Context: Four philosophers who realized they were completely wrong about things The article referenced above is an interesting, if spectacularly shallow, reflection on conceptual about-faces in philosophy. The deeper lesson and message here is not so much that these particular – if diverse – philosophical, political or theological world-views (and their proponents) found themselves in […]
Tag: Complexity
Information increases constantly – as a corollary and parallel (energy-processing) thread to the form and flow of natural, physical phenomena and thermodynamic diffusion. We might even call that part of the world that avails itself of observation and description – and which is for that reason usefully or operationally defined or described and deployed – […]
Things fall apart…
Perhaps “the centre cannot hold” because there is no centre. Chaos and disorder are far more the native state of material (thermodynamic, dissipative) facts than are the projected order and control around which we reflexively and aspirationally self-validate. Curious, indeed, (and under one perspective) that everything emerging out of the complexity sciences suggests that it […]
Context: Officials see extremist groups, disinformation in protests A Gordian Knot. How much of this disinformation is generated internally and how much externally to national borders? Have we all (i.e. Globally) arrived in a set of circumstances that suggest that, functionally – at least, the differentiation of source and attribution is not as (ultimately) significant […]
Was Capitalism Inevitable?
An interesting question is as to the inevitability of capitalism – or something very much like it – in any hyper-inflating socioeconomic (and by extension, geopolitical) referential space. That is to say: are there senses in which the natural bias towards autonomously self-optimising information and energy-processing systems – as manifest through and as human civilisation(s) […]
We are (all) still attempting to brute-force our way towards Artificial General Intelligence. If the complexity sciences have taught us anything it is that there is an autonomous orientation within naturally-occurring information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems towards self-organisation and bootstrapped system optimisation via logical extensibility and recursive exponentiation. We appear to be attempting to […]
Or: Why The Enlightenment Inevitably Consumed Itself Each new system of thought, each extension, each insight, each historical inflection-point and distributed, systemic phase transition or levelling-up of human civilisation and each new branching of the tree of combinatorial (human) possibility – it opens the degrees of freedom, of motion, of growth and – simultaneously – […]
What is Hidden
In the search for knowledge and wisdom it is very often what is hidden that is more useful than what is revealed. While we value what we understand and what utility we might obtain from it, the vast and plausible infinity of that which we do not (and can never) know is the defining logical […]
Context: Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is Bogus I would usually just slide past this kind of topic without commenting. However, as an artefact in a vigorously-contested information environment – an observation to be made here is that even a document of dubious veracity serves a useful purpose above and […]
We inhabit the material of manifest corporeality and in equal measure – abstract patterns of information inhabit us. Which is more fundamental? There is no base, no anchor, no foundation; the imaginary spaces of information and autonomously self-propagating computational resonance are the contours through which matter and energy travels; the embodied (and reflexive, in our […]
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 […]
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 […]