Categories
Philosophy

The Entropy of Simplicity: Language, Ideology, and the Field

The rise of rigid ideology is a reciprocal function of the simplicity of the language with which it embellishes itself. This is not a moral judgement, nor an apologetic for autocracy, but a statistical inevitability: simplicity wins because simplicity persists. Such narratives are not the only dynamics at work, but they gain disproportionate attention. Words […]

Categories
cybernetics

Entropy, Complexity, Algorithm, Identity

I dare say that wherever humanity does or does not find itself in regards to hyper-accelerating tech ological metamorphosis, this destination (or waypoint) will only ever be the most probable as manifest constellation of all possible artefacts, entities and systems in the world. I study holism. Ironically, you come to see it everywhere.

Categories
technology

Generative Complexity

Under some definition of artificial intelligence, generative complexity is remarkable and for at least two primary reasons. First: to use these interfaces to inordinately high-dimensional information systems is always and already to concede some marginal threshold of control. You just never know what the model outputs will be and this represents both the technology’s strength […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unexpected Words

I am quite interested in the ways in which a normative gamification of language (in wordle, crosswords, quizzes, tests and other educational, institutional, political or ideological taxonomies) reflects and reinforces the essentially probabilistic information signal that inflects all linguistic statements, descriptions and assertions of fact with significance. The words, concepts and downstream grammatical or cultural […]

Categories
Philosophy

Is Extreme Nationalism and Territorial Imperialism a Probabilistic Inevitability?

The role of language in cultural and political systems of belief is such that geographic tropes are anchors that provide internal narrative self-validation to such systems and their inhabitants. It doesn’t mean their assertions of territorial impropriety are valid, merely that such adversarial gambits are the perennially ascendant low-hanging fruit of belligerent nationalist pathologies everywhere […]

Categories
information

Breathe In: Lungs, Language, Civilisation

There is a relationship between speech and cognition. There is also a relationship between written language and intelligibility. The longer and more convoluted a sentence, the harder it becomes to understand. The harder the sentence is to understand, the less likely it will self-replicate through artefacts, entities and systems of communication. What this means is […]

Categories
culture history technology

The Toss of a Coin

All civilisation is built upon the toss of a coin.

Categories
information

What is Information?

Information is a quantification of the difference between the current state of a system and its most probable state.

Categories
Philosophy

Probability is Real

Probability is as real as are tables and chairs. It is only our limited cognitive capacity which fails to understand that the complex information spaces that surround us are as real as we are.

Categories
Philosophy

We are not who we think we are…

If it is true, as I currently believe, that language manifests or instances an adaptive and emergently complex holistic structure that partially pre-processes (and stores, distributed for resilience and redundancy against loss that) information, the question of cognition-as-ordered-thought becomes one of just how much of our choices and self-determination is outsourced or displaced to the […]

Categories
Philosophy

Infinite Improbability

If you took an absolutely titanic-sized bag of randomly unsorted letters and numbers and proceeded to draw them out, one by one, laying them in long threads of letters – what is the chance that you would accidentally assemble the collected works of Shakespeare, perhaps Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Orwell’s 1984 or the Tibetan Book of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaning is a Function of Probability

All meaning is a function of probability, of uncertainty or ambiguity and ignorance. As an adaptive or transient property of words, we can infer that not only is any particular or specific meaning not itself of the words to which we assert it belongs, but that meaning is an inverse property of all those other […]