Context: AI must be developed responsibly to improve mental health outcomes It is a delicate and potentially dangerous matter when self-validating commercial incentives and their accelerated technical metamorphoses have taken the center of surveilling, assessing and aspirationally recalibrating human experience in this way. I quite often wonder about the compound, composite ironies of a world […]
Context: Any Single Galaxy Reveals the Composition of an Entire Universe Such induction to general principles from instances is itself, also, a broader lesson regarding complexity. If recognisable (i.e. “real world”) properties of cosmological matter and energy distribution can be inferred from a single galaxy, in what other systems does such a depth of logical […]
I wonder if commercial incentives might not destructively inhibit and limit the possible range and diversity of all possible research and applications. By which I mean that decoupling curiosity-driven research from purely commercial incentives might open up a much vaster state space of combinatorial possibility than could otherwise exist or be beneficially investigated. It would […]
Context: Editorial to the Inaugural Issue of Collective Intelligence, 24-Aug-22…https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26339137221114179 That intelligence and/or intelligence-like dynamical properties can be distributed, as it were, across the entire information and energy-processing “surface” of a complex system should give us all pause for thought. This seems to implicate thermodynamic system properties and self-organising computational dynamics that consistently bridge the […]
Context: After death, you’re aware that you’ve died, say scientists What a difficult experience this must be. To know that life has ended and as though the dimming glow of a candle wick, to quickly fade into darkness. I wonder if this is a moment of release and cathartic decompression or a few troubled seconds […]
I’m a committed advocate for the importance of systems theory, cybernetics and complexity science but the solution of communication precisely is the problem. It is not a bundle of ideas or throwaway conceptual vocabularies that can ever compress down to a brief logo. The conservation of cognitive as much as cultural resources predisposes people to […]
Our fundamental theories of physics are only one experimentally validated “local minima” in a much vaster logical as mathematical and material cartography of possibility. If there is something fundamental that we are not understanding here, it represents a salient moment to ponder which of our axioms are incomplete, misinformed or obsolete. That is the point […]
Context: Genetic paparazzi are right around the corner, and courts aren’t ready to confront the legal quagmire of DNA theft — I find that the unacknowledged (yet common enough) assumption that genes deterministically prescribe destiny as more or less isomorphic mappings of downstream biological development is unhelpfully shaping an already complex debate. Yes, genes shape […]
Context: Science of science workshop: discovery & inequality The data and computational tools in use are not only transforming the field, they are recursively shaping the radiative speciation of scientific practice as their own transmission medium. We rarely notice just how profoundly trajectories in science and technology are a reflexive function of the extended phenotype […]
Context: A theory of reality that makes sense On the topic of the nominally closed systems referenced in the article above, much of the closure asserted (or interpreted) is at a cost of displacing or offsetting the external dependencies of those systems. Yes, there is a certain degree of ontological individuation without which rationality and […]
The most interesting conceptual artefacts, entities and systems are often like this – they maximally replicate the degrees of freedom by and through which we might leverage utility but do so in ways that hardly if ever lock down ontologies and definitions in unambiguous closure. This is the recursive self-propagation of a logical depth and […]
I’ve spent a long time now down the rabbit hole of technology, science and the conceptual ecosystems that accompany them. The extent to which these devices and machines are fundamentally not fault tolerant is for diverse, yet related, reasons of psychological and commercial self-interest quite widely unreported. The narratives of mechanical or computational ascendance rarely […]
Daedelus Kite 