Categories
cybernetics

Introvision

Cultural systems are fundamentally recursive.

Categories
cybernetics

Convergent Stupidity

The phenomenon of societal ‘dumbing down’ is undeniable. While terms like “uninformed” or “disengaged” may seem too blunt, there is a notable drift – both culturally and intellectually – towards a collective state that is increasingly indifferent, uninspired, and detached from genuine engagement with one another. And yet, this shift is layered beneath a polished […]

Categories
cybernetics

Adaptive Policy Design

Navigating Complexity: Embracing Indeterminacy, Uncertainty, and Openness in Global Policy In an increasingly interconnected and rapidly changing world, global challenges such as climate change, economic instability, and social inequality defy simple solutions. Traditional policy approaches often struggle to address these issues effectively because they rely on predictability and control. However, complex systems inherently involve indeterminacy […]

Categories
Philosophy

Seeding Entropy

Context: China’s spy threat is growing, but the West has struggled to keep up …oh yes, and we might also ask: to what extent is the burbling, percolating insecurity of incessant intrusion, theft and deceptive misdirection actually a necessary and sustaining precondition for the continuity of a constitutively repressive political system? Is the invocation, cultivation and […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Value of Chaos

Generative AI systems provide an interface to the near-unbounded representational, referential and/or relationally networked complexity of ourselves, as historical data and informational or logical abstraction. We struggle cognitively and linguistically with a notion that there is no simply deterministic mapping from input to output in these tools. This is not a bug or failure, it […]

Categories
Philosophy

Generative Uncertainty

Indeterminacy is the generative core of cognition. It is an elementary absence in knowledge that counter-intuitively inflates language (and communication) with meaning.

Categories
Philosophy

We are not machines

It’s an interesting thought that the countless electrochemical systems that sustain life and experience are in some mischievously self-orchestrating sense far smarter than we are. Our own minds do not encompass biological complexity, they are a subset of it. As for artificial intelligence, we should not let its utility and imminent ubiquity deceive us into […]

Categories
communication

Communication Complexity

Language and its corollary of narrative communication finds itself quite poorly-fit for engaging with anything other than the products and assumptions of language, as rich and diverse as they may ultimately be. This is a primary method of communication system self-replication through indefinitely extensible introspective self-reference. We don’t often notice this because we are all […]

Categories
communication

Story, Game, Complexity

Notice: this hybrid constellation of symbols, narratives, and competitive idioms is the central band and “strange attractor” of a probability distribution we might otherwise recognise or identify under some definition of entropy. In a complex system, the paths that emerge and persist are those that reproduce and sustain their environmental containers, contexts, and communication systems. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Existential Pragmatics and Emergence

There are, in general, two main ways to understand a complex system-of-systems. First, as an adaptive constellation of modularly decomposable artefacts, entities and sub-systems as subject to and expressions of orchestration and directed purpose – that is, in terms of its differentiated parts and their relationships. Later, as a bonded, binding proxy organism in which […]

Categories
cybernetics

Not True

A critical nexus: the assumption of truth as the lowest-energy level or ground-state, system attractor and natural telos of communication. Such beliefs are credible, plausible and compelling but are mistaken. Communication systems are proxy organic entities, maximally-oriented towards the reproduction of themselves and seek to prime their own self-entangled transmission media for existential continuity. The […]

Categories
Philosophy

Omniscience

A provocative hypothesis emerges from the rapid evolution of technology: the phenomenon we’re witnessing in accelerated technological speciation (and convergence) is not localized but rather a distributed systemic property. We generally think to localize the essence of Artificial Intelligence within distinct nodes or points. This localization serves a practical purpose, enabling us to dissect and […]