Categories
language

Semantics Follows Frequency: Language in the Spectral Domain

When people speak about language, they often imagine that meaning sits inside words like a substance carried in a vessel. If only we could replace “false” words with “true” ones, communication would repair itself. The history of both linguistics and information theory shows something else: semantics does not precede use. It follows frequency. From signals […]

Categories
cybernetics

Technical Insecurity

Because mathematics is infinite, the field of cybersecurity can never be truly closed. The space of vulnerabilities is unbounded, each patch or solution only ever an approximation against the open horizon of possible attacks. Risk is permanent, not as a flaw but as a structural consequence: a system that protects itself must also endlessly expose […]

Categories
Philosophy

Absence, Approximation, Alienation

The further we push description, the more it drifts from the thing described. What begins as a gesture to bring the world close becomes, over time, a mechanism of distance. The machinery of representation translates immediacy into abstraction, and the cost is intimacy itself. To know through description is also to estrange: the signal replaces […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophically Attractive

In dynamical systems, trajectories do not simply collapse into rest. They can (and tend to) drift endlessly, circling within strange attractors where motion never repeats yet never escapes. Turbulent fluids, weather patterns, ecological populations, and even networks of neurons exhibit this restless confinement. What seems chaotic is in fact structured wandering, an orbit that sustains […]

Categories
Philosophy

Worlds Beyond Words

There is indeed a boundary and border between what might be said or defined and what might eventually be understood or known as reality, information, the physical facts that (or as they) exist beyond our descriptions of them. I am sympathetic with any philosophical position that seeks to build and inhabit the difference and distance […]

Categories
Complexity mathematics systems

Rat on a Wheel: The Doughnut in your Mind

Recent research suggests that the underlying symmetry in neural patterns of geometric world mapping in the mammalian brain are toroidal. “(…) the Mosers discovered the activity structure of single grid cells. What they found was a hexagonal grid pattern that functions as the brain’s metric and coordinate system for space. Today they have uncovered the […]

Categories
Philosophy

On things we can never know…

Context: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, The Inherent Limitation Of Mathematics The discontinuous boundary condition at the edge of (as much as being that around which we built) logic, physics and mathematics is a global property, distributed across and as the complex hypersurface of a self-propagating, soliton-like hybrid matter/energy/information system. It is as though a logical vacuum, […]

Categories
mathematics

Why is Mathematics Difficult?

A curious revelation of logic, mathematics and physics is that the concepts themselves are never really all that difficult and can usually be quite rapidly grasped if the method of education is sufficiently powerful. The difficulty lies in acquiring an aptitude to intuitively understand and leverage the relationships between the symbols that are used to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Intelligence is Endemic to Biology

Context: Single-celled organism can ‘change its mind’ despite lacking a nervous system This is an example of entropy as degrees of freedom; intelligence as manifest choice. Not quite a solid vote for panpsychism but certainly heading in the direction of autonomously self-propagating biological computation being universal within observed biotic artefacts, entities and systems on Earth. […]

Categories
Philosophy

AI: Big Data, Narrow Intelligence

Context: The False Philosophy Plaguing AI The (or at least a) problem here is that the ascendant technologies, frameworks, cultures and commercial incentives have inadvertently stumbled upon the constructive and recursively self-inflected sweet-spot through which those core assumptions themselves optimally self-propagate. If the incentives and rewards for developers, researchers and corporate or institutional entities find […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Mystery of Mathematics

Context: Studying maths beyond GCSEs helps brain development, say scientists Mathematics is a truly wonderful mystery and I only wish that it had been taught as such when I was at school. The concepts are fascinating, mysterious and completely astonishing once a triangulation between the paradoxes of logic, physics and material reality is rendered intelligible. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Beautiful Convergence

Beauty fascinates me although it is not at a purely aesthetic level or in any visceral approximation to emotional experience and desire with which our culturally-mediated experience of self and subjectivity endows us. Consider that there have been a number of cross-cultural and ethnically-diverse academic studies that demonstrate that the faces which are considered to […]