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 […]
Tag: recursion
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. […]
Technology Copies Itself Through Us
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, […]
Robotic Stars: Virtualising Everything
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 […]
Infinitely Random Encryption Seeds
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. […]
Context: Truth Beyond Logic and Time Beyond Clocks: Janna Levin on the Vienna Circle and How Mathematician Kurt Gödel Shaped the Modern Mind Gödel is interesting in many ways. While acknowledging that his logical and mathematical foundation-shaking Incompleteness proofs have a very specific context and meaning, the extent to which a broader reading (and thinking) […]
Life is Reason Without Meaning
The raison d’etre of all creation is reproduction but, as is so often the case, the naked fact(s) and essential truth of this matter is right there, unadorned, in front of us – too obvious to be seen. The Cosmos is a magnificently self-inflected logical shockwave of difference and differentiation, of information and energy – […]
Copy
We are all swept away by the normative idioms of our era. It is only really ever true that in retrospect the particular peculiarities of cultural identity and material self-expression become apparent. This (our) moment in time is not marked by any unique idiom or stylistic trait so much as the aggregate and accelerating dissolution, […]
Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness
Somewhere in the deep dark pit of indeterminate catastrophe that we call our shared Global history, we find ourselves endlessly seeking reasons, causes and inviolable proofs to explain just why our world is the way it is. Our linear, narrative minds are so entrained and reflexively conditioned by these visceral, intimate experiences of time and […]