Categories
Philosophy

Distributed Intelligence

Intelligence is somewhat catastrophically problematised by our inability, from within the system, to ever fully capture or represent the system. From within language (and logic) we generate models as fantasies of complete and consistent truths that much more closely approximate to systems of belief that, similarly, simulate closure and completeness without ever being able to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Probability is Real

Probability is as real as are tables and chairs. It is only our limited cognitive capacity which fails to understand that the complex information spaces that surround us are as real as we are.

Categories
Philosophy

Uncertainty

Uncertainty is perfection. We have all spent so very long and so much effort and wasted time seeking some Other and distant or somehow different completeness and possession of Self as refined, perfect and infallible that we almost entirely missed the point. That uncertainty and doubt which plagues us is really only and always just […]

Categories
Philosophy

Infinite Highway

Ascending the asymptote of taxonomical complexity is a process that in many ways reflexively defines what science both is and does but there is a core problem and ontological vacuum that lies here, unacknowledged and largely unexplored. This is that the sum total entropy and complexity of information and energy encoding and processing systems in […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

Self-identity is a Cultural Genome

Those small fragments of recombinatory information through which we understand and define ourselves and each other are nothing more or less than a patterned instance of the local, national and global cultures we inhabit and that, equally, inhabit us. In this way we are no different than the diverse and essentially narcissistic artefacts, entities and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Chemical Computation

Context: How chemical reactions compute The endemic computation of information dynamics in (and as) chemical reactions suggests that matter, energy and material relationships or interdependencies are already an implicit form of computation as complex logical information-processing. The interesting thing, from a philosophical perspective, is just what it is that damps or limits and abstracts a […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

Cultural Replication is Error-Prone

Context: What Misspellings Reveal About Cultural Evolution Copying errors represent a broken logical symmetry of system self-containment that provides momentum to effective information-processing and encoding self-propagation. Just as errors in DNA encoding invoke as many useful changes as redundant ones, cultural systems possess and manifest implicit and distributed, endemic information-encoding discontinuities. The underlying logic is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Why does humanity keep fighting wars?

It is because they are gullible, insecure and easily deceived. The expansionist empire-building of any nation is only ever an inverse function of the doubt and fragile uncertainty upon which they have been built. The proof of this is not difficult to determine – notice that every adversarial and belligerent gesture only ever serves to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Information contains matter.

We are all struggling with what are really little more than the contemporary stone axes and torches of technological hyper-extension of human intelligence to comprehend and leverage the implicit complexity ourselves and- inevitably- of the Cosmos from which we emerge and ofvwhich we are each microcosms. On an infinite arc and trajectory into complex systems […]

Categories
Philosophy technology

Artificial General Intelligence, but not as we expect it…

Notice that the organisational as much as technical self-propagation in AI research is, beyond the enlightened self-interests of commercial investment and the low-hanging fruit of metric spectacles, profoundly shaped by the degree to which the emergent entities, artefacts and systems provide the optimal opportunities for their own (non-ergodic, constrained or probabilistically-damped) self-replication. I realise that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Truth

Truth, like belief and most other assertions or aspirations to objectivity, is always and already anchored as unacknowledged tautology upon itself and the game of denying and obfuscating this fact constitutes the shared existential, organisational and cultural histories – good, bad and all between – that we inhabit. The perspicacity required to understand this is […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Dragon that Ate its own Tail

The general arc and trajectory of a pathology is rarely identified or recognised by those that inhabit it; this functional blind-spot is a partial representation of core cognitive factors that exist as much inter as intra individuals and in or as distributed ideologies. Notice, though, that the curious self-organisational resiliency of autonomously self-propagating (and entirely […]