Categories
life

Purpose in Life

Purpose is really just actualised meaning and just like meaning there is no purpose in life other than that which we make. The reason that most people are looking for meaning or validation and something, anything at all to provide a goal or trajectory around and as which they might wrap their aspirations and goals […]

Categories
Philosophy

Freedom is not of self, it is from self.

One thing that appears as something of a universal property of human behaviour is that we define ourselves much more by negative experiences than by or through positive ones; regardless of the extent to which we might prefer to maintain positive affirmations and self-perceptions – the darkness looms large in our imaginations. Most shared (national) […]

Categories
politics

Personality Tests: Political Metrics

Context: http://www.politicalcompass.org This kind of test resonates with precisely the kind of personality assessments that Cambridge Analytica so successfully exploited. I’m not asserting that any inadvertent conspiratorial undercurrent exists in this instance but there may be (other) rich philosophical seams of insight to be mined here. Notice that an observational, participatory metric and expression of […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Dissociative Beauty

“My beauty was my curse, so to speak; it created an impenetrable shield between people and who I really was.” ~Hedy Lamarr There really does seem to be something of a deep and irremediable sorrow in all great beauty. We might say the same of a beautiful mind as much as of an attractive face […]

Categories
Philosophy

Psychoanalysis as a “talking cure”?

Is it we who seek balance through conversation, through language and an endless aspiration towards resolutions that seem to forever fade away into uncertainty and unknowing? Or is it in some profoundly unacknowledged, unacknowledgable way a language and the autonomously self-propagating patterns of cognition and communication or culture that we inhabit that are actually seeking […]

Categories
Philosophy

An Unbalanced “I”

We all live in half-mirrored labyrinths through which we view this world as a kaleidoscopic, reflective collage of our own dreams, hopes and desires. It is a necessary function of individuality (or ego) to be structured this way – as though “from an inside looking out” – but the difference and differentiation between inner and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Information Entropy

Information is a measure of difference and the extent to which we might assert that it possesses meaning is a function of the entropy or unexpected qualities it possesses or is perceived to have. Our minds are fine-tuned towards the recognition and differentiation of pattern from background noise but we quite rapidly desensitise to pure […]

Categories
Philosophy

Logical Flowers

Finding myself alone and sitting in a local coffee shop on a Saturday morning, I noticed a game of chess in progress at the table behind me. It struck me that the specific configuration of the end game being stumbled through with much gusto (and less art) was quite possibly a unique pattern of logical […]

Categories
Philosophy

Peace is Freedom from Self

There seems to be something of a plausible inevitability to depression and psychological suffering. Being that our minds have been sculpted by long-term evolutionary biases towards survivability in a probabilistically uncertain and materially dangerous world, there is something of a hard-coded orientation towards pessimism (or at the very least – pragmatism) within us all. Culture […]

Categories
Philosophy

Freedom

You can neither give nor take freedom from someone else in any profound, enduring or ultimate and Universal sense – they always and already possess it and no matter how much you rationalise or embellish it with words and reasons or project ethical, ideological and behavioural grammars upon it or as it, the underlying fact […]

Categories
Philosophy

Rejection Reflection

Rejection is an empty room. Is the hollow hell of fear we feel the clear and present absence as much and in or of ourselves as that of any Other? We each and all in turn eventually reject that Other self and in dusty, mirrored isolation turn once more towards our own essential emptiness and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Growing Up

How true it is: even as responsibilities (and their flip-side of worry) proliferate, as we take on so many more burdens and find that we must internalise the normative expectations and behavioural or cognitive and technologically-mediated vocabularies of a world that itself hardly knows any better than does an infant when first learning to walk, […]