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Philosophy

Intelligence is Endemic to Biology

Context: Single-celled organism can ‘change its mind’ despite lacking a nervous system This is an example of entropy as degrees of freedom; intelligence as manifest choice. Not quite a solid vote for panpsychism but certainly heading in the direction of autonomously self-propagating biological computation being universal within observed biotic artefacts, entities and systems on Earth. […]

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Philosophy

Distributed Intelligence

Intelligence is somewhat catastrophically problematised by our inability, from within the system, to ever fully capture or represent the system. From within language (and logic) we generate models as fantasies of complete and consistent truths that much more closely approximate to systems of belief that, similarly, simulate closure and completeness without ever being able to […]

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Philosophy

Uncertainty

Uncertainty is perfection. We have all spent so very long and so much effort and wasted time seeking some Other and distant or somehow different completeness and possession of Self as refined, perfect and infallible that we almost entirely missed the point. That uncertainty and doubt which plagues us is really only and always just […]

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Philosophy

On Seeking the Impossible

I know of no other way than to seek the impossible beyond ourselves in the paragon of perfect forms or infinity other than as simultaneously and endemically manifest in and as the incompleteness, doubt, undecidability and uncertainty within us. In this, we come to understand that the distance and difference by which we seek and […]

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Philosophy

Truth

Truth, like belief and most other assertions or aspirations to objectivity, is always and already anchored as unacknowledged tautology upon itself and the game of denying and obfuscating this fact constitutes the shared existential, organisational and cultural histories – good, bad and all between – that we inhabit. The perspicacity required to understand this is […]

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Philosophy

Actually, this is why we can’t have nice things…

Most of us have to endure the gradual and eminently tedious acquisition of eloquent versatility across increasingly narrow conceptual and technical vocabularies and only then, having been profoundly shaped by the normative logical and grammatical, behavioural or cognitive organisational practises that aspirationally contain and constrain systems as a function of their sustainable continuity, finding ourselves […]

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Philosophy

Fixing a Broken World

If it is true that there does in fact exist a class (or singular, if enigmatic, presence) of global systems theories that successfully, comprehensively and usefully abstract universal properties, theorems or logical relationships in any one non-trivially complex or sophisticated system and integrated, adaptive and evolutionary context; then those insights, abstractions and global properties solve […]

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Philosophy

The Unexpected

We are perhaps all on an arc and trajectory of discovery upon which that which was though to be an exception only ever reveals itself as the rule by and through which the normative reality of our own world and all its diverse complexity, information, matter and energy begins to feel a little like an […]

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Philosophy

A Conscious Cosmos

Consciousness is, perhaps inevitably and as a function of psychological egoism, asserted as the ascendant peak of ordered information-processing significance but it is just as likely that our visceral experience of this complex, patterned experience and distributed computational system of matter and energy is only one, diminutive hyper-plane slice across a vast and plausibly unmeasurable […]

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culture

Information Explosion

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would […]

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Philosophy

Imagination

Under analysis, we might be pleasantly (or otherwise) surprised to discover that imagination and its abstracted introspection represent the kernel and tonal center around which all intelligence as ordered experience and perception modulate. More than this, though, all belief – being the interior reflection of a half-mirrored labyrinth asserted and projected upon assumptive metaphysical facts […]

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Philosophy

AGI: The Missing Link

There is something foundational missing and it can not be brute-forced – all emulations are bound to be hollow and haunted. The ontological, holistic bootstrap of autocatalytic system self-containment that provides even a possibility of life, sentience, and eventually – intelligence and technology, is an absence conspicuous by its presence. There is a hidden logical […]