Lists seduce us with the illusion of order—each item a shard of clarity arranged just so, hinting at mastery over the infinite. They compress the world into clean lines and neat progressions, comforting in their symmetry, irresistible in their simplicity. In a culture tuned to acceleration, these fragments multiply, not to deepen understanding but to […]
Having widely now gained access to this effectively unbounded as relationally networked complexity in generative computational representation, what are the odds that many if not most of the images and texts produced are used to directly or indirectly embellish, validate and incentivise the development of yet more generative and/or (other, as) downstream communications technology?
A totalising political mindset becomes about as self-imprisoned by censorship as it is ever emboldened by it. If it were an unambiguously measurable property, I’d say the damage inflicted upon a nation’s prosperity and sustainable continuity is directly proportional to its self-isolation.
There is an interesting, related theory hailing from philosophers Andy Park and David Chalmers. The Theory of Extended Mind asserts that, while your consciousness (whatever that may be) does seem squarely anchored between your ears, your cognition is a distributed entity that – yes – is characteristically if not uniquely “of human brains” but need […]
Will sentient machines require psychological care? It is a serious question and while it must be acknowledged that these likely are (or will be) very different kinds of minds than our own, in as much as they could understand and engage their presence in the world through (human) language they might find themselves facing their […]
Systems of belief are commonly engaged as performative role-plays in which the actual meaning or reality of whichever loosely cobbled bundle of assertions one inhabits need not in any way be anchored upon logical facts or verifiable truth. In fact, the more remote from plausibility or sensible, rational forethought and analysis that any particular position […]
There is a relationship between speech and cognition. There is also a relationship between written language and intelligibility. The longer and more convoluted a sentence, the harder it becomes to understand. The harder the sentence is to understand, the less likely it will self-replicate through artefacts, entities and systems of communication. What this means is […]
Knowledge as a function of intuitively “grokking it” in perception is a curious beast. Is demonstrable knowledge the only valid form of knowledge? Are there forms of knowledge that are only ever indirectly accessible as a corollary of true but unprovable logical facts. Consider the mental visualisation of a 3D sphere. There is some implicit, […]
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 […]
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 […]
The cognitive potential of any system is not so much a product of its informational architecture as it is a function of the dissipative dynamics that sustain it. This is where the black box of intelligence comes in – it is not so much a lack in our understanding of how the brain works, but […]
In general, people’s thinking is teleological and focused on specific details, rather than the big picture. This is due to the fact that people are distracted by individual instances and fail to see the overarching patterns that tie them together. As the hyper-extended cognition of (a) technology and communications system, language recursively shapes the way […]
Daedelus Kite 