Categories
Philosophy

Interesting Things

The most interesting conceptual artefacts, entities and systems are often like this – they maximally replicate the degrees of freedom by and through which we might leverage utility but do so in ways that hardly if ever lock down ontologies and definitions in unambiguous closure. This is the recursive self-propagation of a logical depth and […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Expected Unexpected

The further and faster our collaborative human endeavour expands into the vast and sprawling information space we have cocooned ourselves in, the more that our cognitive hyper-extension in and as technology and myriad dialects of identity speciates and radiates, the more sophisticated and intricately complex our world becomes – the greater the dissipative acceleration into […]

Categories
Philosophy

Cybernetics and Cybersecurity

Cybernetics tends to be as diverse as the spectrum of artefacts, entities and systems to which it intelligibly or contextually applies. If applied to cybersecurity, must cybernetics necessarily internally model and assume at least the level of variety (as complexity, combinatorial entropy) that its object of study asserts? In this case, does cybernetics then acquire […]

Categories
AI Philosophy

The Self-Opening Door of Artificial General Intelligence

The technologies of Artificial Intelligence have had stunning success with a hyper-inflating speciation of statistical in logical and inferential complexity as the savant-like Narrow AI that Gary Marcus references. The recognition of an ontological bootstrap and conspicuous absence of “common sense” being an optimistic step in a direction towards General as (at least minimally) sentient […]

Categories
Digital Philosophy

Metaverse: Virtual Unreality

The philosophical question remains: is the hyper-extended cognition of abstraction into virtual worlds a running towards or away from reality, from ourselves? Utopia, dystopia or simultaneously both? We should not be surprised that, just as with any journey or symbolic displacement of subjective identity and experience that, regardless of the embellishment or sophistication of the […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

E.T. ?

In a Universe of potentially 2 trillion galaxies, by some models of cosmological inflation necessarily infinite in extent, we should be much less surprised that we have not found our own very specific and plausibly transient technologies staring back at us from this abyss. For perhaps no other reason than relative developmental and logical self-consistency, […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Metaverse Mortgages: The Absurdity of (Virtual) Value

Oh yes, mortgages are now a thing in the Metaverse. There is something really interesting here, from a speculative philosophical and psychotherapeutic perspective. Some people are quite willing and enthusiastic to jump on the bandwagon of perceived or projected value in and as virtual artefacts, entities and systems. This is plausibly because at a reflexive […]

Categories
technology

Algorithmic Futures: Competitive Forecasting

In any adversarial contest it is only ever entropy that wins. Not only this, but the contest and competition (pick a context, any context) is the carrier wave for a logic and information metric of difference that it itself circularly, recursively invokes. A predictive algorithm asserted incorrectly that Nadal would lose because it knew no […]

Categories
technology

Broken Machines

I’ve spent a long time now down the rabbit hole of technology, science and the conceptual ecosystems that accompany them. The extent to which these devices and machines are fundamentally not fault tolerant is for diverse, yet related, reasons of psychological and commercial self-interest quite widely unreported. The narratives of mechanical or computational ascendance rarely […]

Categories
technology

Metaverse Fashion

Context: What to wear in the Metaverse? Why should we even need bodies? The momentum (and compulsion) towards abstraction is and has always been towards the progressive refinement and umbilical detachment of a fully virtualised bundle-of-experiences as self. In as much as this self is still grounded in material information processes and thermodynamic-as-energy costs, what […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophical Idioms of Simulation

An effervescing philosophical idiom of simulation hypotheses is really just Cartesian doubt wearing steampunk cosplay. Even then and in so very many ways the associated concepts of rationality stretch back to an Aristotelian logical turn that passes through many minds and places before a Boolean backflip into computational brevity as manifest cybernetic control and all […]

Categories
information

Complexity, Disinformation, Strategy

An ineradicable problem in the context of engaging disinformation is that, of all possible paths we might as a fledgling technological civilisation have taken through the vast forest of combinatorial possibility, we have arrived in and at a world in which partisan difference and deceptive, adversarial contests have become the  methods by and through which […]