Categories
Philosophy

Life: Outside the Comfort Zone

I believe it was Paul Verlaine who once opined that “l’application c’est le plupart de l’intelligence” but without struggle, without the broken, breaking symmetries and dissociative, alienating furnace of experience and entropy, nothing is learned, nothing is gained and intelligence (as much as life) uselessly dissipates into all oblivion and forgetting. What, then, to say […]

Categories
politics

Democracy

We are never going to find, define or unambiguously inhabit a “perfect” ideological, socioeconomic or political system. None of us – never. What we are able to do is to cultivate open, adaptive, complex networks and communities that most accurately approximate to modelling the natural world from which we emerged. Once we accept the implicit […]

Categories
Philosophy

On the value of not knowing…

Context: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge Epistemological uncertainty is the center of gravity and compelling force (as vacuum) that drives discovery. AI constitutes something of an instance of a much broader principle (or sociotechnical pattern). Inductive utility is a function of the degrees of reduction in uncertainty but this same uncertainty as occluded knowledge faces, […]

Categories
technology

The Limits of Thought: Algorithms, Brains and our Fragile Humanity

Can algorithms successfully encode for the stochastic properties and endemic entropy that provides sentience with evolutionary intelligence and a bias towards novelty and (information) entropy? There are logical (and philosophical) limits to algorithmic compression or optimisation that biology has nevertheless successfully exploited, not by removing errors but – from genetics to intelligence – by capitalising […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Image in the Mirror is the (Intelligent) Machine

We build machines to define ourselves but in neither do we find the certainty or the completeness we seek.