Categories
Philosophy

Limits of Language

Given the potentially infinite continuum of expressive freedom available within language, it is something of a mystery as to why we generally only occupy such a small range of creative possibility within it.

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
cybernetics

Semantic Morphology is Anamorphic

In a context of artificial intelligence and among many other complex issues of governance and control, we can effectively build the conceptual labyrinth of regulatory theory any way we choose to, unbounded from canonical dogma. Some technical dialects and definitions or descriptions will be more inequitable than others and this is the placeholder for an irreducible obligation and orientation towards […]

Categories
Philosophy

DALL-E can’t spell well

I am coming to believe that these shady generative AI spelling misadventures are actually not at all what we think they are. Our primary method of communication in language is subject to core ambiguities at the semantic layer. Certainly, the training data is formative but insofar as language itself is concerned, these disjointedly discontinuous misrepresentations […]

Categories
Philosophy

Omniscience

A provocative hypothesis emerges from the rapid evolution of technology: the phenomenon we’re witnessing in accelerated technological speciation (and convergence) is not localized but rather a distributed systemic property. We generally think to localize the essence of Artificial Intelligence within distinct nodes or points. This localization serves a practical purpose, enabling us to dissect and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Mandala

Metaphysics is an interesting consideration. I wonder if it is only ever and really a problem of words and language. In some senses, it could only ever be this game of words, semantics, of communication. It’s a problem to which Zen applies the kōan, analogous to the Gödel sentence of a narrative mind. It’s actually […]

Categories
Philosophy

3 critiques of logical positivism

Verification Principle Limitations:Logical positivism asserts that a statement is meaningful only if it can be empirically verified or is analytically true. Critics argue that this verification principle is itself neither empirically verifiable nor analytically true, thus rendering it self-defeating. This critique challenges the positivists’ demarcation criterion for meaningful statements Reductionism and Oversimplification:Critics contend that logical […]

Categories
communication

Reflection on Media

This is, among other things, a relatively succinct description of the (current, Global) communications system drift through combinatorial entropy into the more probable states of relatively meaningless yet optimally reconfigurable (as modular) noise. High frequency, low fidelity narrative artifacts (and all who sail in them) don’t become completely meaningless signals, but they come to share […]

Categories
Philosophy

Infinite Emptiness: Language and Via Negativa

Language is a class of epistemological (as self-validating) tesseract. From within its horizon of intelligibility, we can only ever see or engage the descriptions (and the descriptions of descriptions) with more language. This is why Zen kōans frame impossible questions and concepts: it is a way to escape the language trap, using language. Non-linearity is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Inexplicable Me

Understanding agency is deeply problematised by the languages with which we aspire to do so. We find ourselves haggling over meanings and inferential teleologies within a system of semantic encoding (in language) that, as complex adaptive system, maintains and sustains its tenured continuity in its environment as a function of the impossibility of isolating meaning, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Freedom

To claim, to reclaim, to assert ownership or self-determination, in almost any conceivable constellation of semantics and implicature, is simultaneously an act of submission, concession and referential, relational displacement in, through and as language. Technology functions quite similarly in that every aspirational act and assertion of communication and control is only ever rendered intelligible and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Alienation and Meaning: Bartering Emptiness with Language

The definitions of words. The definition (or description) of a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a document, a corpus. At the “atomic” level of words, each definition and interpreted meaning is inflated and rendered intelligibly sensible as a function of dependency. All words being defined in terms of other words, and as Bertrand Russell reflects […]