Categories
Philosophy

On Unknowing

The mystery of the void is that the absence beyond knowledge is indistinguishable (and arguably identical) to that within. Our embodied experience of life and knowing then become less the container of a mystery and more that other mystery that is itself simply an island of transience amongst all this unknowing. There is a tradition […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Whispering Doubts and Paradox

I wonder if we whisper little doubts to ourselves as ways of staying alive. Entertaining certainties is reassuring but leads to complacency and this, in turn, can lead to catastrophe. It is worth remembering that the definitions and identities we inhabit are only as bounded and certain as are the languages with which we inflate […]

Categories
Philosophy

Borderless Boundaries

Our all too human instinct and reflex is for the construction of system boundaries, gradients of definition, of adaptive frameworks of differentiation and models as metrics of distance and duration. In what ways is the drawing of lines, grids, matrices, referential networks and complex symmetries upon the shifting sands of experience as memory actually always […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Reflexive Absence of Artificial General Intelligence

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 […]

Categories
logic

The mischievous absence of mystery…

Sometimes the most mysterious and/or significant mystery may be that there is none, that nothing exists where he (or we) expect to find something. Notwithstanding that “nothing” and ontological absence is not, as a function of mischievous logic as much as of the semantic tesseract of language, as reductively simple as it appears to be […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Suspension of Disbelief

I spent years learning about the stars, the galaxies and the deep mysteries of logic, time and space; countless mornings staring out my window into the blazing furnace of the rising sun, afternoons in the hills watching the slow-setting peach orb descend, questioning all that I had by then knew, wondering how the immensity and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Cosmological Autodidact

Context: Can the Universe Learn? It seems to be something of an inevitability, in some sense, that the mothership from whence all complex emergence arises is itself an instance and template case of autonomously self-propagating distributed learning systems ontology. The inadmissibility, in general, of such concepts is very much more a consequence of rank psychological […]

Categories
Philosophy

Universal Reboot

Context: Could We Force the Universe to Crash? If we were to take seriously the implications of much-maligned and misunderstood general principles of endemic incompleteness and uncertainty that occur both in and as distributed (“Global”) hyper-surfaces across logic, physics and mathematics, we might consider that such a cosmological “Entscheidungsproblem” is not so much fantasy as […]

Categories
culture

Beautiful Words and Emptiness

I enjoy the endless Baroque complexity of words far too much to ever settle on a generalised shape or articulated pattern and causal ontology for them. Of course, though, even the absence of pattern is a kind of pattern, no? By this logic we might even assert that the intricate improbability of a truly random […]

Categories
Philosophy

Enigma

There is an irreducible enigma in this world. To put it more accurately: the world itself is an irreducible enigma. It is an enduring mischief cast upon our understanding that we ever and always clothe ourselves in the contingency and moving frame of reference and endless symbolic metamorphosis that our systems of belief embody. Failing […]

Categories
Philosophy

Cyclical Cosmos

Context: Big Bounce Simulations Challenge the Big Bang It makes you wonder how the laws of physics themselves commute the bottleneck from one Universe to another unless they are themselves semi-Platonic forms of logical necessity. Perhaps there is a reductive inevitability in the laws of physics as being the minimally complex form (i.e. as per […]

Categories
Ontology

Mysteries of Higher Geometry

The greatest mystery of mathematics is, to me, that all of these patterns and logical systems appear to almost (and autonomously) seek higher-dimensional self-representations. In category theory or combinatorics we can relatively simply determine and demonstrate the way a set of properties or relationships seeks something of an implicit, intrinsic and endemic higher-dimensional geometry. The […]