Context: Single-celled organism can ‘change its mind’ despite lacking a nervous system This is an example of entropy as degrees of freedom; intelligence as manifest choice. Not quite a solid vote for panpsychism but certainly heading in the direction of autonomously self-propagating biological computation being universal within observed biotic artefacts, entities and systems on Earth. […]
Context: DeepMind tells Google it has no idea how to make AI less toxic The raw data is indeed endemically and intermittently toxic. Filtering out venomous misanthropy from the dataset is a solution but this also requires a language model that does something substantively more than generate probabilistic sequences of linguistic artefacts sans comprehension. John […]
The extent to which psychoanalysis is a successful or compelling theory is really a very interesting question in and of itself, even before considering its subject matter. This same dark thread was identified by Nietzsche as being a symptom of more distributed belief-system neuroses. Regardless of where, when or how anyone asserts the causal factors […]
I’m about half way through reading Jeff Hawkins’ book “A Thousand Brains” which has been taking me quite some time, not because it is overly complicated or inaccessible, but because I tend to have so little spare time these days. It’s an interesting read with the key takeaway (so far) being that our mental world […]
The long journey of technological civilisation is shaped by a curious and generally unacknowledged enigma that the most sophisticated technologies will almost always approximate to natural, physical and environmental systems that already exist. We should perhaps be unsurprised that technology converges towards the elegant sophistication, efficiency and eloquent complexity of nature. We might be even […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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