Truth is a mischievous beast. Everywhere asserted, almost nowhere justified and in those rare instances when it might have been said to have been proven or unambiguously defined, it requires we suspend ourselves on contraptions and hooks of such intricate complexity that it is quite easy to forget what we were initially discussing or seeking […]
Context: Superconducting Silicon-Photonic Chip Developed for Quantum Communication It is interesting that there really seems to be no best way of negotiating computation at this scale. The effervescing diversity of technical innovations in this context is instructive. Even as technology converges towards an accelerating point, it radiates out upon as many branches of technical speciation […]
Some fascinating video lectures from Jeff Lichtman of Harvard University on the topic of connectomics are linked below. The reflections on technological aspirations to machine intelligence are implicit. Connectomics: seeking neural circuit motifs • Brains are initially maximally interconnected as wired networks and it is the imprinting of experience that prunes this connectivity to more […]
Context: COP26: Bezos pledges $2bn for restoring nature Yes, thanks Jeff, but it is likely going to cost several orders of magnitude more than that to even begin to effect substantive systemic change. It is something of an unresolvable existential irony that it is precisely the system(s) of value and wealth that we so viscerally […]
In an era of complex systems, negotiating organisational complexity is front and center. Large, stratified hierarchies have traditionally relied upon the necessary – or at least (and arguably) inevitable – Manichaean historical certainties that both define and constrain growth, innovation and resilience in this context. In some ways, traditional bureaucracy represents a logico-symbolic aspiration for […]
Context: Peter Thiel says, forget the hype: Big Tech is slowing down It may be a necessary property of non-trivially sophisticated dynamical systems to oscillate through periods of acceleration and deceleration. Rising complexity in this context is equivalent to acceleration, logically as much as materially; we may quite sensibly speak of self-gravitation in this context. […]
Context: Pentagon Wants AI to Predict Events Before They Occur If we abstract the concept of pattern formation from its instances, this becomes plausible. This becomes about not specifically determining what is going to happen but rather and as a function of the resonant (i.e. harmonic) symmetries endemic of and to complex systems, where and […]
Indeed, and similarly – the metric and ticking metronome of those times is so often and deeply inflected by a chronology (as history) measured in, by and as reflexive institutional responses to human being that we have all come to quite normatively expect that all of our catastrophes and our triumphs must necessarily conform to […]
Context: Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science Complex systems of anything other than trivial complexity tend (and trend) towards a median value of approximation towards optimal system self-replication. These academic and associated publishing systems have become oriented towards the maximally effective and efficient reproduction of the organisational systems themselves and this is, as […]
The integration of diversity within coherent unity (and as expressed or experienced across multiple technical and functional domains and disciplines) is a core problem of our era. One thing, and context agnostic, that large organisational systems rarely do well is to find effective balance between a need for control (as direction, guidance, intent) and the […]
Psychological factors in risk seem to be commonly unacknowledged in literature and associated organisational practice. There are factors as dimensions or degrees of freedom available to complex (human) organisational systems that seem to endemically predispose them to structure and assert value and utility as an inverse measure of risk. In many ways, these factors derive […]
Why ideology? Partisan individuation is (an) optimal method by which sociocultural (and technological) systems autonomously self-propagate, through and as us. A threshold level of entropy is constructively reintroduced back into the system as noise that invokes adaptive resilience in and as the distributed information pattern encoding across the entire “surface” of an integrated system of […]
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