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The Purpose of Neurodiversity

Context: Research on Recognizing Facial Emotion Expressions Could Change Our Understanding of Autism Interesting. The subtle irony here is that the historical (and plausibly paradigmatic) misunderstanding of human aptitude under one target variable reveals more about the science and the underlying cultural assumptions than it does about the experimental subjects. I love a good inversion […]

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technology

How Technology Shapes Science

Context: Science of science workshop: discovery & inequality The data and computational tools in use are not only transforming the field, they are recursively shaping the radiative speciation of scientific practice as their own transmission medium. We rarely notice just how profoundly trajectories in science and technology are a reflexive function of the extended phenotype […]

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Philosophy

Solving Complexity

Complex systems require complex solutions and global problems require global thinking. The application of holistic analyses to complex adaptive systems obligates us to come up with solutions that are themselves complex adaptive systems. An evolutionary feedback loop is the only plausible way to align adaptive technical solutions with “real-world” volatility and uncertainty. Obtaining contextual tenure […]

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Alien Anthropology

All War is Civil War

How do we resolve the central enigma of human existence? That problem is not that simple yet intractable fact of our own existence, mystifyingly beautiful and as ultimately puzzling as this may be. Nor is it that we invest such a vast amount of our limited individual and collective time blundering from one catastrophic, often […]

Categories
information

The Distributed Brain of Culture

Context: When and why did human brains decrease in size 3,000 years ago? Ants may hold clues If information processing and storage is offset to an environmental context, brain size becomes less important. I would probably ask the (corollary) question in this context as to the extent that cultural (as information processing and knowledge transmission) […]

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Philosophy

Meta?

Context: Facebook Changes Name, Announces AR Layer Over Physical Reality Utopian fantasy tends to follow a predictable arc as much in ideology as in technology. The cognitive consequences will be constitutively dissociative and alienating but then, all technology simultaneously empowers and inhibits. A recent study regarding the shrinking of brains some 3,000 years ago aligns […]

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technology

Is Technology Slowing Down?

Context: Peter Thiel says, forget the hype: Big Tech is slowing down It may be a necessary property of non-trivially sophisticated dynamical systems to oscillate through periods of acceleration and deceleration. Rising complexity in this context is equivalent to acceleration, logically as much as materially; we may quite sensibly speak of self-gravitation in this context. […]

Categories
Philosophy

How Did Evolution Get Here?

Context: Watch This Caterpillar Turn Into A Puss Moth Big picture: speciation, differentiation, radiation, change, growth – all instances of an underlying algorithm representing an optimally concise or (computational/logically) compressed method for the reproduction of an algorithm representing an optimally concise or compressed method for the reproduction of itself. The instances are indeed beautiful but […]

Categories
culture

Information Explosion

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would […]

Categories
Philosophy

Constructive Disinformation

Why is language so generally, genuinely and in all but the most trivial, superficial of meaningless of instances quite catastrophically inadequate for the task of clear and unproblematic communication? What is it, that is, that shrouds our primary method and medium of personal (interior, cognitive) or interpersonal communication in ambiguity and doubt? Beyond the irreducible […]

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information

Copies of Copies of Copies

It is quite difficult to directly perceive at times but everything we do, everything we see and think, all of our behaviours and beliefs or patterns of reflex and unscripted living joy (or sorrow) – it is all just a flowing form and effervescing pattern of self-replication. What is really clever about it all, and […]

Categories
life

Pandemic Metamorphosis

Pandemic metamorphosis is upon us all and among all the darkness and tragedy there will be new life. Patterns of behaviour carry us, much as does language, in many ways much more than we could ever carry, possess or assert control over them and regardless of these fragile egos we are all compelled (as Subjects […]