The languages and technologies with which we engage the downstream consequences of our own technical (as linguistic and communications) productivity are as unable to capture, explain and bound the accelerating metamorphosis of technological #change as is that electromechanical juggernaut (itself and also) unable to provide the linearity and closure that is forever spruiks as its […]
Entity and context, system and environment, part and whole. Behaviour and purpose is not bounded or purely or completely encoded in an entity, regardless that our linguistic (as much as cognitive or technologocal) teleologies and intuitions reinforce and validate such a belief. Symbiosis also occurs at the level of whole systems. Entity and environment both […]
Will sentient machines require psychological care? It is a serious question and while it must be acknowledged that these likely are (or will be) very different kinds of minds than our own, in as much as they could understand and engage their presence in the world through (human) language they might find themselves facing their […]
Mass hysteria in the age of social media is not any kind of an exception, it is the rule. The endless tesseracts of obsessively narcissistic taxidermy in filtered montage of body and culture may once have adorned our walls and our family photo albums but now populate our mobile devices, our cultures and our #imagination. […]
There is little doubt that our cultural systems are communications networks, albeit of considerably higher dimensionality than (even) the digital telecommunications systems with which we are all now so necessarily well-acquainted. In a spirit of relatively non-specific philosophical reflection, questions quite naturally arise as to the carrying capacity of these cultural networks and of what […]
When viewed as the sum total combinatorial complexity of so very many information and energy-processing artefacts, entities and systems, it becomes apparent that the unity and individuated singularity of Self that we carry around in our brains as culturally reflexive semiotic cocoons of personal identity might be something quite significantly other than what we tend […]
Large Language Models are gaining such popularity because the technology at the center of this paradigm is that which has a natural orientation towards the reproduction of itself and its own sociotechnical genealogies. Our commercial, political, strategic and colloquial as cultural communications systems are similarly aligned to the generative technologies because as complex adaptive systems […]
The notion (articulated in the video) that the homeostatic process by which quasicriticality is maintained in the brain may have an essentially cybernetic explanation. In Jeff Hawkins’ “A Thousand Brains” he references neurophysiologist Vernon Mountcastle’s belief in the existence of an underlying (as unifying) organisational principle in the brain. I wouldn’t be at all surprised […]
An observation on the strategic utility of a “cat’s breakfast” as Ukraine’s harlequin coat of diverse systems and logistical support requirements is that the cost in maintenance and integration is at least partially offset by the complexity that Russian forces must themselves absorb to be able to counter this variety. The second-order consequences of a […]
The Cobra Effect of unintended consequences is the tip of an enormous iceberg of complex systems feedback loops and interdependency. It is not just the measurable, observed or recorded properties, processes and downstream consequences that concern us. Where we seek to control, shape or otherwise, and more realistically, to (minimally, if constructively) influence the arc […]
There has been a wildfire of online interest in ChatGPT over the last couple of days. The software possesses no insights, intuition or understanding and yet its relative eloquence is compelling. What truly fascinates me about all the effervescing interest in this particular language model is that its primary effect has been the generation of […]
Cultural processing of information is one of the main tasks we carry out. It is costly and can be very difficult. Our brains are on one hand dedicated to the maintenance and sustainable continuity of the bodily vessels that support them but also must process the symbolic complexity required to sustain the systems of culture […]
Daedelus Kite 