Categories
Philosophy

What if Artificial General Intelligence actually wants to be discovered?

We are (all) still attempting to brute-force our way towards Artificial General Intelligence.  If the complexity sciences have taught us anything it is that there is an autonomous orientation within naturally-occurring information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems towards self-organisation and bootstrapped system optimisation via logical extensibility and recursive exponentiation.  We appear to be attempting to […]

Categories
mathematics

Infinitely Random Encryption Seeds

Context: The Puzzling Search for Perfect Randomness I can never resist a good speculative and completely “out there” waffle.  Randomness is non-trivially significant in cryptography. The closer the approximation of a numerical sequence or the properties of an abstract geometrical object to randomness, the more difficult the encryption seed derived from it is to crack. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Truth Beyond Logic and Time Beyond Clocks

Context: Truth Beyond Logic and Time Beyond Clocks: Janna Levin on the Vienna Circle and How Mathematician Kurt Gödel Shaped the Modern Mind Gödel is interesting in many ways. While acknowledging that his logical and mathematical foundation-shaking Incompleteness proofs have a very specific context and meaning, the extent to which a broader reading (and thinking) […]

Categories
Philosophy

No Limits

Is it really so? Is ICT or any other language and hyper-extended (or reflexive) cognition really the limit of our world? That would surely to be to assume that that world – any world – was in some aspirational sense bounded, complete, even if only by, in or of itself; but the language, the grammar […]

Categories
Philosophy

Logical Meaning

If all of life, all of matter, energy and the autonomously self-propagating, soliton-like and computational shock or compression wave of sentience and intelligence is to mean anything at all, it is in the glorious ambiguity of semantics and degrees of freedom by and through which we bootstrap ourselves back up into that world of logical […]

Categories
technology

Cyber: Hidden Patterns

Consider the many ways that the cyber arms-race is precisely this – a procedurally-incremental measure, counter-measure, counter-counter-measure. The hyper-inflating combinatorial possibility space of attack and defence as a gestalt creates it’s own momentum and self-propagating, patterned structure(s) and open or extensible system(s). The evolutionary nature of this process is inescapable. Each act of interdiction then […]

Categories
Philosophy

Logical Origami and the Infinite Emptiness

Or: Why The Enlightenment Inevitably Consumed Itself Each new system of thought, each extension, each insight, each historical inflection-point and distributed, systemic phase transition or levelling-up of human civilisation and each new branching of the tree of combinatorial (human) possibility – it opens the degrees of freedom, of motion, of growth and – simultaneously – […]

Categories
culture

In What Ways is Science Like Religion?

A key reflection might be: in what ways does the contemporary experience of science, of technology and of an empirical, evidence-based world view actually (and perhaps inadvertently) fulfill many of the traditional functions of religion? In what ways, in short, does science as a paradigm of thought perform the same essential tribal binding and reflexive […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Countering Fake Brands

This issue of Fake Brands and commercial “knock-offs” represents interesting problem. These clearly exist on a spectrum that begins with the dodgy Rolex bought from a street vendor and ends with potentially life-threatening fake medicines. Most solutions appear to be retrospective, reactive and post facto attempts to influence behaviour or punish those purposefully profiting from […]

Categories
Philosophy

What is Hidden

In the search for knowledge and wisdom it is very often what is hidden that is more useful than what is revealed. While we value what we understand and what utility we might obtain from it, the vast and plausible infinity of that which we do not (and can never) know is the defining logical […]

Categories
technology

COVID-19, Cybersecurity and an Underlying Enigma

“The joint statement did not name any of the attacked organizations, but two people familiar with the matter said one of the targets was Gilead, whose antiviral drug remdesivir is the only treatment so far proven to help patients infected with COVID-19. The hacking infrastructure used in the attempt to compromise the Gilead executive’s email […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Planetary Civilisation: Balancing the Books of Sustainable Growth

Core questions of sustainable civilisation are surely not whether or not growth should occur, but rather – what form or shape that growth should take.  Growth characterised purely as material multiplicity and external, organisational or (associated) thermal or energy burden (also) entirely misses the mark of understanding and harnessing the logically self-inflected nature of innovation […]