Context: Social media users more likely to believe misinformation The adoption of a “social” communications technology walks hand in hand with the suspension of disbelief as to the veracity of curated information broadcast on that channel; a wilful or semi-unconscious cognitive entrapment as progressive desensitisation to serial falsehoods. This may have taken a particular shape […]
Category: Philosophy
Ignorance as Enemy of Knowledge
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” – Stephen Hawking …and yet, how often is ignorance really little more than the illusion of knowledge? We can quite easily observe (very many) belief systems masquerading as factual, informed knowledge in all spheres of human life. Scientific knowledge is a […]
Global Development as Road to Peace?
As a species, we find it difficult to step beyond competitive biases into authentically (and sustainably) collaborative behaviours oriented towards Global development. The rank antitheses of adversarial conflict and shared sense of community (as self-identity) are so deeply entangled in our histories, our cultures, our linguistic assumptions and our psychological experience that effective and enduring […]
Creative Entropy
Creativity requires entropy, novelty, the unexpected. We invoke new things, new concepts and new realities as a function of our experience of difference and diversity, of randomness. Brains rapidly desensitise to repetition and this is why it is a foundationally important property of any environment to possess or manifest a threshold of uncontrolled, unbounded or […]
Facebook is Dangerous
Context: Facebook blocks Australian users from viewing or sharing news I have not used Facebook for years and it is not at all missed. It says a lot for just how rapidly and reflexively people come to depend on the integrated communications systems of “social networks” that the threat of removing access to algorithmically-shaped biases […]
When we trade in Universals or concepts of substantive reality, we are engaging concepts of notionally “whole” or “complete” systems. The curious thing about any “totality” or aspirationally “complete” system is that there is no outside to that entity, no external conditions or properties. Everything is internal to that system. Why does this matter? Because […]
Ethics in Art
Context: Shakespeare’s Moral Compass Is a moral compass always and necessarily retrospectively attributed in art and to artists? I do wonder how often we do assert or interpret such qualitative values in hindsight only to (eventually) discover that all such attributions of ethical relativism are always and already much more a literal and half-mirrored reflection […]
Will AI superintelligence be evil?
The question might be not as to if or when General AI successfully transcends human intellect, but rather – what is it about the culture, competition and commercial (or, to be frank, geostrategic and complex adversarial) contexts in which these technologies currently effervesce and thrive that might only ever guarantee that they are shaped from, […]
Know Thyself
…and in knowing, in that endlessly self-inflected and hyper-inflating abstract space of iteratively refined and asymptotically unresolvable logical evolution that knowing, intelligence and material complexity are all aspects or dimensions and vectors of – we surely embody whatever plausible unifying and Universal principle exists as would ever be sufficient to generate this Cosmos, this life, […]
Bewitched
Fictional though it may ultimately be, there’s something that profoundly bewitches intellects in such aspirationally complete future states and through which psychological and tribal identities endlessly and self-reflexively define themselves, invoking meaning as this undiscoverable (or unrecoverable) endpoint or perspectival projection and horizon. After all, what better way to displace plausibly unmanageable complexity in the […]
Art and Intelligence
Art is surely not bound by artefacts any more than intelligence is bound by a cranium. Generating value in art is really only a function of the extent to which an artefact (as a concept) directly, indirectly or even – in some instances and as a corollary of entropy, inversely – renews or reinvents the […]
Negation
Negation is an irreducible property. Speaking of ontology, epistemology: these are all different flavours on the same buffet cart. Where we speak of a thing, a system, a person, a point of view, a technology or a system of belief – it is always from that system’s point of view or aspirationally-privileged perspective. We are […]