Today's Elites

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Artificially intelligent?

What is the “density” of a quantum of “information?” Say that for example, I communicate to you a method for investigating anomalies in the domains of the inert, biophysical, and human consciousness or the mutual interaction among each of them. Now this method is a dialectic. That is, it is not a fixed set of nostrums or formulas that resolve a particular problem, but rather a methodology that subsumes whatever level of knowledge that might prevail at any future historical epoch. Take Socrates as the paradigm of this. Now it is nigh unto irrefutable that the dialogues of especially Plato which centered about the historical person of Socrates when taken up afresh by successive civilizations efficiently caused transformations in society. Thereby Socrates’ ideas acted efficiently to transform the practice of humanity centuries after his life ended. If you read Moses Mendelssohn’s Phaedon, essentially you see this principal revealed. In that what this dialogue does is that it uses the death of Socrates to convey a set of principles that subsumes a particular historical incident. There is nothing untruthful in having Socrates set forth ideas which are modeled upon the writings of Nicholas of Cusa and Gottfried Leibniz because that series represents a sort of self similar continuum of enquiry which is taken up afresh by successive generations, and thereby continuously enriched (or so one might hope.) Contrast this as an evolutionary principle with the threadbare and reductionist weltanschauung of Darwin and his ilk. The notion that somehow an accumulation of percussive interactions will somehow magically add up to such a nested series of subsuming transfinite ordinals is clinically quite insane. Yet, this is the prevailing methodology (if one chooses to characterize it by a name that it doesn’t deserve) of so called information theory today. This is basis for stochastic theory emanating from the standard of radically reductionist Empiricism This is what underlies the assumptions of the probability matrix of procedures inherited from Bayes, et al. The irrational a-causality quantum mechanics that Einstein scoffed at as God throwing dice. This is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in essence.
Given this prevailing idiosyncratic failure of choice of scientific method, how is it that any progress is made despite all of these crudities as it were? Well that goes to the point there is a sort of “auto pilot” that follows from the unfolding in investigating physical and biophysical reality itself. By sticking to the course of investigating a certain class of anomalies in science a Promethean quality of agapic (or brotherly) love of humanity wins out, ironically so. Imagine the irony when that author of the US constitution, erstwhile having the nom de plume of Silas Dogood, gave the world free of patent the lightning rod. So during the course of investigating the constituents of the immune system, for example, perforce one is ineluctably driven via a vector-like design inherent in this realm that smacks of a higher ordered principle. One does the good in spite of oneself (to paraphrase Shelley.) The question is when will humanity remove those self-imposed blinders of misguided ideology?

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