In any such competition of adversarial systems, the advantage surely goes to whoever has the most sophisticated conceptual model of the gestalt. This is to say – all of these systems and “systems of systems” have co-evolved as such intimately entangled artefacts, entities, technologies, institutional practices and pragmatic organisational constructs that they embody a unified […]
In general, people’s thinking is teleological and focused on specific details, rather than the big picture. This is due to the fact that people are distracted by individual instances and fail to see the overarching patterns that tie them together. As the hyper-extended cognition of (a) technology and communications system, language recursively shapes the way […]
Algorithmic complexity is a measure of information. For any non-trivially sophisticated (i.e. interesting) system, there exists no shortest/best programmatic representation – i.e. theory, model, framework or network wiring. This means that in some circumstances we can reduce ad infinitum. There is no best, only better; a lesson in abject humility still to be learned by […]
System/environment boundaries are really somewhat arbitrary. It is generally only on the simplest and most rudimentary vectors of analysis that we can ever speak clearly of any kind of Manichaean system/environment differentiation and unambiguously-articulated identity or closure. Where and when boundaries are easily delineated, the systems under discussion are generally quite uninteresting and unrealistic. Systems […]
The extent to which psychoanalysis is a successful or compelling theory is really a very interesting question in and of itself, even before considering its subject matter. This same dark thread was identified by Nietzsche as being a symptom of more distributed belief-system neuroses. Regardless of where, when or how anyone asserts the causal factors […]
Context: Australia installs first space laser optical ground station in southern hemisphere It is interesting to observe, and from a broader (integrated, technological) systems perspective, that the value acquired by iterating upon and through the technical ratchet of space-based communications solutions and innovations is a measure of displaced information (as much as material) entropy. Much […]
Context: The Guardian view on the heat dome – burning through the models These events are truly worrying. What we often do not see, and perhaps by the very nature of cognition and the language(s) through which we reason and communicate, is that there is a unified, globally-integrated system of autocatalytic feedback at work here. […]
“System differentiation is nothing more than the repetition within systems of the difference between system and environment.” Niklas Luhmann, ‘Social Systems’, Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 7. The abstractions are effectively the difference between a(ny) system and its environment, replicated and recursively reproduced as the self-inflation and fact that is that system. The abstraction that […]
As I get older and, reluctantly, more mature – my social life has become dominated by sitting in cafes by myself, wistfully scribbling obscure observations on the nature of mind and systems theory into personal notebooks. It is very lonely and in very many ways. Something which occurred to me, mid-scribble, today was more generally […]
Context: The False Philosophy Plaguing AI The (or at least a) problem here is that the ascendant technologies, frameworks, cultures and commercial incentives have inadvertently stumbled upon the constructive and recursively self-inflected sweet-spot through which those core assumptions themselves optimally self-propagate. If the incentives and rewards for developers, researchers and corporate or institutional entities find […]
We think and act as though the things we believe are reliable and unproblematically grounded upon an objective truth. This is a falsehood because all assertions, all references and all concepts – being defined in terms of other definitions and so in tautological circularity – are only ever the interior and half-mirrored surface of our […]
Context: Artificial general intelligence: Are we close, and does it even make sense to try? It seems to me that there is an unbridgeable discontinuity here between a belief in the ascendant utility of more data processed faster and the (at least superficially) antithetical systemic self-containment and enigmatic ontological bootstrap of a sentience that I […]
Daedelus Kite 