Intelligence is either there in (or as) someone’s mind or it is not. Where it is not there, no amount of rhetorical hyperbole or tribal and ideological alignment can dissimulate its absence. Ignorance can in most cases be remediated, lack of intelligence is a little more difficult to amend.
It’s a big Buddha. I can’t help but wonder if the whole point of emotional non-attachment has been lost on some people. The more we attach ourselves to ideas of things, people, places – the more internally fragmented we ourselves become. We are all to some extent trapped by our own behavioural reflexes and the […]
We are all quite simply role-playing: doing what it is that we think that someone like that who we believe we are should be doing, regardless that there is no one thing that anyone actually is. Fascinated by this internalised mirror image of Other as Self, we find ourselves transfixed by fantasy and illusion. Even […]
Context: Why do we ignore catastrophic risk? It may just be that some entities, artefacts, events or (other) possibilities are so vast and so horrifying that they all but entirely invalidate the limited linguistic or cognitive referential frame(s) of this comforting little semiotic cocoon of complex tautologies and half-mirrored surfaces within which we (all) live. […]
Circularly self-referential and self-propagating information-processing systems, laws seek certainty by cultivating and generating referential systems which possess no ultimate or external authority, beyond those axiomatic assumptions upon which they are built. A certain necessity and importance of rectitude might be asserted from within any such hyper-inflating referential space but the ultimate authority that laws assert […]
It was Shakespeare who coined the phrase regarding love’s indifference to what we directly perceive with our senses but his intention was more to indicate that everything we do, no less – those deep visceral and emotional facts of our lives, are first and foremost mental phenomena. I love not what I see but what […]
What does it mean for a thing not to exist, for it to be quite literally “conspicuous by its absence”? When a thing that is there is removed, it is clearly an absence marked by memory or by material evidence, not that memory is perhaps all that trustworthy and notwithstanding that it is an irreducible […]
The first – and quite probably last – question will always have to be this one. All of our logical, mathematical and physical technologies or explanations and the essential cognitive hyper-extension of conceptual or material artefacts and information or energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems that we inhabit (and that equally, inhabit us) – this is all […]
We (all) often forget that every single thing any of us does is so stupendously unlikely in such a vast and ultimately meaningless Cosmos that every act, every thought and every artefact or consequence is of monumental significance. We corral these wonders into the small, everyday concepts and containers of art and objects we can […]
I would never suggest that any of us should let the truth get in the way of a good story (or sales pitch and project management agile scrum), but observe how often we end up with the developmental and technological cart placed (well) before the horse. Developments in AI tend towards various unknown (perhaps – […]
An interesting consequence of generalised attributions of human exceptionalism is that we tend to automatically believe that all intelligence, all value and all experience exist (and persist) in this diminutive cranial cavity we inhabit. Cogito ergo something is definitely going on between our ears but there is a deep and irreducible mystery at work (i.e. […]
The world is so beautiful and perfect in all the glorious randomness and unexpected symmetry or beauty of it’s flow and form. Why is it that the perfection of this world deviates in the way it does from simple linearity to recurse itself into hidden patterns of mathematical complexity that displace this symmetry into opaque […]
Daedelus Kite 