Note: this was originally written as a response to a specific contemporary geostrategic context for an audience that was spectacularly uninterested in my opinion, so I share it here just to keep it in some modest sense “alive” as a bundle of ideas. I can’t help but wonder if the threat of war is itself […]
Conflict is the flip-side of a difference that is itself the necessary condition for the production and definition of information. Being that contested information spaces are now ubiquitous, it should also be clear that the competitive dissonance of endlessly self-replicating information hyper-inflation is an effective proxy for conflict. What does this mean? Quite simply: that […]
Context: IQ tests: are humans getting smarter? Intelligence is a topic in which explicability possesses an uncanny correspondence to the behavioural practices by and through which it is defined. Having framed longevity as a plausibly necessary function of intellect, Social Darwinism arrives (yet again) on the Pale Horse as meritocracy wearing a clown hat. Having […]
Superficiality is a function of acceleration. The mainstream flow of technological complexity is such that not only is it quite possible to exist, survive and (indeed) thrive while doing little more than juggling labels, names, references and (other) abbreviations – this is the constitutive default mode of contemporary psychological and cultural experience. Complexity and comprehension […]
What we assume as the central tenet of language and (other) symbolic systems of information-encoding is not in fact its goal, it is a supporting consequence and effective symptom of a system that, like all non-trivially sophisticated or complex entities, first and foremost seeks continuity and replication. The primary purpose of human language is not […]
Context: Logical Fallacies Curiously, though, logical fallacies have a largely unacknowledged and arguably pivotal role to play in the successfully sustainable continuity of cultural (as much as cognitive) communications systems. What is inaccurate or even outright absurd often carries more information entropy and influence than that which is, strictly speaking, factual or true. It is […]
Context: Prometheus’ Toolbox Even if the only way we might ever find technology viscerally intelligible is as just such a Golem of projected corporeal self-inflection, we almost always seem to miss an important point. That which is created or copied and which then endlessly regenerates itself with all the logical necessity of a Von Neumann […]
Context: How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists I am interested in Global Systems Theory as the Grand logical Poobah system of all systems which, notwithstanding and plausibly because of Russell’s Paradox of entity self-containment, generates some interesting concepts, viewed laterally. Consider that “sucking orderliness” from an environment is inversely equivalent to asserting disorder upon […]
I’m going for yet another deep (if relatively brief) dive on the question of suffering. The natural orientation of the Universe towards dissolution and decay or disorder is precisely the reason why we have life, sentience, experience and intelligence – the entropy of material dissolution is a precondition for the structural aggregation and compression of […]
The bias in machine learning (and AI more generally) is the bias in data. The bias in data replicates the bias in ourselves, our distributed social and cultural information-processing systems, and in the natural orientation of complex information and energy-processing systems towards autonomous self-propagation through optimally-concise self-representational abstraction(s). Machine Learning applies mathematical heuristics to extract […]
Context: The simple reasons online disinformation may never be fixed It is not only a question as of how best to engage the persistence of disinformation so much as it is of how the Global (as much as political or strategic) information-processing and media system has come in many ways to functionally depend upon the […]
Context: https://youtu.be/2Uj1A9AguFs Vertical motion in this chart is a measure of the degree to which any of the organisations or entities recursively and reflexively facilitates global information system self-replication. This is precisely how complex information-processing systems function: they autonomously self-select for those components, entities and sub-systems that optimally bias for the replication of the overall […]
