Categories
life

Boxes of Books

I recently received several boxes of books that had once belonged to my father. He died around 10 years ago now and these books seem to be the last traces of his life left to touch my world in any material manner. I had the strangest sensation and revelation as I stood there and stared, […]

Categories
Psychology

Fascination, Transference and Romantic Dissatisfaction

My recent fixation on flowers is quite plausibly an instance of psychological transference, where feelings or emotions that might find themselves unattainably inhibited in one direction find new avenues, channels and vectors of (self) expression. We often enough observe the rapid and adaptive transmutation of emotional needs and impulses from one goal to another and, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Art, Inauthenticity and Poverty

Art requires inauthenticity just like wealth requires poverty. The issue is that wealth and all associated power is of necessity a narrowly-focused exclusive, dissipative system that, like a tornado, maintains coherence and continuity through offsetting its own cost and entropy to an environment composed of poverty and disempowered, disenfranchised multitudes. Wealth foundationally depends upon the […]

Categories
Philosophy

What is Science?

The very fact that definitions are diverse and scattered across such a rugged ontological landscape of entities, artefacts and information (or institutional and behavioural or cognitive) processing systems and endlessly-extensible logical refinement suggests that, beyond general qualities or properties any one of us might render in any number of complementary ways, there is and can […]

Categories
Philosophy

Problems of Constitutional Democracy

Watching the information bonfire of the current US election processes is troubling, to say the least. Beyond external interference in the fidelity of democracy and the internal dissonance of a nation being in many ways torn apart by incessant adversarial posturing and partisan self-interest, there is in this situation an instance of some broader unresolved […]

Categories
Philosophy

What is the “Secret Sauce” of Life and Intelligence?

The question might become as of the extent to which integrated biological systems express or manifest an altogether more subtle logic than purely brute-forced calculation. We have a tendency to isolate intelligence and problem solving in the processing unit but, beyond the implicit (or at least plausible) value in any identifiable circuits and cleverly-constructed cybernetic […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Aesthetics of Poverty

Aesthetics is not only about the appraisal and critical assessment of beauty in art or any other form. It is also an analysis of sensory experience, of perception. Perception is directly related to assessments of beauty, of symmetry and of value and inflates our experience with judgements – both known and unknown, recognised and unacknowledged. […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Abyss

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, quite famously, that “if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you” and it was meant as a warning, a caution following a statement that those who fight with monsters can themselves become monsters and this is in many ways a representation, among other things, of the manifest […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Emptiness

There is an implicit and irreducible incompleteness in things. Those who feel experiences most acutely, with greater sensitivity and the profound depth of interior, psychological reflection are much less likely to simply sweep away a lingering sense of unease, less able to simply accept with complete belief or unproblematic gullibility the profoundly hollow or superficial […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Borders and Boundaries

We live in a world that perhaps needs and unwittingly depends on its borders and boundaries but in many cases they persist not because they are necessary in any ultimate or foundational sense but quite simply because they can. There are deep truths here; of humanity, of history and of minds.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

One Big Family of Planetary Dysfunction

Notice that the love of family is the love that humanity really needs; we are, for all our shared problems, just One vast and dysfunctional (planetary) family.

Categories
communication

Disinformation Questions

Some general philosophical questions and reflections on disinformation: To what extent is disinformation not only evidence of directed or (even, in a limited sense) desirable artefacts, belief systems or entities, and to what extent is disinformation itself an irreducible property of large-scale sociotechnical systems? Our languages and institutional, geopolitical and self-organisational logics require we leverage […]