So a couple weeks back I posed the Augmentation Paradox:
The more you ‘improve’ some ancestral cognitive capacity, the more you degrade all ancestral cognitive capacities turning on the ancestral form of that cognitive capacity.
I’ve been debating this for several days now (primarily with David Roden, Steve Fuller, Rick Searle, and others over at Enemy Industry), as well as scribbling down thoughts on my own. One of the ideas falling out of these exchanges and ruminations is something that might be called ‘anarcho-ecology.’
Let’s define an ‘anarcho-ecocology’ as an ecology too variable to permit human heuristic cognition. Now we know that such an ecology is possible because we know that heuristics use cues possessing stable differential relations to systems to solve systems. The reliability of these cues depends on the stability of those differential relations, which in turn depends on the invariance of the systems to be solved. This simply unpacks the platitude that we are adapted to…
View original post 858 more words
synthetic zerØ 
I saw this original post when it went up on three pound brain, and tried to make sense of it. It’s neat to see you’ve reblogged it here. What are your thoughts?
well i’m one of the et al in RSB’ post/links so some of my reactions are in those threads but for me the trans/post stuff is more interesting/useful as sorts of limit-terms, highlighting as best we can the limits of our grasps and ideally (tho not likely!) to serve as at least yield signs if not stop signs (do you know isabelle stengers’ plea for slow science?).
RSB is big on the total failures/gestalt-switches but i don’t think we will get that far as the relatively lesser (but still brutally lethal) failures of our grasps (blinkered by our cognitive-biases) are likely to destroy not only the organic forms of intelligent life but also the physical infrastructures that potential AIs would need to come into being and to continue on. that’s a bit fragmentary and on the fly but hopefully gives you a sense of my take?
see what you think of:
https://syntheticzero.net/2014/01/07/assembling-ethics-in-an-ecology-of-ignorance-paul-rabinow/