There are many kinds of fear. Some of them are straightforward, unproblematic and represent a simple correlation between a concept and the thing it represents. In this sense a fear of a specific animal is usually just that and regardless that arachnophobia, for instance, rarely represents something unconscious or indirect other than a linearly-related fear […]
The perceived value of any particular information system, entity or artefact is directly proportional to the combined resources applied to protect it from unauthorised access. It is only as a function of the most simply-conceived models and idealised frameworks that such a dynamical system could ever remain static and unchanging. The reality is that complex […]
Power is really an inverse function of ethics. What is considered permissible or (indeed) valuable under any moving ethical frame of reference is implicitly – some would argue necessarily – representative of the power structures, systems and integrated social, political and ideological modalities of a time and place. Notice also that what is considered good […]
I’ve been watching and worrying as the wheels of war turn once more, churning lives and bodies like fuel for some gargantuan machine that blindly seeks nothing more than its own effective self-propagation. No one can control this monster and as a complex information-processing system, all contours and arcs of territorial self-interest and existential fear […]
People don’t fear death anywhere near so much as they are afraid of being forgotten. It is all part of a strange game we play with in which a symbolic life and the complex narratives of abstraction we build around living comes to envelop and invalidate the concrete facts upon which that fragile experience so […]
There is nothing so simultaneously intangible and yet visceral, concrete and consequential as unbounded, unselfish compassion. Every step and gesture or word oriented towards hate and war is a failure and yet finds itself masked with a purpose, self-determination and simplistic caricature of meaning that draws us all along quite unwittingly towards our own destruction. […]
As much as DNA encodes information abstractions that become concrete instances expressed through phenotypes, as an information system it also represents something of an inverse mapping of the environmental context in which that phenotype provides adaptive leverage. This indicates a continuous and unbroken, singular or unified information system. We tend to think in terms of […]
Language is fascinating. From the inside of the (i.e. this) referential system, the combinatorial possibilities are effectively unbounded. Notice that linguistic compression waves of complexity as ordered information pass quite autonomously through a transmission medium of narrative cognition, culture, communication – encoded through and as our minds. Human thought and behaviour becomes the extended phenotype […]
Context: Scientist: Extent of DDT dumping in Pacific is ‘staggering’ As a species and (such as it is) a Global civilisation, we surf on the breaking waves of short term advantage while incessantly displacing cost and complexity into the future as “someone else’s problem”. In contexts such as this instance of toxic envenomation of an […]
If it is true, as I currently believe, that language manifests or instances an adaptive and emergently complex holistic structure that partially pre-processes (and stores, distributed for resilience and redundancy against loss that) information, the question of cognition-as-ordered-thought becomes one of just how much of our choices and self-determination is outsourced or displaced to the […]
Note: this was originally written as a response to a specific contemporary geostrategic context for an audience that was spectacularly uninterested in my opinion, so I share it here just to keep it in some modest sense “alive” as a bundle of ideas. I can’t help but wonder if the threat of war is itself […]
Conflict is the flip-side of a difference that is itself the necessary condition for the production and definition of information. Being that contested information spaces are now ubiquitous, it should also be clear that the competitive dissonance of endlessly self-replicating information hyper-inflation is an effective proxy for conflict. What does this mean? Quite simply: that […]
Daedelus Kite 