Categories
Philosophy

Consciousness, Language, Paradox

Context: Brain experiment suggests that consciousness relies on quantum entanglement Of microtubules and metaphors… …we can not describe anything beyond our systems of description. This tells us something significant about the nature of these conscious systems and of what kinds of explanations might be possible. Entanglement suggests, to my mind, that the ways in which […]

Categories
Philosophy

Will AI Destroy Social Media ?

Is artificial intelligence going to destroy social media? Would it even matter if it might not also destroy us in the process? These are fractal tesseracts of linguistic narcissism as wheels within wheels of technologically mediated autopoiesis. Will we be able to see anything outside the half-mirrored sphere of reflective, reflexively dopamine-boosting narrative self-engagement? There […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technological Immortality?

Nope. If nothing else and far beyond the actual sophisticated engineering (*not* rhetorical) problem this represents, to render life endless is simultaneously to render it meaningless. It may not always be obvious but value is not anywhere near so much a function of abundance as it is of scarcity. It is the transience of our […]

Categories
Complexity

Self-Organising Criticality in Brains, Battles and Universes

The notion (articulated in the video) that the homeostatic process by which quasicriticality is maintained in the brain may have an essentially cybernetic explanation. In Jeff Hawkins’ “A Thousand Brains” he references neurophysiologist Vernon Mountcastle’s belief in the existence of an underlying (as unifying) organisational principle in the brain. I wouldn’t be at all surprised […]

Categories
Complexity

Brain Function as Communications System

Context: Neuroscientists listened in on people’s brains for a week. They found order and chaos. Brain as decentralised communications network that exists with optimal efficiency on a globally-distributed fractal boundary between order and disorder? “Specific brain networks seemed to communicate with each other in what looked like a “dance,” with one region appearing to “listen” […]

Categories
cybernetics

Of Ant Colonies and Neural Networks

Context: Ant colonies behave like neural networks when making decisions …and, indeed, vice versa but we would do as well to acknowledge that such adaptive autotelic information and energy-processing symmetries quite plausibly constitute something of a primary reality of which all complex instances, resonant analogies and artefacts of salient or perceived intelligence represent mere component […]

Categories
Philosophy

An Open Mind

Being that the combinatorial complexity of 86 billion neurons exists in an utterly vast state space of possible connection and structure, yet given that a limited sub-set of all possible network edges or computational and thermochemical functions as dynamical symmetry occurs, an intuition is that the patchwork quilt of neurocognitive or otherwise causal biological facts […]

Categories
creativity

Creative Cognitive Semantics

From the article: “participants with higher creative activities and achievements had semantic memory networks that were less segregated and more efficient”. So, creative utility is a function of a globally-distributed semantic potential (as memory, encoding, storage). The more semantic combinatorial possibility, the greater the potential creative “depth” of a cognitive system. If “creative cognition involves […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Metaverse Mortgages: The Absurdity of (Virtual) Value

Oh yes, mortgages are now a thing in the Metaverse. There is something really interesting here, from a speculative philosophical and psychotherapeutic perspective. Some people are quite willing and enthusiastic to jump on the bandwagon of perceived or projected value in and as virtual artefacts, entities and systems. This is plausibly because at a reflexive […]

Categories
Complexity mathematics systems

Rat on a Wheel: The Doughnut in your Mind

Recent research suggests that the underlying symmetry in neural patterns of geometric world mapping in the mammalian brain are toroidal. “(…) the Mosers discovered the activity structure of single grid cells. What they found was a hexagonal grid pattern that functions as the brain’s metric and coordinate system for space. Today they have uncovered the […]

Categories
Philosophy

Pale Blue You: a Beautiful Brain

Beautiful. Gazing upon this kind of creative cartography of the embodied, material form and home of our mental selves is evocative in ways reminiscent of Carl Sagan’s wistful soliloquy on Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot image. Why? Because our whole lives and all our memories, all of our aspirations, our loves and fears, our […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Oblivion of Broken Things

I am endlessly captivated by the many and diverse ways that this world of ours, for all its patterned continuity, already and always bears a certain discontinuous fracture, harmonic displacement and logical dissonance at heart. It is as though all our vainglorious aspirations to meaning as the symbolic mirror of existential assurance and cognitive (or […]