Categories
Philosophy

Information is a Material Presence and a Logical Absence

We inhabit the material of manifest corporeality and in equal measure – abstract patterns of information inhabit us. Which is more fundamental? There is no base, no anchor, no foundation; the imaginary spaces of information and autonomously self-propagating computational resonance are the contours through which matter and energy travels; the embodied (and reflexive, in our […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Against a Mercenary Ideological Economics

Economics provides an ordered symmetry, compelling fantasy and mercenary ideological fallacy of reflexive psychological certainty and control that does not actually exist. Certainty is a conspicuous absence in the base axioms of mathematical logic, the probabilistic entropy of complex adaptive systems, or the volatile neurochemically-driven hormonal broth of chaotic human beings. The key error we […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

COVID-19: Pandemic Logic

From a purely logical standpoint – the implicit, endemic and enduring possibility for (and probability of) systemic extensibility is by recursive insight and bootstrapped self-inflection back into the structure of a system itself. The most profoundly deleterious vulnerabilities in, for instance, Cybersecurity are those 0-day pearls which, like axiomatic booby-traps just waiting to be triggered […]

Categories
Philosophy

Dark Logic: The Disinformation Entropy Paradox

A curious, perhaps mischievous, property of complex adaptive systems is that they are autonomously biased towards the means and methods of their own optimal continuity, succinct encoding/self-representation and environmental self-propagation. In this sense, and while acknowledging that diverse actors can and do wilfully generate turbulence and confusion, a listless vessel of policy or doctrine is […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Entropy Binds

To what extent does a procedural (i.e. temporal) experience of cognition, language, culture and technology bias us towards linear problem-solving and reductionist explanation? The aggregate sum of all (multithreaded) organisational heuristics may itself be a non-linear and adaptively dynamic system as a fact but from an individual thread of experience (within that gestalt), planning, problem-solving […]

Categories
Philosophy

Evolving Narratives and Cultural Behaviours to Negotiate a Global Pandemic

Sociality and interdependence is our species’ strength but is simultaneously also our weakness. The complex networks and intangible feedback loops of behaviour, communication, material artefacts and technologies upon which we have built a Global civilisation, such as it is, are autonomously self-propagating information systems. Once such psychological, social and cultural systems have gained energy and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Communication is not Consciousness

An interesting article: A Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind Mind is certainly built around nested hierarchies, but the general structures built here (in this article) are too dependent upon loosely unverified correlation and analogy; “X implies Y, so then Z”, where X is unsubstantiated. The structural constraints of communication and narrative cognition derive from, are […]

Categories
technology

Unravelling Tapestries of Cryptographic Entropy

The endless unravelling of assurance at one end of this cryptographic tapestry is simultaneously the enduring incentive, obligation and functional necessity of creating more sophisticated and impermeable logical entanglements at the other end. A question which springs to mind is as to the plausible inevitability of an acceleration of applied human or machine intelligence overtaking […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophical Fallibilism, Incomplete Knowledge and a Science of the Unknown

Such a principle (of Fallibilism) should indeed be taken as implicit to science and all ordered systems of knowledge or organisational practice. The indefinitely extensible essence (and raison d’etre) of all material, biological, cognitive, cultural and technological systems is irreducible; it is simultaneously strength and vulnerability in (and as) everything we build, cultivate and share. […]

Categories
politics

Ideology

Ideology is a tool, a technology of descriptive (i.e. algorithmic) information compression and generalised (over-)simplification through which complex realities and observed facts are rendered comprehensible.  Decisions, evaluations and strategic planning for continuity (of self, of organisations, of civilisation) are facilitated by compression. Having cultivated or procedurally-defined the conceptual boundaries and adaptive grammars of such systems […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Global Unity and Environmental Sustainability

The problem of Global Peace is synchronous, co-existent and reflexively resonant with the critical existential problem of environmental continuity. The conspicuous absence of unity in the International Society of Nations (such as it is) is an indication, not of failure, but of the logical presence of unity and wholeness as a distributed and manifest absence […]

Categories
culture

The Gospel of Emptiness

Our images, our Self- or Other-portraits and all of our representational fantasies are always subtle dissimulations of a projected, doubly-inflected Self that we only ever feel that we need to cultivate – (in ourselves as much as in others), to construct, because it is precisely what is expected of us, what everyone else “does” (or […]