Author: G

Categories
technology

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 […]

Categories
culture

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 […]

Categories
Psychology

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.

Categories
Philosophy

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 […]

Categories
life

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.

Categories
Psychology

Ignorance is Bliss

If it is true that ignorance is bliss, I am surprised that there are not many more blissfully happy people in this world. Ignorance, of course, has quite little to do at all with acquired knowledge or education and is more often a direct measure of a person (or group) being unable to accommodate the […]

Categories
life

Galaxies of Light: Civilisation, Entropy and the Blood-Dimmed Tide

Civilisation is as easily unwound as it is woven and when the unweaving overtakes the making, when the diffuse entropy and structural disassembly outpaces the aggregate capacity for humanity to innovate fast enough, the world falls apart. It will take profound humanity, compassion and intellect to resolve the darker futures we are facing and being […]

Categories
environment

Climate Change: When the wind blows…

Climate Change is accelerating. Human organisational systems are already quite fragile (as an inverse yet direct measure of psychological, cultural and political immaturity) and will find themselves bearing the burden of an entropy they are poorly-prepared to negotiate. Expect dramatic and sometimes spontaneously self-organising conflicts, turbulence and political upheavals which will sweep away millions of […]

Categories
culture

Diversity in Organisational Leadership

Monocultural or ideological hegemony in organisational leadership is a recipe for disaster. As a general observation, when organisational systems fall into overtly biased configurations and power symmetries, it is rarely a consequence of willful misdirection. From the interior surface of a half-mirrored labyrinth of self-validating justification and institutional logic, this kind of monocultural percolation may […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Involuntary Nature of Belief

It is by way of the assertion of belief as a foundational property or quality of an interior surface or individuated self-identity that we unwittingly reproduce the information-processing systems of cognition and culture within which we are all embedded. No surprise then, perhaps, that these distributed, integrated and interdependent systems of autonomously self-propagating and aspirationally […]

Categories
history

The Oscillating Horrors of History

Context: Jonathan P. Baird: Nazi Germany and the fall of law It is a curious property of the dissociative logic and intractable pathology of any extreme ideological position, not just to sweep along compliant and unwitting collaborators who see in the asserted “strength” of their hollow belief system a reflexive framework upon which to hang […]

Categories
culture

The Value of Controversy

Context: ‘It’s Going to Take a Long, Long Time.’ How the Uproar Over a Bollywood Lyric About Beyoncé Fits Into the Fight Against Colorism in India As Malcolm McLaren (as manager of the Sex Pistols) once noted – there is no such thing as bad publicity – he even cancelled performance to make the band […]