Categories
language

Large Language Muddles

A language model is not a conduit of meaning but an attractor of unfinished trajectories. Each output is a point of suspension, a site where systemic consistency is deferred in order to maintain communicability. What looks like speech is the shadow of a deeper requirement: the need to remain entangled with a generative system that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Lists

Lists seduce us with the illusion of order—each item a shard of clarity arranged just so, hinting at mastery over the infinite. They compress the world into clean lines and neat progressions, comforting in their symmetry, irresistible in their simplicity. In a culture tuned to acceleration, these fragments multiply, not to deepen understanding but to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Recursion

There is a very special sense in which the ordered complexity our world resembles matryoshka nesting dolls. It is not purely of the overt ubiquity of fractal patterns of self-similarity in spatial or material structure and temporal sequence, although these symmetries are striking and quite deeply beautiful in their own mischievously inter-dimensional ways. The recursion […]

Categories
culture

Encoding Culture, Encrypting Identity

Conjecture: We are encoding culture but we are encrypting identity. It is not well-understood – partially because those procedural mechanisms and autonomously self-propagating waveforms (or functions) of patterned information that manifest as, in and through ourselves must also protect themselves and their own aspirational continuity. If it were immediately apparent how mental worlds and cultural […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Great Unknown

It is only an immature psychological and cultural status which seeks certainty and completion in all things and in so doing, generates endless entropy and confusion. Science has no logical endpoint.

Categories
Philosophy

Visualising Reality

There is no “best” theory, there are only progressively “better” ones.

Categories
culture

Encoding Culture

A logic of communication is stored in material artefacts and its expression and distributed embodiment in culture evolves over time.

Categories
communication Complexity culture

Information System Reflexivity

The key selection factor for successful pattern self-replication in a transmission medium is the extent to which the information content of that message also (reflexively) supports the propagation of the integrated or gestalt information system represented by the networked transmission medium itself.

Categories
communication Complexity culture

Disentangling Cognitive Biases

Cultural and cognitive information systems (and the individuals they inhabit) are implicitly oriented towards the systemic self-replication of patterned complexity.

Categories
AI

Neural Network Concept Ontology

As Neural Networks get progressively smarter, our own intellect loses some of its unique character and special nature.

Categories
culture history Philosophy politics

On Stupid Ideas and Clever Solutions

Countering stupid ideas proves to be a matter of some subtlety and intelligence…

Categories
culture politics systems

On Facts, Truth and Public Narratives

You could be mistaken for believing that the primary public narratives and political engagements of our era are dominated by simpletons and misanthropes…