Categories
Complexity

Brain Function as Communications System

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” […]

Categories
Philosophy

Is AI going to make us stupid?

Dissimulated intelligence percolates to ascendance in this way because it more readily recombines with the plethora of similarly vacuous artefacts, entities and systems within which we are currently inundated. The role of (inter)networked communications systems in this drift through technological entropy into lowest common denominators is clearly that of transmission medium but it is also […]

Categories
Philosophy

Automated Technological Malevolence

Context: Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code Exponentiation… it’s a language game, all of it. The hyper-inflating state space of all combinatorial possibility has a tendency to drift, through entropy, into precisely those transient structural constellations that maximally reproduce: • not only the elements and instances or references, idioms, sentences, logical fragments and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Is Extreme Nationalism and Territorial Imperialism a Probabilistic Inevitability?

The role of language in cultural and political systems of belief is such that geographic tropes are anchors that provide internal narrative self-validation to such systems and their inhabitants. It doesn’t mean their assertions of territorial impropriety are valid, merely that such adversarial gambits are the perennially ascendant low-hanging fruit of belligerent nationalist pathologies everywhere […]

Categories
Philosophy

On Living and Dying in Languages and Ecosystems

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

A Bonfire of Meaningless Belief

Many of us might wonder why so many people (and indeed – nations) fall backwards upon a pyre of absurd belief and foolish cruelty. The larger portion of humanity that now inhabits a twilight world of near-perpetual, technologically-mediated connectivity and material dependency should, it seems, be perfectly content with the meaning and methods we now […]

Categories
cybernetics

Paranoiac Identity

The essence of the paranoiac is in every act and thought to reproduce, invoke and justify the circumstances that generate their paranoia. To indicate a specific instance may be to miss the point. Being a generalised bias of identity, individuation and subjectivity – it is a global property that appears in and as culture, communication […]

Categories
Philosophy

Masking Chaos in Strategy

The relationship between entropy and sustainable continuity in any undertaking resonates with John Boyd’s OODA loop. Indeed, the ability to “get inside” an adversary’s decision loops is quite directly related to the degree and extent of combinatorial entropy they face: information in (as structure, knowledge, order, certainty) is more or less symmetrically equivalent to entropy […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Second Law

Finding ourselves, as we do, bound by the necessity and immediacy of diffusion and disorder in our lives, we quite naturally come to interpret the inevitability of decay as an intrinsic property of reality. While it is also overwhelmingly likely that this deintegration into chaos is a native property of the world we inhabit as […]

Categories
Philosophy

Language as Mirror Machine and Entropy

It perhaps requires no underlining but it remains sadly self-evident that human history and global technological civilisation (such as it is) maximally self-propagates as a function as much of its failures and dissonant misunderstandings as of its successes. The component microcosms of individuated selves that inhabit and interpret the shimmering whole in, through and as […]

Categories
Philosophy

Emotional Maturity: Acquiescence

The first sign that you are emotionally mature: you acknowledge that no one ever truly is. The generative discontinuity of insecurity is very much the mischievous absence around which we build our subjective selves and each iteration of developmental sedimentation into (and as) memory, experience and learning only ever really amplifies this uncertainty in useful […]

Categories
Organisation

An Entropy Engine of Scholastic Inertia?

I have been reflecting on the bias in academic institutions towards the accelerated production of research papers at a cost of their quality or consequence. It is a curiously irritating function of many but certainly not all of the autonomously self-propagating (as soliton-like) organisational systems that human beings inhabit that these entities are prone to […]