Context: Neural network based on autocatalytic reaction performs image classification It really is not much of a hop, skip and jump from all these emerging discoveries of proxy mechanisms for invoking rudimentary machine intelligence to suggest that we have quite profoundly placed the ontological cart before the horse here. Information-processing systems (of which all matter […]
Context: Sperm whales in 19th century shared ship attack information Seems like a moment for an(other!) apposite philosophical Herman Melville quote but the (emergent) complexity of these things is as much a measure of their natural intelligence as it is of our enduring hesitance to acknowledge it. The next step on from identifying the existence […]
Context: A Language AI Is Accurately Predicting Covid-19 ‘Escape’ Mutations A fascinating method of discovery. An inference here is that the underlying information and energy-processing characteristics or adaptive, dynamical symmetries of viral RNA and linguistic structure possess a common logical antecedent. We might, indeed, perform such ontological archaeology through or as the indefinitely-extensible “languages” of […]
Context: Listening for Extraterrestrial Blah Blah I doubt whether human beings are even a quarter of a percent as smart as we think we are. The indefinitely-extensible properties of logic and mathematics suggest that languages and intelligence on the higher end of the (Kardashev) scale are quite plausibly far too sophisticated for us to interpret […]
Creativity is indeed a sign or marker of intelligence. There are many kinds of intelligence, though, and creative intelligence is as often shunned as celebrated. This represents something of an intractable enigma: the creative insights upon which innovation, technological metamorphosis and revelatory insight so foundationally depend simultaneously represent something of a psychological challenge and existential […]
…and in knowing, in that endlessly self-inflected and hyper-inflating abstract space of iteratively refined and asymptotically unresolvable logical evolution that knowing, intelligence and material complexity are all aspects or dimensions and vectors of – we surely embody whatever plausible unifying and Universal principle exists as would ever be sufficient to generate this Cosmos, this life, […]
Art is surely not bound by artefacts any more than intelligence is bound by a cranium. Generating value in art is really only a function of the extent to which an artefact (as a concept) directly, indirectly or even – in some instances and as a corollary of entropy, inversely – renews or reinvents the […]
Professor Bell provides a fascinating, artfully-abbreviated and profoundly well-informed historical survey of the steam, electrical, computational and AI/cyber-physical technological phase transitions of human civilisation. As an anthropologist, she grounds technological systems in the people and places that inhabit them. It is clearly of critical importance to consider the lived experience of a future that remakes us and […]
“My beauty was my curse, so to speak; it created an impenetrable shield between people and who I really was.” ~Hedy Lamarr There really does seem to be something of a deep and irremediable sorrow in all great beauty. We might say the same of a beautiful mind as much as of an attractive face […]
Context: Climate change: 2020 in a dead heat for world’s warmest year Climate change has been off the radar for a while, it seems and while the shit-show and train-wreck of 2020 rolls on into 2021, there are some things which seem painfully obvious to me but which also, for whatever reason, seem to be […]
Some days I feel so out of place, so different and separate from the world. It is a paradox, of course: the essential and irreducible dissonance of life is precisely that unwitting method by and through which the world as a whole most optimally self-propagates and obtains patterned, sustainable continuity or environmental tenure; to maintain […]
Context: Eradicating black rats on Palmyra Atoll uncovers eye-opening indirect effects A perspicacity and intelligence sufficient to the task of successfully and conscientiously managing our natural environment is quite positively anathema to administrative bureaucracies. There is in this a microcosm of a certain functional or instrumental narrowing of representation and behavioural engagement which institutional interdictions […]
Daedelus Kite 