Categories
Philosophy

Naive Happiness

Whether as a function of age, ignorance or blind good fortune to never have suffered any of life’s indignities or inevitable hardships – it always strikes me that the happiest people I know have pretty much no idea how the world really works and just how dark it can be, how unfair and complex or […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Movie that Ruined my Life

Showing my age here, but when I was a teenager I saw a movie that completely ruined my life. The Day After was a 1983 drama that illustrated the immediate consequences of nuclear war. It was such a singularly depressing experience that I really don’t think I have ever been the same since. Perhaps it […]

Categories
Philosophy

AGI: The Missing Link

There is something foundational missing and it can not be brute-forced – all emulations are bound to be hollow and haunted. The ontological, holistic bootstrap of autocatalytic system self-containment that provides even a possibility of life, sentience, and eventually – intelligence and technology, is an absence conspicuous by its presence. There is a hidden logical […]

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Philosophy

COVID’s Metamorphosis, Revisited

A salient question to ask at this time is whether or not it is possible for rates of viral mutation to be self-modified. The rationale: if the information-replication and associated encoding mechanism that this viral family of entities represent is autonomously oriented towards maximal self-reproduction, and if accelerated mutation becomes a sustainable form of maximising […]

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Philosophy

The Selfish Problem of Duality

The core issue is an ontological symmetry that in some sense “breaks” or aggregates around, through and as human subjectivity. All of our organisational systems, definitions, structural and technological innovations and vulnerabilities reflect this self-same underlying and enigmatically self-contained dynamic. The proliferation of models, frameworks, maps and “best practices’ is  misses a key point. A […]

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Philosophy

Why do Philosophers Argue?

Because entropy. There are always and as a consequence of combinatorial necessity more disordered states available than ordered ones and as a consequence debate eventually travels through them into dissonance and disagreement but this, curiously, is also the source for more philosophy. It is a common (recursive) idiom and is endemic of and to logic, […]

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Philosophy

Neologisms are the Exception that Proves the Rule

Cicero: “exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis”.(The exception that proves the rule). Context: The chaos theory of word creation Interesting etymologies coursing as arcs from quarks through stochastic serendipity into literature and beyond but then most etymology is found fascinating to reflective minds. Neologisms are the recursive concatenation and hybrid juxtaposition of pre-existing symbol […]

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Philosophy

Peace

A rare moment of clarity: I realise that I’m not going to be here forever, that my own transient, anxious and caffeine-fuelled path through life is, has been and will forever be completely meaningless if I do not in some small way make this world a better place and room for improvement quite clearly exists […]

Categories
life

Friendship is a Kind of Love

Don’t let the unexpected arrival of a lifelong friendship blind you to its simplicity: no expectations, only compassion. If they expect anything from you which is in any way, shape or form beyond those things that will nurture your safety, well-being and happiness – then they are not your friends. Friendship is a kind of […]

Categories
life

Soulmates

Soulmates are two sides of one life. It is in the difference and distance between us that we might identify both our selves and each other as though two ends of some silvered, higher-dimensional thread but it is in the binding identity of entangled energy, information and experience that we discover the unity of which […]

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Philosophy

Synthetic Biases

Context: What Is Synthetic Data? …and yet, with this – the bootstrap into virtualised abstraction becomes all but complete. Fascinating and clearly intersects with some of Jean Baudrillard’s observations on simulation, semiotics and reality. Training machine intelligence on data generated in virtual worlds solves some tricky problems but at what cost; where does the “real-world” […]

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Philosophy

DNA: Structure is not Meaning

Context: The Human Genome Is—Finally!—Complete This is interesting, of course, but access to the catalogue of the Library of Congress is not the same thing as understanding its contents. (Enter: John Searle’s Chinese Room, stage left.) Of note here is that a record of information is as a function of observable difference in or as […]