Recently reading of airborne multiple-drone systems that, being once (and unsuccessfully) modelled on insect swarms, are now being modelled on wolf-pack behaviour, it got me thinking. Biomimetic systems are powerful but I do wonder if and when the analogies that compel them might at times become inadvertently inhibitory. Logic and technological (as much as biological) […]
The most interesting conceptual artefacts, entities and systems are often like this – they maximally replicate the degrees of freedom by and through which we might leverage utility but do so in ways that hardly if ever lock down ontologies and definitions in unambiguous closure. This is the recursive self-propagation of a logical depth and […]
Metaphorical corollary: is technology the extended phenotype of the genotype of humanity or is humanity the extended phenotype of the genotype of technology? It is really neither and both. The key issue being that the radical inversion of teleological intuitions in language and cognition is a necessarily difficult feat of mental gymnastics. Analogies are useful. […]
All systems exist in contexts, environments and distributed, often integrated, other systems from which they gather or variously acquire (as effect, consequence, experience or memory and encoding) information as internal structure. This internal structure or variety is only possible and sustainably continuous by offsetting the inevitability of growing internal (as thermodynamic or logical/information) entropy to […]
It’s not easy to accept that we might all be implicitly, irreducibly and intractably broken and regardless that such an assertion forms the basis of rationalising exactly why the human world is in many ways such a shambling mess of confusion and fear, the possibility remains that even while we find acknowledging our limitations to […]
I am endlessly captivated by the many and diverse ways that this world of ours, for all its patterned continuity, already and always bears a certain discontinuous fracture, harmonic displacement and logical dissonance at heart. It is as though all our vainglorious aspirations to meaning as the symbolic mirror of existential assurance and cognitive (or […]
Doctor Who is a classic character of science fiction. He travels through space and time in a sentient machine called the TARDIS. The first thing that most people remark when stepping into the machine is “It’s bigger on the inside!” This, I think, is the situation we find ourselves in with time. As a hybrid […]
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 […]
Algorithmic complexity is a measure of information. For any non-trivially sophisticated (i.e. interesting) system, there exists no shortest/best programmatic representation – i.e. theory, model, framework or network wiring. This means that in some circumstances we can reduce ad infinitum. There is no best, only better; a lesson in abject humility still to be learned by […]
Context: Attack Mannequins: AI as Propaganda An interesting article but the assertion of ideological counter-propaganda in this context is a bit of stretch. It projects much more structure, aptitude and volition to the behavioural and regulatory (as control/governance) systems than has ever actually existed. The assertion of all ideological positions requires a foil, an antithesis […]
Context: Australia installs first space laser optical ground station in southern hemisphere It is interesting to observe, and from a broader (integrated, technological) systems perspective, that the value acquired by iterating upon and through the technical ratchet of space-based communications solutions and innovations is a measure of displaced information (as much as material) entropy. Much […]
Daedelus Kite 