Categories
information

Breathe In: Lungs, Language, Civilisation

There is a relationship between speech and cognition. There is also a relationship between written language and intelligibility. The longer and more convoluted a sentence, the harder it becomes to understand. The harder the sentence is to understand, the less likely it will self-replicate through artefacts, entities and systems of communication. What this means is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaning Machines

Context: — Can computers understand complex words and concepts? Yes, according to research — Is understanding a “simple” matter of inhabiting and adaptively observing or shuffling the relational properties of language? This raises questions of meaning as only being the suspended tension wire of inductive resonance across a logical frame of gestalt linguistic self-reference, without […]

Categories
technology

Artificial General Intelligence: Self-deception

Context: Elon Musk & Joe Rogan talk to “conscious AI” If our intent in seeking to scale the complex asymptote of AGI has been to convince ourselves that it is conscious and possesses subjectivity, personhood or sentient experience, then it is perhaps inevitable that we will arrive at a point where the reflexive conversational and […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Expected Unexpected

The further and faster our collaborative human endeavour expands into the vast and sprawling information space we have cocooned ourselves in, the more that our cognitive hyper-extension in and as technology and myriad dialects of identity speciates and radiates, the more sophisticated and intricately complex our world becomes – the greater the dissipative acceleration into […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology technology

Technological Competition

That our failures and our successes are intimately entangled applies as much at nascent planetary technological civilisation level as at any other. Interesting, also, to conjecture that our greatest failures (in microcosm and at scale) are generally in and of a partisan adversarialism that as reflexive psychological and existential compulsion cycles and oscillates through this […]

Categories
Philosophy technology

Metaverse: The Digital Egg

Context: Metaverse: Augmented reality pioneer warns it could be far worse than social media It has been said that a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg. The extent to which the idioms of technologically-mediated subjectivity we inhabit are the primary methods of information system self-propagation remain as generally opaque to us as […]

Categories
art Philosophy

Aesthetic Relativity: Lascaux and Other Minds

Representational relativity is an epiphenomenon strongly supported by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (itself perhaps also, and ironically, subject to the representational vicissitudes and aesthetics of oscillating academic taste and cultures). While we might never decompress exactly what the Lascaux cave art meant to its creators, the reflexivity of creative expression as a function of whichever cultural […]

Categories
Philosophy

Is colour a purely subjective experience?

To what extent might we ever comprehensively or justifiably speak of an external or “objective” reality? Internal experience is intimately interdependent with an “external” world, assertions of certainty regarding subjective ownership of an experience of colour remain somewhat unreliable. Experience exists, but as an inductive inevitability the doubt regarding objective reality is mirrored in that […]

Categories
Psychology

Emptiness in Psychology, Subjectivity and Art

This, from the book above: (…)art functions, in essence, to “creat[e] the void and thereby introduce[e] the possibility of filling it.” Staging Nothing: The Figure of Das Ding in Poe’s “The Raven”, Sean J. Kelly, in Psychology in Edgar Allan Poe, Logos Verlag Berlin, 2019, p. 69 Replace “void” with “subjectivity” and you have a […]

Categories
Psychology

Mental Illness as Endemic Property of Subjective Identity

It is an unacknowledged truth that subjective self-identity is always and already a psychological artefact that exists upon a sliding scale of graduated pathology. A notionally healthy or well-adjusted individual in comparison to a person experiencing some form of dissociative or discontinuous psychological reality represents a difference in degree but not in kind. That is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Individuality is a Kind of Emotional Isolation

Individuality is really a kind of unacknowledged emotional isolation for which by reflex we cultivate more self-definition as a cure, but only ever generate further discomfort and alienation. In this way, personal subjectivity and individuated psychological experience come to unwittingly depend for emotional security upon precisely the referential distance and difference (of aspirational uniqueness) that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Some brief (if complex) agnostic observations on Machine Sentience

Context: How would we know if an AI is conscious? We find ourselves in an intractable ontological (as much as epistemological) bind here. If we ever get to the point of generating autonomous synthetic information-processing systems that tick all the boxes for notionally proving their possession of consciousness by whatever standard metric we might arbitrarily […]