Categories
Philosophy

What does AI mean for us all?

An interesting thing about Artificial lntelligence so rapidly acquiring such an eloquent aptitude to mimic, engage and constructively deceive us is that this ensemble of technologies do not in any comprehensive sense actually understand us – we and our intricately stochastic behaviours are merely so many numbers and statistical (as probabilistic) relationships or correlations and […]

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Philosophy

When Words Fail

When words finally fail us, we might have actually found something worthwhile to say.

Categories
Philosophy

Technological Immortality?

Nope. If nothing else and far beyond the actual sophisticated engineering (*not* rhetorical) problem this represents, to render life endless is simultaneously to render it meaningless. It may not always be obvious but value is not anywhere near so much a function of abundance as it is of scarcity. It is the transience of our […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaningless Reflection

There’s an argument to be made for the notion that the contents of our minds are really nothing more than the reflective internalisation of all that froth and bubble we experience from other people. In such a world in which the contents of each mind are little more that the reverberating reflection of all the […]

Categories
Philosophy

Narrative

Narrative is a curious beast and whether or not we assert it as resident or absent in minds, lives, cultures and selves – notice that we only ever invoke and generate more words when we debate a point upon it. I think we do just as well to consider that in as much as human […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unexpected Words

I am quite interested in the ways in which a normative gamification of language (in wordle, crosswords, quizzes, tests and other educational, institutional, political or ideological taxonomies) reflects and reinforces the essentially probabilistic information signal that inflects all linguistic statements, descriptions and assertions of fact with significance. The words, concepts and downstream grammatical or cultural […]

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Philosophy

On a Wheel

Cultural processing of information is one of the main tasks we carry out. It is costly and can be very difficult. Our brains are on one hand dedicated to the maintenance and sustainable continuity of the bodily vessels that support them but also must process the symbolic complexity required to sustain the systems of culture […]

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Philosophy

Technological Triumph of Linguistic Mediocrity

Context: We could run out of data to train AI language programs  We should be less worried about running out of data to train language models and more concerned about finding ourselves without anything interesting to say. The profusion of large language models does not occur in a vacuum. Regardless that our cognitive (as much […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Time and Tide: A War-Weary Sadness

Armageddon is in the news just now – how strange to have a word which invokes the end of all meanings, a system of belief that renders all belief as void and an Imperialist state that unwittingly seeks to atomise all kingdoms, all kings. The gullibility of people never ceases to amaze me and yet […]

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Philosophy

The Wrong Words

Have you ever found yourself quite eloquently incapable of cutting through the purely intractable boundaries which condense between concept and utterance? The efferevescing liminalities between the images in your mind and the words with which you speak (and write) them sediment themselves between the structured experience of lived memory and the barren skeletons of orchestrated […]

Categories
Philosophy

Organisational Orbitals of Language

It is as a consequence of the extent to which linear logic and causal intuitions have been successful (as technology) that we tend to assert similarly deterministic prescriptions regarding the relationships between artefacts, entities and systems in the world. Yes, there are often simple abstractions that map with relative fidelity upon the facts of our […]

Categories
life

Monday Mornings…

It’s Monday morning and I just can’t escape the feeling of being chained to a wheel of ever-accelerating meaninglessness. The reciprocal obligations, the games, the roles, the participatory self-surveillance of endlessly hyper-inflating complexity and confusion that invents its own purposes, meanings and necessity as it rumbles blindly along. I am unsure of what it all […]