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Philosophy

Political Belief

Political systems, as much as the ideologies which endlessly resonate through them, are very much not as controlled or indicative of individual or collective self-determination as people might choose to believe. There is certainly choice, just as there is responsibility, but the overall complex dynamical system as information and energy-processing field that these artefacts  embody […]

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Philosophy

The Suspension of Disbelief

I spent years learning about the stars, the galaxies and the deep mysteries of logic, time and space; countless mornings staring out my window into the blazing furnace of the rising sun, afternoons in the hills watching the slow-setting peach orb descend, questioning all that I had by then knew, wondering how the immensity and […]

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Philosophy

We’re all Amateurs

“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Charlie Chaplin Amateurs indeed, and yet – as with so many things – we perceive not only the implicit limitations of our minds (and lives, collectively – of cultures and civilisation) but also intuit the significant persistence of doubt, […]

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Philosophy

Superficiality

Superficiality is a function of acceleration. The mainstream flow of technological complexity is such that not only is it quite possible to exist, survive and (indeed) thrive while doing little more than juggling labels, names, references and (other) abbreviations – this is the constitutive default mode of contemporary psychological and cultural experience. Complexity and comprehension […]

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Philosophy

Linguistic Conflicts

What we assume as the central tenet of language and (other) symbolic systems of information-encoding is not in fact its goal, it is a supporting consequence and effective symptom of a system that, like all non-trivially sophisticated or complex entities, first and foremost seeks continuity and replication. The primary purpose of human language is not […]

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Philosophy

Irrationality is Endemic

Context: Logical Fallacies Curiously, though, logical fallacies have a largely unacknowledged and arguably pivotal role to play in the successfully sustainable continuity of cultural (as much as cognitive) communications systems. What is inaccurate or even outright absurd often carries more information entropy and influence than that which is, strictly speaking, factual or true. It is […]

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Philosophy

Knowledge can be Useless

Something I have noticed over the last few years of my journey through complexity theory and cognitive, cultural and communications systems is that knowing how (or even why) a something happens is not always of any particular use beyond pure intellectual fascination. Another way of saying this is that the world we inhabit optimally self-propagates […]

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Philosophy

Existential Kindergarten

Almost exclusively, this human life and shared cultural experience represents some kind of an existential kindergarten. Our world is essentially a half-mirrored labyrinth of recursively self-validating communication and endlessly self-propagating patterns of information; encoded (in general) as the difference and notional distance through which we are each and all reflexively defined. Our behaviour, thought and […]

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Philosophy

AI: The Bias Inside

The bias in machine learning (and AI more generally) is the bias in data. The bias in data replicates the bias in ourselves, our distributed social and cultural information-processing systems, and in the natural orientation of complex information and energy-processing systems towards autonomous self-propagation through optimally-concise self-representational abstraction(s). Machine Learning applies mathematical heuristics to extract […]

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Philosophy

Competitive Difference is the Optimal State of Complex Socioeconomic Systems

Context: https://youtu.be/2Uj1A9AguFs Vertical motion in this chart is a measure of the degree to which any of the organisations or entities recursively and reflexively facilitates global information system self-replication. This is precisely how complex information-processing systems function: they autonomously self-select for those components, entities and sub-systems that optimally bias for the replication of the overall […]

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Philosophy

On the freedom of choosing not to choose…

It remains an unrelenting mystery and enigmatic fact that this world of ours is exquisitely well-tuned for producing precisely the wrong kind of complexity. This is to say that the technological and geopolitical trajectory that humanity on the whole feels compelled to create, reproduce or cultivate is quite clearly one of least optimal solutions of […]

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Philosophy

Are Languages Intelligent Entities?

Context: Quick thoughts on GPT3 An aptitude to compose text artefacts without enduring, substantive (or perhaps any) comprehension forms the basis of many of our journeys through educational institutions. In a sense – blind rule-shuffling in context is what is requested of many if not most students in any standardised learning environment. Competency is measured […]