...as a general observation: All of this (shared) online aspiration to reflexively self-validating identity-construction and participatory meaning-generation masks a howling vacuum of dissimulated subjectivity. We seek self-expression but no such endpoint exists, no epistemogical closure or certainty and (certainly) nothing even vaguely approximating to that monster-image of projected, illusory control that stares back at us…
Predators, Machines and Co-evolution
For many years now, I have been fascinated by the mischievous, mysterious relationship between material systems (like living organisms) and the astoundingly complex information abstractions, systems and relationships within which they quite literally swim. I have mentioned parasitic wasps before - in a related context - but encountered an interesting article today which got me…
Internet Narratives, Self-propagating Complexity and Adversarial Evolution
Some philosophical thoughts on these contemporary, massively-distributed online communications systems:• social media now (largely) subsumes news media and the powerful, potentially unmanageable, flow and form of recursively self-propagating information-processing systems is such that even putatively reputable media or news channels - not to mention governments - are forced to contort themselves and their narratives in…
A Cultural Vacuum of Self
The strangest thing about personal identity and subjective psychological experience is that, at core, it consists solely of internalised references to an external world of images, ideas, idioms, languages and conventions. This "external" world is only ever the substantive collection and dynamic aggregate of all of those other individual nodes, similarly empty, and swimming in…
Commercial Identities: Generational Difference
Notice how the primary cultural differentiation of generational identity is always a commercially-mediated product, idiom or artefact. Can anyone ever truly own their expression of identity, of cultural self when it is always already so much someone else's possession? Does commercial self-interest (even unwittingly) cultivate a possibility for the emergence of self-identity and t h…
Logic: Indefinite Extensibility
The indefinitely extensible essence of logic (Gödel, 1931) is both bug *and* feature. That which provides a possibility of recombinatory (technological, organisational, psychological) development, of the degrees of freedom by which we might define (and endlessly redefine) the meaning and substance of "intelligence" or "technology", is also the tangled hierarchy of inertia and entropy within…
AI: Engineering Intelligence
I wonder in what ways the "engineering of intelligence" recursively shapes, and to some extent prescribes the most probable developmental vectors of, our definition of human intelligence. We may find ourselves several years from now seeking the inflection points and procedural saliences that explain why it is that our core assumptions and concepts of intelligence…
The Machines, the Mirrors and the Emptiness of Self
The image in the mirror of psychological self-reflexivity is the machine, the rational, the explicable and the logic which has through so many, many iterations become what we now recognise as information and communications technology. An aspirational aptitude towards anticipatory self-explanation is always, perhaps, only ever going to appear or manifest as the percolated surface…
The Implicit Value and Logical Depth of Cognitive Diversity
Cognitive diversity represents that useful, recombinatory information entropy from which insight and innovation assert and reproduce or replicate themselves. A subtle, adaptive balance between self-propagating continuity and incessant metamorphosis is the source of as many evolutionary wonders as it is of the abstract information origami of psychological, cultural and technological enigmas with which we are…
Climate Change In Security: Insecurity
It may be a matter of social and psychological necessity that this kind of monumental existential threat - to which we have perhaps long been desensitised by repetition and the droning monotony of unnecessarily adversarial ideological and political competition - carry more impact, more information entropy and cultural gravity when they become a tangible, material,…
Rethinking Social Media
I came across an interesting idea today: the production of a new, reliable, verifiable, safe and trustworthy social media platform. My reflex was to think: what of the tendency of information and energy-processing (i.e. communications) systems to autonomously drift into optimally-concise patterns and methods of self-propagation?There is no particular brilliance about Facebook et. al. -…
Technology: Utopian Aspirations?
Utopian aspirations are inevitably three parts marketing and one part plausibility. While communication (as much as communications platforms or technologies) is necessarily a matter of endlessly effervescent linguistic or logical self-inflection, the implicit openness of our contemporary context and the cognitive hyper-extension of technological complexity represents cost and burden as much as it does utility.A…
