Categories
Alien Anthropology

Conflict is Stupid, and this is why…

The world must be considered as a single, unified or gestalt and autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing (i.e. complex, computational) system if it is ever to be successfully negotiated or shaped. Conflict, competition, socioeconomic or geostrategic dissonance and entropy adopt unexpected forms when viewed from Global Systems perspectives. Complex adaptive systems (such as is this […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Stupid Bomb: Choice, Entropy, Oblivion

There is always a choice. No matter what we do, there is always a choice. It is in general a wonderful thing to be able to choose and even when we do not necessarily possess (or need) any control over the spectrum and menu of choices available, it remains a fact that we would rather […]

Categories
Philosophy

Intelligence

Intelligence is either there in (or as) someone’s mind or it is not. Where it is not there, no amount of rhetorical hyperbole or tribal and ideological alignment can dissimulate its absence. Ignorance can in most cases be remediated, lack of intelligence is a little more difficult to amend.

Categories
Philosophy

Beautiful Brains and the Mystery of Unified Theories

An interesting consequence of generalised attributions of human exceptionalism is that we tend to automatically believe that all intelligence, all value and all experience exist (and persist) in this diminutive cranial cavity we inhabit. Cogito ergo something is definitely going on between our ears but there is a deep and irreducible mystery at work (i.e. […]

Categories
Philosophy

The world is Perfect Imperfection, but Why?

The world is so beautiful and perfect in all the glorious randomness and unexpected symmetry or beauty of it’s flow and form. Why is it that the perfection of this world deviates in the way it does from simple linearity to recurse itself into hidden patterns of mathematical complexity that displace this symmetry into opaque […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

On Orwell

The persistent value in literature such as Eric Blair‘s seems, to me, to be substantively – if counter-intuitively – abstracted from the political filter through which it may (or may not) be interpreted. While we seem collectively unable (or unwilling) – and much to my own chagrin – to just “get beyond” and “get over” […]

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 […]