The cognitive potential of any system is not so much a product of its informational architecture as it is a function of the dissipative dynamics that sustain it. This is where the black box of intelligence comes in – it is not so much a lack in our understanding of how the brain works, but […]
Context: Deep Learning’s Diminishing Returns Rolf Landauer coined the phrase that information is physical. The consequences being that all computation and sophisticated or automated statistical analysis at scale has similar costs, at scale. Diminishing returns is a function of the second law of thermodynamics. The article’s observation that “new approaches” are required is accurate. Are […]
Context: Climate change: 2020 in a dead heat for world’s warmest year Climate change has been off the radar for a while, it seems and while the shit-show and train-wreck of 2020 rolls on into 2021, there are some things which seem painfully obvious to me but which also, for whatever reason, seem to be […]
You really have to wonder if senescence and potential (or probable and plausibly inevitable) catastrophic collapse is as necessary in this context as is the endless production of entropy as a corollary of complexity. Any specific system (or system of systems) can only ever maintain sustainable continuity through the offset and displacement of its own internal […]
Perhaps “the centre cannot hold” because there is no centre. Chaos and disorder are far more the native state of material (thermodynamic, dissipative) facts than are the projected order and control around which we reflexively and aspirationally self-validate. Curious, indeed, (and under one perspective) that everything emerging out of the complexity sciences suggests that it […]
It is a truth almost universally known but rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the strengths and the values of our world are simultaneously its weakness and qualitative (as much as quantitative) poverty. Contemporary communications systems have, for instance, been truly wonderous – they have brought us all closer together through near-instaneous text, voice and video […]
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 […]
Ideological turbulence, media distrust, fake news and the hyper-inflating bias towards successfully self-propagating inflammatory rhetoric in (or as) social media is one instance of a broader principle through which life and intelligence negotiate and harness or exploit entropy in information and energy processing systems.
From an Algorithmic Information Theory and general systems perspective, matter can be conceived of as an optimally concise algorithmic compression of energy.
The emergence of structured and patterned complexity may just be an inevitable consequence of a Cosmos in which the self-replicating, iterating logical process of self-replication itself represents the simplest, low-energy (and minimal algorithmic information complexity) state of any dynamical process.
This is how it starts: the heatwaves, the droughts, the fires, the extreme weather…
Organisational systems are as subject to the exigencies of thermodynamics as are any other material systems…
Daedelus Kite 