The world and everything in it constitutes a single, unified and mischievously indefinable information and energy-processing system. This is in essence a computational system but is distinguished from computers by the fact that it does not possess quite the same properties of mechanical or algorithmic and rules-based limitation that a computer demonstrates (as both weakness […]
It remains endlessly problematic that the words and the knowledge or cognitive information patterns through which we interpret our world are always already and inadvertently alienating and dissociative. The unity we seek is above and beyond and can never be bounded by the very language and thought which aspires to understand it. It is and […]
An interesting consequence of generalised attributions of human exceptionalism is that we tend to automatically believe that all intelligence, all value and all experience exist (and persist) in this diminutive cranial cavity we inhabit. Cogito ergo something is definitely going on between our ears but there is a deep and irreducible mystery at work (i.e. […]
Context: This AI Robot Just Nabbed the Lead Role in a Sci-Fi Movie Dissimulated truths (here, as robotic self-representation) are perhaps always more compelling (if disconcerting) than unproblematically verifiable or “real” ones. Where a truth (or representation) is introduced as an overtly plausible fake, it is the slippery slope and unravelling, accelerating diffusion of value […]
Context: Embracing Complexity On thinking in terms of complex systems. The concept of emergence is introduced (at the article referenced above) by an example of self-organisation in ant colonies. Emergence is the point where complex systems acquire a unique dimensional property. This property is succinctly captured by the common trope of “the whole being more […]
The intransigent difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently concise, compelling, universally agreed-upon and resilient definition of intelligence sits somewhere on the same geometric arc or architecture of axiomatic assertion as does complexity and, indeed, life. If epistemological closure is demonstrably (ref. paradoxes of self-containment, among other things) impossible, intelligence both can and can not (!) be […]
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.
AI systems approximating human thought? It seems to me that we are quite a long way from comprehensively understanding what human thought actually is, let alone successfully simulating it.
