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 […]
Tag: recursion
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 […]
When so much contemporary art – as with politics and ideology – survives and thrives on a pure and insubstantial superficiality that is profoundly hollow, fragile and ultimately meaningless, this art demonstrates a deep stylistic and aesthetic value and enduring emotional, psychological impact. I truly love this work – it is evocative, alluring and conceptually, […]
COVID-19: Pandemic Logic
From a purely logical standpoint – the implicit, endemic and enduring possibility for (and probability of) systemic extensibility is by recursive insight and bootstrapped self-inflection back into the structure of a system itself. The most profoundly deleterious vulnerabilities in, for instance, Cybersecurity are those 0-day pearls which, like axiomatic booby-traps just waiting to be triggered […]
An Unfurling Emptiness
Every mind is like this: patterns, faces, surfaces and dreams. We recombine these things in different ways and while we might all arrive in different places and by different paths or idioms of cultural and linguistic orientation – it is fundamentally the same process that we are all engaged in. We all spend our lives […]
Language is something of an operating system. Language also represents a self-propagating, abstract information system – much like culture or socioeconomic reality – that inhabits us just as much as we inhabit it. Human beings, technologies, artefacts and communication systems are the medium through which this linguistic entity manifests and self-replicates. The resilience of this […]