“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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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Change is as easy as A, B, C
As it ever has been with this human being: finding an order, a pattern a convention or conceptual trope we tend on the whole – and with very little convincing required to overcome what minimal (and liminal) barriers to our gullibility that might exist – to mistake the order we find as being meaningful, objective, […]
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The Paradoxical Haunting of Selfhood
What is (perhaps) even more curious than this, the translucent Cheshire Smile of a concept of Self that becomes an artefact around which we find ourselves (!) in endless free-fall and ontological orbit, is that the very difference and distance by and through which we define that self traps us in an intractable enigma. We […]
In what ways does regulation, interdiction, surveillance and retrospective analysis or definition actually and inadvertently (re)produce the problems it seeks to diminish? Distinctions between legal and illegal are clearly and self-evidently important but in terms of comprehensive analysis and aspirations towards effective problem resolution they may also be a foundational misdirection. It is becoming clear […]
The return of the Wicked Problem. The problem of antibiotic resistance characterises a key symmetry of “wickedness” in any problem-space. That is, the activities, responses, interdictions and behaviours that might solve the problem are also those inadvertently exacerbate it. It is an endemic property of complex systems to seek optimal patterns of self-propagation. What at […]
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A Meaning of Life?
“What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.” – Virginia Woolf […]
The article Tackling wicked problems : A public policy perspective provides a comprehensive acknowledgment of the complexity of many of the “wicked” problems that large organisations (not just governments) face in negotiating the facts of reality as they are (i.e. being pragmatic), not as we might prefer them to be (i.e. ideological assertions). “The handling […]
Reductive abstractions in explanatory systems serve very well to ground those systems in self-validating (if demonstrably incomplete) logic, and possess considerable power and compelling reasons to believe them. Observe the thread of Turing‘s abstraction arrive in the (perhaps inevitable) artefacts, entities and exceptional utility of cloud computing – the simulated computing machines of various kinds: […]
Daedelus Kite 