Categories
Philosophy

On Knowing, Unknowing and Ignorance

The diminishing returns of a double negative. It is such a subtle linguistic game to play because, yes, the absence of absence constitutes a problem representing anything other than the accrual of benefit, but the nature of knowledge as indefinitely-extensible referential matrix indicates that new information and insights are always (similarly) a negation upon what […]

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Philosophy

Worlds Beyond Words

There is indeed a boundary and border between what might be said or defined and what might eventually be understood or known as reality, information, the physical facts that (or as they) exist beyond our descriptions of them. I am sympathetic with any philosophical position that seeks to build and inhabit the difference and distance […]

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Philosophy

Intuitive Knowledge

Knowledge as a function of intuitively “grokking it” in perception is a curious beast. Is demonstrable knowledge the only valid form of knowledge? Are there forms of knowledge that are only ever indirectly accessible as a corollary of true but unprovable logical facts. Consider the mental visualisation of a 3D sphere. There is some implicit, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Can our ideas love us back?

If other people must always and to some extent only ever be ideas to any of us, how can those ideas ever love us back without the whole thing devolving into intricate games of haunted, hollow and narcissistic self-deception? What, in essence, is the meta-ethical solution here? Is there one? I suspect there is, but […]

Categories
culture

Art as a Function of Ignorance

Could art (and its attendant adaptive contours of information artefacts or entities that we recognise as religion) ever have become what it was if representational technologies such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter existed at the time of Jesus’ life, or even the Renaissance? Is religion a function of unknowing and does faith necessarily require the […]

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Philosophy

Why is there Something rather than Nothing?

The first – and quite probably last – question will always have to be this one. All of our logical, mathematical and physical technologies or explanations and the essential cognitive hyper-extension of conceptual or material artefacts and information or energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems that we inhabit (and that equally, inhabit us) – this is all […]

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Philosophy

Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness

Somewhere in the deep dark pit of indeterminate catastrophe that we call our shared Global history, we find ourselves endlessly seeking reasons, causes and inviolable proofs to explain just why our world is the way it is. Our linear, narrative minds are so entrained and reflexively conditioned by these visceral, intimate experiences of time and […]

Categories
technology

Artificial Intelligence and a Fallacy of Complete Knowledge

An unremitting curiosity of human psychology and culture is that, from about the time – perhaps of the Industrial Revolution (?) – when we acquired a degree of distributed and self-conscious awareness of the extent and consequence of our own procedural and developmental technological progress, each significant iteration has been regarded as the end of […]

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Philosophy

Defining Intelligence

The intransigent difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently concise, compelling, universally agreed-upon and resilient definition of intelligence sits somewhere on the same geometric arc or architecture of axiomatic assertion as does complexity and, indeed, life. If epistemological closure is demonstrably (ref. paradoxes of self-containment, among other things) impossible, intelligence both can and can not (!) be […]

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Philosophy

Solving the Problem of Environmental Degradation requires us to Solve Ourselves

Is it possible to genuinely acknowledge or effectively disentangle the diverse patterns and consequences of environmental disruption without also simultaneously addressing the core epistemological shortcomings of human cognition, of human nature ?

Categories
culture

Selfies as Memes, Memes as Cultural Selfies

Selfies are memes and memes are cultural selfies through which a logic and self-replication of the question of individual or cultural self-identity reproduces itself.

Categories
Philosophy technology

The Limits of Automation

If automation is only limited by the boundaries of what we can describe, are we actually capable of describing those entities, processes, objects and systems of non-trivially sophisticated complexity with which we all must eventually and inevitably engage ?