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, […]
Objectivity is a strange beast. The language and corollary cognition with which we engage complexity is itself the constitutive invocation of a necessarily partial model of the systems we seek to define, articulate and/or usefully shape. The definition of a “system” being quite clearly the manifest as epistemological reality of that artefact, entity or logical […]
If wisdom consists of knowing that you do not know, knowledge and all that ever creatively emanates from it can only ever be built upon such shifting sands. Technology is, for better and for worse, an extension of this principle. In every innovation, every inflected discontinuity of human ingenuity, and in every ratchet up the […]
If other people must always and to some extent only ever be ideas to any of us, how can those ideas ever love us back without the whole thing devolving into intricate games of haunted, hollow and narcissistic self-deception? What, in essence, is the meta-ethical solution here? Is there one? I suspect there is, but […]
Context: Attack Mannequins: AI as Propaganda An interesting article but the assertion of ideological counter-propaganda in this context is a bit of stretch. It projects much more structure, aptitude and volition to the behavioural and regulatory (as control/governance) systems than has ever actually existed. The assertion of all ideological positions requires a foil, an antithesis […]
The presence of absence is a curious thing. From Lao Tze through to logical incompleteness as a function of the indefinite extensibility of all non-trivially sophisticated complex information and energy-processing (i.e. natural, computational) systems. What is really interesting, though, is that the absence of overarching structure and patterned grammar or organisational unity is an inverse […]
The key reason that we are unable to completely and comprehensively understand the world we live in is because the core systems symmetry of analytical leverage necessitates that we, ourselves, are removed from the equation. Any whole systems analysis requires us to consider that there is no outside if the system under analysis. The consequences […]
I enjoy the endless Baroque complexity of words far too much to ever settle on a generalised shape or articulated pattern and causal ontology for them. Of course, though, even the absence of pattern is a kind of pattern, no? By this logic we might even assert that the intricate improbability of a truly random […]
The very fact that definitions are diverse and scattered across such a rugged ontological landscape of entities, artefacts and information (or institutional and behavioural or cognitive) processing systems and endlessly-extensible logical refinement suggests that, beyond general qualities or properties any one of us might render in any number of complementary ways, there is and can […]
It may be something of a truism that to understand war, one must first understand peace. It is of a similar kind of statement to assert the inverse – that to understand peace, one must first understand war. What then of attempting to understand the unified totality of conflict and harmony? When inspecting the unified […]
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 […]
What does it mean for a thing not to exist, for it to be quite literally “conspicuous by its absence”? When a thing that is there is removed, it is clearly an absence marked by memory or by material evidence, not that memory is perhaps all that trustworthy and notwithstanding that it is an irreducible […]
Daedelus Kite 