A is A. The interesting question is how it keeps getting away with it.
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why identity is not as simple as A = A
Tag: negation
Civilisation runs on language. Every system we build—laws, markets, machines, minds—depends on describing the world in order to act within it. Yet the world always moves first. The act of catching up is not a flaw but the essence of thought: meaning arises in pursuit, not possession. The delay—between what is and what can be […]
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Consciousness: Unexplain This
Many theories of consciousness attempt to resolve its opacity. Some frame it as an emergent computation arising from neural substrates; others treat it as an epiphenomenon, reducible to material process. Phenomenologists insist it must be described in its own terms, while eliminativists argue it is a cognitive illusion, a misapprehension of distributed processes. Each stance, […]
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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 […]
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Generative Complexity
Under some definition of artificial intelligence, generative complexity is remarkable and for at least two primary reasons. First: to use these interfaces to inordinately high-dimensional information systems is always and already to concede some marginal threshold of control. You just never know what the model outputs will be and this represents both the technology’s strength […]
Language is a class of epistemological (as self-validating) tesseract. From within its horizon of intelligibility, we can only ever see or engage the descriptions (and the descriptions of descriptions) with more language. This is why Zen kōans frame impossible questions and concepts: it is a way to escape the language trap, using language. Non-linearity is […]
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It is its own shadow.
A torus floating against a dark background. This torus is its own negative space. It is a singularly continuous topological surface that is unbroken but that also contains at its core an absence, a discontinuity and a recursive entanglement. The identity theorem (here) is that logical incompleteness precisely is the presence of an unbounded and […]
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The Vanishing
More reflections on cosmological conundrums, today. It occurs to me that whatever the Universe (or really – our descriptions of it) is, it is actually trying to vanish. The natural bias and orientation towards entropic disassembly and diffusion is that through this system in gestalt aspires to reach the lowest energy state. The mischievous irony […]
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On Knowing, Unknowing and Ignorance
The diminishing returns of a double negative. It is such a subtle linguistic game to play because, yes, the absence of absence constitutes a problem representing anything other than the accrual of benefit, but the nature of knowledge as indefinitely-extensible referential matrix indicates that new information and insights are always (similarly) a negation upon what […]
There was a mystical thread of thought in medieval philosophy called “apophasis”. This is an “un-saying” and reductive process of abstraction and recursively self-inflected introspection that may arrive at a goal of finding whatever is left after everything else is removed – God, enlightenment, essence, reality, certainty, truth; take your pick. Of course, we find […]
Algorithmic complexity is a measure of information. For any non-trivially sophisticated (i.e. interesting) system, there exists no shortest/best programmatic representation – i.e. theory, model, framework or network wiring. This means that in some circumstances we can reduce ad infinitum. There is no best, only better; a lesson in abject humility still to be learned by […]
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Explaining Everything
Ontology is the baseline. [All definitions are made in terms of other definitions in what only ever arrives at circularly tautological uncertainty. An arbitrary starting point must be chosen from inside the hyper-inflating self-referential systems of language and logic.] What does a “whole” or “complete” (if feeling adventurous, add “consistent” or “decidable”) system look like? […]
Daedelus Kite 