Categories
Philosophy

Prometheus Decoded

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 […]

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Philosophy

Battling Maxwell’s Demon: Entropy, Infinity and Logic

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Why do we suffer?

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

AI: The Bias Inside

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Transcending Disinformation

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 […]

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Philosophy

Competitive Difference is the Optimal State of Complex Socioeconomic Systems

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 […]

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Philosophy

Oh yes, this world is a mess

Science and technology cartwheel and careen past us in ways that few can convincingly argue are fully comprehended, defined or ever anything more than superficially controlled. This accelerating turbulence of complex sociotechnical recursion and self-validating necessity is a self-propagating compression wave of information, energy, technology and concepts. It ripples and oscillates like waves on a […]

Categories
literature Philosophy

Bookstore

On yesterday’s visit to garner some domestic logistics I found myself drawn, as is quite natural for me, to a local bookstore. Rapidly yet calmly and with apposite politeness I navigated my way to the psychology and philosophy section, just next to popular science and astronomy. I tend to treat the pages of these books […]

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Philosophy

When Big is Small: Technological Miniaturisation as Self-Accelerating Singularity

Context: The revolution in satellite technology means there are swarms of spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread in orbit It is a curious property of the juggernaut of relentless technological metamorphosis that utility is generally measured in inverse proportionality to miniaturisation, regardless that a network of associated, integrated systems quite naturally proliferate and […]

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Philosophy

Beautiful Convergence

Beauty fascinates me although it is not at a purely aesthetic level or in any visceral approximation to emotional experience and desire with which our culturally-mediated experience of self and subjectivity endows us. Consider that there have been a number of cross-cultural and ethnically-diverse academic studies that demonstrate that the faces which are considered to […]

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Philosophy

Language Lies

Language lies to us about its ability to facilitate communication. Anything beyond the most trivial of instances of description and communication carries enormous degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity. This is both the strength and the weakness of symbolic language, but ultimately – language itself benefits most. Human minds are bound by an acquired linguistic intuition […]

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Philosophy

There is no final truth…

There are no final, complete or self-contained answers. Language, for one, and as much as cognition itself, is not oriented towards closure. It is like a genetic code that acquires optimal, sustainable continuity through the counter-intuitive utility and value that incompleteness and uncertainty brings. Without the random mutation that logical or physical necessity creates, the […]