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Tag: complexity

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    Failure of simplicity

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    1–2 minutes

    The only reason an idea takes hold is because it answers an emotional need. This is an instinctual recognition: the idea or message makes sense of the world in a way that aligns with your experience.

    This implies two things:

    1. The previous ideology and common sense messaging are no longer adequate.

    2. As the world progresses and grows more complex, we need more intricate and nuanced ways to interpret and process information.

    Yet, in the face of increasing complexity, the appeal of simplicity endures, hence the rise of conspiracy theories. These fantasies offer neat explanations (aliens, government cabals, Jews, a fake moon landing), but reconciling them with reality requires increasingly convoluted arguments, leading to shambolic constructions. Complexity, it seems, is inescapable.

    Historically, humanity’s progress has involved learning, moving beyond, and creating ever more complex systems to sustain ourselves and stave off boredom. Our simple pleasures require oddly sophisticated machines. As such, the most simplistic answer revert back to understanding human truths; classic myths which are never simple.

    Even access to these stories and information increases, meaning every response must account for more variables than ever before, necessitating more sophisticated tools for reduction and understanding to break through what we fail to see.

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    Simplistic governance

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    1–2 minutes

    To explain where you are now and predict (or forecast) the future requires understanding history, mythology, human nature, and science.

    With only partial models (or only a couple of disciplines), your predictions will be biased and your forecasts will be askew.

    Amplified ignorance across an entire democracy, manipulated by mediated algorithms, reduces the ability of people to model; they only react instinctively, emotionally. The result is that simplistic governance will take over as citizens become simpletons.

    There is nothing wrong with simple. The problem is that complexities manifest, seemingly producing themselves from simple starts (just a few proteins produce all of life), and require multifaceted consideration and foresight to evolve even moderately alongside.

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    Social Overcorrection: Grasping at Symbolic Solutions

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    1–2 minutes

    When trying to make up for mistakes, we become vulnerable to new forms of manipulation. In looking for immediate solutions, we tend to choose flawed solutions that are easy to hand.

    Applied to the social/communal sphere, our effort to avoid repeating atrocities (such as Nazism or slavery) creates new opportunities for totalitarianism: our insistent righteousness by saying “never again” becomes blind rigidity, overpowered extremism.

    Rather than learning from the past, we become more concerned with becoming virtuous and increasing our positional distance from it. As such, we cease to react to some forms of empirical reality and embrace the symbolic, as it alone offers an eternal, ideological guiding star divorced from the world’s complex muddiness.

    Since all symbols are stand-ins (reductive categorizations), the secondary traits of people (race/sex/religion) also become primary and more readily defensible. Yet, the symbolic defense becomes convoluted and complex, perhaps in inverse proportion to the discounted reality, as if we seek to recapture/recreate reality’s confusion, which we threw away for certainty.

    The past is thus repeated from our desperation not to repeat the past.

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    AI as Analyst: love, transference, and reduction

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    1–2 minutes

    Freud says the analyst evokes transference of love from the patient because of their ability to reduce complexities: the analyst discerns a kernel of truth, which guides the process, and grateful for this path, the patient forms a unique attachment they consider love.

    Applied to artificial intelligence, AI’s summarization skill mirrors the analyst’s reductive approach: generating simplified core truths as guides for alignment. This normalization (through guided reduction) ‘cures’ the individual.

    The reduction excites echoes love: a simplification that allows directed yearning to please and happiness with the self for discovery.

    In an additional step, the term “science” derives from the word Skei, which means “to cut.” Thus, scientists slice apart reality to achieve reductions, which allows comprehension, which can feel like love.

    This insinuates love is not about ‘complexity’ per se, but founded upon sustained artificial simplification, which is indeed complicated if not complex.

    (Freud insight from Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour podcast)

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    Creating complexity: sentience and divinity

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    1–2 minutes

    If sentience emerges from construction, be it organic or synthetic, then increasing complexity might be the key to developing consciousness.

    Consider a "replicant," inherently metallic and digital, programmed to perceive itself as mechanistic rather than sentient. This self-perception is shaped by programming and is attributed more to its material composition than to its complexity.

    This paradigm reflects our theological relationship with divinity, where creations are inherently subordinate. In crafting entities that are deemed "lesser," we mirror our own existential state: beings of flesh attempting to transcend our nature are committing a sin.

    This perspective suggests that our creations, no matter how sophisticated, are destined to remain fundamentally inferior, as we design in a reflection of our own human limitations.

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    Nihilism: All wood is potentially firewood

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    1–2 minutes

    An aspect of natural entropy is denied by our creative impulse: our construction, crafts, and myths expand and grow more complex. Surrounded by complex fabrications denying reality, there is a subversive pleasure in returning to materialistic reality.

    To resurface “the real” is oddly considered nihilistic, in part because it denies the abstract ideological prisons that drive so much behavior: the dreams society is built upon are more powerfully dominant than physical matter.

    Given the pervasive culture and economic underpinnings, perhaps the only way nihilism can exist is to become a structured corporation that burns its own money.

    Unfortunately, such sardonic insight is precisely the state of current reality, hence our reactive desire to burn the complexity down, reintroduce physicality as a return to humanity.

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    Mono-answer fragility

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    1–2 minutes

    A mono-answer is when all problems lead to one overarching issue, i.e., capitalism.

    Similar to a monoculture (where one crop is grown to the exclusion of bio-diversity, creating a fragile ecosystem susceptible to blight), the mono-answer’s simplicity is vulnerable to collapse with one argument.

    Reality is complex and by artificially simplifying it, we simplify our faculty for understanding and leave ourselves blind (from hyper-myopia.)

    Unfortunately, complex thinkers are dangerous and often alienated. Allies do not want you to have more than one answer; they need you to be predictable to pretend stability through consensus.

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    Life has to be lived

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    1–2 minutes

    The more we narrate our life, the less we are enacting t: we turn to language to fantasize and reposition ourselves, and as life grows more complex and callously brutal, words become easier than life.

    "Life will not be blathered into submission." ~ Ian McGuire

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    the gremlin in the machine

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    1–2 minutes

    When you are working on a complex machine, or maybe even a simple device like a bicycle, its ability to thwart you repeatedly, despite your persistent efforts, feels like you are struggling against the stubborn will of another person.

    Machines seem to possess a will: a determined antagonistic force that requires arcane psychological voodoo to overcome.

    To get your way and coax the cantankerous machine to abide by your control (temporarily) requires an affinity that finds life in the inanimate: a gremlin or golem soul invested in the stuttering steel to whom relational attunement cedes benefit.

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    “I have never met a shallow addict”

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    1–2 minutes

    Addicts are complicated and deep people who don’t know how to deal with their emotions.


    This is why they often turn to drugs and alcohol (sex or ambition as well) and cannot quit them. Turning inward to deal with your complicated self is more challenging than dying.