Every mind is like this: patterns, faces, surfaces and dreams. We recombine these things in different ways and while we might all arrive in different places and by different paths or idioms of cultural and linguistic orientation - it is fundamentally the same process that we are all engaged in. We all spend our lives…
Language is an Operating System
Language is something of an operating system. Language also represents a self-propagating, abstract information system - much like culture or socioeconomic reality - that inhabits us just as much as we inhabit it. Human beings, technologies, artefacts and communication systems are the medium through which this linguistic entity manifests and self-replicates. The resilience of this…
The Persistence of False Belief
Do we possess beliefs or do beliefs possess us? Are the distributed, integrated information artefacts and systems of belief actually entities in their own right? Are individual nodes in a networked, self-propagating information system really the storage components for the resilient continuity of an idea, a belief or an ideology? Are the intrinsic errors (within…
Enigma: Cartography of Self
The more that our inner worlds become outer artefacts, the more that our personal lives (now - thoughts) becomes commercial or surveillance data points, the more that the porous boundaries of psychological and material subjectivity disassemble and dissolve. A history, a culture, a civilisation predicated upon the ascendance of individuality (and it's logical complement of…
Dark Logic: The Disinformation Entropy Paradox
A curious, perhaps mischievous, property of complex adaptive systems is that they are autonomously biased towards the means and methods of their own optimal continuity, succinct encoding/self-representation and environmental self-propagation. In this sense, and while acknowledging that diverse actors can and do wilfully generate turbulence and confusion, a listless vessel of policy or doctrine is…
Entropy Binds
To what extent does a procedural (i.e. temporal) experience of cognition, language, culture and technology bias us towards linear problem-solving and reductionist explanation? The aggregate sum of all (multithreaded) organisational heuristics may itself be a non-linear and adaptively dynamic system as a fact but from an individual thread of experience (within that gestalt), planning, problem-solving…
What is Entropy?
Well, among other things... Entropy is a measure of the "degrees of freedom" available to a system. Generally-speaking, the more components, sub-systems, artefacts, entities that compose a system - the more degrees of freedom that are available to that system. Because there are always more possible disordered system states than ordered ones (in the total…
Crown of Thorns: this gathering storm
This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds - never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged - these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance.…
Evolving Narratives and Cultural Behaviours to Negotiate a Global Pandemic
Sociality and interdependence is our species' strength but is simultaneously also our weakness. The complex networks and intangible feedback loops of behaviour, communication, material artefacts and technologies upon which we have built a Global civilisation, such as it is, are autonomously self-propagating information systems. Once such psychological, social and cultural systems have gained energy and…
Communication is not Consciousness
An interesting article: A Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind Mind is certainly built around nested hierarchies, but the general structures built here (in this article) are too dependent upon loosely unverified correlation and analogy; "X implies Y, so then Z", where X is unsubstantiated.The structural constraints of communication and narrative cognition derive from, are related…
Unravelling Tapestries of Cryptographic Entropy
The endless unravelling of assurance at one end of this cryptographic tapestry is simultaneously the enduring incentive, obligation and functional necessity of creating more sophisticated and impermeable logical entanglements at the other end. A question which springs to mind is as to the plausible inevitability of an acceleration of applied human or machine intelligence overtaking…
Curiouser and Curiouser: The Complex Emptiness of (Self and) Words
The curiousity of narrative is precisely the (very) many degrees of freedom available to the hyper-inflating interior spaces of language and an associated conceptual eloquence of psychologically-resonant teleology implicit to story-telling. The resonance derives from the ways that language and narrative reflexively shape experience, perception, culture and cognition. The degrees of freedom highlight the logical…
