Categories
Philosophy

An Enigma of Self-Deception: Jokes

The value of a joke as surprise and stochastic, staccato salience in the otherwise smooth flow of narrative experience is a function of the semiotic entropy (as existential) displacement that it both embodies and reveals. Significance and meaning are stored externally to a symbol, globally-distributed in and as the networked “latent space” of all other […]

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Philosophy

Consciousness, Language, Paradox

Context: Brain experiment suggests that consciousness relies on quantum entanglement Of microtubules and metaphors… …we can not describe anything beyond our systems of description. This tells us something significant about the nature of these conscious systems and of what kinds of explanations might be possible. Entanglement suggests, to my mind, that the ways in which […]

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Philosophy

Not

The suspension of disbelief is a concept that illustrates a kind of game we play against, with and as our selves. The twist in this tale is that we seek to mask (as though by self-hypnosis) the unreality of a world that only becomes real as a function of the extent to which we become […]

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Philosophy

Emotional Experience

It strikes me as fascinating that the most significant things we ever experience in our lives are quite impossible to describe with language. Emotional life and other experiences occur at a level prior to language or ordered cognition. When we try to explain it, all we ever do is see our own descriptions reflected back […]

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Philosophy

You are the Culture that is You

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. […]

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Philosophy

Paradox of Control

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 […]

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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 […]

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Philosophy

A Multidimensional World?

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 […]

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Philosophy

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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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 […]

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Philosophy

Blockchain as Void

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 […]

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Philosophy

Meaning Machines

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 […]