Categories
Philosophy

The image in the mirror is the machine…

Observe how the image in the mirror of all of our aspirational self-definitions is the machine, logic, the structured and ordered grammar of a game, a recurring pattern and design or, most overtly in our globally interdependent information and communications networks: an algorithmic sequence. The fantasy of truth, of certainty (beyond that which can be […]

Categories
culture

Encoding Culture, Encrypting Identity

Conjecture: We are encoding culture but we are encrypting identity. It is not well-understood – partially because those procedural mechanisms and autonomously self-propagating waveforms (or functions) of patterned information that manifest as, in and through ourselves must also protect themselves and their own aspirational continuity. If it were immediately apparent how mental worlds and cultural […]

Categories
culture

On Mechanism, Holism and (an) Organisational Logic of Life

On mechanism and holism: we often enough mistake the discrete, bounded artefacts with which we are presented as being the reality and substance of this world when it is the immaterial abstractions and a matrix of interdependence and representational cross-reference between them which is the true reality. This is where a “logic of life” manifests […]

Categories
culture

Reality Inversion: The Emptiness in Art

“Reality” is a subtle concept. An artist creates an artefact, a fact, a reality through the skillful convergence of other facts. Those other references and earlier, representational facts were similarly composed of other, earlier facts. This is how our minds (and cultures) endlessly rebuild this world. In this way – we often mistake the discrete, […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Violence Paradox: is this Really a More Peaceful World?

The cost of order is always going to be a certain degree, presence or manifestation of disorder. The notion of a “more peaceful world” is one in which vast numbers of (relatively) small, regional conflicts proliferate, generalisations notwithstanding. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which such distributed conflict is inevitable as a displaced information […]

Categories
Complexity

Cancer, Senescence, Computation and Complexity

I had an intuition that rather than genetic or cellular breakage and strict malfunction that cancer represents something of an uncanny alignment with the Halting Problem of computational theory. What is on one level a function of an atavistic throwback to deep biological history where replication and continuity at all costs provides a cellular (genetic) […]

Categories
technology

On Reason and Intelligence in Mind and Machine

What differentiates reasoning from algorithmic procedure and computation? Does reasoning suggest comprehension, agency, subjectivity or is it just a complex sequence and integrated, autonomously self-propagating network and goal-directed pattern of blind mechanism and self-inflected logic? If reasoning is really just complex algorithm, and if the treasured concepts of our own embodied knowledge and experience are […]

Categories
culture

Social Computation, Complexity and the Constructive Necessity of Dissonance

Some reflections occurred to me while listening to this Santa Fe Institute podcast today: Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice, What of questions concerning the nature of social, psychological and cultural value systems when considered as a unified whole? While it is clear that the aggregate macrostate of any particular system […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy technology

Self-Propagating Technological Metamorphosis

If you listen very carefully you can almost hear a faint whooshing sound as the vacuum created in the wake of the products of our own creative intelligence, which having long ago outpaced us, draws us inexorably along behind it. As the accelerating juggernaut of pure and abstract technological metamorphosis has always – and perhaps […]

Categories
Philosophy technology

Creativity and Artificial Intelligence: (some) Questions

There has been a lot of media buzz recently about the potentials and limitations of Artificial Intelligence in a general domain of creativity. I have been studying aspects of philosophy, psychology, physics, logic, computer science and art (i.e. creativity) for quite a long time now. A question of Artificial Intelligence as creative agent creates a […]

Categories
culture

Evanescence

Travelling into the future is an inverse archaeology of entropy. There is some possible future, a singular branch of most probable outcomes in an undiscovered and unknowable configuration of ourselves towards which we all travel. A small consolation lies in being clever enough to decode this inexorable material process and abstract logical labyrinth of decay […]

Categories
physics

Yet another “Crisis in Cosmology”

More cosmological enigmas are upon us. The statement that “disparate observed properties of the Universe appear to be mutually inconsistent” is awesome. It is endlessly entertaining that we are all so constantly surprised to discover that these discontinuities and (apparent) logical enigmas arise. When they do emerge as artefacts of observation, it suggests that radical […]