Context: The next pandemic may be cyber — How Biden administration can stop it Interesting article, but the centralisation of resources and administrative control is a limited and piecemeal assertion over a global and overall systemic problem: • the irreducible, implicit and generally unacknowledged insecurity of digital technologies represents something of a leaking bucket that could […]
Author: G
Professor Bell provides a fascinating, artfully-abbreviated and profoundly well-informed historical survey of the steam, electrical, computational and AI/cyber-physical technological phase transitions of human civilisation. As an anthropologist, she grounds technological systems in the people and places that inhabit them. It is clearly of critical importance to consider the lived experience of a future that remakes us and […]
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Disentangling Love and Hate
Love is an experience and representation from inner to outer, from system to environment and from self to other. It is that direction and momentum that inversely generates and cultivates the experiencing “I” or loving person in reflexive self-definition through their relationship to that other. Imaginary hypotheses of “other” are metaphysical fictions no less than […]
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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 […]
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) […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
Daedelus Kite 