A philosophical perspective: I accept that conscious machines are plausible, but I have trouble believing that the diverse algorithmic and networked approaches under development are anything beyond sophisticated, limited, mechanical or incomplete axiomatic models. It provides reflexive psychological comfort to assert (and believe) that the hard problem of consciousness is explicable via a reductive algebra […]
There exists an endemic and intransigent adherence to the self-evident necessity of linear or causal teleology and reductive explicability in human experience that misleads us as to the underlying organisational or logical principles of our shared reality. The many and diverse games we play are, for instance, evidence of core principles of systemic (and systematic) […]
I have been seeking a sophistication and beauty of intelligence in life, in humanity and – by an inevitability of existential or logical extension – in myself which may just never have existed. Can we ever truly make our own meanings, our own worlds and our own destinies or are we forever bound to be […]
It is a little hard not to feel somewhat dispossessed and saddened by the arc of catastrophe that human history traces in time. There is some essential adversarial turn in psychology and nature that provides and requires the entropy from which new forms of thought and life are able to emerge. We come to depend […]
The international society of nations, such as it is, is not very often seeking clever solutions to the problems that it itself is generating, across all countries and conflicts. Each instance of dissonance is a microcosm of a global property of discontinuity, a distributed planetary discord that is oblivious to nation or ideology and that we all are dealing with, wherever we are.
Simulating the Universe to approximate to an understanding of galactic evolution.
The entities and artefacts we make “in our own image” include the abstractions and patterns through which we understand and organise the world and ourselves.
Who benefits from stoking the fires of fear, insecurity and hatred?
Every act of creativity and recombinatory cultural reconfiguration is both additive and subtractive – it is an addition of complexity and structure and is simultaneously the systemic logical negation of existing methods and strategies of organisation and thought.
If consciousness is a holistic property of information and energy-processing systems, or even a “phase” of matter, it must have some very special logical properties.
For a Universe to have spontaneously emerged from nothing may be an alternate view on the the same fact as that it has always existed. It is not the logic which fails so much as the implicit (or apparent) boundaries of our own minds.
Conspiracy theories are interesting, if for the most part demonstrably false. In the integrated information environment we live in, conspiracies are the little sisters of fake news but it is all on a colourful spectrum from plausible fiction to complete and utter bullshit.
Daedelus Kite 