Categories
culture

The Postman died from a Broken Heart

What makes a beautiful story is often not so much that part of the narrative that is obvious and visible to the eye – like the tip of an iceberg – but rather all those depths that remain unseen, unknown and unsaid. Sometimes the back-story is even more powerful than the story itself and raises […]

Categories
culture

Thinking Slow, Thinking Fast, Thinking Beyond Binary Systems

This is an age-old competition between efficiency and resilience, aesthetics and utility. While efficiency and resilience are clearly placed here, aesthetics (as perception or experience) and utility (as effect-multiplication or intentional consequence) oscillate across arbitrary boundaries and definitions. There is an unacknowledged dimension to this binary model; that is, not so much that any reductive […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

How, exactly, does Democracy survive?

An interesting observation is: if you consider the overall system of antithetical ideologies and jockeying competitive (self-)interests in play here, the self-defining competition between Democracy and “Other” kinds of political system seems to be a necessary component in the sustainable continuity of Democracy itself. The gestalt of the Global information-processing system lumbers and lurches along […]

Categories
Philosophy

Organisational Philosophers?

The art of the concept (as Philosophy) is one which, perhaps, largely sits outside the grammatical and behavioural constraints of non-trivially sophisticated (i.e. complex) organisational or corporate systems, and for all that it remains as plausibly unintelligible to those systems as it simultaneously embodies inestimable value for them. It is in many ways not that […]

Categories
physics

Observation Changes Reality

Context: Observing The Universe Really Does Change The Outcome, And This Experiment Shows How There are aligned problems in logic here. If the description of a system (pick a card, any card: mathematics, material reality [a.k.a. physics], sentience, digital transformation, cybersecurity, culture, science, politics, language, etc.) is also a component element of that system, the […]

Categories
technology

Psycho-Cultural Computation?

Context: New analysis of human portraits reveals shift in culture, cognition We could just as well speak of aspirationally-unified (boundless, seamless, reflexive, interdependent) cultural and cognitive information-processing fields, topologically Ouroboros-like and akin to those conceptually-variegated and mischievously labyrinthine mathematical beasts of physics. A clear problem of determination, definition or observational identification here is in that […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Authoritarian Vacuum and the Chaos that Follows

Which begs the question: if individuals tend on average towards a path of least resistance and select (or become selected by) a singular – or authoritarian – narrative interpretation and filter of their world, why is it that these systems in which there is no (or at least a sudden vacuum of) overarching meta-narrative find […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Current Moment is a Strange Place

“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” – L.P. Hartley Indeed, and an accelerating technological – as much as cultural – disassembly of the present moment not only slings us post-haste into an uncertain future, but also (and in equal measure) makes itinerant historical tourists and displaced voyeurs of us all […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

American Decline

American capitalism is an evolving information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system and complex socioeconomic metabolism that possesses implicit spatial, temporal and material limits. Where boundaries are eventually encountered, the reflexive impulse is for any such system so foundationally grounded upon assumptions of the heroic values implicit to (a) consumptive necessity to begin, slowly – at […]

Categories
Philosophy

Paradigm Shift: Complexity, Uncertainty, Entropy

Uncertainty is an indirect measure of the sum-over-all combinatorial possibilities of any definable (or intelligible) systems state space. The combinatorial possibilities of any non-trivially sophisticated – i.e. complex – state space are larger than any definition (or empirically-derived knowledge) of that same complex entity. Complete descriptions are impossible for the same essential reason that mathematical […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Beyond Borders and Political Fiction

It endlessly mystifies me that humanity, in finding itself so much more Globally-connected from an information or communications and technological perspective, simultaneously finds itself so catastrophically fragmented, isolated and divided from itself. It was never that we could not obtain the Universal freedom, direction or common goal that might potentially have united us so much […]

Categories
Philosophy

Watering Floridi’s Roses

…and in trying, aspiring, in reaching out and making a purpose – or a difference – where there is (demonstrably) none we find ourselves reweaving a semantic tapestry from the bare mechanism and engineered fact of brute (-forced) realism. (Shannon excluded meaning from Information Theory because the complexity is exponential, not because it wasn’t there […]