For a Universe to have spontaneously emerged from nothing may be an alternate view on the the same fact as that it has always existed. It is not the logic which fails so much as the implicit (or apparent) boundaries of our own minds.
In this painting of the “human Barbie doll”, Swiss artist Stefania Pinsone reflects the self-conscious self-replication of culture, self and art itself. The painting is titled “Valeria Lukyanova (white noise)”.
Art is that through which we recreate ourselves.
AI systems approximating human thought? It seems to me that we are quite a long way from comprehensively understanding what human thought actually is, let alone successfully simulating it.
A view from the periphery on the tribal self-validation of academic cliques.
Self-replication. Surely this is what life is all about.
The distributed information systems which we experience as social, cultural, economic and cognitive (or technologically-mediated) reality are implicitly weighted towards the self-replication and reproduction of existing patterns and biases.
If a non-trivially complex organisational system of any kind or scale is to be considered (even notionally) as complete or entirely self-consistent, it can not also be adaptive, flexible and resilient.
The key selection factor for successful pattern self-replication in a transmission medium is the extent to which the information content of that message also (reflexively) supports the propagation of the integrated or gestalt information system represented by the networked transmission medium itself.
Cultural and cognitive information systems (and the individuals they inhabit) are implicitly oriented towards the systemic self-replication of patterned complexity.
Human minds are self-propagating patterns of information that are implicitly biased towards seeking biological, cultural and technological methods of (self-)reproduction.
The road to hell is paved with populist simplicities.
Daedelus Kite 