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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Wrong Words

Have you ever noticed how even the most deliberate thought collapses at the boundary where concept attempts to become utterance? The effervescent liminality between inner image and external word sediments itself between lived cognition and its skeletal representation. Thought arrives whole, textured, multi-dimensional. Language receives it late, fragmented, already reduced. In the act of speaking […]

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

We should never use empty words but it is all we have…

Understanding that language is essentially quicksilver and almost impossible to control or unambiguously direct for communication and meaning is a difficult realisation to negotiate. A consequence of this problematic ambiguity is that the kinds of language and narratives or systems of belief that percolate to ascendance tend to be quite remedial and simplistic. This inevitably […]

Categories
Philosophy

A Bonfire of Meaningless Belief

Many of us might wonder why so many people (and indeed – nations) fall backwards upon a pyre of absurd belief and foolish cruelty. The larger portion of humanity that now inhabits a twilight world of near-perpetual, technologically-mediated connectivity and material dependency should, it seems, be perfectly content with the meaning and methods we now […]

Categories
Philosophy

Mirror, Mirror: Enigmas in Language

Context: — Three ideas from linguistics that everyone in AI should know — I do wonder if we might fundamentally misrepresent our relationship to these systems of symbolic communication as something of an irreducible function of language itself. Noting here that the persistent problems of these LLMs with bias, truth values and drift into effectively […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaning Machines

Context: — Can computers understand complex words and concepts? Yes, according to research — Is understanding a “simple” matter of inhabiting and adaptively observing or shuffling the relational properties of language? This raises questions of meaning as only being the suspended tension wire of inductive resonance across a logical frame of gestalt linguistic self-reference, without […]

Categories
Philosophy

What if ?

What if everything we ever do and think or feel was purely the reflexive experience of a vast and indeterminately complex statistical flow of information and energy? What if the triumphs, successes, errors and abject failures endemic of people and ideas were really only the instances of a much vaster, grander stream of intricately entangled […]

Categories
Philosophy

Conflict, Hope, Identity

Key problems appear to be the degree and extent to which brains (as though pattern-recognition savants) are so willingly bewitched by the structure of an argument as a sufficient reason to believe in its validity. The psychologically reflexive experience of an argument or conceptual constellation tends to reproduce epistemological subjectivity in ways biased towards structure […]

Categories
Philosophy

Pattern Recognition and Conspiracy Theory

One thing that human minds as intelligent entities maintain particular fluency in is the recognition and conceptual or material reproduction of patterns. It allows us to generalise by analogy and to draw inferences across multiple facts to derive underlying symmetries and principles. This lateral pattern-matching across domains is a uniquely powerful mental facility but may […]

Categories
technology

Ceci n’est pas une automaton…

…entertaining but I suspect there is deep resonance here, if only we were able to sufficiently, efficiently, insightfully decompress it. The mechanisms and the technologies we make inhabit us every bit as much as we inhabit the world populated and inflated, made possible by them. How we do or do not respect those things is […]