Categories
culture

The Implicit Resilience of (a) Limited Cognitive Dissonance

Narrative dissonance is a necessary component of social communication; an autonomous method for introducing the useful information entropy of difference through which biological, cognitive and cultural systems evolve and maintain resilience against catastrophic disassembly.  This difference has become acute, amplified by technology and it’s consequences have all but shredded political civility.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Mind, Information and Entropy

It is not surprising that the symbolic abstractions and mental worlds of homo sapiens arrive at incompleteness and negation but “deficiency” is a word perhaps altogether too easily attributed affective, emotional qualities.  The indefinite extensibility of (both) logical and material systems, and each in their own ways invoking parameters and probabilities unique to their own […]

Categories
systems

Information, Influence and Dissonance: the Utility of Fakes and Errors in System Self-Propagation

Information systems, viewed from a gestalt/holistic perspective, possess many properties we might otherwise recognise as self-propagation, “emergence” or self-organisation. The presence of values attributed semantic (or logical) properties of truth or falsity at a level of cognition or language may be purely incidental. From a Global Systems perspective, information systems autonomously pursue the optimal means […]

Categories
Philosophy

Digital Media: It was Never about Truth…

These information environments are biased towards the accelerated throughput and bandwidth of data, largely blind to truth values. The self-propagating gestalt of integrated digital information systems appear to require this constant throughput to avoid over-extension and self-gravitational collapse. It is something of a constant back-filling and hyper-inflating referential effervescence of naked data, sans semantics or […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Necessity of Cognitive Bias

I honestly wonder sometimes if we make sense of the world or if the world makes sense of (and through) us; it is most certainly true that the information patterns of this world inhabit our minds just as much as we inhabit them. Cognitive biases, for instance, are those endemic psychological faux pas through which […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Fractal Fire and Microcosm

We rarely perceive that each action, experience and event is always in some way a microcosm, deeply entangled with (and symptomatic of) a much broader and more complex world.  In each notionally separate event, entity or artefact we might seek to discover a Global truth hidden, encrypted, but still standing there in plain sight.

Categories
Philosophy

Cyber: Technology, Information, Identity and Conflict

…as a general observation: All of this (shared) online aspiration to reflexively self-validating identity-construction and participatory meaning-generation masks a howling vacuum of dissimulated subjectivity. We seek self-expression but no such endpoint exists, no epistemogical closure or certainty and (certainly) nothing even vaguely approximating to that monster-image of projected, illusory control that stares back at us […]

Categories
Philosophy

Defining Intelligence

The intransigent difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently concise, compelling, universally agreed-upon and resilient definition of intelligence sits somewhere on the same geometric arc or architecture of axiomatic assertion as does complexity and, indeed, life. If epistemological closure is demonstrably (ref. paradoxes of self-containment, among other things) impossible, intelligence both can and can not (!) be […]

Categories
Philosophy

Internet Narratives, Self-propagating Complexity and Adversarial Evolution

Some philosophical thoughts on these contemporary, massively-distributed online communications systems: • social media now (largely) subsumes news media and the powerful, potentially unmanageable, flow and form of recursively self-propagating information-processing systems is such that even putatively reputable media or news channels – not to mention governments – are forced to contort themselves and their narratives […]

Categories
culture

Commercial Identities: Generational Difference

Notice how the primary cultural differentiation of generational identity is always a commercially-mediated product, idiom or artefact.  Can anyone ever truly own their expression of identity, of cultural self when it is always already so much someone else’s possession? Does commercial self-interest (even unwittingly) cultivate a possibility for the emergence of self-identity and t h […]

Categories
technology

Logic: Indefinite Extensibility

The indefinitely extensible essence of logic (Gödel, 1931) is both bug *and* feature. That which provides a possibility of recombinatory (technological, organisational, psychological) development, of the degrees of freedom by which we might define (and endlessly redefine) the meaning and substance of “intelligence” or “technology”, is also the tangled hierarchy of inertia and entropy within […]

Categories
technology

AI: Engineering Intelligence

I wonder in what ways the “engineering of intelligence” recursively shapes, and to some extent prescribes the most probable developmental vectors of, our definition of human intelligence. We may find ourselves several years from now seeking the inflection points and procedural saliences that explain why it is that our core assumptions and concepts of intelligence […]