Categories
Alien Anthropology

Multidimensional Heuristics

Multidimensional heuristics are those forms of analysis that, rather than attempting a cumulative or brute force aggregation and hard interpretation of data, seek recursive logical insight through intuitive reconfiguration and subtractive recombination of existing patterns. It is true that our minds and acquired or entrained cognitive methods, as much as the procedural artefacts and coded […]

Categories
technology

Technological Overextension: Security, Entropy, Logical Hyperinflation

The accelerating hyper-inflation of information and communications technology networks and systems is an overextended structural entity. The primary reason it does not immediately collapse back upon itself is the existence of uncertainty, useful ambiguity and logical entropy. The more components and logical relationships we have, the more those systems themselves generate further artefacts, abstractions and […]

Categories
systems technology

Cybersecurity’s Unacknowledged Truth

The whole cybersecurity enterprise seems to be built upon a suite of psychological and culturally-reflexive assumptions that assert that there exists even a possibility of logical or systemic closure. No such closure or completion is possible and this is rarely acknowledged.

Categories
systems

Turing, Undecidability, Adaptation and Cancer

Alan Turing’s proof of the undecidability of non-trivially sophisticated algorithms is sufficient reason for:• the autonomously adaptive, complex information strategies of life; and,• the intractably problematic and recursively non-terminating information transcription of cancer.

Categories
technology

Active Measures: information, physics, influence and censorship in cyberspace

It is interesting that active intervention, interdiction and an assertion of ideological self-interest through campaigns of enthusiastic (technologically-facilitated) censorship are probably the most expensive and least efficient ways of achieving information-centric goals. It is like attempting to cool a building by adding cold air – far more expensive in terms of energy, resources and information-processing […]

Categories
Philosophy

Is Consciousness Everywhere?

It is as likely that the autonomously self-propagating patterns of information and energy processing (of which consciousness is an instance or manifestation) are ubiquitously distributed; such that (what we experience as) intelligence, consciousness and the self-inflective logic of embodied complexity in life are indeed “everywhere”. It is not that what we are is anything radically […]

Categories
politics

Political Problems: the ubiquitous, intractable and shared enigmas of outsourcing our rationality to those least able to effectively use it

A central problem of all political systems is that the idealised abstractions of those systems are of a fundamentally different kind or class of entity than are the lived experiences and material extension or implementation of those systems into, upon, through and as the world. There is a fundamental (and foundational) discontinuity between the material […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Disentangling Bureauracy

It is fascinating to consider that an anachronistic hierarchy produces precisely the organisational inertia and systemic entropy that it itself is best oriented to negotiate (and through this to endlessly reproduce its own self-validating necessity). It is quite likely that the path of least effort and autonomously self-organising (i.e. low energy-state, minimal algorithmic complexity) systems […]

Categories
culture

We are the distributed medium of cultural information transmission…

There exists a radical misunderstanding and of the nature and of the role information plays in our lives and world. We do not possess or own information in any substantive sense – at least not beyond a certain superficial psychological or cultural attachment that really only serves to mask the many ways that information, in […]

Categories
technology

Technology: Misunderstanding Each Other

Has anyone (else) noticed that the proliferation of communications technologies has occurred in direct proportion to the level of misunderstanding and confusion in the world? It is not that we do anything new by misinterpreting each other’s intentions – as people have been doing this for as long as there have been people – we […]

Categories
Philosophy

Why do scientific theories become more complex?

“Bonini’s paradox is the name given to the problem that emerges when a model of a phenomenon is just as hard to understand as the phenomenon that it is supposed to explain.” University of Alberta’s Dictionary of Cognitive Science A critical point of reason here, and one for which we may all be fairly poorly furnished, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Ascending An Impossible Self-Disassembly of Infinitely-Extensible Emptiness

Some truths are only known by inversion, by negation and through a proof by contradiction. Alan Turing’s proof of the undecidability of non-trivially complex algorithms, that is – the impossibility of analysis to arrive at certainty concerning whether a given computer program will terminate or continue forever, was just such a proof. Kurt Gödel’s proof […]