Context: DeepMind tells Google it has no idea how to make AI less toxic The raw data is indeed endemically and intermittently toxic. Filtering out venomous misanthropy from the dataset is a solution but this also requires a language model that does something substantively more than generate probabilistic sequences of linguistic artefacts sans comprehension. John […]
Tag: dissonance
Why do Philosophers Argue?
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, […]
Constructive Disinformation
Why is language so generally, genuinely and in all but the most trivial, superficial of meaningless of instances quite catastrophically inadequate for the task of clear and unproblematic communication? What is it, that is, that shrouds our primary method and medium of personal (interior, cognitive) or interpersonal communication in ambiguity and doubt? Beyond the irreducible […]
Information Wildfire
Viewed in gestalt from a holistic perspective, information systems are naturally predisposed to moving through the combinatorial possibility-spaces of entropy into dissonant states. The question is as to whether that dissonance represents a literal sociopolitical or interpersonal turbulence and concrete representation of lost and unrecoverable (i.e. adversarial, belligerently futile) information or energy-processing potential, OR, if […]
How true it is, but how simultaneously true that: As a gestalt information and energy processing system, the world (of culture and cognitive-extension in, through, and as technology) is one of difference and dissonance in which each might experience themselves as a unique or tribally-affiliated individual. This autonomously self-propagating algorithmic gestalt is oriented towards a […]
The cost of order is always going to be a certain degree, presence or manifestation of disorder. The notion of a “more peaceful world” is one in which vast numbers of (relatively) small, regional conflicts proliferate, generalisations notwithstanding. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which such distributed conflict is inevitable as a displaced information […]
Hong Kong: Umbrellas on the Go Game
The international society of nations, such as it is, is not very often seeking clever solutions to the problems that it itself is generating, across all countries and conflicts. Each instance of dissonance is a microcosm of a global property of discontinuity, a distributed planetary discord that is oblivious to nation or ideology and that we all are dealing with, wherever we are.
Productive Entropy
Death is productive in ways that might never be comfortably acknowledged.
A Fascination with Broken Things
Broken things and imperfect people are often far more interesting than are complete and whole ones…
Counter-culture as Useful Entropy
The dissonance of difference serves useful purposes for the continuity of cultural sytems.
The Dissociative Art of Leonardo Vargas

The art of Leonardo Vargas invokes the ghost of Francis Bacon’s disturbing vision but arguably finds itself arriving in an altogether different aesthetic solution to a representation of human identity and the psychological dissonance of individuation.