Categories
Philosophy

Absurdity

A thing being as equally and oppositely defined by that which it is not as much as by what it provably is (or consensually appears to be), the absence of its opposite is the simultaneous presence of its psychological, cultural and technologically-mediated self. Facilitated by conveniences of Gestalt illusion, familiar enough to student artists but […]

Categories
communication

Communication Complexity

Language and its corollary of narrative communication finds itself quite poorly-fit for engaging with anything other than the products and assumptions of language, as rich and diverse as they may ultimately be. This is a primary method of communication system self-replication through indefinitely extensible introspective self-reference. We don’t often notice this because we are all […]

Categories
Philosophy

Epistemological Bootstrap

Our greatest risk may be that we each and all entertain and inhabit a reflexive abhorrence of the essential uncertainty that science is, if inadvertently, bound to generate. This, I think, represents a key misunderstanding in how we cultivate and describe theories (and technologies). The aspirational orientation towards epistemological closure, communication and control is a […]

Categories
Philosophy

Certain Uncertainty in Science

In the quest to comprehend the vast tapestry of reality, we find ourselves at a crossroads of opposites and contradictions. It is as if the very fabric of existence hinges on a delicate balance, a critical dependence upon its opposite. This interplay of contrasts isn’t merely a linguistic construct or a byproduct of our cognitive […]

Categories
Philosophy

Will AI take Our Jobs?

The core question is that of continuity versus change. Not only do we find the genotypical logic of Aristotelian syllogisms whispering back to us in various ways in and as these aspirationally cognitive technologies, but we also find ourselves engaging in similarly antique philosophical reflections at almost every inflection point. Aligning personal experience and socioeconomic […]

Categories
Philosophy

Generative Uncertainty

The technologies with which we once aspired to any kind of teleological (or explanatory as aesthetic) closure and epistemological certainty have now proved much more effective in generating the inverse case.

Categories
Philosophy

Separating Thought from Language in AI Language Models?

Separation perhaps, but we would be committing a major disservice to knowledge if we were not to acknowledge that both language and thought must derive in some way from deeper principles of self-organisational complexity in (and as) information, energy and logical or material communications systems in nature and physics. Language may be separable from thought […]

Categories
Philosophy

Aristotle and Alexander, Albert and the Atom

I’ve never been entirely certain that educating a person who as a probable consequence then goes on to conquer the known world (of their time) is necessarily a good thing. Of course, we can never be certain what someone will do with the technical knowledge or practical wisdom we might be fortunate enough in all […]

Categories
Philosophy

Reverse Engineering the Future with Curiosity-Driven Research

I wonder if commercial incentives might not destructively inhibit and limit the possible range and diversity of all possible research and applications. By which I mean that decoupling curiosity-driven research from purely commercial incentives might open up a much vaster state space of combinatorial possibility than could otherwise exist or be beneficially investigated. It would […]

Categories
Philosophy

Time

There is a certain poetry in the notion that our understanding of time itself possesses a developmental arc and trajectory. It is something of a meta-temporal reflection that might go the way of much other involuntarily metastatic metaphysical inconsequentialities except for this – the unfolding (as organic) growth of our collaborative cognitive, linguistic and cultural […]

Categories
Philosophy

All the Simple Things

What is known (or is believed to be known) varies, adapts and undergoes the relentless metamorphosis of entangled streams of intersubjective abstraction we experience as cultural (and now, explicitly, technological) reality, but amongst all this effervescing percolation and uncertain intentions of identity and difference there remains a constant. The song, that is, remains the same […]

Categories
Philosophy

Paradise Lost, Found and Unbounded

Something that really annoys me is that academia, but not only academia, requests of us the simplest possible assertions and explanations as atoms of maximal communication but seems to fail to understand that this is not at all how the world actually exists. The aspirationally reductive simplicities of a lowest common denominator of communicative social […]