Categories
Philosophy

The Zen of Systems

All systems exist in contexts, environments and distributed, often integrated, other systems from which they gather or variously acquire (as effect, consequence, experience or memory and encoding) information as internal structure. This internal structure or variety is only possible and sustainably continuous by offsetting the inevitability of growing internal (as thermodynamic or logical/information) entropy to […]

Categories
technology

Broken Machines

I’ve spent a long time now down the rabbit hole of technology, science and the conceptual ecosystems that accompany them. The extent to which these devices and machines are fundamentally not fault tolerant is for diverse, yet related, reasons of psychological and commercial self-interest quite widely unreported. The narratives of mechanical or computational ascendance rarely […]

Categories
Philosophy

Time and Impatient Knowing

Being a chronic holist and aspiring raconteur of recursion, I note that the value of the vast and swelling tides of available books, magazines, articles, videos and mixed media montage is a function of the abstract as abbreviation and a (temporal) compression of synopsis as acceleration. This is, of course, a matter of time, of […]

Categories
technology

AI: Too much information…

I am quite interested in Artificial Intelligence but suffer from the broad availability and utter tsunami of related technical and general information. This preponderance of generally useful data leads to a very special case of having to invest time and energy differentiating signal from noise. This aspect of learning and knowing in any information rich […]

Categories
Philosophy

The words that break us also make us

It’s not easy to accept that we might all be implicitly, irreducibly and intractably broken and regardless  that such an assertion forms the basis of rationalising exactly why the human world is in many ways such a shambling mess of confusion and fear, the possibility remains that even while we find acknowledging our limitations to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Intractable Uncertainty in Nature and Mind

Context: Paradox at the heart of mathematics makes physics problem unanswerable What happens if we are to assert this reflexive tesseract of indefinitely-extensible symbolic information as abstraction at (and as) the beating heart of autonomously self-propagating, soliton-like logical vacuum and necessity that compels this Universe forwards? What might it mean to engage with uncertainty, incompleteness, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Biological Complexity: Bootstrapping Explanations

The endemic, near-ubiquitous orientation of dynamical systems towards the emergence of purposive information and energy-encoding and processing (as essentially computational) mechanisms is astonishing. When and where these artefacts, entities and relatively closed (as bounded or measurable and defined) self-propagating patterns arise, it is worth reflecting that while the coding logic is in general our main […]

Categories
information

What is Information?

Information is a quantification of the difference between the current state of a system and its most probable state.

Categories
technology

The Big Business of Disinformation

Context: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation There’s the rub. Not only do complex information and communication networks optimally self-propagate through the autonomous cultivation of threshold levels of dissonance, error and what amounts here to a nurtured “fidelity drift”, commercial and existential (corporate) incentives in this context are quite natively oriented towards it. The […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

Myth as Propaganda?

Narrative culture as mythological abstraction optimally self-propagates through precisely these forms of wilful misdirection and perception-shaping. Appraised in gestalt, the roles of fictional narratives are really no different than any other essentially tautological and self-generating system of belief. The most beautiful aspect and functional bootstrap of this system is that which is hardly at all […]

Categories
cybernetics Philosophy

The Cybernetic Zero: (an) Algorithmic Complexity

Algorithmic complexity is a measure of information. For any non-trivially sophisticated (i.e. interesting) system, there exists no shortest/best programmatic representation – i.e. theory, model, framework or network wiring. This means that in some circumstances we can reduce ad infinitum. There is no best, only better; a lesson in abject humility still to be learned by […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Metaverse Lies

Utopian technological fantasies provide precisely an inverse, equal and opposite promise of abbreviated complexity, simplicity, reduced information or cognitive burden from the unmanaged entropy they materially invoke and to which they are often applied as aspirational panacea. Notice here that recurring trope of escape into a world of pure control and endless choice in subjective […]