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 […]
Context: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, The Inherent Limitation Of Mathematics The discontinuous boundary condition at the edge of (as much as being that around which we built) logic, physics and mathematics is a global property, distributed across and as the complex hypersurface of a self-propagating, soliton-like hybrid matter/energy/information system. It is as though a logical vacuum, […]
The endemic, near-ubiquitous orientation of dynamical systems towards the emergence of purposive information and energy-encoding and processing (as essentially computational) mechanisms is astonishing. When and where these artefacts, entities and relatively closed (as bounded or measurable and defined) self-propagating patterns arise, it is worth reflecting that while the coding logic is in general our main […]
Complex systems require complex solutions and global problems require global thinking. The application of holistic analyses to complex adaptive systems obligates us to come up with solutions that are themselves complex adaptive systems. An evolutionary feedback loop is the only plausible way to align adaptive technical solutions with “real-world” volatility and uncertainty. Obtaining contextual tenure […]
It remains as something of an intractable and enigmatic fact that all systems of description, all linguistic artefacts and logical entities must conform in some way to the basic structure of a tautology. This in itself is an interesting enough conceptual waypoint but even while we find ourselves forever gazing into the half-mirrored labyrinths of […]
Ashby had powerful insights. The Good Regulator theorem of Conant and Ashby that every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system is instructive. Further down the Ashby path – the variety (a.k.a. complexity) of a model needs to be at least as sophisticated as that of the system it models. […]
Context: Superconducting Silicon-Photonic Chip Developed for Quantum Communication It is interesting that there really seems to be no best way of negotiating computation at this scale. The effervescing diversity of technical innovations in this context is instructive. Even as technology converges towards an accelerating point, it radiates out upon as many branches of technical speciation […]
At a relatively recent “reunion” event, I noticed that the primary social process with which people were engaged was the negotiation and confirmation of facts, measurements, names, identities and dates. They were all, in essence, reconstructing a network graph of personal histories as effective coordinate systems by and through which to render their shared experience […]
Context: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge Epistemological uncertainty is the center of gravity and compelling force (as vacuum) that drives discovery. AI constitutes something of an instance of a much broader principle (or sociotechnical pattern). Inductive utility is a function of the degrees of reduction in uncertainty but this same uncertainty as occluded knowledge faces, […]
Context: Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science Complex systems of anything other than trivial complexity tend (and trend) towards a median value of approximation towards optimal system self-replication. These academic and associated publishing systems have become oriented towards the maximally effective and efficient reproduction of the organisational systems themselves and this is, as […]
Daedelus Kite 