Categories
Alien Anthropology

Unifying the World

Context: Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation A key and core critical issue is that, even as the hyper-inflating representational information and knowledge matrices we inhabit find themselves piling specialisation upon specialisation and complexity upon complexity, the underlying (and arguably – overarching) factors that bind – and effectively unify – those […]

Categories
Philosophy

Logical Origami and the Infinite Emptiness

Or: Why The Enlightenment Inevitably Consumed Itself Each new system of thought, each extension, each insight, each historical inflection-point and distributed, systemic phase transition or levelling-up of human civilisation and each new branching of the tree of combinatorial (human) possibility – it opens the degrees of freedom, of motion, of growth and – simultaneously – […]

Categories
Philosophy

Concepts of Truth and a Philosophy of Freedom

Concepts of truth have been debated for at least the last several thousand years – across cultures, times and places and as a matter of Philosophy (which as an intellectual endeavour itself far outshines the dissociative political metrics into which fact and falsehood are rendered in our fractured contemporary context). The provision of value in […]

Categories
Philosophy

Defining Knowledge and Intelligence Simultaneously Inhibits It

Observe the progressive sedimentation of difference that occurs as fields of study are defined and become their own relatively self-consistent, self-propagating information systems. Each area of study (of knowledge, of associated, interdependent abstractions) becomes structured around unique taxonomies and conceptual centers. The enigma of this procedural refinement is that the structural and functional mechanism of […]

Categories
Epistemology

Trapped by Taxonomy

Those complicated labyrinths of formal vocabulary, taxonomy and tribalised genuflection to conventional thinking or institutional self-validitation that inflate knowledge (and science) with possibility are simultaneously the dragging anchor that binds us (all) to an incomplete and necessarily partial or flawed vision of the world. Art by Agnes Denes.

Categories
technology

The Limits of Thought: Algorithms, Brains and our Fragile Humanity

Can algorithms successfully encode for the stochastic properties and endemic entropy that provides sentience with evolutionary intelligence and a bias towards novelty and (information) entropy? There are logical (and philosophical) limits to algorithmic compression or optimisation that biology has nevertheless successfully exploited, not by removing errors but – from genetics to intelligence – by capitalising […]

Categories
Psychology

Bad Luck Bamboo and the Magical Indifference of Nature

I got myself some lucky bamboo a few weeks ago, just before the scattered tapestry of our world began rapidly unravelling under the weight of a viral pandemic. It makes me wonder about luck – not because I really believe in anything fundamentally magical or, at least, “lucky” but because superstition and unfounded belief 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
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
politics

Democracy, unmasked…

…and this, this is the yawning abyss at the heart of Democracy; that is, it is a system so exquisitely poor at selecting individuals of sufficient aptitude, intelligence and enduring moral character to perform the roles into which they might find themselves unwittingly flung.

Categories
Philosophy

Defining Intelligence

The intransigent difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently concise, compelling, universally agreed-upon and resilient definition of intelligence sits somewhere on the same geometric arc or architecture of axiomatic assertion as does complexity and, indeed, life. If epistemological closure is demonstrably (ref. paradoxes of self-containment, among other things) impossible, intelligence both can and can not (!) be […]

Categories
technology

AI: Engineering Intelligence

I wonder in what ways the “engineering of intelligence” recursively shapes, and to some extent prescribes the most probable developmental vectors of, our definition of human intelligence. We may find ourselves several years from now seeking the inflection points and procedural saliences that explain why it is that our core assumptions and concepts of intelligence […]