Science seeks underlying patterns and abbreviated logical explanations (as equation, model and approximation or general framework) to describe and manipulate nature but this is always at an inadvertent and inverse cost of generating precisely the same quantity of unmanageable complexity and disorder as that control and value or utility it brings. There exists a general […]
Language lies to us about its ability to facilitate communication. Anything beyond the most trivial of instances of description and communication carries enormous degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity. This is both the strength and the weakness of symbolic language, but ultimately – language itself benefits most. Human minds are bound by an acquired linguistic intuition […]
There are no final, complete or self-contained answers. Language, for one, and as much as cognition itself, is not oriented towards closure. It is like a genetic code that acquires optimal, sustainable continuity through the counter-intuitive utility and value that incompleteness and uncertainty brings. Without the random mutation that logical or physical necessity creates, the […]
Context: Neural network based on autocatalytic reaction performs image classification It really is not much of a hop, skip and jump from all these emerging discoveries of proxy mechanisms for invoking rudimentary machine intelligence to suggest that we have quite profoundly placed the ontological cart before the horse here. Information-processing systems (of which all matter […]
Context: Sperm whales in 19th century shared ship attack information Seems like a moment for an(other!) apposite philosophical Herman Melville quote but the (emergent) complexity of these things is as much a measure of their natural intelligence as it is of our enduring hesitance to acknowledge it. The next step on from identifying the existence […]
Context: A Language AI Is Accurately Predicting Covid-19 ‘Escape’ Mutations A fascinating method of discovery. An inference here is that the underlying information and energy-processing characteristics or adaptive, dynamical symmetries of viral RNA and linguistic structure possess a common logical antecedent. We might, indeed, perform such ontological archaeology through or as the indefinitely-extensible “languages” of […]
More important, I feel, than any particular aphorism or penetrating psychological and historical insight from Nietzsche is that he teaches us how to think. Much the same might be said of Bach; the patterns and complex symmetries of logical abstraction he defined and refined do not (only) instruct us in the use of any particular […]
Context: The Appearance of Robots Affects Our Perception of the Morality of Their Decisions Curious: “People consider moral decisions made by humanoid robots to be less ethically sound than when another human or traditional-looking robot makes the same decision.” The uncanny valley rides again. This is a particular instance of a general principle. The apperception […]
When we trade in Universals or concepts of substantive reality, we are engaging concepts of notionally “whole” or “complete” systems. The curious thing about any “totality” or aspirationally “complete” system is that there is no outside to that entity, no external conditions or properties. Everything is internal to that system. Why does this matter? Because […]
Negation is an irreducible property. Speaking of ontology, epistemology: these are all different flavours on the same buffet cart. Where we speak of a thing, a system, a person, a point of view, a technology or a system of belief – it is always from that system’s point of view or aspirationally-privileged perspective. We are […]
Attempting to comprehensively explain the many and diverse ways in which information autonomously self-propagates as and through cognition, communication and culture is a subtle process. More often than not, such aspirations towards linguistic, mathematical (or other) conceptual closure devolve into meaningless noise that is only saved from complete irrelevance by that pattern-obsessed brains and sociotechnical […]
Everything points towards language being a distributed, adaptive encoding system. Biases and norms (among many other interpenetrating and interdependent sub-systems) are not merely, or only, the hyper-extended cognitive and cultural artefacts of linguistic mediation. The encoded symptoms of bias and normative assumption or behavioural prohibition (as self-inflected, reflexive agent/entity control) non-linearly and recursively reproduce the […]
Daedelus Kite 