Categories
Philosophy

AI and You

There is a central self-gravitational pivot and compound acceleration in the distributed, patterned fields of dynamical symmetry that spontaneously emerge as a communications bridge between human experience and artificial intelligence. The first principle to realise is that, just as there can be no ordered descriptions beyond the languages and encoding systems with which we assert […]

Categories
Philosophy

Who copies the copiers?

We are the mockingbirds, compulsively copying the copies and idiomatic machinery of our shared times and places, of our competitive or collaborative systems of belief. We don’t copy things, we reflexively copy their encoding mechanisms. Each and every coding error breeds further evolutionary metamorphosis. This indicates our critical dependency upon, and endless invocation of, productive […]

Categories
Philosophy

Induction

Context: Any Single Galaxy Reveals the Composition of an Entire Universe Such induction to general principles from instances is itself, also, a broader lesson regarding complexity. If recognisable (i.e. “real world”) properties of cosmological matter and energy distribution can be inferred from a single galaxy, in what other systems does such a depth of logical […]

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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

A Hollow Wheel Turns

All our ontological aspirations to reflexively self-validating linguistic closure are forever shrouded in the mist of uncertainty that language itself invokes. Having found a resting place as existential security blanket and nominal narrative of purpose and reality, you will likely move on again, after a time, to another semantic center of gravity – it is […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Sinking Ship

Opportunities are the anchors that like grappling hooks we cast out and upon the stochastic turbulence and mercurial probabilities of uncertain futures and there, in identifying them, in defining or formulating the possibilities they invoke we do well not to forget all those other unrealised worlds that might also exist and which yet as ontological […]

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Philosophy

Ontology, Hierarchy, System

Differentiation in ontology often asserts unnecessary-as-eminently-redundant-distinctions, however: Systemic hierarchies seem to come in two main flavours from which later differentiation and confusions emerge. There are designed hierarchies and there are un-designed hierarchies. The first is an assertion of order, planning and control on a spectrum from brute-forced top-down through to the most sophisticated and nuanced […]

Categories
cybernetics

Cybernetics and the Fiction of Objectivity

Objectivity is a strange beast. The language and corollary cognition with which we engage complexity is itself the constitutive invocation of a necessarily partial model of the systems we seek to define, articulate and/or usefully shape. The definition of a “system” being quite clearly the manifest as epistemological reality of that artefact, entity or logical […]

Categories
Philosophy

Worlds Beyond Words

There is indeed a boundary and border between what might be said or defined and what might eventually be understood or known as reality, information, the physical facts that (or as they) exist beyond our descriptions of them. I am sympathetic with any philosophical position that seeks to build and inhabit the difference and distance […]

Categories
Philosophy

What is Time?

Doctor Who is a classic character of science fiction. He travels through space and time in a sentient machine called the TARDIS. The first thing that most people remark when stepping into the machine is “It’s bigger on the inside!” This, I think, is the situation we find ourselves in with time. As a hybrid […]

Categories
cybernetics Philosophy

The Cybernetic Zero: (an) Algorithmic Complexity

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 […]

Categories
Ontology Philosophy

Systems Unity

System/environment boundaries are really somewhat arbitrary. It is generally only on the simplest and most rudimentary vectors of analysis that we can ever speak clearly of any kind of Manichaean system/environment differentiation and unambiguously-articulated identity or closure. Where and when boundaries are easily delineated, the systems under discussion are generally quite uninteresting and unrealistic. Systems […]