As an observer of media and communications systems in regards to oversight, constraint and psychological, cultural or ideological aspirations to control and manipulate, there is a curious enigma and blind-spot in all attempts to surveillance as a method of control. That is, specifically, that asserting prohibition and censorship is only ever superficially able to provide […]
Author: G
Spring’s scattered Autumn irony…
There is in these delicate flowers such sweetness and unbounded longing for life. These cherry blossoms from my garden were full of life a few days ago and now they have faded, as though in accelerated decrepitude their moving frame of reference and colourful Spring joys are as short as they are glorious. Where pale […]
Tautological Recursion
Bertrand Russell once remarked that all of mathematics consists of tautologies. In this sense, we are considering as logically foundational a vast, complex panoply of equivalences, equations, symmetries and relationships asserting unproblematic definitions, references, ontologies. It may be true that from within any system of reference, any conceptual schema whatsoever only acquires and maintains aspirational […]
The Power of the Collective
The mystery of this “power of the collective” is not in the overt presence or tidal, cultural and narrative-psychological force it compels. It is in the many and diverse ways that individuals bound together by information, communication and shared experience or role find themselves as bearers of a meaning and a message which is hardly […]
The Wisdom of Crowds
The “wisdom of crowds” is, beyond the statistical phenomenon of mischievously accurate prediction, rarely approximate to any kind of wisdom whatsoever. Swept away in swells of emotional passion, people rarely notice that in seeking belonging and a salve or treatment for the irreducible existential uncertainties or emotional insecurities of life, they actually, wilfully surrender their […]
Turning a profit from loneliness…
Turning a profit from loneliness through the promise and perfect fantasy of attention, loving gratitude and intimacy from beautiful people is the essence of all entertainment, all media and – if we’re to be particularly honest about the underlying psychological symmetries – of all business, all politics and all ideology.
In his classic Tao Te Ching (The Way of Life), Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu characterises the utility of what does not exist as being of profound importance. While there exist complex senses in which this illustrates a powerful gradient of logical thought, the fact is – and contrary to pretty much every single ideological position or […]
Who’s afraid of the big bad AI?
Artificial Intelligence technologies raise (or revisit) enduring philosophical questions regarding the relationships between notions of individuality, self-determination and distributed information systems (as language, culture, technology, civilisation) in which such concepts acquire meaning. The gathering stormclouds of technologically-mediated identity-harvesting, surveillance and (emerging artefacts, idioms and tools of) ideological control suggest that we do not understand and […]
Meaning does not reside in symbols…
The general assertion of significance and meaning as belonging to symbols (of Self, of nation, of Other, of flag or tribal, ideological and cultural association) is a direct and inverse consequence of a foundationally incomplete psychological identity; itself being little more than the symbolic or communications system and technological hyper-extension of a general principle of […]
Incomplete Sketches of Mental Life
Our mental images are the incomplete sketches upon which we build a whole world and in their useful ambiguity and uncertainty we cultivate our freedom to grow.
Hidden Geometry of Life in the Cosmos
Beautiful… and the fact that these spiral symmetries are ubiquitous as (a) most energy-efficient method of maintaining adaptive structural complexity is magnificent. There are abstract, logical corollaries of this. Interesting how life possesses similarities to abstract geometric patterns like this – adaptive systems that (soliton-like) autonomously self-propagate by the sustainably continuous information and energy-processing gradient […]
Love is a game best played by fools…
Love is a game best played by fools and in the end we are all played as so many fools by love.