Observing the President of COP26 stifling emotion as he apologised for the shortfalls of the limited agreement obtained at this critically important conference, I find myself reflecting on the words being variously wielded and warped on such a Global stage. There are two primary games of symbolic communication (i.e. language) at work in these large […]
To what extent might we ever comprehensively or justifiably speak of an external or “objective” reality? Internal experience is intimately interdependent with an “external” world, assertions of certainty regarding subjective ownership of an experience of colour remain somewhat unreliable. Experience exists, but as an inductive inevitability the doubt regarding objective reality is mirrored in that […]
Indeed. I do wonder if a little constructive self-deception is the necessary cognitive consequence and corollary of a symbolic language that is anything other than perfectly fit for the purpose of unambiguous communication. In this sense, are discoveries really accidental dialects? Feynman diagrams being an (abstract, representational) case in point.
Context: Cambridge Quantum Releases World’s First Quantum Natural Language Processing Toolkit and Library We are moving away from chatbots that intermittently hurl absurdities and misinformation at (and as each other and) the world towards autonomous language-processing systems that reason and understand. Whether or not we get there is not as important as that we invoke […]
A curious revelation of logic, mathematics and physics is that the concepts themselves are never really all that difficult and can usually be quite rapidly grasped if the method of education is sufficiently powerful. The difficulty lies in acquiring an aptitude to intuitively understand and leverage the relationships between the symbols that are used to […]
Context: DeepMind tells Google it has no idea how to make AI less toxic The raw data is indeed endemically and intermittently toxic. Filtering out venomous misanthropy from the dataset is a solution but this also requires a language model that does something substantively more than generate probabilistic sequences of linguistic artefacts sans comprehension. John […]
The artefacts and instances as microcosms or individuated and particular salience are indeed not the essence of a linguistic system, but notice how that from within the grammatical and ordered sub-set of logic that language (inadvertently) embodies – the projective and asserted totality of intelligible meaning or self-consistent systems is some kind of statistical average […]
The limits of language as an inadvertent or accidental sub-set of all logical possibility (as sum entropy of referential) systems possess a peculiar property of masking the limits of logic. Notice that within language we can assert total, consistent and compelling assertions as to the nature and reality of the system of language (or the […]
If it is true that we must in some sense build ourselves upon what is or may be the irreducible self-deception of a language and logic that can only ever pretend or deceive as to its ability to ever hold as certain knowledge the closure and self that is the pearl at the center of […]
The certainty of self, other and identity that is sought in language is only ever represented in language but is never of it nor of the world we assert it upon as system(s) of belief. Notice here that the self-gravitation towards repetitive patterns of thought as unacknowledged pathology is the most common form of mental […]
I wonder a lot about words, thoughts and those repetitive phrases both good and bad that we all build our inner (as much as our outer) worlds upon. Do you think we shape language or that language shapes us? Or is it both? Experience certainly shapes us and we are each relatively free to shape […]
These broken words and worlds are mirrors of broken selves that we have carried around like those old coats that, ragged and torn, serve no other purpose than to give us something reassuring to cling to and in being or becoming so accustomed to bearing these burdens as second-skins and masquerades or shades upon a […]
Daedelus Kite 