Humans are exceptional imitators. From infancy, neural systems prioritise social learning, language acquisition, and behavioural mirroring because copying is cheap, fast, and scalable compared to individual trial-and-error. Cultural transmission compounds this: ideas, habits, tools, symbols, and institutions propagate through imitation, modification, and re-imitation across generations. Genetic evolution provided the substrate, but memetic and cultural reproduction […]
There are strange attractors in the high-dimensional possibility spaces that exist all around us. Our evolutionary inheritance and over-saturated attention dissociates us from it. Idioms and cliches are the central bank of a probability distribution. The simplest theatrical narratives and conceptual, behavioural vocabularies as compression. A battery and mirror for experience and decompressive enculturation. Information […]
People seem quite naturally biased towards the lowest common denominator of what is really the most absurd and idiotic of behaviours. I understand that this is hardly charitable but I’d say that this applies to all of us and even more so when we are unaware or in denial of it. Further to this, it […]
What I think we might all often fail to understand, seduced as we so easily are by the constructive discontinuity of such biomimetic entropy, is that this is not the product of some alien as Artificial (or Machine and Algorithmic) Intelligence anywhere near so much as it is the reflexive abstraction and unbounded metamorphosis of […]
It perhaps requires no underlining but it remains sadly self-evident that human history and global technological civilisation (such as it is) maximally self-propagates as a function as much of its failures and dissonant misunderstandings as of its successes. The component microcosms of individuated selves that inhabit and interpret the shimmering whole in, through and as […]
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 […]
Context: — The Transcripts of an AI That a Google Engineer Claims Is Sentient Are Pretty Wild — A (prospectively Zen) Buddhist psychology in which the core of conscious experience is rendered as a discontinuously generative absence seems to be a much richer vein of sentience to mine than that of endlessly throwing larger and […]
A brief thought for today but based indirectly on a peculiar montage and vintage vignette of Lacanian mirrors and Zen voids. We all wear masks. To be a person, an individual, a subjective experience in the world is to adopt a role, a pattern or perceived or expected and normative self hood. Underneath it all, […]
Context: Aliens are a mirror to humanity Aeschylus, Shakespeare or Mary Shelley would all and also very likely recognise these narrative tropes of alien Other as being endemic behavioural and psychological reflections of humanity itself. More interesting, perhaps, than that we find ourselves serially encountering our own image and bundled native biases in fiction is […]
Context: The Appearance of Robots Affects Our Perception of the Morality of Their Decisions Curious: “People consider moral decisions made by humanoid robots to be less ethically sound than when another human or traditional-looking robot makes the same decision.” The uncanny valley rides again. This is a particular instance of a general principle. The apperception […]
The image in the mirror of psychological self-reflexivity is the machine, the rational, the explicable and the logic which has through so many, many iterations become what we now recognise as information and communications technology. An aspirational aptitude towards anticipatory self-explanation is always, perhaps, only ever going to appear or manifest as the percolated surface […]
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 […]
Daedelus Kite 