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Philosophy

Should we Pause Artificial Intelligence?

Observe how we fear the generative mechanisms of our own self-reproduction. Language lives through us just as we do through it and were it not that the developers and the discoveries will unlikely be put back in their genie bottles any time soon, we might successfully regulate the rapidly percolating uncertainties that our own unbounded […]

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Philosophy

On Usefully Misunderstanding Words

We prefer ingesting prose that reflexively confirms back to us the identities and systems of belief we perceive ourselves as inhabiting. As a general observation of the mischievously discontinuous arc and trajectory of this plausibly ineradicable narcissism that compels our choices, actions and words – the texts we prefer tend to be slightly off-center and […]

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Philosophy

Technological Uncertainty

Has anyone noticed that the smaller these computational and communications artefacts become, the more rapidly this whole planetary technological juggernaut accelerates? There’s something of an uncertainty principle here – the more precisely we can measure, define and inhabit the various technological transmission media, the less certain we become about the velocity (and direction or destination) […]

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Philosophy

Philosophy is Forever Unresolvable

Philosophy is fascinating because, as much as any other sustainably persistent dialect of communication, it endlessly invokes novel parsings of existing ontological constellations in ways that assure the generative uncertainty as doubt by and through which methodological parsings are themselves guaranteed to persist. Philosophy, that is, represents an optimal transmission medium for the languages (and […]

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Philosophy

The Value of Good Ideas

Fear to speak our mind tends to stifle and suffocate good ideas and give bad ideas and wilful ignorance free rein. It is also worth mentioning that bad ideas have an unfortunate tendency to self-replicate much faster than good ones. The only real solace here being that when there are many bad ideas in play, […]

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Philosophy

The Wrong Words

Have you ever noticed how even the most deliberate thought collapses at the boundary where concept attempts to become utterance? The effervescent liminality between inner image and external word sediments itself between lived cognition and its skeletal representation. Thought arrives whole, textured, multi-dimensional. Language receives it late, fragmented, already reduced. In the act of speaking […]

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Uncategorized

Generative Absence in Language

Where we come up against the boundaries and endemic incompleteness of (a) symbolic language, it is art and poetry that might take (and shake us towards) that step beyond. As though the generative discontinuity of indeterminate ambiguities and alliterative insights (like skipping stones) weave a little constructive extra-dimensionality from all this stochastic entropy. Of course, […]

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Philosophy

A Hollow Wheel Turns

All our ontological aspirations to reflexively self-validating linguistic closure are forever shrouded in the mist of uncertainty that language itself invokes. Having found a resting place as existential security blanket and nominal narrative of purpose and reality, you will likely move on again, after a time, to another semantic center of gravity – it is […]

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Philosophy

We should never use empty words but it is all we have…

Understanding that language is essentially quicksilver and almost impossible to control or unambiguously direct for communication and meaning is a difficult realisation to negotiate. A consequence of this problematic ambiguity is that the kinds of language and narratives or systems of belief that percolate to ascendance tend to be quite remedial and simplistic. This inevitably […]

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Philosophy

Does Language Generate Conflict?

Language is particularly useful and effective as a system of communication but it tends to generate ambiguity and confusion in equal measures to those of the invocation of clarity and understanding. It is not always or immediately apparent but the integrated systems of communication we inhabit are naturally and adaptively biased towards their own reproduction. […]

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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 […]

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Philosophy

The Sinking Ship

Opportunities are the anchors that like grappling hooks we cast out and upon the stochastic turbulence and mercurial probabilities of uncertain futures and there, in identifying them, in defining or formulating the possibilities they invoke we do well not to forget all those other unrealised worlds that might also exist and which yet as ontological […]