Categories
Philosophy

Evil

When encountering the serially haunted futility of so much of our species’ belligerently selfish behavioural vocabulary, I often resort to an attempted witty quip to the effect that this is, yet again and quite simply, “human beings being human”. It is not after all as though most who conduct themselves in variously disgraceful ways have […]

Categories
Philosophy

Will AI Destroy Social Media ?

Is artificial intelligence going to destroy social media? Would it even matter if it might not also destroy us in the process? These are fractal tesseracts of linguistic narcissism as wheels within wheels of technologically mediated autopoiesis. Will we be able to see anything outside the half-mirrored sphere of reflective, reflexively dopamine-boosting narrative self-engagement? There […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technological Immortality?

Nope. If nothing else and far beyond the actual sophisticated engineering (*not* rhetorical) problem this represents, to render life endless is simultaneously to render it meaningless. It may not always be obvious but value is not anywhere near so much a function of abundance as it is of scarcity. It is the transience of our […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Microbial Archipelago of You

When viewed as the sum total combinatorial complexity of so very many information and energy-processing artefacts, entities and systems, it becomes apparent that the unity and individuated singularity of Self that we carry around in our brains as culturally reflexive semiotic cocoons of personal identity might be something quite significantly other than what we tend […]

Categories
Philosophy

Human Intelligence

Human intelligence is really some kind of game that language plays against itself through us.

Categories
life

Monday Mornings…

It’s Monday morning and I just can’t escape the feeling of being chained to a wheel of ever-accelerating meaninglessness. The reciprocal obligations, the games, the roles, the participatory self-surveillance of endlessly hyper-inflating complexity and confusion that invents its own purposes, meanings and necessity as it rumbles blindly along. I am unsure of what it all […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technology as Transmission Medium for Difference

Technology is a transmission medium for the difference as information and individuation that it then proceeds to iteratively articulate and amplify. The unrelenting technological metamorphosis in which we exist is in this way generated by its own positive as self-accelerating feedback loops, both logico-technical and human-existential. It is in one (limited) sense a closed feedback […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Smart Weapons and Stupid Wars

It is only because we are quite astonishingly and catastrophically unable to end wars that we find ourselves in so very many ways and for so very many different reasons still fighting them. We have refined our sharpest technological insights as a function of conflict and the intertribal dissonance that our species specialises in. What […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaning Machines

Context: — Can computers understand complex words and concepts? Yes, according to research — Is understanding a “simple” matter of inhabiting and adaptively observing or shuffling the relational properties of language? This raises questions of meaning as only being the suspended tension wire of inductive resonance across a logical frame of gestalt linguistic self-reference, without […]

Categories
technology

Artificial General Intelligence: Self-deception

Context: Elon Musk & Joe Rogan talk to “conscious AI” If our intent in seeking to scale the complex asymptote of AGI has been to convince ourselves that it is conscious and possesses subjectivity, personhood or sentient experience, then it is perhaps inevitable that we will arrive at a point where the reflexive conversational and […]

Categories
Philosophy

We are our cities.

See how the cityscape as that material and procedural or functional inversion of human being (and becoming), at once or initially at least those tools and cognitive hyper-extensions of minds as language and culture, have swollen into a tide of mechanical complexity and logical grammars that only the most naive would ever assert might one […]

Categories
Philosophy

Distance

We have all and for so very long defined ourselves by a conceptual difference and distance we now accept as necessary that we fail to see that the loneliness and isolation this exclusion brings has become the one thing that unites us all. It is as though we seek to experience and know the world […]