Bertrand Russell once remarked that all of mathematics consists of tautologies. In this sense, we are considering as logically foundational a vast, complex panoply of equivalences, equations, symmetries and relationships asserting unproblematic definitions, references, ontologies. It may be true that from within any system of reference, any conceptual schema whatsoever only acquires and maintains aspirational […]
Partisan Political Systems have a double life as what is visible and what is not. What is not obvious is generally the most interesting (and causally critical) feature. If a complex information and/or energy-processing (i.e. computational) system maintains sustainable intrinsic homeostatic and extrinsic contextual continuity through the reflexive priming of its environment as a pliable […]
Notice how, if we are conceptually and cognitively able to step back and observe the forest rather than the trees, that the primary information system function here is that of the recursive self-propagation of soliton-like, continuously self-propagating waveforms in patterns of behaviour and thought. Those artefacts that are produced at times of duress and stress, […]
It remains endlessly problematic that the words and the knowledge or cognitive information patterns through which we interpret our world are always already and inadvertently alienating and dissociative. The unity we seek is above and beyond and can never be bounded by the very language and thought which aspires to understand it. It is and […]
Information, like entropy, is always created. When considered in gestalt: successful cultural, technological or socioeconomic systems (and their diverse artefacts or entities) are autonomously-oriented towards self-propagation as biological as much as material facts of information and energy-processing. One of the common errors we make when we engage the growing presence of both amateur and professionally-bespoke […]
An interesting consequence of generalised attributions of human exceptionalism is that we tend to automatically believe that all intelligence, all value and all experience exist (and persist) in this diminutive cranial cavity we inhabit. Cogito ergo something is definitely going on between our ears but there is a deep and irreducible mystery at work (i.e. […]
What I find unrelentingly entertaining about the technologically-mediated collective and aspirationally-individuated self-definitions of our historical moment is not that we (all, and each in our own ways) seek to create and sustain these distributed and functionally differential or dissociative Others of self-representation that we endlessly cultivate. What is more interesting is that we rarely notice, […]
Context: This AI Robot Just Nabbed the Lead Role in a Sci-Fi Movie Dissimulated truths (here, as robotic self-representation) are perhaps always more compelling (if disconcerting) than unproblematically verifiable or “real” ones. Where a truth (or representation) is introduced as an overtly plausible fake, it is the slippery slope and unravelling, accelerating diffusion of value […]
In what ways does regulation, interdiction, surveillance and retrospective analysis or definition actually and inadvertently (re)produce the problems it seeks to diminish? Distinctions between legal and illegal are clearly and self-evidently important but in terms of comprehensive analysis and aspirations towards effective problem resolution they may also be a foundational misdirection. It is becoming clear […]
The return of the Wicked Problem. The problem of antibiotic resistance characterises a key symmetry of “wickedness” in any problem-space. That is, the activities, responses, interdictions and behaviours that might solve the problem are also those inadvertently exacerbate it. It is an endemic property of complex systems to seek optimal patterns of self-propagation. What at […]
We are (all) still attempting to brute-force our way towards Artificial General Intelligence. If the complexity sciences have taught us anything it is that there is an autonomous orientation within naturally-occurring information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems towards self-organisation and bootstrapped system optimisation via logical extensibility and recursive exponentiation. We appear to be attempting to […]
Context: The Puzzling Search for Perfect Randomness I can never resist a good speculative and completely “out there” waffle. Randomness is non-trivially significant in cryptography. The closer the approximation of a numerical sequence or the properties of an abstract geometrical object to randomness, the more difficult the encryption seed derived from it is to crack. […]
Daedelus Kite 