Categories
Philosophy

Connectome Brainbows, Neural Networks and River Deltas

Some fascinating video lectures from Jeff Lichtman of Harvard University on the topic of connectomics are linked below. The reflections on technological aspirations to machine intelligence are implicit. Connectomics: seeking neural circuit motifs • Brains are initially maximally interconnected as wired networks and it is the imprinting of experience that prunes this connectivity to more […]

Categories
environment

Symmetry of Nature: An African Fluid Dynamical Topography Map

Beautiful. Natural systems here approximating to optimal functions for energy dispersion (as fluid dynamics) relative to a topography and geography (as much as geology) that they then proceed to reflexively shape and mold. It is no coincidence that the pinnacle of technological sophistication converges on nature’s own approximations. In this case – note how the […]

Categories
Philosophy

AI: The Bias Inside

The bias in machine learning (and AI more generally) is the bias in data. The bias in data replicates the bias in ourselves, our distributed social and cultural information-processing systems, and in the natural orientation of complex information and energy-processing systems towards autonomous self-propagation through optimally-concise self-representational abstraction(s). Machine Learning applies mathematical heuristics to extract […]

Categories
Philosophy

Recursion

There is a very special sense in which the ordered complexity our world resembles matryoshka nesting dolls. It is not purely of the overt ubiquity of fractal patterns of self-similarity in spatial or material structure and temporal sequence, although these symmetries are striking and quite deeply beautiful in their own mischievously inter-dimensional ways. The recursion […]

Categories
Philosophy

Broken Symmetry

In our endless fascination with symmetry we mistake its instances for a generalised property of value and in attributing significance this way we tend to totally miss the point. More important than this or that symmetry group or identifiable pattern of encoded mathematical relationship and patterned ratio  was always the mischievously-binding fact (and counter-intuitively asymmetrical […]

Categories
Philosophy

The world is Perfect Imperfection, but Why?

The world is so beautiful and perfect in all the glorious randomness and unexpected symmetry or beauty of it’s flow and form. Why is it that the perfection of this world deviates in the way it does from simple linearity to recurse itself into hidden patterns of mathematical complexity that displace this symmetry into opaque […]

Categories
technology

Cyber: Hidden Patterns

Consider the many ways that the cyber arms-race is precisely this – a procedurally-incremental measure, counter-measure, counter-counter-measure. The hyper-inflating combinatorial possibility space of attack and defence as a gestalt creates it’s own momentum and self-propagating, patterned structure(s) and open or extensible system(s). The evolutionary nature of this process is inescapable. Each act of interdiction then […]

Categories
Philosophy

Information is a Material Presence and a Logical Absence

We inhabit the material of manifest corporeality and in equal measure – abstract patterns of information inhabit us. Which is more fundamental? There is no base, no anchor, no foundation; the imaginary spaces of information and autonomously self-propagating computational resonance are the contours through which matter and energy travels; the embodied (and reflexive, in our […]

Categories
Philosophy

Freedom is Unbounded, as is Beauty

Freedom is as this: a half-glimpsed beauty and eloquent symmetry that by it’s essential nature can only ever be experienced in part. To possess freedom, to behold it’s boundless symmetry all at once would be to try and control it, and freedom can not be constrained by the dragging anchor of mere psychological aspiration. This […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Crown of Thorns: this gathering storm

This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds – never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged – these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance. […]

Categories
Philosophy

When we close our eyes…

This is what we all see when we close our eyes and look deep inside.  It is imperfect, discontinuous, fractured and incomplete.  This is also why it is beautiful.  The world is a broken symmetry and imperfect self-reflection and this is exactly why there is diversity, complexity, creativity and life.  Some things can only manifest […]

Categories
culture

Cumulative Cultural Evolution

Cultural change is cumulative self-gravitation.