It takes more strength to be kind that it ever takes to be cruel but this world positively incentivises and encourages adversarial competition, cruelty and aggression. I seem to have inadvertently found myself on the wrong planet…
Meanwhile, the pandemic is starting to take off (again) here in Australia, spreading rapidly… …history is always implicitly interesting but is generally best seen from a safe distance.
The more we all become digitally connected, the less we actually and sincerely connect. There is a vast (and possibly inevitable) vacuum of trust and faith in each other, in interpersonal or international bonding and in humanity. This lack of trust leads us all, for the most part, to seek to share and inhabit the […]
Intelligence is either there in (or as) someone’s mind or it is not. Where it is not there, no amount of rhetorical hyperbole or tribal and ideological alignment can dissimulate its absence. Ignorance can in most cases be remediated, lack of intelligence is a little more difficult to amend.
It’s a big Buddha. I can’t help but wonder if the whole point of emotional non-attachment has been lost on some people. The more we attach ourselves to ideas of things, people, places – the more internally fragmented we ourselves become. We are all to some extent trapped by our own behavioural reflexes and the […]
We are all quite simply role-playing: doing what it is that we think that someone like that who we believe we are should be doing, regardless that there is no one thing that anyone actually is. Fascinated by this internalised mirror image of Other as Self, we find ourselves transfixed by fantasy and illusion. Even […]
Context: Why do we ignore catastrophic risk? It may just be that some entities, artefacts, events or (other) possibilities are so vast and so horrifying that they all but entirely invalidate the limited linguistic or cognitive referential frame(s) of this comforting little semiotic cocoon of complex tautologies and half-mirrored surfaces within which we (all) live. […]
Circularly self-referential and self-propagating information-processing systems, laws seek certainty by cultivating and generating referential systems which possess no ultimate or external authority, beyond those axiomatic assumptions upon which they are built. A certain necessity and importance of rectitude might be asserted from within any such hyper-inflating referential space but the ultimate authority that laws assert […]
It was Shakespeare who coined the phrase regarding love’s indifference to what we directly perceive with our senses but his intention was more to indicate that everything we do, no less – those deep visceral and emotional facts of our lives, are first and foremost mental phenomena. I love not what I see but what […]
What does it mean for a thing not to exist, for it to be quite literally “conspicuous by its absence”? When a thing that is there is removed, it is clearly an absence marked by memory or by material evidence, not that memory is perhaps all that trustworthy and notwithstanding that it is an irreducible […]
The first – and quite probably last – question will always have to be this one. All of our logical, mathematical and physical technologies or explanations and the essential cognitive hyper-extension of conceptual or material artefacts and information or energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems that we inhabit (and that equally, inhabit us) – this is all […]
We (all) often forget that every single thing any of us does is so stupendously unlikely in such a vast and ultimately meaningless Cosmos that every act, every thought and every artefact or consequence is of monumental significance. We corral these wonders into the small, everyday concepts and containers of art and objects we can […]
Daedelus Kite 