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 […]
Context: I am a big fan of Anton Petrov’s space and science YouTube channel. Today I was watching this video which inspired the spontaneous reflection recorded below. Many of the shared, Global and effectively holistic problems that we face as an industrialised technological civilisation are fundamentally and foundationally matters of successfully characterising and negotiating – […]
Context: Can the Universe Learn? It seems to be something of an inevitability, in some sense, that the mothership from whence all complex emergence arises is itself an instance and template case of autonomously self-propagating distributed learning systems ontology. The inadmissibility, in general, of such concepts is very much more a consequence of rank psychological […]
Context: Aliens are a mirror to humanity Aeschylus, Shakespeare or Mary Shelley would all and also very likely recognise these narrative tropes of alien Other as being endemic behavioural and psychological reflections of humanity itself. More interesting, perhaps, than that we find ourselves serially encountering our own image and bundled native biases in fiction is […]
Bias represents an interesting and potentially intractable problem. Regardless of how (or where) we seek to address or interdict it, there exists an intrinsic, endemic property of complex information and energy-processing (i.e. logical, material) systems that natively orients those entities towards abstraction, abbreviation and mnemonic compression. Bias is the persistence of logical errors that naturally […]
It is not only a question as of how best to engage the persistence of disinformation so much as it is of how the Global (as much as political or strategic) information-processing and media system has come in many ways to functionally depend upon the wilful inaccuracy of proliferating falsehoods. Qualifying the previous statement: there […]
Context: Math explains polarization, and it’s not just about politics The mathematics indicates aspects of causal necessity, perhaps, in dynamical systems but we might turn to a complementary psychological ontology of polarisation, Othering and system differentiation. A partisan point of view (or mind and associated political, ideological subjectivity) is always and already inversely anchored and […]
Context: The revolution in satellite technology means there are swarms of spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread in orbit It is a curious property of the juggernaut of relentless technological metamorphosis that utility is generally measured in inverse proportionality to miniaturisation, regardless that a network of associated, integrated systems quite naturally proliferate and […]
When we trade in Universals or concepts of substantive reality, we are engaging concepts of notionally “whole” or “complete” systems. The curious thing about any “totality” or aspirationally “complete” system is that there is no outside to that entity, no external conditions or properties. Everything is internal to that system. Why does this matter? Because […]
Context: The next pandemic may be cyber — How Biden administration can stop it Interesting article, but the centralisation of resources and administrative control is a limited and piecemeal assertion over a global and overall systemic problem: • the irreducible, implicit and generally unacknowledged insecurity of digital technologies represents something of a leaking bucket that could […]
Where we speak of disinformation it is quite plausible that we do not reference any kind of antithesis to information or the logical, structured and relatively well-ordered patterning upon which cognition as much as civilisation depends. Rather, disinformation is a functional representation of the inconsistencies and discontinuities that are endemic, irreducible and omnipresent to (and […]
Daedelus Kite 