Conflict is the flip-side of a difference that is itself the necessary condition for the production and definition of information. Being that contested information spaces are now ubiquitous, it should also be clear that the competitive dissonance of endlessly self-replicating information hyper-inflation is an effective proxy for conflict. What does this mean? Quite simply: that […]
Context: IQ tests: are humans getting smarter? Intelligence is a topic in which explicability possesses an uncanny correspondence to the behavioural practices by and through which it is defined. Having framed longevity as a plausibly necessary function of intellect, Social Darwinism arrives (yet again) on the Pale Horse as meritocracy wearing a clown hat. Having […]
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 […]
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