Tag: uncertainty

Categories
cybernetics

Disinformation Dynamics

Language is a dynamic communicative field of oscillatory coupling, in which coherence, drift, and disinformation emerge as harmonic modes of the same process. Drawing on Kuramoto’s synchronisation model, synergetics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and information theory, this essay interprets linguistic activity as rhythmic modulation between repetition and deviation. Meaning arises through metastable oscillation among semantic attractors, maintained […]

Categories
cybernetics

Addicted to Technology?

Technology operates as an engine of sociotechnical addiction not only because of the dopamine loops it inhabits but because of the recursive deficit embedded in every function it provides. Each convenience extracts slightly more than it gives back, yet disguises this loss through displacement: the cost is shifted outward, onto others, into the future, or […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technical Insecurity

The strange game of personal, digital (ie cybersecurity) hygiene is a mirror turned back on itself. Someone might believe that they are essentially protecting personal data, identity, security — but in truth what is being protected are the very contours of surveillance and extraction required by the (ie world, integrated) communications system. Every password, every […]

Categories
Philosophy

Indeterminacy: Metastable Humanity

Belief systems—political, spiritual, cultural—do not cohere because they achieve certainty. They cohere because they cannot. The very fact that their claims are indeterminate and unprovable generates the turbulence that binds them together. What looks like a contest over truth is, in effect, the medium of systemic persistence. Institutions, rituals, and governing frameworks stabilise themselves by […]

Categories
Philosophy

Dependent Definition

The more precisely we define and describe any system, the more deeply it becomes embedded in the field of relations (and/or language) that makes it possible. This is not an accidental by-product of analysis but a structural inevitability: to single something out is to weave it more tightly into what surrounds it. Every definition is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Absurdity

A thing being as equally and oppositely defined by that which it is not as much as by what it provably is (or consensually appears to be), the absence of its opposite is the simultaneous presence of its psychological, cultural and technologically-mediated self. Facilitated by conveniences of Gestalt illusion, familiar enough to student artists but […]

Categories
Philosophy

Does AI understand anything?

Is “does the AI understand meaning?” an inadvertently deceptive question? We are intent on chasing and catching butterflies with a jar made out of butterflies! Yes, that may just have to be the nature of any expansive philosophy of language but the least we might do is to acknowledge the core intractability of seeking explanatory […]

Categories
Philosophy

Generative Uncertainty

Indeterminacy is the generative core of cognition. It is an elementary absence in knowledge that counter-intuitively inflates language (and communication) with meaning.

Categories
Philosophy

Confusion and Insecurity

I suspect that human confusion and belligerent insecurity may be irreducible. This is not to say that these things are endemic or necessary properties of either ourselves, or of the world more generally. It is to suggest that our historical development and evolutionary inheritance has so profoundly entangled intelligence with uncertainty that we are not […]

Categories
cybernetics

AI and Strategy

The relationship of new technologies with sustainable organisational learning and growth is not itself new. It’s a journey of adaptive sociotechnical integration that is as beneficial to consider in the strategic whole as it is mandatory to define and refine in the instrumental parts. What is new is that non-linear effects are inevitable at scale. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Partial Selves

Humanity is, as ever, bound by our endemic fascination and obsession upon details and aesthetic narcosis in the beauty of visual and narrative abstractions. We serially fail to recognise and comprehend that it is the property of recursive self-similarity that is far more significant than any of its transient instances. Beautiful, but profoundly incomplete, we […]

Categories
Philosophy

Epistemological Bootstrap

Our greatest risk may be that we each and all entertain and inhabit a reflexive abhorrence of the essential uncertainty that science is, if inadvertently, bound to generate. This, I think, represents a key misunderstanding in how we cultivate and describe theories (and technologies). The aspirational orientation towards epistemological closure, communication and control is a […]