Categories
Philosophy

Leveraging the Limits of Knowledge in Language and Technology

The languages and technologies with which we engage the downstream consequences of our own technical (as linguistic and communications) productivity are as unable to capture, explain and bound the accelerating metamorphosis of technological #change as is that electromechanical juggernaut (itself and also) unable to provide the linearity and closure that is forever spruiks as its […]

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Philosophy

Bias in Machine Learning

Machine Learning amplifies existing signals in the data and also does so when we ourselves are quite unaware of that bias. Identifying biases and engaging them is, or has largely become, an art of post facto, retrodictive engagement. The futures technology generate are so often unacknowledged as recursively self-propagating compression waves, signals as an encoded  […]

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Philosophy

Conflict, Language, Communication, Technology

While it is inordinately difficult to remain politically agnostic or to detach emotion from remote observation of the grotesque inhumanity and unrepentant criminality of an irredeemable decision to inflict Imperialist war upon any nation, just as it is somewhat difficult not to cast a wry smirk in the general direction of self-disassembling totalitarian aspirations to […]

Categories
Philosophy

You are your digital devices…

There is an interesting, related theory hailing from philosophers Andy Park and David Chalmers. The Theory of Extended Mind asserts that, while your consciousness (whatever that may be) does seem squarely anchored between your ears, your cognition is a distributed entity that – yes – is characteristically if not uniquely “of human brains” but need […]

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communication

Strategic Communication: Countering Deception

An excellent piece of communication on the topic of communication: A spectrum and integrated matrix of regenerative uncertainty is simultaneously: that which compels that we must communicate, and, that which inevitably arises from communication. That we find ourselves somewhat lashed to the mast of this self-propagating vortex of competitive differences and ideological distances should really […]

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Uncategorized

Las Vegas UFO and Alien Encounter

When science encounters the unexplained it tends only to see reflected back those concepts that self-validate the assumptions by (and through) which this well-ordered system of knowledge persists. The absence of unambiguous evidence is also the kind of thing we might expect when encountering any intelligence that is seeking for whatever reasons to obscure its […]

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Philosophy

Technological Alchemy

It is worth reflecting that, as though some elementary yet monumentally high-dimensional linear reflex, it is at precisely the moment when our collective intelligence and expressive creativity is set free by #technology that we are also quite utterly and unwittingly imprisoned by it. As above, so below… indeed.

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Philosophy

Epistemological Closure?

It seems to me that most technologically-inflected discussions of what it means to be human begin from the assumption that our experience represents some kind of necessary closure as terminal (and teleological) endpoint. The notion that intelligence or sentience (and intelligence- or sentience-like) artefacts, entities and systems could ever represent any kind of pinnacle (or […]

Categories
politics

Chinese Aggression and Submarine Deterrence

In all its forms, a totalitarian state is reflexively oriented towards and dependent upon the threat and insecurity that conflict and difference with Others represents. Even if they invade and conquer Taiwan, the Phillipines, Thailand and Indonesia – the Chinese regime is constitutively unable to cease its aggressive rhetoric and actions as every part of […]

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Philosophy

What does AI mean for us all?

An interesting thing about Artificial lntelligence so rapidly acquiring such an eloquent aptitude to mimic, engage and constructively deceive us is that this ensemble of technologies do not in any comprehensive sense actually understand us – we and our intricately stochastic behaviours are merely so many numbers and statistical (as probabilistic) relationships or correlations and […]

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Philosophy

Mass Hysteria and Social Media

Mass hysteria in the age of social media is not any kind of an exception, it is the rule. The endless tesseracts of obsessively narcissistic taxidermy in filtered montage of body and culture may once have adorned our walls and our family photo albums but now populate our mobile devices, our cultures and our #imagination. […]

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Philosophy

Platonic Beauty in Generative Art

Artificial Intelligence has no experience of #beauty beyond its exposure to the corpus of training data with which its neural network weights and biases are programmatically refined. Despite this, it can return to us an image which we recognise as being in some way beautiful. The question that occurs to me is that of whether […]