Categories
Alien Anthropology

Karma Suture: Sex, Genetics and Deception

The intinctual principle and hormonal drive which propels us toward coupling and copulation is simultaneously the psychological symmetry which compels us to seek unity and wholeness where there is, in fact, none. The last thing that any of us is likely to feel particularly comfortable in acknowledging is that we are all at base the […]

Categories
Complexity

Epidemiological Entropy: Modeling Coronavirus

Uncertainty (and it’s irreducible twin shadows of proliferating information and entropy) represents an implicit logical discontinuity in, and of, information systems.  This is the central abstract artefact around which complex systems self-gravitate, accelerate, self-replicate and autonomously self-propagate in, through, and as internal system structure and environmental information and energy flows. This recursive entanglement and adaptive […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Entropy Binds

To what extent does a procedural (i.e. temporal) experience of cognition, language, culture and technology bias us towards linear problem-solving and reductionist explanation? The aggregate sum of all (multithreaded) organisational heuristics may itself be a non-linear and adaptively dynamic system as a fact but from an individual thread of experience (within that gestalt), planning, problem-solving […]

Categories
physics

What is Entropy?

Well, among other things… Entropy is a measure of the “degrees of freedom” available to a system. Generally-speaking, the more components, sub-systems, artefacts, entities that compose a system – the more degrees of freedom that are available to that system. Because there are always more possible disordered system states than ordered ones (in the total […]

Categories
Philosophy

Cyber: Technology, Information, Identity and Conflict

…as a general observation: All of this (shared) online aspiration to reflexively self-validating identity-construction and participatory meaning-generation masks a howling vacuum of dissimulated subjectivity. We seek self-expression but no such endpoint exists, no epistemogical closure or certainty and (certainly) nothing even vaguely approximating to that monster-image of projected, illusory control that stares back at us […]

Categories
Philosophy

Defining Intelligence

The intransigent difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently concise, compelling, universally agreed-upon and resilient definition of intelligence sits somewhere on the same geometric arc or architecture of axiomatic assertion as does complexity and, indeed, life. If epistemological closure is demonstrably (ref. paradoxes of self-containment, among other things) impossible, intelligence both can and can not (!) be […]

Categories
Philosophy

Internet Narratives, Self-propagating Complexity and Adversarial Evolution

Some philosophical thoughts on these contemporary, massively-distributed online communications systems: • social media now (largely) subsumes news media and the powerful, potentially unmanageable, flow and form of recursively self-propagating information-processing systems is such that even putatively reputable media or news channels – not to mention governments – are forced to contort themselves and their narratives […]

Categories
communication Complexity culture

Disassembling Control: Talent, Technology and Entropy

In any context where an employment and technology ecosystem is so rapidly evolving – recognising talents, skills and aptitude becomes about as difficult and as (ultimately and) unmanageably complex as acquiring or maintaining them. What interests me here is a second-order semantic analysis: there is such an efflorescence of salient wisdom and clever advice available, […]

Categories
technology

Logic: Indefinite Extensibility

The indefinitely extensible essence of logic (Gödel, 1931) is both bug *and* feature. That which provides a possibility of recombinatory (technological, organisational, psychological) development, of the degrees of freedom by which we might define (and endlessly redefine) the meaning and substance of “intelligence” or “technology”, is also the tangled hierarchy of inertia and entropy within […]

Categories
technology

AI: Engineering Intelligence

I wonder in what ways the “engineering of intelligence” recursively shapes, and to some extent prescribes the most probable developmental vectors of, our definition of human intelligence. We may find ourselves several years from now seeking the inflection points and procedural saliences that explain why it is that our core assumptions and concepts of intelligence […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Machines, the Mirrors and the Emptiness of Self

The image in the mirror of psychological self-reflexivity is the machine, the rational, the explicable and the logic which has through so many, many iterations become what we now recognise as information and communications technology. An aspirational aptitude towards anticipatory self-explanation is always, perhaps, only ever going to appear or manifest as the percolated surface […]

Categories
Organisation Philosophy Psychology

The Implicit Value and Logical Depth of Cognitive Diversity

Cognitive diversity represents that useful, recombinatory information entropy from which insight and innovation assert and reproduce or replicate themselves. A subtle, adaptive balance between self-propagating continuity and incessant metamorphosis is the source of as many evolutionary wonders as it is of the abstract information origami of psychological, cultural and technological enigmas with which we are […]