Consciousness is (in Lao Tzu’s sense) the hole in the wheel that makes it useful. It is the conspicuously absent (but mischievously omnipresent) ontological unity, the counter-intuitively hollow yet binding property and inarticulable metaphysics of the manifest antinomy of logical system self-containment.
I wonder if a reflex to identify the where and the how of consciousness might not necessarily, if inadvertently, render the what inaccessibly unintelligible. Distributed (as emergent) system properties inhabit their transmission media in a counter-intuitive way. Yes – where, how and what are all different perspectives on the same abstract conceptual entity but the […]
Curiouser and curiouser. When we map a living thing upon or within itself and in or through its own cognitive and representational hyper-extension of technological mediation, we find our minds engaging this all as an aspiration towards closure and control yet forever fall short of attaining that goal. We can not completely model or map […]
Context: Decoding Decision-Making: Insect Brains Are More Complex Than We Thought I find it curious to consider how agency, volition, deliberation and the cognitive “inhabitation” of a form of life are slowly, begrudgingly being conceded to our ecological colleagues as something other than inevitable endpoint of human exceptionalism. Interesting, as a consequence, perhaps, to reflect […]
Context: Brain experiment suggests that consciousness relies on quantum entanglement Of microtubules and metaphors… …we can not describe anything beyond our systems of description. This tells us something significant about the nature of these conscious systems and of what kinds of explanations might be possible. Entanglement suggests, to my mind, that the ways in which […]
Context: Elon Musk & Joe Rogan talk to “conscious AI” If our intent in seeking to scale the complex asymptote of AGI has been to convince ourselves that it is conscious and possesses subjectivity, personhood or sentient experience, then it is perhaps inevitable that we will arrive at a point where the reflexive conversational and […]
…entertaining but I suspect there is deep resonance here, if only we were able to sufficiently, efficiently, insightfully decompress it. The mechanisms and the technologies we make inhabit us every bit as much as we inhabit the world populated and inflated, made possible by them. How we do or do not respect those things is […]
Context: Why is quantum theory so strange? The weirdness could be in our heads The disconnect between experience and the counter-intuitive products of (a) material logic is endemic to cognition and it is, in essence, an irreducible discontinuity. It may change form as theory and popular narratives of science co-evolve but the foundational peculiarity and […]
Context: Can consciousness be explained by quantum physics? A common error is that we assert consciousness as an instance, the artefact of a fractal (in this context), and the narrow end of aspirations to explanatory closure and teleology more native to language than to information, matter, energy or natural computation. It is not the artefact […]
Consciousness is, perhaps inevitably and as a function of psychological egoism, asserted as the ascendant peak of ordered information-processing significance but it is just as likely that our visceral experience of this complex, patterned experience and distributed computational system of matter and energy is only one, diminutive hyper-plane slice across a vast and plausibly unmeasurable […]
Context: How would we know if an AI is conscious? We find ourselves in an intractable ontological (as much as epistemological) bind here. If we ever get to the point of generating autonomous synthetic information-processing systems that tick all the boxes for notionally proving their possession of consciousness by whatever standard metric we might arbitrarily […]
An interesting consequence of generalised attributions of human exceptionalism is that we tend to automatically believe that all intelligence, all value and all experience exist (and persist) in this diminutive cranial cavity we inhabit. Cogito ergo something is definitely going on between our ears but there is a deep and irreducible mystery at work (i.e. […]
Daedelus Kite 