There’s an idiom to the effect that when you find yourself in a traffic jam you are never “stuck in traffic”, you are traffic. It’s something of a cognitive and linguistic reflex to identify an artefact, entity or system as a bounded or isolated fact in the forest of references and definitions that we inhabit. […]
There is a paradox of control. The most sophisticated models and methods of shaping regulatory guidance approximate to a complete absence of guidance. Guidance and control is less directed, morec. Taking ecosystems as an example, the distributed self-regulatory function of such a monumentally complex system is an emergent property exhibiting a conspicuous absence of centralised […]
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 […]
It’s quite a strange thing to consider but the question of whether or not higher dimensions exist seems to me to be precisely the wrong kind of inquiry to be making of this deeply mysterious human experience. Given the implicit linguistic (as neurocognitive) orchestration of experience, we should always acknowledge that those things we might […]
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 […]
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 […]
Context: — Blockchain Guy Struggles to Explain a Single Practical Use for Web3 — Interesting, yet, in that this self-referentiality and non-existence are quite common across linguistic and symbolic or logical systems of reference when viewed from (i.e. inhabited as) gestalt bundles of artefacts, entities and systems such as those we reflexively posit our own […]
Context: — Can computers understand complex words and concepts? Yes, according to research — Is understanding a “simple” matter of inhabiting and adaptively observing or shuffling the relational properties of language? This raises questions of meaning as only being the suspended tension wire of inductive resonance across a logical frame of gestalt linguistic self-reference, without […]
The integration of diversity within coherent unity (and as expressed or experienced across multiple technical and functional domains and disciplines) is a core problem of our era. One thing, and context agnostic, that large organisational systems rarely do well is to find effective balance between a need for control (as direction, guidance, intent) and the […]
Psychological and cultural systems of thought, language and belief that promote and nurture a core, selfish egocentrism are simultaneously the most fragile and prone to rapid, irreversible and catastrophic disassembly. There is much to be said here for the overtly pathological aspects of psychological self-identity that become encoded, validated, rewarded and celebrated as orthodox or […]
We trade substance, experience and a visceral, lived sense of meaning for a hollow representation of these same things and in finding ourselves dissatisfied and haunted over the transactional deficit of a mechanism that always loses energy and value, we feel quite positively compelled and emotionally motivated to double-down on our losing hand. This is […]
Singularly final unifying theories are a – or indeed, the – holy grail. The most significant barrier to unifying theories is that we expect them to be domain-specific, narrow and effectively limited – i.e. epistemologically “controlled” or even “controllable”. That’s the core problem – unified and/or unifying theories are constitutively not limited. Further, I expect […]
Daedelus Kite 