Categories
Philosophy

Separating Thought from Language in AI Language Models?

Separation perhaps, but we would be committing a major disservice to knowledge if we were not to acknowledge that both language and thought must derive in some way from deeper principles of self-organisational complexity in (and as) information, energy and logical or material communications systems in nature and physics. Language may be separable from thought […]

Categories
Philosophy

A Multidimensional World?

It’s quite a strange thing to consider but the question of whether or not higher dimensions exist seems to me to be precisely the wrong kind of inquiry to be making of this deeply mysterious human experience. Given the implicit linguistic (as neurocognitive) orchestration of experience, we should always acknowledge that those things we might […]

Categories
culture

Ebb and Flow

A favourite pastime of mine is sitting in cafes, reading relatively complex academic books and pondering deep thoughts. I consider the noise and distraction of my environment as resistance training, as an incentive to concentrate mental focus upon the hidden layers of experience that dwell so intimately, viscerally and yet innocuously in these everyday moments, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Leonardo da Vinci: Drowning in Imagination

Unable to focus on singular topics or projects for very long, was Leonardo da Vinci an embodiment of innovation as a specialist generalist for the information age, 500 years too early; or, was an information and technology revolution 500 years too late? Beyond wistful anecdotes and instructive historical vignettes, it is useful to consider that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Actually, this is why we can’t have nice things…

Most of us have to endure the gradual and eminently tedious acquisition of eloquent versatility across increasingly narrow conceptual and technical vocabularies and only then, having been profoundly shaped by the normative logical and grammatical, behavioural or cognitive organisational practises that aspirationally contain and constrain systems as a function of their sustainable continuity, finding ourselves […]

Categories
Philosophy

Battling Language and Thought

The battle against language and thoughts is uncannily familiar to me but should be no stranger to any of us. We find ourselves stranded and abandoned upon a vast and brutal desert of simple words, signs and symbols; with nothing other than the shifting sands of inconsistent logic and communication that lie at our feet […]

Categories
Philosophy

Intellectual Freedom

Intellectual freedom is a precious kind of friendship and honesty we can share with ourselves, even when it is unsafe or impossible to share with others. Sharing with others can be uncomfortable – and in some contexts, impossible – the emotional, visceral and intimately personal quality of ideas is as rarely acknowledged as is the […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Peaceful Delusions of Well-Intentioned Logic

Effective critical thought is only ever as effective as the axioms upon which it is founded and being that all linear, axiomatic and aspirationally well-ordered systems of logic (or belief) are generally only as good as their own implicit and irreducible discontinuities or functional and structural or cognitive blindspots allow them to be, we usually […]

Categories
Philosophy

Words Fail

I find that words are too slow, too clumsy and for all their intrinsic and adaptive plasticity as flexible tokens of an indefinitely extensible logical system of extended cognition in language, they are quite unable to obtain sophistication sufficient to actually capture or accurately reflect the quicksilver of thought. There are concepts, mental images and […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Is the study of language itself a language?

Can we consider the instance and structural context of the study of language to itself be a rare or unique language? What is a language? Can any ordered bearer of information be a language? Is a language only that ordered pattern of information that is understood, known, comprehended, intelligible? Is material reality a language? Is […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Mind, Information and Entropy

It is not surprising that the symbolic abstractions and mental worlds of homo sapiens arrive at incompleteness and negation but “deficiency” is a word perhaps altogether too easily attributed affective, emotional qualities.  The indefinite extensibility of (both) logical and material systems, and each in their own ways invoking parameters and probabilities unique to their own […]

Categories
Philosophy Science

How free would we all be if there was no ultimate truth?

I just read an interesting (partial) article/concept/book on life, the universe and everything from biologist Robert Lanza: “Biocentrism: A New Theory of the Universe“. I am not entirely convinced that the author is not just substituting one mystery and suite of questions with another. For instance – the role of the conscious observer in “creating” […]