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 […]
Steven Pinker is very clever and provides resonant food for thought whenever he speaks or writes anything. The dichotomy of which he is so fond and upon which so much of his work depends – a political turn is never far from a popular work on science in his many compositions – is an instance […]
Ascending the asymptote of taxonomical complexity is a process that in many ways reflexively defines what science both is and does but there is a core problem and ontological vacuum that lies here, unacknowledged and largely unexplored. This is that the sum total entropy and complexity of information and energy encoding and processing systems in […]
Ontology is the baseline. [All definitions are made in terms of other definitions in what only ever arrives at circularly tautological uncertainty. An arbitrary starting point must be chosen from inside the hyper-inflating self-referential systems of language and logic.] What does a “whole” or “complete” (if feeling adventurous, add “consistent” or “decidable”) system look like? […]
Singularly final unifying theories are a – or indeed, the – holy grail. The most significant barrier to unifying theories is that we expect them to be domain-specific, narrow and effectively limited – i.e. epistemologically “controlled” or even “controllable”. That’s the core problem – unified and/or unifying theories are constitutively not limited. Further, I expect […]
Context: The Human Genome Is—Finally!—Complete This is interesting, of course, but access to the catalogue of the Library of Congress is not the same thing as understanding its contents. (Enter: John Searle’s Chinese Room, stage left.) Of note here is that a record of information is as a function of observable difference in or as […]
Science as a system of belief is no less prone to fallibility than any other but embraces this implicit doubt and uncertainty as a core strength. The procedural aggregation of a body of verifiable, ordered knowledge as scientific truth is the foundation of our Global civilisation. It is significant to acknowledge that the essential and […]
Context: Studying maths beyond GCSEs helps brain development, say scientists Mathematics is a truly wonderful mystery and I only wish that it had been taught as such when I was at school. The concepts are fascinating, mysterious and completely astonishing once a triangulation between the paradoxes of logic, physics and material reality is rendered intelligible. […]
“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Charlie Chaplin Amateurs indeed, and yet – as with so many things – we perceive not only the implicit limitations of our minds (and lives, collectively – of cultures and civilisation) but also intuit the significant persistence of doubt, […]
Context: The Speed of Ocean Currents Is Changing in a Major Way, Scientists Warn Increasing the median internal energy gradients in any such vastly distributed information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system is bound to have consequences. Complexity and self-referential combinatorial structure of sufficient sophistication is likely to acquire new and perhaps relatively stable phases. If […]
Science and technology cartwheel and careen past us in ways that few can convincingly argue are fully comprehended, defined or ever anything more than superficially controlled. This accelerating turbulence of complex sociotechnical recursion and self-validating necessity is a self-propagating compression wave of information, energy, technology and concepts. It ripples and oscillates like waves on a […]
Science seeks underlying patterns and abbreviated logical explanations (as equation, model and approximation or general framework) to describe and manipulate nature but this is always at an inadvertent and inverse cost of generating precisely the same quantity of unmanageable complexity and disorder as that control and value or utility it brings. There exists a general […]
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