Categories
Philosophy

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 […]

Categories
technology

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 […]

Categories
narrative

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 […]

Categories
culture

The Implicit Resilience of (a) Limited Cognitive Dissonance

Narrative dissonance is a necessary component of social communication; an autonomous method for introducing the useful information entropy of difference through which biological, cognitive and cultural systems evolve and maintain resilience against catastrophic disassembly.  This difference has become acute, amplified by technology and it’s consequences have all but shredded political civility.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Mind, Information and Entropy

It is not surprising that the symbolic abstractions and mental worlds of homo sapiens arrive at incompleteness and negation but “deficiency” is a word perhaps altogether too easily attributed affective, emotional qualities.  The indefinite extensibility of (both) logical and material systems, and each in their own ways invoking parameters and probabilities unique to their own […]

Categories
systems

Information, Influence and Dissonance: the Utility of Fakes and Errors in System Self-Propagation

Information systems, viewed from a gestalt/holistic perspective, possess many properties we might otherwise recognise as self-propagation, “emergence” or self-organisation. The presence of values attributed semantic (or logical) properties of truth or falsity at a level of cognition or language may be purely incidental. From a Global Systems perspective, information systems autonomously pursue the optimal means […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Coronavirus, Dr. Li Wenliang and the Implicit Fragility of Authoritarian Political Regimes

While it is true that there is no such thing as a perfect political system, some forms of social organisation clearly possess greater resilience than others. This current epidemiological catastrophe is clear evidence of the implicit failures of authoritarian information control. https://twitter.com/howroute/status/1225480460979056642?s=09 The mechanical, austere logical function of authoritarian states generates deep fragility in their […]

Categories
Philosophy

Digital Media: It was Never about Truth…

These information environments are biased towards the accelerated throughput and bandwidth of data, largely blind to truth values. The self-propagating gestalt of integrated digital information systems appear to require this constant throughput to avoid over-extension and self-gravitational collapse. It is something of a constant back-filling and hyper-inflating referential effervescence of naked data, sans semantics or […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Necessity of Cognitive Bias

I honestly wonder sometimes if we make sense of the world or if the world makes sense of (and through) us; it is most certainly true that the information patterns of this world inhabit our minds just as much as we inhabit them. Cognitive biases, for instance, are those endemic psychological faux pas through which […]

Categories
culture

Information Entropy and Psychological Desensitisation in Culture and Art

When the recombinatory convergence of once-distant or disparate symbols no longer shocks us, it is probably not merely because the world (and it’s inhabitants) have moved on and desensitised to the essential information entropy of difference.  It is because these once dissonant symbols share some deeper (and logical) bond. The cultural and psychological self-representation of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Cyber: Technology, Information, Identity and Conflict

…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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

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 […]