Categories
Philosophy

What is the “Secret Sauce” of Life and Intelligence?

The question might become as of the extent to which integrated biological systems express or manifest an altogether more subtle logic than purely brute-forced calculation. We have a tendency to isolate intelligence and problem solving in the processing unit but, beyond the implicit (or at least plausible) value in any identifiable circuits and cleverly-constructed cybernetic […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Aesthetics of Poverty

Aesthetics is not only about the appraisal and critical assessment of beauty in art or any other form. It is also an analysis of sensory experience, of perception. Perception is directly related to assessments of beauty, of symmetry and of value and inflates our experience with judgements – both known and unknown, recognised and unacknowledged. […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Abyss

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, quite famously, that “if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you” and it was meant as a warning, a caution following a statement that those who fight with monsters can themselves become monsters and this is in many ways a representation, among other things, of the manifest […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Emptiness

There is an implicit and irreducible incompleteness in things. Those who feel experiences most acutely, with greater sensitivity and the profound depth of interior, psychological reflection are much less likely to simply sweep away a lingering sense of unease, less able to simply accept with complete belief or unproblematic gullibility the profoundly hollow or superficial […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Borders and Boundaries

We live in a world that perhaps needs and unwittingly depends on its borders and boundaries but in many cases they persist not because they are necessary in any ultimate or foundational sense but quite simply because they can. There are deep truths here; of humanity, of history and of minds.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

One Big Family of Planetary Dysfunction

Notice that the love of family is the love that humanity really needs; we are, for all our shared problems, just One vast and dysfunctional (planetary) family.

Categories
communication

Disinformation Questions

Some general philosophical questions and reflections on disinformation: To what extent is disinformation not only evidence of directed or (even, in a limited sense) desirable artefacts, belief systems or entities, and to what extent is disinformation itself an irreducible property of large-scale sociotechnical systems? Our languages and institutional, geopolitical and self-organisational logics require we leverage […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Nuclear Weapons are Stupid

Context: Bombs and the Bikini Atoll I recently saw an interview with US Gen (ret.) Colin Powell discussing this technology. His assessment seems to be accurate – these weapons are so powerful and of such vast consequence that they are effectively and completely useless. If any one side or warhead-or-sabre-rattling power were to launch a […]

Categories
Philosophy

Is Authoritarianism a form of Mental Illness?

Context: Oakland, Portland sue over use of federal agents at protests A generally irreducible property of pathological ideologies, context and partisan-agnostic – in as much as any assertion can ever now be, is that they work industriously (and just as often unconsciously) towards the recreation of the circumstances that validate their insecurity and the actions […]

Categories
Philosophy

Deep Dives into Holistic Philosophy

Our world is complex and yet as a matter of cognition and, beyond the confused and hollow or unthinking tribally-reflexive and adversarial impulse that humanity is prone to express, of intelligence – we are bound to assert or overlay simplicities, mnemonics and shortcuts or cartographies to interpret all of this effervescent noise in useful ways. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Science and Logic versus Belief and Climate Change Denial: Duelling Uncertainties?

Context: ‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial Notice how the frame of reference represented by this (or for that matter – any) belief system is so easily detached from the reality and unassailable facts upon which it actually and constitutively depends for sustainable continuity and existence. Systems […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Necessity of Self-Deception

We are always and already primed, cultivated and prepared by those cultural information systems we inhabit to possess some primitive – but essential – form of self-deception. There is a necessary blind-spot in self-identity that very much forms the core around which that aspirational bundle of ambiguities, uncertainties and insecurities we identify as Self is […]