Categories
Philosophy

Many Worlds

A question worth pondering is that of whether or not the genealogy that percolates as ascendant method(s) of questioning is the one and only possible radiating path through a complex space of all possible (incomplete) logical trajectories. Of all possible worlds and laws of physics (or technical extrapolations of these), something constrains the sum total […]

Categories
Philosophy

Weird Science

Context: Why is quantum theory so strange? The weirdness could be in our heads The disconnect between experience and the counter-intuitive products of (a) material logic is endemic to cognition and it is, in essence, an irreducible discontinuity. It may change form as theory and popular narratives of science co-evolve but the foundational peculiarity and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technological Civilisation

Context: 94% of the universe’s galaxies are permanently beyond our reach The scale of the cosmos is astonishing. Some estimates infer 2 trillion galaxies and some variations of cosmological hyper-inflation (i.e. early expansion) require an infinite Universe. What is most astonishing of all, though and to anyone who stares into this abyss for longer than […]

Categories
technology

Cybersecurity is an Infinite Game

Context: How quantum security generates randomness to shield IoT systems It strikes me as equal parts interesting and enigmatic that the implicit uncertainty of an abstraction (and extraction) of entropy as randomness upon which we must build our certainties of assurance in information security indicates a profoundly mischievous and rarely, if ever, acknowledged ontological fact. […]

Categories
Philosophy

AI is neither Artificial nor Intelligent

The most curious thing about Artificial Intelligence is, as Kate Crawford of Microsoft asserts, it is neither artificial nor intelligent. Information-processing and encoding is precisely what nature (as physics, complexity, biological systems, sentience, intelligence, culture and technology) always and already do. Intelligence is a distributed property of nature and it is only in the very […]

Categories
Philosophy

AI: Big Data, Narrow Intelligence

Context: The False Philosophy Plaguing AI The (or at least a) problem here is that the ascendant technologies, frameworks, cultures and commercial incentives have inadvertently stumbled upon the constructive and recursively self-inflected sweet-spot through which those core assumptions themselves optimally self-propagate. If the incentives and rewards for developers, researchers and corporate or institutional entities find […]

Categories
Philosophy

Viral Misinformation

Context: The misinformation virus Systems of belief are without exception only ever aspirationally grounded upon the objects of their attention. It is as a function of endemic logical (as much as material or cognitive, cultural and communications system) extensibility that these systems become anchored as effective tautologies upon themselves. In this way they can adaptively […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Mystery of Mathematics

Context: Studying maths beyond GCSEs helps brain development, say scientists Mathematics is a truly wonderful mystery and I only wish that it had been taught as such when I was at school. The concepts are fascinating, mysterious and completely astonishing once a triangulation between the paradoxes of logic, physics and material reality is rendered intelligible. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Battling Maxwell’s Demon: Entropy, Infinity and Logic

Context: How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists I am interested in Global Systems Theory as the Grand logical Poobah system of all systems which, notwithstanding and plausibly because of Russell’s Paradox of entity self-containment, generates some interesting concepts, viewed laterally. Consider that “sucking orderliness” from an environment is inversely equivalent to asserting disorder upon […]

Categories
Philosophy

Lost between worlds…

I have spent most of my life somewhat lost between two worlds. On the one side, a world of social existence, historical contingency and the endlessly accelerating rat race of attempting to conform to a changing rule-set and framework of normative assumptions that changes much faster than anyone can ever safely (or sanely) adapt. On […]

Categories
Philosophy

Is the Cosmos intelligent?

Context: Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? It is a concept on the higher end of a modified Kardashev scale that sufficiently advanced technological intelligence may be indistinguishable from nature itself; effectively – a parallel of the conjecture (in the article linked above) that “life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear […]

Categories
AI

Chemical Intelligence

Context: Neural network based on autocatalytic reaction performs image classification It really is not much of a hop, skip and jump from all these emerging discoveries of proxy mechanisms for invoking rudimentary machine intelligence to suggest that we have quite profoundly placed the ontological cart before the horse here. Information-processing systems (of which all matter […]