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, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Seeding Entropy

Context: China’s spy threat is growing, but the West has struggled to keep up …oh yes, and we might also ask: to what extent is the burbling, percolating insecurity of incessant intrusion, theft and deceptive misdirection actually a necessary and sustaining precondition for the continuity of a constitutively repressive political system? Is the invocation, cultivation and […]

Categories
Philosophy

It’s a Lie

Fakes fly further and faster than facts because truth is not and never was the ground state of communication. Truth is IN language but it is not OF language: indeterminacy regarding semantics and truth is a primary method of linguistic system self-propagation. We should, perhaps, focus less on rubrics of culturally and psychologically self-validating (as […]

Categories
Philosophy

Science and/or Art?

Art is not an externality. Abstractive visualisation is significant for gaining intuitions regarding many relational and topological spaces, networked systems, causal flows and (even, for elaborating) assertions of causality, intent and purpose in mind and/or nature. It is not a matter of art OR science, which as a logical relationship approximates and resolves to some […]

Categories
Philosophy

3 critiques of logical positivism

Verification Principle Limitations:Logical positivism asserts that a statement is meaningful only if it can be empirically verified or is analytically true. Critics argue that this verification principle is itself neither empirically verifiable nor analytically true, thus rendering it self-defeating. This critique challenges the positivists’ demarcation criterion for meaningful statements Reductionism and Oversimplification:Critics contend that logical […]

Categories
Philosophy

Certain Uncertainty in Science

In the quest to comprehend the vast tapestry of reality, we find ourselves at a crossroads of opposites and contradictions. It is as if the very fabric of existence hinges on a delicate balance, a critical dependence upon its opposite. This interplay of contrasts isn’t merely a linguistic construct or a byproduct of our cognitive […]

Categories
Philosophy

Leveraging the Limits of Knowledge in Language and Technology

The languages and technologies with which we engage the downstream consequences of our own technical (as linguistic and communications) productivity are as unable to capture, explain and bound the accelerating metamorphosis of technological #change as is that electromechanical juggernaut (itself and also) unable to provide the linearity and closure that is forever spruiks as its […]

Categories
communication

Strategic Communication: Countering Deception

An excellent piece of communication on the topic of communication: A spectrum and integrated matrix of regenerative uncertainty is simultaneously: that which compels that we must communicate, and, that which inevitably arises from communication. That we find ourselves somewhat lashed to the mast of this self-propagating vortex of competitive differences and ideological distances should really […]

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 […]