Categories
Philosophy

The Vanishing Present

Marcus Aurelius observed that all we ever encounter — this continuous present in which the world appears at all — is precisely what stands to be lost at the moment of death, not as a possession but as the condition of experience itself. Past and future exist only as internal operations within this aperture, memory […]

Categories
cybernetics Philosophy

Civilisation is Choking on Greed

Civilisation was never meant to run on panic, yet that is the rhythm we’ve drifted into. The public story insists we are building a future, but the machinery underneath tells a different tale — one of shortening time-horizons, defensive accumulation, and a cultural field tuned to performance rather than survival. The great systems of finance, […]

Categories
Complexity cybernetics environment freedom humanity imagination mathematics Philosophy Psychology

Unity

If unity is assumed, then the only coherent approach is to work backwards from it. This is not about sentiment or abstraction but about logical necessity: if there is unity, then every relation already participates in it, and our task is to discern how those connections reproduce the whole. Unity is not an optional conclusion […]

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Philosophy

Zak Stein: AI, Education, Regulation

Zak Stein frames the personhood conferral problem as a distinct risk in education and society. Alignment asks how humans control machines, this asks how humans mistake machines for persons. As systems simulate dialogue, affect, and presence, children and adults may confer moral standing to tools. Placing AI in roles of educator, caregiver, or companion risks […]

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Philosophy

Engaging the Riots and Violence in France

So, I’ll just leave this here: Yes, violence is NEVER the solution in these circumstances and wildfire complexities. The problem of juridico-political and/or racial and cultural inequity is one to which systems of governance classically apply linear solutions, quite unwittingly reinstituted g the matrix sacristan of self-propagating socio-affective turbulence. It is a poorly-managed problem and […]

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Philosophy

Leveraging the Limits of Knowledge in Language and Technology

The languages and technologies with which we engage the downstream consequences of our own technical (as linguistic and communications) productivity are as unable to capture, explain and bound the accelerating metamorphosis of technological #change as is that electromechanical juggernaut (itself and also) unable to provide the linearity and closure that is forever spruiks as its […]

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Philosophy

Bias in Machine Learning

Machine Learning amplifies existing signals in the data and also does so when we ourselves are quite unaware of that bias. Identifying biases and engaging them is, or has largely become, an art of post facto, retrodictive engagement. The futures technology generate are so often unacknowledged as recursively self-propagating compression waves, signals as an encoded  […]

Categories
Philosophy

What does AI mean for us all?

An interesting thing about Artificial lntelligence so rapidly acquiring such an eloquent aptitude to mimic, engage and constructively deceive us is that this ensemble of technologies do not in any comprehensive sense actually understand us – we and our intricately stochastic behaviours are merely so many numbers and statistical (as probabilistic) relationships or correlations and […]

Categories
culture

Fiction

Fiction as myth is humanity’s first form of collaborative, cultural self-simulation. Clear boundaries between systems of belief and proven facts might forever be intricately indeterminate but the power and consequence of fiction is unquestionable. The role and power of creative language and an unbounded (if pragmatic) technological imagination should never be misunderestimated. The speculative forecasting […]

Categories
Philosophy

Reverse Engineering the Future with Curiosity-Driven Research

I wonder if commercial incentives might not destructively inhibit and limit the possible range and diversity of all possible research and applications. By which I mean that decoupling curiosity-driven research from purely commercial incentives might open up a much vaster state space of combinatorial possibility than could otherwise exist or be beneficially investigated. It would […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Sinking Ship

Opportunities are the anchors that like grappling hooks we cast out and upon the stochastic turbulence and mercurial probabilities of uncertain futures and there, in identifying them, in defining or formulating the possibilities they invoke we do well not to forget all those other unrealised worlds that might also exist and which yet as ontological […]

Categories
Philosophy

New World, New Self

All actions, all choices, all approximation to unambiguously individuated (as subjective) self-determination tends to fade away in such an exquisitely, eloquently, interdependently entangled Cosmos. More subtly rendered: the kinds of self and other or system and environment that such a complex world as this invokes is distributed, integrated and functionally, existentially multidimensional. The reflexive boundaries […]