Context: Juukan Gorge inquiry: Rio Tinto’s decision to blow up Indigenous rock shelters ‘inexcusable’ Wittgenstein at one point identified meaning as a function of use. From a social constructivist perspective, this follows quite naturally as a corollary fact of epistemological (as much as linguistic) self-reference that all integrated information-processing, meaning-generating or socially-constructed contexts embody. It […]
Tag: ethics
An introspective taxonomy of labels and the grammatical order of participatory technology in – and as – systems of knowledge and control has always been the nature, kernel and subjective essence of personal identity. It is difficult to identify a particular inflection point at which this Linnean, categorical game evolved from constructive personal boundary and […]
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Ethical Impropriety
Ethical frameworks are those guiding principles within which we are free to make moral choices. The extent to which our choices align to the semantic intentions of any particular ethical framework is a definition and declaration of our adherence, conformity or alignment to it. Notice, however, that the majority of ethical frameworks we encounter do […]
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Ethics and Power
Power is really an inverse function of ethics. What is considered permissible or (indeed) valuable under any moving ethical frame of reference is implicitly – some would argue necessarily – representative of the power structures, systems and integrated social, political and ideological modalities of a time and place. Notice also that what is considered good […]
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The Recursive Enigmas of Battling Bias
Bias represents an interesting and potentially intractable problem. Regardless of how (or where) we seek to address or interdict it, there exists an intrinsic, endemic property of complex information and energy-processing (i.e. logical, material) systems that natively orients those entities towards abstraction, abbreviation and mnemonic compression. Bias is the persistence of logical errors that naturally […]
Context: Real Meat That Vegetarians Can Eat If the reason for not eating meat is purely ethical, then consuming simulated meat bears no moral consequence whatsoever to a person committed to a position that all plausibly sentient life is sacred, that all manifestations of embodied experience and awareness are a difference of degree, not of […]
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On Moral Machines and Embodied Biases
Context: The Appearance of Robots Affects Our Perception of the Morality of Their Decisions Curious: “People consider moral decisions made by humanoid robots to be less ethically sound than when another human or traditional-looking robot makes the same decision.” The uncanny valley rides again. This is a particular instance of a general principle. The apperception […]
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Can Robots possess Legal Rights?
Context: Experts Sign Open Letter Slamming Europe’s Proposal to Recognise Robots as Legal Persons Robots might be a bit of a stretch for asserting personhood although it does remain somewhat indistinct as to where and when awareness, experience or sentience arise in recognisably “living” things. We may (following, at a distance, something I once read […]
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Ethics in Art
Context: Shakespeare’s Moral Compass Is a moral compass always and necessarily retrospectively attributed in art and to artists? I do wonder how often we do assert or interpret such qualitative values in hindsight only to (eventually) discover that all such attributions of ethical relativism are always and already much more a literal and half-mirrored reflection […]
Everything points towards language being a distributed, adaptive encoding system. Biases and norms (among many other interpenetrating and interdependent sub-systems) are not merely, or only, the hyper-extended cognitive and cultural artefacts of linguistic mediation. The encoded symptoms of bias and normative assumption or behavioural prohibition (as self-inflected, reflexive agent/entity control) non-linearly and recursively reproduce the […]
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The Dream Police
Context: ‘This is not science fiction,’ say scientists pushing for ‘neuro-rights’ Dystopian authoritarian visions notwithstanding, there is a strong philosophical argument to be made that consciousness, sentience or intelligence only possesses the value (and, indeed, the substantive reality) it does because there are aspects of self and indeed of complex systems self-organisation that are not […]
Context: The Calculus of Ought It is a curious world in which what can ever and only be proven from within the clockwork constraints of complex quantitative and logical tautologies might become the foundation and justification of and for ethical prescription. Of course, science is invaluable and proceeds from strength to strength by proof and […]
Daedelus Kite 