The cognitive potential of any system is not so much a product of its informational architecture as it is a function of the dissipative dynamics that sustain it. This is where the black box of intelligence comes in – it is not so much a lack in our understanding of how the brain works, but […]
In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. The natural bias of any ordered system system will always be to move towards equilibrium, where entropy is at a minimum. This is because a system will dissipate energy in order to become more ordered. In a complex system, entropy is necessary to […]
Context: Deep Learning’s Diminishing Returns Rolf Landauer coined the phrase that information is physical. The consequences being that all computation and sophisticated or automated statistical analysis at scale has similar costs, at scale. Diminishing returns is a function of the second law of thermodynamics. The article’s observation that “new approaches” are required is accurate. Are […]
We are all struggling with what are really little more than the contemporary stone axes and torches of technological hyper-extension of human intelligence to comprehend and leverage the implicit complexity ourselves and- inevitably- of the Cosmos from which we emerge and ofvwhich we are each microcosms. On an infinite arc and trajectory into complex systems […]
If it is true that there does in fact exist a class (or singular, if enigmatic, presence) of global systems theories that successfully, comprehensively and usefully abstract universal properties, theorems or logical relationships in any one non-trivially complex or sophisticated system and integrated, adaptive and evolutionary context; then those insights, abstractions and global properties solve […]
Political systems, as much as the ideologies which endlessly resonate through them, are very much not as controlled or indicative of individual or collective self-determination as people might choose to believe. There is certainly choice, just as there is responsibility, but the overall complex dynamical system as information and energy-processing field that these artefacts embody […]
What a strange thing to find such an artefact of profound wisdom located on the wall next to a wash basin in the public toilet of a shopping center. Language is structured in precisely this way and it is around precisely such micro-choices of self-inflected emotional bias that our whole lives sometimes turn. There is […]
Context: How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists I am interested in Global Systems Theory as the Grand logical Poobah system of all systems which, notwithstanding and plausibly because of Russell’s Paradox of entity self-containment, generates some interesting concepts, viewed laterally. Consider that “sucking orderliness” from an environment is inversely equivalent to asserting disorder upon […]
Context: How Bill Gates’ company TerraPower is building next-generation nuclear power As a general observation, *anything* which measures safety as “analyzed by deaths per unit of electricity generated” is a worry – it is a normative expectation of inevitable fatality. The technical solution described is interesting and certainly shifts the hazards and juggles the entropy […]
Context: Climate change: 2020 in a dead heat for world’s warmest year Climate change has been off the radar for a while, it seems and while the shit-show and train-wreck of 2020 rolls on into 2021, there are some things which seem painfully obvious to me but which also, for whatever reason, seem to be […]
Our world is complex and yet as a matter of cognition and, beyond the confused and hollow or unthinking tribally-reflexive and adversarial impulse that humanity is prone to express, of intelligence – we are bound to assert or overlay simplicities, mnemonics and shortcuts or cartographies to interpret all of this effervescent noise in useful ways. […]
We are (all) still attempting to brute-force our way towards Artificial General Intelligence. If the complexity sciences have taught us anything it is that there is an autonomous orientation within naturally-occurring information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems towards self-organisation and bootstrapped system optimisation via logical extensibility and recursive exponentiation. We appear to be attempting to […]
Daedelus Kite 