Categories
Alien Anthropology

Dark Side of the Moon

Context: Solar eclipse 2024: Millions in North America will view what promises to be a blockbuster We reflexively attribute significance as a function of the extent to which astronomical facts can be rendered intelligible by the transient communicative adaptation we more readily recognise as culture, as language and as the variously dissimulated fidelity of partial […]

Categories
communication

Story, Game, Complexity

Notice: this hybrid constellation of symbols, narratives, and competitive idioms is the central band and “strange attractor” of a probability distribution we might otherwise recognise or identify under some definition of entropy. In a complex system, the paths that emerge and persist are those that reproduce and sustain their environmental containers, contexts, and communication systems. […]

Categories
art

Signification Supersedes Semantics

Signification supersedes the semantics it claims as its own. The accuracy of a representation is subordinate to the act of representing. This is also how compression functions in cultural systems: it abbreviates by cross-reference, by the innvocation of possibility. The methods of system self-replication become more important than the discrete snapshots and timeslices with which […]

Categories
Philosophy

Belief

Belief systems are intricate webs of shared understanding. They anchor even the most fiercely independent or introspective identities of adversarially partisan tribalism within a vast, self-entangled tapestry of cultural and linguistic relationships. This network, this communal dance of meaning and experience, shapes our sense of self. We strive to forge an identity that feels wholly […]

Categories
communication

Reflection on Media

This is, among other things, a relatively succinct description of the (current, Global) communications system drift through combinatorial entropy into the more probable states of relatively meaningless yet optimally reconfigurable (as modular) noise. High frequency, low fidelity narrative artifacts (and all who sail in them) don’t become completely meaningless signals, but they come to share […]

Categories
Philosophy

Alienation and Meaning: Bartering Emptiness with Language

The definitions of words. The definition (or description) of a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a document, a corpus. At the “atomic” level of words, each definition and interpreted meaning is inflated and rendered intelligibly sensible as a function of dependency. All words being defined in terms of other words, and as Bertrand Russell reflects […]

Categories
Philosophy

Replicating Narrative Uncertainty

𝙄𝙣 𝙖 𝙣𝙪𝙩𝙨𝙝𝙚𝙡𝙡: 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘢𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦. A key takeaway is that while the replication of systems of cultural narrative are the center of gravity, truth itself is (or becomes) incidental to the main game of communications system self-replication. Institutional “doom scrolling” is a generative method by […]

Categories
technology

AI is a Mirror

In the current metamorphoses and radiative speciation of artificial intelligence, we’re witnessing a subtle yet profound transformation in our relationship with technology. AI, often perceived through a lens of fear and dystopian fictional narratives, is in reality a mirror reflecting and amplifying our own existential anxieties and aspirations. This reflection reveals not only our concerns […]

Categories
technology

AI Alignment is also a Human Responsibility

In the discourse on artificial intelligence and its integration into society, a pressing concern emerges: the potential inability of humanity to adapt to the transformative changes AI brings. This concern is not rooted in the capabilities of AI itself, but in the human response to its rapid evolution. This blog post examines this issue, structured […]

Categories
Philosophy

Entropy Tesseract

Complex systems generate their own dissonance. This is how they bind themselves with their environment. Producing entropy as an offset, communication or environmental interchange and signal transduction is a form of declarative individuation, sans agency per se. Language functions similarly in regards to how identity and rationally understood or otherwise relatively well-ordered self-descriptions reproduce themselves […]

Categories
environment

Dialectic Climate Change

A significant problem percolates through all this melting ice: the decomposable modularity of our languages, technologies and organisational systems remains functionally unable to comprehensively or sustainably address the complexity or scale of this issue. Subsequently, we find ourselves inhabiting and endlessly replicating media tropes of hollow platitudes and inherited generalisations that are simply not sophisticated […]

Categories
technology

Control

Access to the high-dimensional complexity resident in machine learning models comes at a cost. It is not being discussed much in public discussions but the ability to interrogate these complex information systems appears to bring an inevitable loss of control over the outputs. Generative systems in particular are prone to this inverse riddle: the more […]