Circularly self-referential and self-propagating information-processing systems, laws seek certainty by cultivating and generating referential systems which possess no ultimate or external authority, beyond those axiomatic assumptions upon which they are built. A certain necessity and importance of rectitude might be asserted from within any such hyper-inflating referential space but the ultimate authority that laws assert […]
It is unlikely to be a popular or perhaps particularly useful philosophical reflection but, as it turns out, many of the questions of complexity, complex self-organisation systems and the underlying logical discontinuities by which emergence and self-propagation occur and persistently manifest are not a difference in kind but of degree to the ways in which […]
Einstein couldn’t quite close the loop on his unified field theory. One reading of a hybrid montage of Algorithmic Information Theory, Kolmogorov Complexity and the (Incompleteness) consequences of logical self-containment in any self-describing system suggests that we may end up with more attractive offices (or desktops) and blackboards but that we, too, will all end […]
Context: This AI Robot Just Nabbed the Lead Role in a Sci-Fi Movie Dissimulated truths (here, as robotic self-representation) are perhaps always more compelling (if disconcerting) than unproblematically verifiable or “real” ones. Where a truth (or representation) is introduced as an overtly plausible fake, it is the slippery slope and unravelling, accelerating diffusion of value […]
It endlessly mystifies me that humanity, in finding itself so much more Globally-connected from an information or communications and technological perspective, simultaneously finds itself so catastrophically fragmented, isolated and divided from itself. It was never that we could not obtain the Universal freedom, direction or common goal that might potentially have united us so much […]
As it ever has been with this human being: finding an order, a pattern a convention or conceptual trope we tend on the whole – and with very little convincing required to overcome what minimal (and liminal) barriers to our gullibility that might exist – to mistake the order we find as being meaningful, objective, […]
In what ways does regulation, interdiction, surveillance and retrospective analysis or definition actually and inadvertently (re)produce the problems it seeks to diminish? Distinctions between legal and illegal are clearly and self-evidently important but in terms of comprehensive analysis and aspirations towards effective problem resolution they may also be a foundational misdirection. It is becoming clear […]
Context: Four philosophers who realized they were completely wrong about things The article referenced above is an interesting, if spectacularly shallow, reflection on conceptual about-faces in philosophy. The deeper lesson and message here is not so much that these particular – if diverse – philosophical, political or theological world-views (and their proponents) found themselves in […]
Context: Nobody Knows Anything About China It is of the nature of a science or an art of existential introspection (not to mention institutional knowledge) to seek the least-incorrect and lowest-energy, succinct model of an Object or Entity. The curiously mischievous enigma of such a psychologically-reflexive aspiration towards ordered pattern as #truth or fact – […]
Context: Facebook staffers walk out saying Trump’s posts should be reined in It is interesting to reflect that, shameless Executive bloviation notwithstanding, information and communications technologies from (for instance) Lascaux through emojis have never really been about truth and falsity so much as they have been about naked self-replication of the encoded system they bear. […]
A problem that I find myself returning to incessantly over the course of extended study and participatory observation in this human life and the diversity of cultural experience we all share is that of misunderstanding. The Philosophers would perhaps identify the problem as being one of Ontological Misunderstanding, of an essential mischaracterisation or ill-informed pattern […]
Context: Officials see extremist groups, disinformation in protests A Gordian Knot. How much of this disinformation is generated internally and how much externally to national borders? Have we all (i.e. Globally) arrived in a set of circumstances that suggest that, functionally – at least, the differentiation of source and attribution is not as (ultimately) significant […]
Daedelus Kite 