Categories
Philosophy

What if Artificial General Intelligence actually wants to be discovered?

We are (all) still attempting to brute-force our way towards Artificial General Intelligence.  If the complexity sciences have taught us anything it is that there is an autonomous orientation within naturally-occurring information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems towards self-organisation and bootstrapped system optimisation via logical extensibility and recursive exponentiation.  We appear to be attempting to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Logical Origami and the Infinite Emptiness

Or: Why The Enlightenment Inevitably Consumed Itself Each new system of thought, each extension, each insight, each historical inflection-point and distributed, systemic phase transition or levelling-up of human civilisation and each new branching of the tree of combinatorial (human) possibility – it opens the degrees of freedom, of motion, of growth and – simultaneously – […]

Categories
Philosophy

Internet Narratives, Self-propagating Complexity and Adversarial Evolution

Some philosophical thoughts on these contemporary, massively-distributed online communications systems: • social media now (largely) subsumes news media and the powerful, potentially unmanageable, flow and form of recursively self-propagating information-processing systems is such that even putatively reputable media or news channels – not to mention governments – are forced to contort themselves and their narratives […]

Categories
environment

Climate Change In Security: Insecurity

It may be a matter of social and psychological necessity that this kind of monumental existential threat – to which we have perhaps long been desensitised by repetition and the droning monotony of unnecessarily adversarial ideological and political competition – carry more impact, more information entropy and cultural gravity when they become a tangible, material, […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Disentangling Bureauracy

It is fascinating to consider that an anachronistic hierarchy produces precisely the organisational inertia and systemic entropy that it itself is best oriented to negotiate (and through this to endlessly reproduce its own self-validating necessity). It is quite likely that the path of least effort and autonomously self-organising (i.e. low energy-state, minimal algorithmic complexity) systems […]

Categories
Complexity

Cancer, Senescence, Computation and Complexity

I had an intuition that rather than genetic or cellular breakage and strict malfunction that cancer represents something of an uncanny alignment with the Halting Problem of computational theory. What is on one level a function of an atavistic throwback to deep biological history where replication and continuity at all costs provides a cellular (genetic) […]

Categories
communication Philosophy technology

The Necessity of Proliferating Vulnerabilities: a General Philosophy of Cyber Security

Compressed: It is something of an inevitability of both logic and of physics that the more components a material system has – including the diverse and recombinatory abstractions and logic of algorithmic, information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems – the more disordered states of entropy that are also possible, indeed – probable within and as […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The March of the Immaterial Abstractions

The form and flow of this life and logical information space we inhabit is as much a matter of what we are not as what we are; we are manifestations and expressions of that life beyond us as much as that within.  There exists a particular narrow focus of abstract pattern or cognitive extension that […]

Categories
environment

Social Reorganisation: Lessons from Physics and Nature

All ordered organisational systems are engaged in an endless competition with (and of) disorder and entropy; it is a race to weave order and patterned persistence from available resources while the other end of the tapestry continuously unravels into largely unrecoverable waste and loss. These organisational systems aspire to a relatively stable or constructively adaptive […]

Categories
culture

Mind the Gap

Our systems of logistics and commuter transport derive the abstract, symbolic value and benefit of logical continuity from their function just as much as the commuters do.

Categories
Philosophy

A Science of Entropy: Anger, Bureaucracy and Systemic Self-Propagation

Complexity is a lot smarter than we are – all of our ratiobal interdictions into behavioural and sociological problems tend to amplify by displacement those problems.

Categories
technology

Cyber Insecurity: Endless Breaches

Context: New Data Breach Has Exposed Millions Of Fingerprint And Facial Recognition Records: Report There is an enigma here, far beyond the rank foolishness of keeping vast quantities of such sensitive data in an unencrypted format (see the linked article), there is a deeper problem. The more valuable any data is, the more incentive there […]