Categories
Philosophy

Cultural Overflow: Network Carrying Capacity

There is little doubt that our cultural systems are communications networks, albeit of considerably higher dimensionality than (even) the digital telecommunications systems with which we are all now so necessarily well-acquainted. In a spirit of relatively non-specific philosophical reflection, questions quite naturally arise as to the carrying capacity of these cultural networks and of what […]

Categories
Complexity

The Community of Me

Context: Mobile Genes From the Mother Shape the Baby’s Microbiome It’s interesting – we can rarely predict precisely what complex systemic relationships will occur, we can only be certain that they will occur. Our own continuity as individual (human) organisms is a function of the extent to which this emergence is a reliable fact. That […]

Categories
Philosophy

Automated Technological Malevolence

Context: Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code Exponentiation… it’s a language game, all of it. The hyper-inflating state space of all combinatorial possibility has a tendency to drift, through entropy, into precisely those transient structural constellations that maximally reproduce: • not only the elements and instances or references, idioms, sentences, logical fragments and […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Cobra Effect of Unintended Consequences

The Cobra Effect of unintended consequences is the tip of an enormous iceberg of complex systems feedback loops and interdependency. It is not just the measurable, observed or recorded properties, processes and downstream consequences that concern us. Where we seek to control, shape or otherwise, and more realistically, to (minimally, if constructively) influence the arc […]

Categories
Philosophy

Induction

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Dialects of Emptiness

I’m pretty sure that all we ever do is generate fragmentary dialects of pre-existing languages, codes, behavioual patterns and conceptual relationships or symmetries. These are ordered structures and complex (adaptive) systems of information and reference that maximally self-propagate and replicate themselves through us as their primary transmission medium, just as they are also our binding […]

Categories
cybernetics

A.I., Creativity, Copyright and Plagiarism in Art

Context: Copyright infringement in artificial intelligence art I know a developer that pulled all their code from Github because of Copilot. It is an interesting area of study because, much as has been said of Mozart, AI in its variously generative species are in essence not doing anything profoundly new, they are doing what has […]

Categories
culture

Human Slavery and the Serial Failure of Governments

It is simpler, if often appropriate, to condemn governments for their serial failures to successfully negotiate and interdict slavery and human trafficking. We would all do well to also understand that the reproduction of specific, known and well-defined classes of inequitable outcomes are not merely a consequence of corruption and failures of intelligence where these […]

Categories
Philosophy

Nothing

I’m of the exquisitely unpopular, largely incomprehensible and eminently unhelpful philosophical opinion that if we were able to calculate it to within a Planck’s length of its life, the sum total of all complex systems as measured along the axes of energy, information and entropy would be zero. That which remains conspicuously absent (and likely […]

Categories
cybernetics

On Describing Complex Systems

My experience, beyond an effervescing percolation of the very many sociotechnical instances with which both we and our reflexively teleological heuristics of symbolic communication (in and as language) aspire to epistemological closure, is that there is no simplest state or unified descriptive method available to us. Yes, we can iteratively refine taxonomies and (what become) […]

Categories
communication

Communicating Science: Systems

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 […]

Categories
cybernetics

On Selectively Breaking Occam’s Razor

Complex systems have a way of reproducing themselves quite agnostic of the methods we use to influence or shape them. Where we assert causal ontologies we tend to do so under the scope and rubric of many prior assumptions. Data is a function of observations that tend to reproduce and self-validate the assumptions by which […]