I was reading somewhere that a certain species of solitary shark has been proven by radio frequency tracking devices to “hang out with friends” when there is an annual gathering of the species in a specific place. Not only was there a mass gathering, but the same sharks were repetitively found in the same “social” […]
Context: The CCP’s Official Journal Falls in Line with Xi Jinping’s Cult of Personality As a more general philosophical observation agnostic of specific contexts (including -isms or persons), human beings are subject to reflexive psychological imprinting of a sort that leads us to cultivate these fantasies and fictions of triumphant great leaders as an inadvertent […]
Notice how, if we are conceptually and cognitively able to step back and observe the forest rather than the trees, that the primary information system function here is that of the recursive self-propagation of soliton-like, continuously self-propagating waveforms in patterns of behaviour and thought. Those artefacts that are produced at times of duress and stress, […]
Flowers can never know that they must always be enslaved in a cage of their own entangled branches and upon encountering some other cruelty they ever assume it as their own; in this way chained dark and anxious sorrows masquerade as freedom while blossoms held in shadow might still sweet innocence bloom. It is we […]
It remains endlessly problematic that the words and the knowledge or cognitive information patterns through which we interpret our world are always already and inadvertently alienating and dissociative. The unity we seek is above and beyond and can never be bounded by the very language and thought which aspires to understand it. It is and […]
Wilfrid Sellars characterised the aim of philosophy “(…) abstractly formulated, (…) to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. The foundational discontinuity of history and in our current Global “civilisation” (such as it is) that leads us into endlessly futile internecine […]
What is life but a long string of melancholy pearls upon which we paint our purposes and interpretations that like the minds that carry them are all just so many dusty Autumnal leaves in time, shackled to an emptiness and eternity that is unknowing and blind, disregarding of our hopes and aspirations, our dreams. We […]
I am endlessly fascinated by the many ways that these systems of knowledge and information or culture and political momentum tend towards similar, recurring self-organisational and behavioural patterns. Much is (rightly) made of a contemporary, pronounced turn towards populism and authoritarianism. A suggestion for interpretation which does not seek to directly engage any specific instance […]
Meaning is an associative property. We define terms in reference to other terms and then those definitions tend by a trick of the (circularly recursive or holographic) light to assume standalone substance and significance but at the base there is nothing, no foundation or ontological anchor upon which to secure our languages, our selves and […]
Information, like entropy, is always created. When considered in gestalt: successful cultural, technological or socioeconomic systems (and their diverse artefacts or entities) are autonomously-oriented towards self-propagation as biological as much as material facts of information and energy-processing. One of the common errors we make when we engage the growing presence of both amateur and professionally-bespoke […]
The ways that fear and stress shape cultures and nations may have corollary systems, symptoms and processes to those that haunt individual brains, personal experiences and memory. The amygdala hijack is in some places and at some times a distributed cultural phenomenon. Microcosm/macrocosm explanations are useful in this context but can be (and often are) […]
The dynamism and flexibility of language is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. This is a corollary of the abstract/logical and concrete/material extensibility that haunts technology as cyber (in)security but is by no means limited there. It is an irreducibly discontinuous symmetry of uncertainty that plagues all organisations and institutional contexts. The incessant invention of […]
Daedelus Kite 