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business Organisation Philosophy

Recursive Utility: On Learning to Learn and the Emergence of Mercenary Capitalism

Agreed, on learning to learn. Recursive utility. On the (later) observations of the benefits to that learning process of competitive socioeconomic systems, as mentioned, I partially agree. A degree of competition is healthy but, invoking a general principle of recursive utility again, when competitive adversarialism becomes a goal and an end in itself – as […]

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Philosophy

Universal Reboot

Context: Could We Force the Universe to Crash? If we were to take seriously the implications of much-maligned and misunderstood general principles of endemic incompleteness and uncertainty that occur both in and as distributed (“Global”) hyper-surfaces across logic, physics and mathematics, we might consider that such a cosmological “Entscheidungsproblem” is not so much fantasy as […]

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Philosophy

When Big is Small: Technological Miniaturisation as Self-Accelerating Singularity

Context: The revolution in satellite technology means there are swarms of spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread in orbit It is a curious property of the juggernaut of relentless technological metamorphosis that utility is generally measured in inverse proportionality to miniaturisation, regardless that a network of associated, integrated systems quite naturally proliferate and […]

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Philosophy

Viral self-propagation of ethical systems in and as the implicit uncertainty of language

Everything points towards language being a distributed, adaptive encoding system. Biases and norms (among many other interpenetrating and interdependent sub-systems) are not merely, or only, the hyper-extended cognitive and cultural artefacts of linguistic mediation. The encoded symptoms of bias and normative assumption or behavioural prohibition (as self-inflected, reflexive agent/entity control) non-linearly and recursively reproduce the […]

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Philosophy

Money

Money is a tool, not an end in itself and the sooner we recognise this, the happier we will all be. We assert intrinsic value to things which possess no ultimate value beyond that which they acquire in the process of asserting it. Beyond this superficially stultifying tautological bootstrap of monetary self-significance, a sufficiently mature […]

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Philosophy

Language lies to us, through us.

The primary purpose of language is not communication. It is self-replication. Communication is a side-effect of the autonomously self-propagating patterns of information and logic that, in passing through us, reproduce us – just as we recursively reproduce them. Information flows through us, it is true, but in both ways (inwards and outwards) simultaneously as a […]

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Philosophy

Are Strawberries Real?

Are strawberries real? Well, for a start, they are not even berries and only retain the name by something of an etymological accident, linguistic coincidence or literary convention. More curiously, though, whenever we step onto the playing field of language we find ourselves asserting definitions, identities and assumptions of inviolable truth just as though there […]

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Philosophy

Constructive Disinformation

Why is language so generally, genuinely and in all but the most trivial, superficial of meaningless of instances quite catastrophically inadequate for the task of clear and unproblematic communication? What is it, that is, that shrouds our primary method and medium of personal (interior, cognitive) or interpersonal communication in ambiguity and doubt? Beyond the irreducible […]

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Philosophy

Strategy

Most good plans are like the best poetry and prose – they just kind of write themselves. Seek insights into your optimal strategies in life by realising that those better paths and dreams you seek are all already there in front of you, in plain sight and as a matter of logical necessity you just […]

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Philosophy

Unity

The world and everything in it constitutes a single, unified and mischievously indefinable information and energy-processing system. This is in essence a computational system but is distinguished from computers by the fact that it does not possess quite the same properties of mechanical or algorithmic and rules-based limitation that a computer demonstrates (as both weakness […]

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Philosophy

Recursion

There is a very special sense in which the ordered complexity our world resembles matryoshka nesting dolls. It is not purely of the overt ubiquity of fractal patterns of self-similarity in spatial or material structure and temporal sequence, although these symmetries are striking and quite deeply beautiful in their own mischievously inter-dimensional ways. The recursion […]

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Philosophy

Manifest Impossibility

If probabilities are real, then possibility and impossibility are as real (as functions of probability) as is Hawaii or chicken soup. The unsettling consequences of quantum theory seem to be quite conveniently swept under the ontological (and epistemological) carpet but the fact remains that material reality is deeply infused by and in some mysteriously unintelligible […]