Categories
Philosophy

Luddite

Luddites, yes, and just as blindness might take many forms, there are so many ways to inhibit the progress of civilisation or work against those creatively seeking collaborative solutions to humanity’s shared existential problems. For some, it becomes a professional if not also political vocation of ignorant bluster and destructive blundering. Analysis is interesting but […]

Categories
politics

The Sleep of Reason

Is America sleepwalking into tyrrany? El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. Context: How far would Trump go? I’m really very grateful that I live in a democracy that is not, currently at least, painfully and publicly disassembling itself.

Categories
technology

Future Proofing Education for Technological Change?

There is no “future proof.” It’s like asserting the presence of impermeably secure communications systems. Nothing, if not a nice story… …longer-term visions don’t play the same game in better ways. They rewrite the assumptions and axioms, they reinvent it. It is the unquestioned assumptions that generally hide in plain sight and everyday language. For […]

Categories
Philosophy

Entangled Vocabularies

General reflection – binary opposition: Most constellations of word pairs, bundled vocabularies and variously symmetrical semantic dichotomies in our linguistic experience represent gradients of difference. This presence of idiomatic antitheses generates ambiguity, uncertainty, confusion, miscommunication. However, we should never just observe the words and the variously transient sociotechnical vocabularies that orbit them. I have been […]

Categories
narrative

AI, Meaning, Absence

Words acquire meaning from adaptively relational dependency and entanglement with other words and definitions in whichever language, mind or culture they inhabit. Extrapolating this to sentences (and beyond, to narrative and ideology or any other linguistically-mediated system of belief), the combinatorial complexity of referential dependencies quickly becomes effectively unintelligible. A useful mnemonic and metaphor is […]

Categories
Philosophy

It’s a Lie

Fakes fly further and faster than facts because truth is not and never was the ground state of communication. Truth is IN language but it is not OF language: indeterminacy regarding semantics and truth is a primary method of linguistic system self-propagation. We should, perhaps, focus less on rubrics of culturally and psychologically self-validating (as […]

Categories
cybernetics

Sickly Sweet Insubstantiality: Generative AI in Popular Music

The music produced here is eminently forgettable, perhaps highlighting a bias of the attention economy towards confectionery-like superficiality. We’re being overwhelmed by a tide of short sharp bursts of information content that lack substantive value or meaning. As a kind of procedural “hollowing out” of ourselves and our diverse histories, this surely poses a risk to the preservation and sustainment […]

Categories
Philosophy

We are not machines

It’s an interesting thought that the countless electrochemical systems that sustain life and experience are in some mischievously self-orchestrating sense far smarter than we are. Our own minds do not encompass biological complexity, they are a subset of it. As for artificial intelligence, we should not let its utility and imminent ubiquity deceive us into […]

Categories
Philosophy

Science and/or Art?

Art is not an externality. Abstractive visualisation is significant for gaining intuitions regarding many relational and topological spaces, networked systems, causal flows and (even, for elaborating) assertions of causality, intent and purpose in mind and/or nature. It is not a matter of art OR science, which as a logical relationship approximates and resolves to some […]

Categories
cybernetics

Entropic Respiration

For a system to persistently self-sustain, it has to negotiate and/or “exhale” its own waste products as entropy. Generating waste that is reusable by something or someone else is all but ubiquitous in biology. Human systems (and consequences, in a scaled, industrial and technological sense) might be uniquely distinguished by the volume, diversity and cadence […]

Categories
Philosophy

Imperfect Communication

Meaning is contested but not because we explicitly or necessarily choose this particular path. If meaning and cultural or political and psychological significance was not subject to ambiguity and confusion, deception and misdirection in the ways it generally is, the adaptive system of bartered value and utility we build around and as language would be […]

Categories
Philosophy

Limits of Language

Given the potentially infinite continuum of expressive freedom available within language, it is something of a mystery as to why we generally only occupy such a small range of creative possibility within it.