Categories
Philosophy

Conscious AI?

I’d be much more worried about an unconscious AI. The impending corporate dissimulation of an omniscient technocratic overlord will attract and acquire all the trappings and recursively self-propagating (human) interfaces of a complex system that maximally self-propagates and self-sustains as a function of the uncertainties it invokes in regards to ambiguities regarding the proof of […]

Categories
communication

Disinformation Wars

In a distributed, ubiquitous information space, everything (including this brief paragraph) is in play. While it is true that complex communications systems can (and do) have many centers of gravity, some of the interesting considerations here orbit a fact that the ascendant networks and platforms of information transmission maximally persist as a function of replicability, […]

Categories
Philosophy

All the Simple Things

What is known (or is believed to be known) varies, adapts and undergoes the relentless metamorphosis of entangled streams of intersubjective abstraction we experience as cultural (and now, explicitly, technological) reality, but amongst all this effervescing percolation and uncertain intentions of identity and difference there remains a constant. The song, that is, remains the same […]

Categories
Philosophy

Deceptive Replication

Communication is not primarily a function of truth or any kind of existential necessity – survival, organisational continuity and culture. It is a process that engages and contains these things but where we tend towards error is when we think we know what communication intends. The intentions are purely of our own individual, collective, collaborative […]

Categories
Philosophy

Mirror, Mirror: Enigmas in Language

Context: — Three ideas from linguistics that everyone in AI should know — I do wonder if we might fundamentally misrepresent our relationship to these systems of symbolic communication as something of an irreducible function of language itself. Noting here that the persistent problems of these LLMs with bias, truth values and drift into effectively […]

Categories
Philosophy

Political Philosophy

“Political philosophy” is a fascinating oxymoron. At once, a dissimulation of the self-validating tautologies that it simultaneously asserts as transparent inevitability. For all its sophistication, philosophy might also and in essence resemble just such an indeterminate tesseract of complex self-referentiality as is so characteristic of political (among all other) systems of belief but it more […]

Categories
history

Palace of Lies

The autocrat’s gambit is to create a vacuum between fact and fiction and there, in worlds and words of half-truth and twilight misrepresentation, to leverage this difference and there make for themselves a golden palace of power and lies. The amount of information and energy invested in obscuring the facts will eventually be measured in […]

Categories
politics

Political Illusions

A magician is someone pretends not to have what they have: a trick, a method, a sleight of hand or some sophisticated logical ploy intended to deceive an audience. A charlatan is someone who pretends to have what they do not: competency, knowledge, skill, authority or substantive and sufficient intellect for whatever masquerade they seek […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaning

We should not be surprised that our collective and individual search for meaning in life is difficult to resolve. The tools of language by which we attempt to plumb the depths of life and existence are unfit for defining or comprehending ultimate meanings in either ourselves or the worlds we inhabit. The language and logic […]

Categories
Philosophy

On things we can never know…

Context: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, The Inherent Limitation Of Mathematics The discontinuous boundary condition at the edge of (as much as being that around which we built) logic, physics and mathematics is a global property, distributed across and as the complex hypersurface of a self-propagating, soliton-like hybrid matter/energy/information system. It is as though a logical vacuum, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Truth and Ambiguity

Truth is a mischievous beast. Everywhere asserted, almost nowhere justified and in those rare instances when it might have been said to have been proven or unambiguously defined, it requires we suspend ourselves on contraptions and hooks of such intricate complexity that it is quite easy to forget what we were initially discussing or seeking […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unreality

The singularly unifying property (as an aggregate sum total entropy and hyper-inflating combinatorial multiplicity) of all diverse methods, logics and schools of philosophical thought is precisely the enduring presence of the absence of unity. This is instructive as to what ontological properties reality (as much as experience or valid descriptions) might possess. If the unifying […]