It always strikes me as being an astonishingly dark irony that the core and kernel of a psychologically reflexive desire to identify or assert centralised control systems in the world is quite plausibly the key causal factor that almost entirely problematises and renders such control as functionally impossible. This indicates a deeper psychological property and […]
Tag: Psychology
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Wisdom
What a strange thing to find such an artefact of profound wisdom located on the wall next to a wash basin in the public toilet of a shopping center. Language is structured in precisely this way and it is around precisely such micro-choices of self-inflected emotional bias that our whole lives sometimes turn. There is […]
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Homeless Fears
There are many kinds of fear. Some of them are straightforward, unproblematic and represent a simple correlation between a concept and the thing it represents. In this sense a fear of a specific animal is usually just that and regardless that arachnophobia, for instance, rarely represents something unconscious or indirect other than a linearly-related fear […]
Context: IQ tests: are humans getting smarter? Intelligence is a topic in which explicability possesses an uncanny correspondence to the behavioural practices by and through which it is defined. Having framed longevity as a plausibly necessary function of intellect, Social Darwinism arrives (yet again) on the Pale Horse as meritocracy wearing a clown hat. Having […]
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Superficiality
Superficiality is a function of acceleration. The mainstream flow of technological complexity is such that not only is it quite possible to exist, survive and (indeed) thrive while doing little more than juggling labels, names, references and (other) abbreviations – this is the constitutive default mode of contemporary psychological and cultural experience. Complexity and comprehension […]
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The Recursive Enigmas of Battling Bias
Bias represents an interesting and potentially intractable problem. Regardless of how (or where) we seek to address or interdict it, there exists an intrinsic, endemic property of complex information and energy-processing (i.e. logical, material) systems that natively orients those entities towards abstraction, abbreviation and mnemonic compression. Bias is the persistence of logical errors that naturally […]
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On Blogging
I guess blogging is really just a daily diary, a notebook into which we inscribe our thoughts, our feelings and whatever other existential paraphernalia we might find decorating these interior surfaces if self and subjectivity. Do we write because we want or need an externalised sense of validation that this experience brings? Perhaps, but there […]
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Saturday Morning Enigma: Language
Few seem to be aware that the primary transmission medium of communication as hyper-extended technological overreach embodied in language and various, diverse encoding systems is (and are) foundationally and intractably unable to provide that closure and certainty that we are (yet) able to emulate or simulate from inside it. This is the source of a […]
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Why do we suffer?
I’m going for yet another deep (if relatively brief) dive on the question of suffering. The natural orientation of the Universe towards dissolution and decay or disorder is precisely the reason why we have life, sentience, experience and intelligence – the entropy of material dissolution is a precondition for the structural aggregation and compression of […]
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AI: The Bias Inside
The bias in machine learning (and AI more generally) is the bias in data. The bias in data replicates the bias in ourselves, our distributed social and cultural information-processing systems, and in the natural orientation of complex information and energy-processing systems towards autonomous self-propagation through optimally-concise self-representational abstraction(s). Machine Learning applies mathematical heuristics to extract […]
It remains an unrelenting mystery and enigmatic fact that this world of ours is exquisitely well-tuned for producing precisely the wrong kind of complexity. This is to say that the technological and geopolitical trajectory that humanity on the whole feels compelled to create, reproduce or cultivate is quite clearly one of least optimal solutions of […]
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Oh yes, this world is a mess
Science and technology cartwheel and careen past us in ways that few can convincingly argue are fully comprehended, defined or ever anything more than superficially controlled. This accelerating turbulence of complex sociotechnical recursion and self-validating necessity is a self-propagating compression wave of information, energy, technology and concepts. It ripples and oscillates like waves on a […]
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