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 […]
Tag: Complexity
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
…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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]