Categories
Philosophy

Does Language Generate Conflict?

Language is particularly useful and effective as a system of communication but it tends to generate ambiguity and confusion in equal measures to those of the invocation of clarity and understanding. It is not always or immediately apparent but the integrated systems of communication we inhabit are naturally and adaptively biased towards their own reproduction. […]

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Philosophy

Blockchain as Void

Context: — Blockchain Guy Struggles to Explain a Single Practical Use for Web3 — Interesting, yet, in that this self-referentiality and non-existence are quite common across linguistic and symbolic or logical systems of reference when viewed from (i.e. inhabited as) gestalt bundles of artefacts, entities and systems such as those we reflexively posit our own […]

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Philosophy

Meaning Machines

Context: — Can computers understand complex words and concepts? Yes, according to research — Is understanding a “simple” matter of inhabiting and adaptively observing or shuffling the relational properties of language? This raises questions of meaning as only being the suspended tension wire of inductive resonance across a logical frame of gestalt linguistic self-reference, without […]

Categories
communication

Complex Failures of Language and Communication

I find the range and spectrum of generative ambiguity around the concept (and definition) of complexity to itself be quite interesting. We find in language (as much as in technology but both as hyper-extended corollaries of cognition) these mischievously self-propagating confusions and constructive indeterminacies around concepts like complexity, entropy and emergence. Otherwise rendered: the most […]

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Philosophy

Better Words, Better Worlds

Watching the ramshackle parade and rickety cart of human civilisation bumping and bumbling along the deep corrugations of this muddy dirt track (of history) that it has never quite managed to effectively transcend, I am struck much less by the cyclical percolation of idiots and tyrants to positions of power than I am that we […]

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Philosophy

Structure and Argument

I have been deep down a rabbit hole of argument analysis just recently. There is a natural orientation as bias in many people towards choosing points of view and systems of belief based upon their structural aesthetics, not upon their substance. The arguments made for and against any particular political point or the tenets of […]

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Philosophy

A Cartography of Language

It is always interesting to see these maps of culture and language or identity, even if they are always and necessarily incomplete. Also and incidentally fascinating to observe that languages drift, undergo metamorphosis and radiating speciation as a function of the implicit and yet eminently generative ambiguities and indeterminacies of verbal and written communication as […]

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Philosophy

Language fails us…

Language optimally self-propagates as a function of the instruction set encoding failures by and through which ambiguity, doubt, uncertainty and innumerable other apertures of opportunity to explore the phase space of all possibility persist. This is also how genetic information reproduces both through and as us. Notice here that the closure and certainty we so […]

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Philosophy

Rage Against the Trolls

Context: Trolls Aren’t Like the Rest of Us I do wonder if the adversarial and tribal biases that so readily percolate through (for instance, but not only) online social networks have a tendency to reflexively cultivate and incentivise a bundle of pathological personality traits. In this sense, the technologically-mediated self-propagation of inflammatory and provocative narrative […]

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Philosophy

Worlds Beyond Words

There is indeed a boundary and border between what might be said or defined and what might eventually be understood or known as reality, information, the physical facts that (or as they) exist beyond our descriptions of them. I am sympathetic with any philosophical position that seeks to build and inhabit the difference and distance […]

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Philosophy

Transmission: Unwriting I

Language is a struggle against the very dissolution and metamorphosis that language itself depends upon for growth and change. The extent to which it is paradoxically unfit for purposes of communication and comprehension is a measure of its success in a primary objective of iterative self-replication through the transmission medium that we ourselves represent. For […]

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Philosophy

Philosophy of Time

Philosophical debates on time are rarely about time. They are primarily about the language with which we order our conceptual vocabularies, our reflexive sociotechnical and behavioural grammars, about what can or may be legally, rationally or intelligibly asserted. Competitive oscillation between established (proxy tribal or political) positions solves nothing and yet, counter-intuitively, it is precisely […]