Categories
cybernetics

Disinformation:  Instrumentalising Communicative Ambiguity

Ambiguity is not the failure of truth; it is the field through which truth sustains itself. What we name “disinformation” is simply the deliberate modulation of this ambiguity—the thickening of uncertainty at the edges so that order can stabilise at the centre. Systems depend on that tension. Clarity cannot exist without contrast, nor coherence without […]

Categories
environment

Honesty or Extinction

Honesty or extinction. That’s the choice. Climate change isn’t a crisis outside us—it’s the mirror of everything we’ve built. Our systems, proud and precise, are designed to defend their own definitions. Governments, universities, corporations—all fluent in continuity, allergic to contradiction. They confuse repetition with stability, and stability with survival. But the planet doesn’t care for […]

Categories
cybernetics

Lattice

Meaning can be understood as relational invariance under transformation. In mathematics, invariance is what stays the same when everything else changes. In physics, such stability gives rise to conservation laws — momentum from translational symmetry, energy from temporal symmetry. Language behaves the same way: its meaning persists not through fixed definitions but through relationships that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Cybernetic Interdiction: Social Media

Spectral Coupling and the Frequency Control Plane of Meaning Most attempts to fix broken communication start at the surface of words. They try to add more facts, more corrections, more explanation. The deeper lever sits underneath the words. It sits in time. Meaning stabilizes when patterns repeat, align, and reinforce one another. That alignment is […]

Categories
cybernetics

Tesseract Dynamics: The Product is Conflict

Conflict is not an aberration of modernity; it is the essential product of our systems. Technologies, markets, and institutions do not simply stumble into conflict—they generate and depend upon it. This is not a metaphor, but a structural fact: complex systems reproduce the conditions that reproduce them. Conflict is not a regrettable waste product but […]

Categories
Philosophy

Truth Value

Any system that seeks to define and sustain truth must recursively encode its own procedures for definition, which necessarily entangles it in a feedback loop wherein the validation of truth becomes contingent on the continuity of the system itself; this induces a structural complication, not as error but as condition, such that any attempt to […]

Categories
Philosophy

It’s not about Truth

I’ve come to accept that what we often call intelligence—philosophical, mathematical, intuitive—is not the ability to accumulate facts or produce formal proof, but the ability to navigate what cannot be formalised. Real insight begins at the boundary where formal systems admit their own insufficiency. Gödel showed us that completeness is incompatible with consistency. Tarski showed […]

Categories
cybernetics

Formal Inertia

Mathematics is powerful not because it captures the world, but because it captures a way of speaking about the world—an internally consistent, symbolic shorthand for logical necessity. The danger arises when this shorthand, born of abstraction and reduction, is mistaken for the thing itself. We begin to force the world into the constraints of the […]

Categories
Philosophy

Value, Meaning, Truth

No one owns anything (or anyone!), in any ultimate sense. Deal with it. 🙂

Categories
literature

Mnemosyne

Mnemosyne, the Titaness of Memory, stands as one of the most profound figures in Greek mythology, embodying the living thread of memory that weaves the past into the present and propels it into the future. She is the daughter of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), representing a primordial force whose power shapes not only individual […]

Categories
technology

LLMs and Institutional Change

Current institutional angst (as sociocultural microcosm) and advice regarding the provenance of machine generated words, sentences and documents feels a little misdirective. That is, it still takes considerable intelligence and patience to extract and usefully curate prose or otherwise insightful text from these new tools. If an LLM has been used is itself neither good […]

Categories
cybernetics

World War Z: Disinformation

The soup de jour is disinformation: I found myself watching the movie World War Z (again) recently. The biological plausibility of a zombie virus that can detect and avoid sickness as a critical vulnerability and plot twist wasn’t quite enough to render the movie as being anything significantly other than “Brad Pitt saves the world, […]