Categories
Philosophy

AGI: The Hole in the Wheel…

Context: Google Engineer On Leave After He Claims AI Program Has Gone Sentient I do wonder if the preponderance towards inflected self-validation and effectively narcissistic pareidolia indicates, quite paradoxically, that subjectivity and prospective machine sentience are concepts essentially built upon smoke and mirrors. In seeking self as Other in the reflective mirror of technological determinism, […]

Categories
technology

Artificial General Intelligence: Self-deception

Context: Elon Musk & Joe Rogan talk to “conscious AI” If our intent in seeking to scale the complex asymptote of AGI has been to convince ourselves that it is conscious and possesses subjectivity, personhood or sentient experience, then it is perhaps inevitable that we will arrive at a point where the reflexive conversational and […]

Categories
communication

Complex Failures of Language and Communication

I find the range and spectrum of generative ambiguity around the concept (and definition) of complexity to itself be quite interesting. We find in language (as much as in technology but both as hyper-extended corollaries of cognition) these mischievously self-propagating confusions and constructive indeterminacies around concepts like complexity, entropy and emergence. Otherwise rendered: the most […]

Categories
Philosophy

What if ?

What if everything we ever do and think or feel was purely the reflexive experience of a vast and indeterminately complex statistical flow of information and energy? What if the triumphs, successes, errors and abject failures endemic of people and ideas were really only the instances of a much vaster, grander stream of intricately entangled […]

Categories
narrative

Narratives Matter

Viewed in gestalt – cultural artefacts, entities and systems generate positive (and negative) feedback loops as a generative discontinuity of communication system self-reference that produces the semiotic and meme-effervescing environment in which their own symbolic sustainability and intelligible continuity remains possible. Given sufficient time and enough degrees of freedom, cultural (and technological) communication systems quite […]

Categories
systems

Supply Chain Stealth

An industrial-scale project is information and energy intensive. That information and energy-processing has a footprint as multidimensional (i.e. complex) signal in the background noise of an economy and all associated sociotechnical artefacts, entities, systems. The relative autonomy and partial logical closure of any manufactured system is a function of referential dependency. The continuity of a […]

Categories
Psychology

The Masks We Wear

A brief thought for today but based indirectly on a peculiar montage and vintage vignette of Lacanian mirrors and Zen voids. We all wear masks. To be a person, an individual, a subjective experience in the world is to adopt a role, a pattern or perceived or expected and normative self hood. Underneath it all, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Emotional Maturity: Acquiescence

The first sign that you are emotionally mature: you acknowledge that no one ever truly is. The generative discontinuity of insecurity is very much the mischievous absence around which we build our subjective selves and each iteration of developmental sedimentation into (and as) memory, experience and learning only ever really amplifies this uncertainty in useful […]

Categories
politics

Self-persecutory Pathology in Autocratic Imperialism

The curious thing about those who seek to leverage political capital from conflict is that this represents an atavistic ideological “business model” that in such a deeply interdependent world, all actions and aggressions return – amplified – to the actor. Even more so, in such an intricately entangled social, economic and technological context in which […]

Categories
Organisation

An Entropy Engine of Scholastic Inertia?

I have been reflecting on the bias in academic institutions towards the accelerated production of research papers at a cost of their quality or consequence. It is a curiously irritating function of many but certainly not all of the autonomously self-propagating (as soliton-like) organisational systems that human beings inhabit that these entities are prone to […]

Categories
technology

How Technology Shapes Science

Context: Science of science workshop: discovery & inequality The data and computational tools in use are not only transforming the field, they are recursively shaping the radiative speciation of scientific practice as their own transmission medium. We rarely notice just how profoundly trajectories in science and technology are a reflexive function of the extended phenotype […]

Categories
Philosophy

Closure: does reality make sense?

Context: A theory of reality that makes sense On the topic of the nominally closed systems referenced in the article above, much of the closure asserted (or interpreted) is at a cost of displacing or offsetting the external dependencies of those systems. Yes, there is a certain degree of ontological individuation without which rationality and […]