Categories
cybernetics

Uncertainty Dividend

The world’s machinery no longer runs on production or belief but on the circulation of insecurity. Each institution converts unease into its own currency of legitimacy: markets price risk, governments legislate threat, media amplify anxiety into attention, and technology encodes volatility as data. What appears as chaos is the deep structure—a dynamic equilibrium in which […]

Categories
language

Language Rules

Language does not simply mirror or constrain thought: it constitutes an environment that enfolds us, a multidimensional structure more akin to a tesseract than a tool. Each act of speech adds to its architecture, expanding the field in which perception, memory, and history take shape. Cognitive linguistics has shifted the debate beyond determinism, showing instead […]

Categories
Philosophy

Enigmatic Holism

Holism is a wonderful word because it resists the temptation to treat language as closed self-reflection. Meaning does not reside in solitary fragments but arises through the whole, parsed and divided against itself. The whole is never intact in presentation: it is displaced, deferred, broken into instances that bear the trace of what they are […]

Categories
Philosophy

On Suffering

Suffering is not a mistake in the order of things; it is the order. What feels like rupture, misalignment, or lack of closure is the very condition that generates motion and awareness. Without tension, the field would dissolve into stasis. The loop persists because it cannot do otherwise, and every attempt to escape its curvature […]

Categories
Philosophy

Mind the Gap

Theory of Mind represents the ingestion, curated entrainment and epistemological event horizon of an essentially inarticulable metaphysical Otherness. Much is made of commercial opportunity and/or existential threat represented by artificial intelligence. I’m not sure we should be so concerned about the potential arrival of unregulated superintelligence, if indeed this does ever occur. We will remain […]

Categories
Philosophy

Consciousness

Consciousness is (in Lao Tzu’s sense) the hole in the wheel that makes it useful. It is the conspicuously absent (but mischievously omnipresent) ontological unity, the counter-intuitively hollow yet binding property and inarticulable metaphysics of the manifest antinomy of logical system self-containment.

Categories
Philosophy

Describing Consciousness with Language and Generative Technology

Even as we seek to comprehensively describe this apparently intractable enigma of experience, the descriptions by and through which we aspire to do so have begun to become active. There is much to say on the roles of generative technology in shaping our methods and paradigms of introspective discovery, but that is still waiting for […]

Categories
Philosophy

Finding Consciousness

I wonder if a reflex to identify the where and the how of consciousness might not necessarily, if inadvertently, render the what inaccessibly unintelligible. Distributed (as emergent) system properties inhabit their transmission media in a counter-intuitive way. Yes – where, how and what are all different perspectives on the same abstract conceptual entity but the […]

Categories
Psychology

Epistemological Emptiness

Buddhist psychology can be uniquely insightful. The animist turn in Shinto casts nature (and all who sail in her) as something of and with an agency, an experience. If everything has experience, then in some sense nothing does but this is a rhetorical trick because negation, uncertainty, nothing, absence and potentiality are endemic to bio-logic. […]

Categories
cybernetics Ontology Philosophy

AGI is a Zen thing

Curiouser and curiouser. When we map a living thing upon or within itself and in or through its own cognitive and representational hyper-extension of technological mediation, we find our minds engaging this all as an aspiration towards closure and control yet forever fall short of attaining that goal. We can not completely model or map […]

Categories
Philosophy

Gradients of Difference

Cognition in some sense exists as a function of the abstract decomposability of the world but finds itself forever problematised and fractured by an unresolvable epistemological enigma. Mind (and brain) has to be divided against itself to persist as this provides the foundational symmetry as gradient of difference through which it can adapt, learn and […]

Categories
Philosophy

You are your digital devices…

There is an interesting, related theory hailing from philosophers Andy Park and David Chalmers. The Theory of Extended Mind asserts that, while your consciousness (whatever that may be) does seem squarely anchored between your ears, your cognition is a distributed entity that – yes – is characteristically if not uniquely “of human brains” but need […]