Sometimes the most mysterious and/or significant mystery may be that there is none, that nothing exists where he (or we) expect to find something. Notwithstanding that “nothing” and ontological absence is not, as a function of mischievous logic as much as of the semantic tesseract of language, as reductively simple as it appears to be […]
The technologies of Artificial Intelligence have had stunning success with a hyper-inflating speciation of statistical in logical and inferential complexity as the savant-like Narrow AI that Gary Marcus references. The recognition of an ontological bootstrap and conspicuous absence of “common sense” being an optimistic step in a direction towards General as (at least minimally) sentient […]
Recent research suggests that the underlying symmetry in neural patterns of geometric world mapping in the mammalian brain are toroidal. “(…) the Mosers discovered the activity structure of single grid cells. What they found was a hexagonal grid pattern that functions as the brain’s metric and coordinate system for space. Today they have uncovered the […]
There was a mystical thread of thought in medieval philosophy called “apophasis”. This is an “un-saying” and reductive process of abstraction and recursively self-inflected introspection that may arrive at a goal of finding whatever is left after everything else is removed – God, enlightenment, essence, reality, certainty, truth; take your pick. Of course, we find […]
I’m about half way through reading Jeff Hawkins’ book “A Thousand Brains” which has been taking me quite some time, not because it is overly complicated or inaccessible, but because I tend to have so little spare time these days. It’s an interesting read with the key takeaway (so far) being that our mental world […]
Context: Liquid sheep – drone footage. The patterns of sheep transit are as of slime mould moving, or of liquid flow – perhaps quicksilver. Note that the resemblance is not merely superficial or in any sense trivial. Complex systems dynamics quite naturally gravitate towards functional eloquence over a diminished or abbreviated dynamical vocabulary; more or […]
Context: The Speed of Ocean Currents Is Changing in a Major Way, Scientists Warn Increasing the median internal energy gradients in any such vastly distributed information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system is bound to have consequences. Complexity and self-referential combinatorial structure of sufficient sophistication is likely to acquire new and perhaps relatively stable phases. If […]
Context: Influencing the mind of an adversary It really makes me wonder what the future (or present) utility of statistical approaches combining neurobiological feedback orchestrated or forecasted through and as machine learning might be. The commercial extraction of utility through social media via algorithmic abbreviation and influence is clearly just such a practice. These brains […]
Context: Neural network based on autocatalytic reaction performs image classification It really is not much of a hop, skip and jump from all these emerging discoveries of proxy mechanisms for invoking rudimentary machine intelligence to suggest that we have quite profoundly placed the ontological cart before the horse here. Information-processing systems (of which all matter […]
Recent studies reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic period has been the quietest period of human activity in the seismic record. It makes you wonder about the cumulative background noise that human activity generates as a constant vibrational hum of socioeconomic activity across the crust and into the subsurface body of the Earth. In what ways […]
Context: A Strange Form of Life Could Flourish Deep Inside of Stars, Physicists Say Fascinating article above, discussing the logical (i.e. hypothetical) presence of life and intelligence inside stars. We are of course blinded by our own intimate familiarity with a form of life that we ourselves take for granted as normative or necessary and […]
Context: Embracing Complexity On thinking in terms of complex systems. The concept of emergence is introduced (at the article referenced above) by an example of self-organisation in ant colonies. Emergence is the point where complex systems acquire a unique dimensional property. This property is succinctly captured by the common trope of “the whole being more […]
Daedelus Kite 