What begins as an act of response—a mutation, a thought, a tool—is not designed to last. It emerges, briefly optimal in a changing landscape, then fades or fragments. But sometimes, the solution doesn’t end when the problem is gone. Sometimes the solution learns to survive. It begins to reinforce itself, not because it’s still needed, […]
For all the triumphalist noise surrounding artificial intelligence, what’s been operationalized is not intelligence, but a functionally narrow slice of cognition—one optimised for pattern recognition, statistical inference, and linguistic mimicry. It is an impressive toolkit, to be sure, but mistaking it for general intelligence is like mistaking a wrench for an entire workshop. What’s been […]
The soup de jour is disinformation: I found myself watching the movie World War Z (again) recently. The biological plausibility of a zombie virus that can detect and avoid sickness as a critical vulnerability and plot twist wasn’t quite enough to render the movie as being anything significantly other than “Brad Pitt saves the world, […]
Context: China’s spy threat is growing, but the West has struggled to keep up …oh yes, and we might also ask: to what extent is the burbling, percolating insecurity of incessant intrusion, theft and deceptive misdirection actually a necessary and sustaining precondition for the continuity of a constitutively repressive political system? Is the invocation, cultivation and […]
Meaning is contested but not because we explicitly or necessarily choose this particular path. If meaning and cultural or political and psychological significance was not subject to ambiguity and confusion, deception and misdirection in the ways it generally is, the adaptive system of bartered value and utility we build around and as language would be […]
Communication is not primarily a function of truth or any kind of existential necessity – survival, organisational continuity and culture. It is a process that engages and contains these things but where we tend towards error is when we think we know what communication intends. The intentions are purely of our own individual, collective, collaborative […]
The kleptocratic turn is in asendance, globally, but I dare say that the barren wasteland of abrogated responsibilities and catastrophic socioeconomic (not to mention humanitarian) outcomes is the most probable destination for any and all such totalitarian trajectories.
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 […]
There is a core property of human experience that aligns with the reflexive self-validation of narrative cognition. Whatever facts might exist in the world, the structure and cadence of the conversation (and, clearly, of interpreted conflict) has a tendency for better and for worse to exploit behavioural and psychological instinct as bias towards pattern recognition. […]
On the topic of untenable belief systems, unsubstantiated conspiracies, intransigent disinformation and ideological absurdity – I was watching a lecture from Gresham College today in which psychosis was posited as the default mental state. If the default state of human mental life is in fact some kind of dissociative discontinuity and stochastic chaos, this might […]
I have been deep down a rabbit hole of argument analysis just recently. There is a natural orientation as bias in many people towards choosing points of view and systems of belief based upon their structural aesthetics, not upon their substance. The arguments made for and against any particular political point or the tenets of […]
“Political philosophy” is a fascinating oxymoron. At once, a dissimulation of the self-validating tautologies that it simultaneously asserts as transparent inevitability. For all its sophistication, philosophy might also and in essence resemble just such an indeterminate tesseract of complex self-referentiality as is so characteristic of political (among all other) systems of belief but it more […]
Daedelus Kite 