Categories
Philosophy

The Infinite Highway

I found myself driving home today after (materially) returning to work for the first time in a number of weeks, the pandemic still being what it is and weighing heavily upon all of our lives and lifestyles in the catastrophic way it has (and – at time of writing – continues to). Making my way […]

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technology

On Training Minds and Machines to be Flexible

One thing humans do share with the machine intelligence we are so enthusiastically refining is a conspicuous (or at least institutionalised) absence of aptitude when it comes to smoothly and efficiently negotiating unexpected events and volatile environments. The benefits of integrated logistical automation are clear but when it comes to training the machine intelligence that […]

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technology

Is it Secure to Store Private Mobile Device COVID Tracking Data with Foreign-Owned Corporations ?

Context: Like many other Governments around the world, the Australian Government is seeking to use mobile device tracking technology to assist suppressing the COVID-19 virus through contact tracing. The Australian Government has found itself as a valuable pawn in a corporate game of power and profiteering. The Australian people have found themselves and their data […]

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technology

COVID-19, Cybersecurity and an Underlying Enigma

“The joint statement did not name any of the attacked organizations, but two people familiar with the matter said one of the targets was Gilead, whose antiviral drug remdesivir is the only treatment so far proven to help patients infected with COVID-19. The hacking infrastructure used in the attempt to compromise the Gilead executive’s email […]

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Philosophy

Life is Reason Without Meaning

The raison d’etre of all creation is reproduction but, as is so often the case, the naked fact(s) and essential truth of this matter is right there, unadorned, in front of us – too obvious to be seen. The Cosmos is a magnificently self-inflected logical shockwave of difference and differentiation, of information and energy – […]

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Philosophy

Concepts of Truth and a Philosophy of Freedom

Concepts of truth have been debated for at least the last several thousand years – across cultures, times and places and as a matter of Philosophy (which as an intellectual endeavour itself far outshines the dissociative political metrics into which fact and falsehood are rendered in our fractured contemporary context). The provision of value in […]

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Alien Anthropology

Planetary Civilisation: Balancing the Books of Sustainable Growth

Core questions of sustainable civilisation are surely not whether or not growth should occur, but rather – what form or shape that growth should take.  Growth characterised purely as material multiplicity and external, organisational or (associated) thermal or energy burden (also) entirely misses the mark of understanding and harnessing the logically self-inflected nature of innovation […]

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art

Malevolent Machines of Fear and Fantasy

Not so much “in the belly of the beast” as she is orchestrating the mechanism and behaviour of her own projected monsters. Similar observations might be made of humanity in gestalt: we find ourselves inadvertently consumed by these malevolent machines and embodied technological architectures of our own manifest fear. Art by Will Murai

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Philosophy

Information is a Material Presence and a Logical Absence

We inhabit the material of manifest corporeality and in equal measure – abstract patterns of information inhabit us. Which is more fundamental? There is no base, no anchor, no foundation; the imaginary spaces of information and autonomously self-propagating computational resonance are the contours through which matter and energy travels; the embodied (and reflexive, in our […]

Categories
politics

Political Pragmatism: Unexpected Destinations, Creative Fabrications and Artful Dodgers

A strange property of systems of ideological or political thought is that they offer constitutively unclear or ambiguous paths between their declarative values and the end states they aspire to. Many Democracies (for instance) celebrate those generic Constitutional assertions constructed around the self-evident importance of free speech, freedom of assembly or various rights oriented towards […]

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art

Trompe-l’oeil: All is Not as it Seems

Trompe-l’oeil is clever but, beyond immediate aesthetic effects and technical mastery, is really just the specific instance of a generalised principle of deception by which an artist fools our gullible brains into suspending their disbelief in the reality with which we are presented. The presence of a logical depth is in this way emphasised by […]

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Philosophy

Freedom is Unbounded, as is Beauty

Freedom is as this: a half-glimpsed beauty and eloquent symmetry that by it’s essential nature can only ever be experienced in part. To possess freedom, to behold it’s boundless symmetry all at once would be to try and control it, and freedom can not be constrained by the dragging anchor of mere psychological aspiration. This […]