Categories
Philosophy

Are we free?

Freedom is a concept we all covet but the truth is we rarely understand or consider anything much more than the simplest of interpretations. Many of us interpret freedom from external as freedom to make choice. The choices we make are rarely as free and unaffected as we would prefer to believe. The world in […]

Categories
Psychology

Human Beings Being Human: Anger

It is a simple truth. Fear drives most of our irrational decisions and our inability to admit it is in fact the greatest fallacy of all. Violence, war, hatred, discrimination, cruelty – it is all at base and in essence just fear under another name. People fear the truth of their own essential vulnerability more […]

Categories
technology

Technological Innovation: Blue-Sky Dreaming

Context: Graceful robotic swifts take flight in latest Festo demo Fascinating technologies. We should perhaps not be all that surprised when these technologies approach (if asymptotically) the neurophysiological and anatomical metabolic efficiencies and long-evolved adaptive aptitudes and spontaneous information-entropy-generation of living systems. Work is already and clearly being done in this area. Long-range blue-skies thinking […]

Categories
technology

Technology Copies Itself Through Us

What I find unrelentingly entertaining about the technologically-mediated collective and aspirationally-individuated self-definitions of our historical moment is not that we (all, and each in our own ways) seek to create and sustain these distributed and functionally differential or dissociative Others of self-representation that we endlessly cultivate. What is more interesting is that we rarely notice, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Does Technology See Us as We See Ourselves?

Technology is always and already the cognitive hyper-extension of our minds and the many ways in which we may choose (or be chosen) to see ourselves through the diverse manifestations of this technology constitute the complex forms of introspective life that we (perhaps inadvertently) inhabit. The material extension and concrete presence of technology masks it’s […]

Categories
Epistemology

The Darkness of Knowing

It is unlikely to be a popular or perhaps particularly useful philosophical reflection but, as it turns out, many of the questions of complexity, complex self-organisation systems and the underlying logical discontinuities by which emergence and self-propagation occur and persistently manifest are not a difference in kind but of degree to the ways in which […]

Categories
life

The Endless Heartbreak of Living Loss and Emptiness

Beauty, like life, is a transient thing and the experience of it brings as much suffering as it does joy – an equation perhaps weighted to the darkness more than to the light and in the inevitability of the ends we all must face, this seems a certain truth. The sense of fragility and indefinable […]

Categories
Philosophy

If ignorance is bliss, then freedom is…

If ignorance is bliss, then freedom is just not giving a shit anymore. I have done it, you have done it, we all do it at some point in our lives – we seek fulfilment and self-validation through other people’s approval as though this might provide some freedom or sense of self-worth but it rarely […]

Categories
art

Loss and Dusty Desolation

A landscape of dusty desolation is beautiful as bare reminder or relic memory of each wonderful thing that no longer dwells there. The broken building brings a nameless frame that haunts this hallowed emptiness like scrub green masks hang dry mist upon the shallow valley. Sparse Somali scene, a momento mori under the infinite emptiness […]

Categories
poetry

Double Bubble Ballad

We two passing bubbles bind in tender bond and balance find in each that missing part of each that is in and of the other’s emptiness.

Categories
politics

The Disunited States of America

Context: Republican plan could embed destructive US foreign policy What a curious world this is where the aesthetic ambiguities of political self-interest are quite prepared to embrace such dissociative pathologies (and personalities) as would have shamed their forebears into abject silence. In some ways we might assert that this is symptomatic of a historical moment […]

Categories
politics

Why the UK Government stumbled on a timely pandemic response? It’s not what you think…

Context: The Covid-19 Catastrophe; Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened – review An interesting article, skimmed, but honestly – we shouldn’t waste excess quantities of spilled ink or time on what is really quite a simple problem. That is: the grammars, games and mechanisms of political selection and government installation of and for […]