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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
All civilisation is built upon the toss of a coin.
Information is a quantification of the difference between the current state of a system and its most probable state.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It is a tesseract. Every action, thought, word, gesture, sentence, idiom, emoticon and (yes, every) blog post – it’s all part of the hyper-inflating information space(s) we inhabit. Posting introspectively back into this maelstrom is perfectly, eminently sensible and is a reflex we all acquire as certainly and surely as breathing. The thing I think […]
What we all generally fail to realise is that even while it is true that any one of us can never hope to achieve anything without sustained effort, the extent to which each and every one of us is subject to the blind and unknowing clockwork patterns and algorithmic necessities of mathematical probability and (an […]
Is cyber security a complex game? Of course, it (i.e cyber) is all a game – of probability, of information entropy, of indefinitely-extensible logical or material systems and of successfully negotiating the vast and hyper-inflating, self-gravitating referential spaces of technology, communication and psychological or socioeconomic and ideological motivations that provide momentum here. To attenuate an […]
Daedelus Kite 