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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Dictators of course arrive wearing many diverse kinds of masks and singing all manner of simplistic songs of self-interested nationalism. For those of you out there who find themselves living under such a regime, it must be a really strange experience. It is true that we all tend to desensitise to hardship or suffering after […]
I have, it seems, made something of a life in words and the variously disambiguating compositional artefacts of language or thought (and other such conceptual melodies) with which we each and all make our ways and narrative meanings in or as this world, but I have not found happiness. There is an irremediable darkness here […]
It’s not easy to accept that we might all be implicitly, irreducibly and intractably broken and regardless that such an assertion forms the basis of rationalising exactly why the human world is in many ways such a shambling mess of confusion and fear, the possibility remains that even while we find acknowledging our limitations to […]
We should not be surprised that our collective and individual search for meaning in life is difficult to resolve. The tools of language by which we attempt to plumb the depths of life and existence are unfit for defining or comprehending ultimate meanings in either ourselves or the worlds we inhabit. The language and logic […]
Context: Language Modelling at Scale: Gopher, Ethical considerations, and Retrieval There is perhaps no more salient feature in the landscape of accelerating technological metamorphosis than that of the many and varied ways that artificial intelligence is recursively shaping the shared vocabularies of our current historical moment. Language holds a special place in that not only […]
Open AI have released the language model of GPT-3 for general use, with appropriate caveats. I have previously been skeptical of the ultimate utility of GPT-3 as a creative authorial or (useful) philosophically reflexive tool but discovered just now that if you feed it a sufficiently sophisticated prompt it actually throws back some interesting linguistic […]
Daedelus Kite 