Artificial intelligence is the single greatest facilitator of natural stupidity. It accelerates, amplifies, and at least partially self-validates our worst impulses while reassuring us that we are becoming wiser. Most people seem oblivious to the historical thinness and transient fragility of what they hold dear — emotions, bonds, responsibilities, wealth, loss. All of it rests […]
The image of vapour trails and diffusion captures more than transience; it maps the way systems unravel under pressure. Passing through might once have seemed neutral, a fact of existence, but it has been bent into something harsher. Entropy, which in physics names the statistical drift of order into disorder, is here mobilised by greed, […]
Hyman Minsky, an economist who studied the fragility and collapse of financial systems, showed how finance is not neutral but recursive: price rises create collateral, collateral expands credit, and credit drives prices higher still. This acceleration does not move toward equilibrium but toward a critical inflection where reversal cascades through the system. Housing markets in […]
We rarely pause for thought to consider that all of this accelerating sociotechnical speciation and generative utility precisely is the drift through combinatorial complexity into states of maximum entropy. It remains as something of a collective (perhaps collaborative) blindspot that organisational order is profoundly dependent upon unrecoverable loss and stochastic uncertainty. The same observation applies […]
Context: Neuroscientists listened in on people’s brains for a week. They found order and chaos. Brain as decentralised communications network that exists with optimal efficiency on a globally-distributed fractal boundary between order and disorder? “Specific brain networks seemed to communicate with each other in what looked like a “dance,” with one region appearing to “listen” […]
Context: The surprising role death plays in the stability of ecosystems There’s a sense in which viable biological systems persist as a function of their ability to offset entropy as dissipative disorder to their environments. When these viable systems are themselves the combinatorial gestalt that an ecosystem represents, there is no externality or reservoir into […]
Because entropy. There are always and as a consequence of combinatorial necessity more disordered states available than ordered ones and as a consequence debate eventually travels through them into dissonance and disagreement but this, curiously, is also the source for more philosophy. It is a common (recursive) idiom and is endemic of and to logic, […]
Science and technology cartwheel and careen past us in ways that few can convincingly argue are fully comprehended, defined or ever anything more than superficially controlled. This accelerating turbulence of complex sociotechnical recursion and self-validating necessity is a self-propagating compression wave of information, energy, technology and concepts. It ripples and oscillates like waves on a […]
I’m going for yet another deep (if relatively brief) dive on the question of suffering. The natural orientation of the Universe towards dissolution and decay or disorder is precisely the reason why we have life, sentience, experience and intelligence – the entropy of material dissolution is a precondition for the structural aggregation and compression of […]
There is an irreducible enigma in the aspiration to peace through structured, ordered methods. Every structure, system, taxonomy, ontology and patterned application of rationality or logic to complex problems always (ALWAYS) becomes another component in the hyper-inflating, combinatorial reference space of the problem that is being addressed – in language, law or perception. Each new […]
This (image above) is how I feel watching history unfold around me. Our Global systems of governance, organisation and power are in essence defined (but hardly well-designed) to compel and incentivise the ascendancy of those ideas and individuals who do not – counter-intuitively – actually represent the best-interests of that world as a whole or […]
Which begs the question: if individuals tend on average towards a path of least resistance and select (or become selected by) a singular – or authoritarian – narrative interpretation and filter of their world, why is it that these systems in which there is no (or at least a sudden vacuum of) overarching meta-narrative find […]
Daedelus Kite 