In his classic Tao Te Ching (The Way of Life), Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu characterises the utility of what does not exist as being of profound importance. While there exist complex senses in which this illustrates a powerful gradient of logical thought, the fact is – and contrary to pretty much every single ideological position or […]
Tag: Complexity
Categories
Who’s afraid of the big bad AI?
Artificial Intelligence technologies raise (or revisit) enduring philosophical questions regarding the relationships between notions of individuality, self-determination and distributed information systems (as language, culture, technology, civilisation) in which such concepts acquire meaning. The gathering stormclouds of technologically-mediated identity-harvesting, surveillance and (emerging artefacts, idioms and tools of) ideological control suggest that we do not understand and […]
Categories
Hidden Geometry of Life in the Cosmos
Beautiful… and the fact that these spiral symmetries are ubiquitous as (a) most energy-efficient method of maintaining adaptive structural complexity is magnificent. There are abstract, logical corollaries of this. Interesting how life possesses similarities to abstract geometric patterns like this – adaptive systems that (soliton-like) autonomously self-propagate by the sustainably continuous information and energy-processing gradient […]
Categories
Language through Identity
Language, like logic or mathematics is alive with a dynamic and self-inflected metamorphosis of endlessly-extensible, recombinatory abstraction. It is the means of our self-expression, of the essential causal and cognitive architecture of language and the shared experience of culture, and it is the core pattern around which conscious and unconscious self-identity and symbolic processing self-gravitates, […]
Categories
The Extinction of Humanity?
You would think that any self-respecting species possessing intellectual and technological aptitude sufficient to fathom the deepest mysteries of the Cosmos might also be able to avoid its own imminent catastrophic dissolution and descent into conflict, environmental disassembly, geopolitical dissonance and self-destruction. Not, as it turns out, this distributed material and symbolic human being within […]
Categories
Partisan Politics, continued…
An observation from Complex Systems Science: Regardless of those (internal or external) who might be seeking to generate more friction and to extract political or ideological value from it, the contemporary extremity of partisan adversarialism and dissonant turbulence that characterises the US political system has the characteristics of a dissipative system – that is, a […]
Categories
Other forms of life in the Universe…
Context: A Strange Form of Life Could Flourish Deep Inside of Stars, Physicists Say Fascinating article above, discussing the logical (i.e. hypothetical) presence of life and intelligence inside stars. We are of course blinded by our own intimate familiarity with a form of life that we ourselves take for granted as normative or necessary and […]
Partisan Political Systems have a double life as what is visible and what is not. What is not obvious is generally the most interesting (and causally critical) feature. If a complex information and/or energy-processing (i.e. computational) system maintains sustainable intrinsic homeostatic and extrinsic contextual continuity through the reflexive priming of its environment as a pliable […]
Categories
Imagination is Living Logic
Imagination – that recursively self-inflected and indefinitely extensible system of undirected grammatical, cognitive or structural exploration and visualisation; it is very similar to a logic, mathematics or physics that itself autonomously expands (albeit in abstract, interior spaces and through us as symbolic codes) and endlessly seeks optimally concise self-representations, abstractions, higher-dimensional compression, self-gravitation and algorithmic […]
A key problem: information and communication systems autonomously self-replicate by optimally-concise pattern encoding methods as an extended consequence of the orientation towards low-energy states. No surprise there, perhaps, for anyone versed in complexity theory but the problem is not necessarily the intractable antitheses by binary poles in this endless partisan argument so much as the […]
Categories
Philosophy of War
Wilfrid Sellars characterised the aim of philosophy “(…) abstractly formulated, (…) to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. The foundational discontinuity of history and in our current Global “civilisation” (such as it is) that leads us into endlessly futile internecine […]
Categories
Authoritarian Oscillations
I am endlessly fascinated by the many ways that these systems of knowledge and information or culture and political momentum tend towards similar, recurring self-organisational and behavioural patterns. Much is (rightly) made of a contemporary, pronounced turn towards populism and authoritarianism. A suggestion for interpretation which does not seek to directly engage any specific instance […]
