering our own image and bundled native biases in fiction is […]
A chair, being neither true nor false and present as a fact or the concept that references one, is only ever the sum over all that it is not and in this sense represents an ontological absence to the presence that inversely defines it. The artefact as teleological narrative or cognitively reflexive endpoint is in […]
Context: New words – 17 May 2021 These new words and phrases possess little aesthetic merit and less etymological grace but in novel conceptual juxtaposition capture something else that sits quite naturally in a blindspot that lexicographical taxonomies can not, arguably, identify. Observe that this kind of word and word grouping (or abbreviated compression) represents […]
What a strange thing to find such an artefact of profound wisdom located on the wall next to a wash basin in the public toilet of a shopping center. Language is structured in precisely this way and it is around precisely such micro-choices of self-inflected emotional bias that our whole lives sometimes turn. There is […]
What is our painful memory of life but the melted wax artefacts of so many errors and regrets, sometimes softly revisited and sculpted into little candles of light as lanterns by which we might then see the long road that ever lies before us? What is a hope of future happiness but that distant shore […]
There are many kinds of fear. Some of them are straightforward, unproblematic and represent a simple correlation between a concept and the thing it represents. In this sense a fear of a specific animal is usually just that and regardless that arachnophobia, for instance, rarely represents something unconscious or indirect other than a linearly-related fear […]
Power is really an inverse function of ethics. What is considered permissible or (indeed) valuable under any moving ethical frame of reference is implicitly – some would argue necessarily – representative of the power structures, systems and integrated social, political and ideological modalities of a time and place. Notice also that what is considered good […]
People don’t fear death anywhere near so much as they are afraid of being forgotten. It is all part of a strange game we play with in which a symbolic life and the complex narratives of abstraction we build around living comes to envelop and invalidate the concrete facts upon which that fragile experience so […]
As much as DNA encodes information abstractions that become concrete instances expressed through phenotypes, as an information system it also represents something of an inverse mapping of the environmental context in which that phenotype provides adaptive leverage. This indicates a continuous and unbroken, singular or unified information system. We tend to think in terms of […]
Language is fascinating. From the inside of the (i.e. this) referential system, the combinatorial possibilities are effectively unbounded. Notice that linguistic compression waves of complexity as ordered information pass quite autonomously through a transmission medium of narrative cognition, culture, communication – encoded through and as our minds. Human thought and behaviour becomes the extended phenotype […]
If it is true, as I currently believe, that language manifests or instances an adaptive and emergently complex holistic structure that partially pre-processes (and stores, distributed for resilience and redundancy against loss that) information, the question of cognition-as-ordered-thought becomes one of just how much of our choices and self-determination is outsourced or displaced to the […]
Daedelus Kite 