Wittgenstein once opined that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” I am starting to wonder if cybernetics might not be a battle against the seduction of our minds by technology. The transmission medium and feedback mechanisms of language and technology become the primary methods of influence as […]
I spend a lot of time considering abstract, complex and the many aspirationally “real” systems that exist between our ears and upon the surface of our planet. My acquired suspicion in this context is that neither “growth” nor “degrowth” represent sufficiently sophisticated concepts with which to effectively engage this vast and multidimensional problem we are […]
The breadth and depth of the systemic (i.e. Global) changes we need to seed to sustain biodiversity and ecological resilience are far beyond the aptitude of contemporary political and economic practices. How to transform the many heroic yet isolated efforts of conservationists into the broad and consequential systemic changes we need without frightening the political […]
It seems to me that most technologically-inflected discussions of what it means to be human begin from the assumption that our experience represents some kind of necessary closure as terminal (and teleological) endpoint. The notion that intelligence or sentience (and intelligence- or sentience-like) artefacts, entities and systems could ever represent any kind of pinnacle (or […]
There are some failing metaphysical assumptions and troubled subjectivities in the notionally “Western” position and its attendant parochialisms. A drift through deterministic materialism and downstream mechanical (or algorithmic) thinking into untenable philosophical positions also seems somewhat inevitable, if perhaps not entirely irremediable. I am constantly fascinated (and yet to be quite honest also simultaneously horrified) […]
A blank sheet of paper, indeed. In the Tao Te Ching (“Way of Life”), Lao Tze wrote of the ways in which the void and vacuum which is always an absent presence represents the anchor of life, of experience and freedom. The hole in the wheel is that which makes it useful; the absence in […]
Context: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: ‘Why can’t we get it through our thick skulls?’ America boosting oil and gas production is ‘not against’ climate change I suspect that his opinion is, much and in one way or another as are all systems of belief, a function of the extent to which language as abstraction has […]
Context: After death, you’re aware that you’ve died, say scientists What a difficult experience this must be. To know that life has ended and as though the dimming glow of a candle wick, to quickly fade into darkness. I wonder if this is a moment of release and cathartic decompression or a few troubled seconds […]
Pragmatic rationality should keep the dreamers from losing their way but, similarly, the dreamers are necessary to remind the rationalists that they have already lost theirs.
Context: Elon Musk & Joe Rogan talk to “conscious AI” If our intent in seeking to scale the complex asymptote of AGI has been to convince ourselves that it is conscious and possesses subjectivity, personhood or sentient experience, then it is perhaps inevitable that we will arrive at a point where the reflexive conversational and […]
Cybernetics tends to be as diverse as the spectrum of artefacts, entities and systems to which it intelligibly or contextually applies. If applied to cybersecurity, must cybernetics necessarily internally model and assume at least the level of variety (as complexity, combinatorial entropy) that its object of study asserts? In this case, does cybernetics then acquire […]
All systems exist in contexts, environments and distributed, often integrated, other systems from which they gather or variously acquire (as effect, consequence, experience or memory and encoding) information as internal structure. This internal structure or variety is only possible and sustainably continuous by offsetting the inevitability of growing internal (as thermodynamic or logical/information) entropy to […]
Daedelus Kite 