Defining “improve” or “better” in the context of our lives is always an interesting proposition. Following a generally Buddhist ontology and cathartic acceptance of suffering as irreducible, I wonder if the role of suffering and imperfection is so profoundly and intricately entangled with happiness and (an) aspirational ascent towards perfection that – if our lives […]
In all its forms, a totalitarian state is reflexively oriented towards and dependent upon the threat and insecurity that conflict and difference with Others represents. Even if they invade and conquer Taiwan, the Phillipines, Thailand and Indonesia – the Chinese regime is constitutively unable to cease its aggressive rhetoric and actions as every part of […]
Will sentient machines require psychological care? It is a serious question and while it must be acknowledged that these likely are (or will be) very different kinds of minds than our own, in as much as they could understand and engage their presence in the world through (human) language they might find themselves facing their […]
We prefer ingesting prose that reflexively confirms back to us the identities and systems of belief we perceive ourselves as inhabiting. As a general observation of the mischievously discontinuous arc and trajectory of this plausibly ineradicable narcissism that compels our choices, actions and words – the texts we prefer tend to be slightly off-center and […]
I find that Buddhist psychology in some of its regional dialects (historically, through Tibet into China and Japan) approximates to a profound observation on the ultimate insubstantiality of this contingent, transient concept of Self that inhabits and invariably haunts us all. In regards to AGI, I think a significant barrier is that the subjective experience […]
I always find it so disheartening that the constructive differences by and through which psychological self (and cultural or national) identity emerge from the form and flow of human experience are so easily warped, twisted and co-opted for vacuous political purposes. The totalitarian turn, perhaps more of an oscillating historical cycle, is a haunting atavism […]
It is interesting to observe how all of our problems and transient solutions take the form of word games. Beyond the autocatalytic pathologies of self-regulatory perseveration, I think it is worth noting that the game itself is the sole beneficiary of this psychological and organisational recursion. Language itself is quite poorly suited to the complex […]
In our colloquially-asserted hard borders and boundaries as difference and distance between human and machine I wonder if we do not, indeed, simply replicate the questions of trust that exist between persons and groups in embodied, organic intelligence. The relationships between human beings and their technologies are only really a special case of a much […]
Context: US strategic policy in Taiwan needs to change as China shows it has capacity to take the island by force Interesting article but I have to wonder about the nature of the psychological factors and essentially pathological dependence of totalitarian ideologues upon the narratives and endless preparation for confrontation. More important than the actual […]
Technology is a transmission medium for the difference as information and individuation that it then proceeds to iteratively articulate and amplify. The unrelenting technological metamorphosis in which we exist is in this way generated by its own positive as self-accelerating feedback loops, both logico-technical and human-existential. It is in one (limited) sense a closed feedback […]
Context: Psychology and Deterrence “(…)deterrence strategies often backfire by aggravating a nation’s sense of insecurity, thereby calling forth the very behavior they seek to prevent.” This kind of feedback loop is really quite foundational in the analysis of complex systems, of which strategic standoffs are a salient (and topical) instance. Something which I haven’t (yet) […]
Much stranger than that such belligerent fury and reckless risk-taking exists is that it persists and returns (with uncanny frequency) in cyclic political episodes and internecine escapades to haunt humanity in the ways it quite clearly does. There is a recurring theme of totalitarian ideological dependency upon the trope and narrative fabrication of having suffered […]
Daedelus Kite 