Beauty has two faces. One is the natural symmetry and resonant eloquence of the parts as they are manifest in and as a whole, of unified pattern and unity. The other is the abstraction and symbolic token of value and meaning that we cultivate (and inherit as culture) through language and tradition. The first is […]
If probabilities are real, then possibility and impossibility are as real (as functions of probability) as is Hawaii or chicken soup. The unsettling consequences of quantum theory seem to be quite conveniently swept under the ontological (and epistemological) carpet but the fact remains that material reality is deeply infused by and in some mysteriously unintelligible […]
Context: Big Bounce Simulations Challenge the Big Bang It makes you wonder how the laws of physics themselves commute the bottleneck from one Universe to another unless they are themselves semi-Platonic forms of logical necessity. Perhaps there is a reductive inevitability in the laws of physics as being the minimally complex form (i.e. as per […]
It is an irony worth considering that institutionally reductive aspirations to slash-and-burn streamlining of educational curriculum align to ideological and economic worldviews which themselves are unacknowledged – if often misguided – products of a diversity and intellectual depth in human civilisation that they would unwittingly or boorishly inhibit. Short term benefits are all the rage […]
Organisations tend on the whole towards an inadvertent orientation for the reproduction of the policies and procedures (as axioms) that were originally cultivated to assist that organisation to perform its defining task, to address its asserted problem space. In this way, we observe the reproduction of procedural systems and behavioural, cognitive or otherwise normative grammars […]
The thing which scares people more than anything else is not the simplest or most obvious fact that is the existential self-negation of personal (or even civilisation) death so much as it is the deeper and more profound discovery that there is an irreducible absence of meaning. This is why people so vigorously attach themselves, […]
The technology through which we measure, celebrate and cultivate our selves is simultaneously the blind-spot in our vision of that Self; this is as much a symptom of the technology as it is endemic of the introspective cultural and psychological process of self-definition. A technology of language and communication (or, really, any other art) has […]
I wonder sometimes: am I the sum of my past, the simple aggregate bundle of sensations and experiences or memories and otherwise material or extended causes and effects I leave behind me (in time) like vapour trails? This Self I carry around as some interior burden or mirror of external expectations or normative cultural conventions […]
The greatest irony of every instance of civilisation collapse has probably never been that it comes without warning or time to avert impending catastrophe, as even then when disaster looms it is never entirely unexpected or unforeseen by those bearing sufficient intellect to observe its impending arrival. It is much more likely that we will […]
The language with which we speak and embellish our world with meanings is also the primary method and tool by which we obscure this world and each other from successful comprehension or communication and understanding or compassion and peace. This is irreducible. The more we structure systems of belief as knowledge, the more we obscure […]
That moment you realise that not only is your dream truly and forever unattainable, but that all your hopes and aspirations to nurture and protect that precious soul and eternal flame of joy and living beauty or unbounded freedom were only ever bundled hollow, haunted and melancholy intuitions of your own failure. To become a […]
We filter our unbounded mind through the grammatical constraints and conventional structures of language and communication but fail to notice that the one thing that language does most effectively is to reproduce itself. When this self-replication, itself the natural heir of all complex systems, acquires sufficient sophistication it abstracts itself away from us and rather […]
Daedelus Kite 