Nick Lowe wrote “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” in 1974, but it was Elvis Costello’s 1979 version that gave it its permanent voltage. Costello took a gentle lament and drove it harder, tighter, with that clipped, anxious delivery that felt like someone shouting into a cultural headwind. By the time it appeared […]
The more I learn, the more I study, the more I come to understand, the more it seems that everything is, at its core, completely random—and perhaps necessarily so. In that randomness lies a kind of essential meaninglessness, or rather, a meaning that emerges only as the inverse echo of its own absence, enigmatic and […]
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 […]
The technologies used to computationally automate the analysis and production of text content rely on the implicit statistical regularities of human language. We all know that these tools are really just parroting back the patterns and narratives of speech and written artefact without any degree of comprehension or intent but it is quite simple to […]
Context: The Human Genome Is—Finally!—Complete This is interesting, of course, but access to the catalogue of the Library of Congress is not the same thing as understanding its contents. (Enter: John Searle’s Chinese Room, stage left.) Of note here is that a record of information is as a function of observable difference in or as […]
The key reason that we are unable to completely and comprehensively understand the world we live in is because the core systems symmetry of analytical leverage necessitates that we, ourselves, are removed from the equation. Any whole systems analysis requires us to consider that there is no outside if the system under analysis. The consequences […]
I am engaged in an unrelenting death-match of Greco-Roman wrestling with mobile device spell checkers. I have had some very near-misses on social media. The spell checker on my phone recently tried to insert Gestapo instead of gestalt and circumcision instead of circumlocution; needless to say – this would have dramatically re-framed the intended meaning […]
Has anyone (else) noticed that the proliferation of communications technologies has occurred in direct proportion to the level of misunderstanding and confusion in the world? It is not that we do anything new by misinterpreting each other’s intentions – as people have been doing this for as long as there have been people – we […]
Daedelus Kite 