Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Implicit and Hidden Weaknesses of (Digital) Authoritarianism

Context: Strong Yet Brittle: The Risks of Digital Authoritarianism There are quite probable logical and (by extension, mathematical and) distributed material or socioeconomic, not to mention strategic, senses in which a strict adherence to unwavering and inflexible closure and continuity must necessarily create the conditions of inevitable, eventual and/or accelerated structural disassembly or decline. A […]

Categories
Philosophy

What if Artificial General Intelligence actually wants to be discovered?

We are (all) still attempting to brute-force our way towards Artificial General Intelligence.  If the complexity sciences have taught us anything it is that there is an autonomous orientation within naturally-occurring information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems towards self-organisation and bootstrapped system optimisation via logical extensibility and recursive exponentiation.  We appear to be attempting to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Truth Beyond Logic and Time Beyond Clocks

Context: Truth Beyond Logic and Time Beyond Clocks: Janna Levin on the Vienna Circle and How Mathematician Kurt Gödel Shaped the Modern Mind Gödel is interesting in many ways. While acknowledging that his logical and mathematical foundation-shaking Incompleteness proofs have a very specific context and meaning, the extent to which a broader reading (and thinking) […]

Categories
Philosophy

Dark Logic: The Disinformation Entropy Paradox

A curious, perhaps mischievous, property of complex adaptive systems is that they are autonomously biased towards the means and methods of their own optimal continuity, succinct encoding/self-representation and environmental self-propagation. In this sense, and while acknowledging that diverse actors can and do wilfully generate turbulence and confusion, a listless vessel of policy or doctrine is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Evolving Narratives and Cultural Behaviours to Negotiate a Global Pandemic

Sociality and interdependence is our species’ strength but is simultaneously also our weakness. The complex networks and intangible feedback loops of behaviour, communication, material artefacts and technologies upon which we have built a Global civilisation, such as it is, are autonomously self-propagating information systems. Once such psychological, social and cultural systems have gained energy and […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Mind, Information and Entropy

It is not surprising that the symbolic abstractions and mental worlds of homo sapiens arrive at incompleteness and negation but “deficiency” is a word perhaps altogether too easily attributed affective, emotional qualities.  The indefinite extensibility of (both) logical and material systems, and each in their own ways invoking parameters and probabilities unique to their own […]

Categories
communication Complexity culture

Disassembling Control: Talent, Technology and Entropy

In any context where an employment and technology ecosystem is so rapidly evolving – recognising talents, skills and aptitude becomes about as difficult and as (ultimately and) unmanageably complex as acquiring or maintaining them. What interests me here is a second-order semantic analysis: there is such an efflorescence of salient wisdom and clever advice available, […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Machines, the Mirrors and the Emptiness of Self

The image in the mirror of psychological self-reflexivity is the machine, the rational, the explicable and the logic which has through so many, many iterations become what we now recognise as information and communications technology. An aspirational aptitude towards anticipatory self-explanation is always, perhaps, only ever going to appear or manifest as the percolated surface […]

Categories
technology

Active Measures: information, physics, influence and censorship in cyberspace

It is interesting that active intervention, interdiction and an assertion of ideological self-interest through campaigns of enthusiastic (technologically-facilitated) censorship are probably the most expensive and least efficient ways of achieving information-centric goals. It is like attempting to cool a building by adding cold air – far more expensive in terms of energy, resources and information-processing […]

Categories
Philosophy Science

How free would we all be if there was no ultimate truth?

I just read an interesting (partial) article/concept/book on life, the universe and everything from biologist Robert Lanza: “Biocentrism: A New Theory of the Universe“. I am not entirely convinced that the author is not just substituting one mystery and suite of questions with another. For instance – the role of the conscious observer in “creating” […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unanswerable Questions: Science, God, Infinity

Michelangelo’s Divinity reaches back from an artfully-obfuscated human cranium and brain to create Adam. It is indeed at the level of (such) Universals – in which questioners become objects of their own self-introspection that we observe an endless referential circularity and recursion without end. Foundational work in logic and mathematics suggests that all aspiration to […]

Categories
money

Financial Physics: Entropy, Gravitation, Complexity

The proliferating, bubbling, effervescent diffusion of information abstractions in (and as) cultural and economic – ergo financial – systems nowhere reveals itself as so much smoke and mirrors than, ironically, where it assumes such literal gravity and influence over our lives and experience. I am fascinated by the autonomous methods and optimal functions of system […]